They used to argue about the streams of newspapers that flowed into the house, and the travel magazines, the journals of poetry from France and Italy, the boxes of sheet music and the fountain pens, found at estate sales and garage sales and antiques stores. Henry kept a cocktail glass for every kind of drink, and always more and more books, stacked geologically on the dining table and the living room floor and on the landing at the top of the stairs. His cookbooks were always spilling out of the kitchen cabinets, the pages stained with the wine and olive oil of thirty years of evenings.
But there is no relief in the stark glare of the dining table, now naked of Henry’s clutter. And none either in the neat sheets of the bed, never piled, these days, with Henry’s clipped articles or his half-read books, his reading glasses lost somewhere in the blankets.
“Wow,” said Nathaniel’s daughter the last time she visited. “It looks like no one lives here.”
To get at the pipe under the sink, he must lie on his back, his legs spread out on the tile, his shoulder jammed into the wall. It’s an antique, this sink, something Henry brought home one summer, more for its beauty than its function. Something about the lines, he’d said. The silhouette. And the mahogany cabinet that stands beneath it.
Inside that cabinet, behind the vitamins and the aspirin, pushed to the far back corner, remains the bottle of secobarbital that Henry got ahold of in the weeks after his diagnosis. Something awful runs in Henry’s genes. His father had it, an uncle. He knew what was coming for him. “When I can’t remember your name,” he told Nathaniel again and again, “give me these.”
But the bottle remains unopened in the cabinet. No good reason but this one: every human being has certain things they can do and certain things they cannot.
The pipe is crusted in rust. This is a harder job than he thought.
While he works on the sink, the voices of public radio stream out through the speakers of a refurbished antique RCA that Henry bought online: ten more cases, they are saying now, five more suspected.
It is hard for Nathaniel to say if it is this reference to the sickness that makes him feel suddenly a little tired, or just the time of day—he always gets sleepy in the afternoons.
He makes himself some coffee. He keeps working. When he finally gets the part loose, it’s a surprise to feel the cold thread of water landing on his forehead. It takes a moment to understand why it’s happening. He forgot to shut off the water—that’s the problem. It’s a little alarming to forget to do something so simple and so crucial. But the proof that he must have is at his feet: a little puddle is forming on the bathroom tile, and growing.
Now is when the phone begins to ring: it’s one of Henry’s doctors.
The voice of this doctor, though—it sounds different—as if the voice belongs to someone else, but he knows that the person on the phone is Dr. Chavez, the same doctor Henry has had all along.
“I have some news,” says the doctor. Nathaniel sits down on the bed. There is a certain kind of dread that destroys the world with its force. “We really weren’t expecting it.”
Henry’s voice has been gone from his head for months. Henry, the great talker, the reciter of poetry, has gone silent. But now a corresponding sensation suddenly grips Nathanieclass="underline" he can no longer assemble in his mind the memory of Henry’s face.
“At first,” says the doctor, “I thought there’d been a mistake. I thought maybe the nurses had mixed up the patients.”
He has sometimes wished, these last few months, that he had done what Henry asked of him. It was supposed to be quick: ten minutes to sleep, four hours for the rest. A quiet release for them both. But now, the more familiar feeling rushes in: a desperate fury to keep Henry alive.
“Is he all right?” he asks.
“I want to warn you,” says the doctor. “We think this is related to the sickness, so there’s no telling what else is coming, but for now, he has a counterintuitive symptom that we haven’t seen in the others.”
Nathaniel’s mouth has gone dry. He can hardly breathe. He waits.
“About an hour ago,” says the doctor, “well, Henry, he started speaking.”
So much of the rest of the day will always be blurry in his mind, the drive back to the nursing home, the guard letting him in, a special circumstance, the doctor’s explanation, full of hesitations and caveats, how there is no way to know if this period of alertness will last, but the wobble of excitement in the doctor’s voice, his use of that word—extraordinary. But what Nathaniel will always remember, as vividly as anything else in his life, is that warm look on Henry’s face, the old expression he has forgotten about until now, the way his eyes fasten on Nathaniel as they have not done in months. This moment makes rational every irrational thought he’s dismissed since Henry got sick: that he might return one day, as if from a walk or a trip, that he might, in some way, wake up. Maybe this is what kept Nathaniel from giving him those drugs. This day makes meaning of that betrayaclass="underline" It was all for this day, see? It was for this, Henry. For this.
Here is Henry, looking a little younger, somehow, than before he got sick, though a little frailer, too, and he is wearing that old red shirt he used to love. There is a slowness to his words, a slur, but stilclass="underline" “Nathaniel,” he says, relief in his eyes. Those are Henry’s arms reaching out for him. That’s Henry standing up from the chair, the press of his big chest against his. He says something else, but it’s hard to understand the words. He tries again: “Nathaniel,” he says. “Where have you been?”
Biology is full of paradoxical reactions. Certain drugs excite the ordinary brain but calm the hyperactive. Tranquilizers can sometimes agitate instead of soothe. Certain antidepressants have been known to hasten suicide.
Nathaniel cycles through examples—associations in place of an explanation—as he packs a box for Henry. Books, mostly. That’s what he’s asked for so far. Books, and chocolate and tea.
They will be studying his case for years, of course, thinks Nathaniel. Henry: one of a handful of people in Santa Lora in whom the virus produces the exact opposite effect as in the others, a heightening of consciousness instead of the loss of it.
Four cases have surfaced so far in the nursing home. An unused wing now serves as a makeshift isolation unit. While the other three lie sleeping in their beds, Henry, in a white mask and blue gloves, walks the echoing halls. His long legs, his long arms—he was always the tallest in any room. And now here he is, looking his age again, which is twenty years younger than the other residents. He walks a little slower, maybe, and slightly hunched in the shoulders, but mostly, he is just like before. He hums and he grumbles. He quotes Emily Dickinson to the nurses.
“I feel fine,” he keeps telling them, his speech sounding clearer every day. “I feel just the same as I ever did. Tell them, Nathaniel,” he says. “Don’t I seem fine?”
But there are some famous cases of the catatonic inexplicably coming to, only to slip away again. He needs to be monitored. That’s what the doctors say. He cannot go home.
He is allowed this much at least: to walk with Nathaniel in the garden, where one hillside is planted with marigolds, where honeysuckle laces the fence, the lake visible just beyond it. This view—this has always been a consolation.
“I moved your desk back the way you like it,” says Nathaniel.
This is November, but the day is sunny and warm.