The train station was empty on Christmas morning. Silence hung in the open terminal like a kind of fog. Most of the shops and restaurants were closed, their grates rolled down and locked tight, garlands hanging heavy above the archways, as if they knew that by the next morning they would be taken down and thrown away. William found Irene sitting on a bench, still wearing the stained red dress. She sat by the big clapboard train schedule, reading William’s copy of the Iliad.
She looked up at him when she saw him coming. “Can’t you leave me alone?”
“Dr. Zarrani said you have to come in before noon today or they’ll need to start over.”
Irene shook her head and clapped the heavy book shut. “I’ll call her.”
“To tell her what exactly?”
“That I’m going away for at least a month, maybe more. I’m sorry, William, we both know it wasn’t going to work out with us. I can’t explain. I’m just like this. I’m—”
William looked down at his phone and read off the words he’d translated the day before.
“Tu es toujours sur le point de me quitter.”
Irene frowned as William sat down on the bench next to her. He knew he had badly mispronounced the line. “I went by your apartment to get you a dress the other day. There weren’t any bugs. And I saw the gift you got me…”
“It’s a scarf,” she said softly.
“And I saw the dirty pictures in your birdcage. I saw what that girl wrote to you.”
Irene didn’t seem upset or violated. She just looked tired. “See? It’s not just you, William.”
“I actually wouldn’t have thought that it was.”
She looked up at him. “Oh, no?”
“No,” William said, and then kissed her forehead once before patting the book as if to say goodbye to it. “I didn’t think I mattered that much to you, No Ears.”
He hadn’t really meant it to be cruel, only true. There was nothing about her that belonged to him. Everything he knew about her, he’d stolen.
• • •
Irene watched William walk away, and then for several more minutes she watched train after train departing. There was one heading for San Francisco, but she didn’t want to go there, not really. She didn’t want to go to Boston, St. Louis, Raleigh, or Chicago either. She’d been to all those places before, and there were other Williams in each of them. Irene kept reading about Ajax and Hector and Priam. Warriors lacing their armor on for battle in one refrain, only to lie slain and forgotten in the sands of the next. All for some “beautiful” woman whom none of them really cared about at all. Irene flipped backward and forward. The men all died and died again. Trains arrived; trains departed.
Irene flipped to the page where William had written his note. Was there some God or gods who knew her fate? She stared up at the wide empty space above the clapboard. Bakersfield. Albuquerque. Pittsburgh. Burlington. Two dozen tracks to the end. Twenty-four places to die. Man must have free will, William had written, or else why would the gods themselves bother?
She sat up straight and closed the book. She rested her hand on her hip. There was still a faint fishy taste on the back of her tongue. She stood up and walked past the tracks to the tunnel for the subway. She rode to the hospital. She apologized to Dr. Zarrani and said there had been an accident on the 5 train and she’d been stuck, underground, for an hour. The doctor said she’d make some adjustments, but they hadn’t lost too much time. Before the nurses hooked her up to the IV, Irene changed into the kimono. Its loose arms fell gently over the elbow where the tube went in, and she felt a great freedom as she drew and drew, nothing but fish eyes. Cold, with dead black pupils staring out at her.
When the dose was over, Irene took the subway home, and was so flushed she had to pull her coat open with only the kimono underneath. People stared, but she didn’t care. It was New York, and there were stranger people than her in every neighboring car. The thought comforted her.
She had already arrived in the place she belonged. Once she was safely inside her apartment, she turned on the heater. There was a loose thread at the sleeve of the kimono that had been tickling her all day long. She tugged, and more silk came away in her hand without breaking. She pulled and pulled at the thread for minutes, until there was no cuff, and then only half a sleeve, and then no sleeve at all. She let the thread fall around her feet.
William called. She didn’t answer. Sara called. She didn’t answer. In a week Sara would be back in the city and she would have to tell her everything, but not yet. She kept pulling until the collar and the bodice and the hem and the other sleeve were all entirely unraveled. Soon the silk thread was piling up to her naked waist. She unraveled the rivers and trees and the carp that swam in circles. At last she unraveled the final stitch. She felt safe and warm as she burrowed into the nest of silk. She had eaten almost nothing since the fish eyes, but she wasn’t hungry. She closed her eyes as she pulled the silk in around her. She wanted nothing more than to rest there in that enormous cocoon, for days and weeks, and then emerge — free of poisons and tumors and heartsickness. With wings, she thought to herself, as sleep finally came.
A SUBJUNCTIVE MARCH
Sara could no longer tell one day from the last or the next. Irene had told her about the biopsy results right after she and George had returned from New Year’s, and now it was March. What had happened to the intervening weeks was a mystery worthy of study by George’s counterparts at the theoretical physics laboratory. Sara suspected that something had happened to the very fabric of time itself. It was always March. Sara didn’t even need to see the gray dawn outside the one tiny window in George’s apartment to know it was out there, dismal and petulant.
She woke up each morning to the sound of her husband-to-be trying to extract himself from the Murphy bed without waking her. She dreamed of it closing up like a Venus flytrap with her inside. With her eyes nine-tenths shut, she breathed heavily so George would believe she was still dozing as he moved around the tiny apartment, from the toilet-in-the-closet to the shower-in-the-kitchen. Coffee dripped behind the spray of the shower. She peeked when George emerged, sopping wet, and proceeded to barrel about the apartment in his towel, trying to simultaneously pour the coffee, check the weather on his phone, and (on alternate days) water the plant. There was a hard deadline, always, of seven o’clock, because that was when George’s car was due for ticketing, and his panic grew and grew as the minute hand worked its way around. Already there were four parking tickets that George was fighting, plus a speeding ticket he’d gotten on the LIE, another from Riverside Drive, and a third he hadn’t yet told her about but that she’d seen hiding under a notebook and seemed to involve driving the wrong way down a one-way block in Tribeca.
Lying in bed, she imagined how much more smoothly things would go if people just listened to her. If her roommate, Karen, saw reason and moved out of their bigger apartment, regardless of whose name was technically on the lease. If Irene would not always wait until the last possible minute to text to say if she needed someone to take her to the hospital or pick her up. If Jacob would read the book she’d bought him for Hanukah. If Irene would hurry up and tell Jacob about the whole cancer thing, instead of always waiting for the “right time,” which was clearly never. If she and George would find the perfect glamorous yet intimate place to hold their wedding so she could finally mail the save-the-date cards she’d already bought and addressed. If William would sign on to Facebook again because even though she was mad at him for leaving Irene at the train station, she was also sure that they would make a great couple once she was all better.