“I’m sorry,” he said, voice doubled. He studied his face through her eyes, the image echoing between them, and then she watched as words coalesced—language like foam forming on black seas of thought—and he said, “You know, I envy you your health.”
He thought of the first time he’d emailed her from the sanitarium in Berne. Who else, he’d written, could possibly understand??? Seven months later she’d been in Denver to see a client while he was there skiing; he’d felt awkward, approaching her in the hotel bar, knowing that everything he said would stay with her forever. “I lose nothing,” he’d said, words coming in a rush. “I remember all the skies, all of them, how the light changes by the second. I remember how the leaves flicker in the wind.” He’d looked uncomfortable, abashed by his poetic effusion. “The vividness never fades. It’s always been here, but before it just flowed over me, like I was standing in a river without getting wet.”
“How many of us are left now?” he asked. The skin below his eyes was black as ink and she fought the urge to call for a nurse, a doctor, anyone. He saw this, as she saw his fear and his diffidence, and in the absence of even social deceit they arrived at shared certainties—that he was dying, that she would see him through it, and that, for the duration, they were as one person—and in these they found a degree of calm.
“I’m not sure. Styrszinski is off in the Caucasus, last I heard, making a survey of all the animals and plants, but it’s been years since he answered email.” She thought of the old biologist, his interminable digressive monologues on natural history, while Constantin wished he’d met him, studied harder, been someone else. “There was that boy in Brazil, the prime minister’s son, but I understand the family’s been in lockdown since his father was assassinated. There’s Stasi, that German performance artist who blew his trust fund getting the implant even though he was in perfect health—he’s still alive, but he’s been stuck in the same endlessly branching run-on sentence for the last seven years. I like to think that, on some level, he’s very happy.” Strange, they both thought, how one needed to talk even when one’s thoughts were open.
“There are things I need you to know,” he said, wanting to linger on in her, as the world darkened, but only in his eyes. He remembered a house on the cliffs in the Dodecanese, reachable by boat when the wind was calm, not at all when it was blowing. The house was old and his mother had renovated endlessly while he hid in the shadows of its courtyard and slept in its garden in the sun. He remembered sitting on the edge of a dam his father built, daydreaming about flying over the precipitous slope of stained white concrete. He remembered the bank of a frozen river in what Irina thought was Hyde Park in winter, waiting in the cold till the woman came, how he hadn’t cared how little cover the brush afforded, the heat of her skin, how cold the snow. She left first, telling him to wait lest someone see, and he sat there studying the impression her body had left behind. Much later, after their final, bitter parting, he had taken to walking through the park past her window, whenever he was in London, and looking at the light there, or its absence, but he never saw her again, and now he never would. He remembered telling his father that his old injuries were worsening, how the old man had stood up behind his desk, face turning red as he lifted a finger like a pompous orator and swore to move the course of scientific history through sheer force of will. At least you were loved, Irina thought, though the memories, it seemed, could almost be anyone’s, as though the major images of a life were dealt randomly from a fixed deck of cards. He remembered skiing over new powder down a mountain’s sheer flank, rapt in the ancient game with gravity and snow, how he desired always to be on that mountain, any mountain, every mountain in the world.
His eyes had closed, and his breathing was shallow. He thought of an old woman closing his fingers over the pomegranate seeds staining his palm, perhaps his grandmother, but by then he was thinking in Greek, and she tried not to see the monitor that showed his blood oxygen falling. He clung to her hand, still wanting to live, regretting the pill that would have given him another hour, which, on her arrival, he had put aside because he hadn’t wanted to keep her.
His words in her mind. Tell me stories. Give me a part of you. Something to take with me. Don’t let me be alone.
She gave him her summer in Singapore, the liberty and solitude, the waves’ reverberation in the emptying downtown. She gave him the day she’d opened her first Swiss bank account, how adult she’d felt when she signed the papers. She gave him the cold in the cheap hotel on the outskirts of Boston, how she had paid for it because her lover, Philip, her first, had had no money at all. How thin he’d been, her fingers counting his ribs under his frayed, worn shirt. His body was like a child’s, though she hadn’t seen it at the time. They’d held each other under the one thin duvet as he whispered on and on about what he’d noticed and his ambitions and then something shifted in him and his eloquence, which she valued, had vanished, supplanted by a need that had surprised her, and, accepting it, she’d felt oddly maternal as she’d guided him in.