Then, of course, came the things not so easily protected from the logic of narrative memory, from the construction of theories and psychology. I remember these things helplessly, and with no small amount of reluctance. An awkward visit in the middle of the day from a university administrator. A call from a colleague, urging me to come to Charlie’s office, where she had locked herself inside, and the whispered conversation that followed through the wood of the door, where I could feel her just on the other side, crying softly.
Then the day before she was to present the first half of her paper at a regional mathematics conference in Kansas City, she didn’t come home from work. At first I assumed that Charlie was punishing me for some perceived slight, perhaps going out for a celebratory dinner with some of her research assistants without telling or inviting me, and then, as it got later into the night, I thought that maybe she’d left early for the conference, gotten the dates messed up. It wasn’t until I pulled into the highway rest stop and saw her sitting there on a bench with a state trooper on either side of her, one of whom must’ve been the voice on the phone a few hours earlier telling me my wife had been found wandering the shoulder “confused,” that I even believed it wasn’t a joke. And I’ll admit that what I thought of on the ride back was the shame, the humiliation of walking toward them, of claiming Charlie, who looked so happy and surprised to see me (looking at me with, unmistakably, the wonder of a child) that it utterly broke my fucking heart.
The thought of Charlie talking to a therapist — Charlie, who, when I pressed her, often gave a survey-course-in-miniature over Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and nihilism as well as depression psychology, and applicable ontology, not to mention the medical science and epistemological implications of antidepressant, antipsychotic, or mood-stabilizing medication — was so ridiculous that I couldn’t even bring myself to demand it. The next day we got halfway to a local therapy office before I pulled the car over to the side of the road and looked out over all that blank snow and punched the steering wheel over and over again, the ancient horn bleating ridiculously. This was Charlie, whose soft, pale flesh of thigh and gluteus and back pressed into my nuzzling body in bed each night and fell asleep that way, in that hold; Charlie, who stood on Saturday mornings with her back to me in the kitchen, in T-shirt and underwear, with one hip cocked, foot turned out to the side, her legs seeming oddly short and thick in the blue light. This was my wife. I knew her.
She did not go back to work. When I went to collect her things from the office, I found the room almost completely bare.
Charlie ended up going to a psychiatrist by herself, of her own accord. In the months we spent holed up in the house, waiting for our savings from the fellowship to run out, we made rules to get through the days.
Mathematics was the great enemy, it seemed, and one rule was that Charlie was no longer to work with numbers, to do any kind of math at all. Somewhere along the line, Charlie told me during those months, she’d become lost in the world of digits and signs, symbols and systems. She tried, as we took walks down to the duck pond, to explain, to point to a small group of children and talk about the systems of equations that could describe each of their forms and chances, about the algorithms that they — their human selves — made up, the least of which could be found out, could describe simultaneously their fetal development as well as their choices in the game they played as they ran past us, and how this was essentially the same math that can be used to describe the shape of the universe.
Sometimes, when neither of us had spoken for a while as we lounged around the house or went for groceries, Charlie would speak differently, trying to reach into my world. “Imagine a forest where all the trees are made up of numbers,” she said. “Imagine you have to build a boat out of their boughs.” There at the end of her work, she’d begun to think of the collections of numbers and symbols as little machines, and in the single box I filled with the contents of her desk’s drawers from the office, there were hundreds of white sheets, each with a small ink drawing of withered, maimed numerals that tangled together to make sinister-looking spiders, tractors, airplanes, landscapes, and cars.
Charlie seemed embarrassed by the diagnosis of severe manic depression her therapist-psychiatrist team came up with and, as if to show its inaccuracy, she refused to display any of the classic side effects; she did not gain a pound, and if anything her sex drive became more consistent, on the whole more lively, spurred by our boredom. Every third weekend our mothers would visit and I’d talk to them while they sat with Charlie in the living room, both of them eyeing Charlie uneasily, as if something unexpected might happen at any moment.
Of course, the fellowship dried up and the promise of the cash prize receded, but after a while it seemed to us just a small part of all the money we would never have. I’d made a late application to several creative writing schools, and we agreed to move wherever I got in. That summer, after twenty months in Attica, Missouri, we celebrated our second anniversary, and two weeks later moved to Iowa, for me to go back to school, and us to have an honest restart.
It was easy to start over in Iowa, to pretend that the fever dream of our small town psychosis had simply never occurred. Charlie had a stable summer, and took a lot of interest in the new house. In essence, we switched roles: now I had the fellowship, now she was the one with the office in the finished basement, and the free time to pursue whatever she felt like. And she went out of her way to assume the kind of normalcy we had never really had in Attica; now she found obscure apple orchards in the farmland around Iowa City, planned whole day trips as if they were apologies. And it was in Iowa City that I first began to notice the changes in her body.
Charlie’s breasts and ass deflated slightly, descending from their nubile perches just a little bit, settling in comfortably to the hold of a mature body that no longer needed the taut energy of lingering adolescence. The skin beneath the complicated eye makeup that she no longer wore became puffy in the mornings, making her eyes reassuring in their calmness. And it was only then — as if to prove even further her stability and optimism, as if to finally regain our purchase on the kind of marital story we had once believed ourselves to be a part of — that Charlie began talking about wanting to have a baby.
•
I woke up this morning because an alarm on one of Haim’s screens was going off. It was his oxygen levels, which I knew by the alarm’s tone, and by the time I could get my eyes unblurred they were down in the 80s. A nurse appeared in the doorway, and together we turned and looked at Haim, who was trying to roll back and forth, his pupils wide, eyes glazed. When we went to him, he grunted and looked wildly up into our faces in confusion, recognizing neither of us.
Last night, after we came back from Ava’s room and went to bed, Haim had to get up three times to vomit. In between he moaned quietly and complained about his head hurting. At two in the morning I called the doctor who is overseeing Haim’s treatment at his home number, and he said some things I was already thinking about possible increased cranial pressure.