Cost

Pushing through the swinging doors into the operating theater he entered a separate world, self-contained, professional, purposeful. The clean, cold, invigorating room. The bold, caustic smell of antiseptic, and the draped motionless body, stark and shadowless beneath the bright lamp. The pale, exposed, shaved skin, brilliant in its glowing pallor, vulnerable and still. The body was now defenseless, its mind absent. The body was no longer the house of the soul but the site of the performance. All of them drew near, the nurses, the assisting surgeons, the anesthesiologist. All of them ready.

Gowned, masked, gloved, costumed as his professional self. That first moment of infinite possibility: making the first incision, the bright metal edge sliding easily into the elastic skin, as he entered his world. Once the opening incision was made, everything else fell away. Then everything was in his grasp.

The crimson interior of the body was his landscape. Cutting through the dense carapace of bone, removing its protective helmet, exposing the secret tissues of the brain: soft, intricate, pulsing, full of their own mysterious life. Here was the true center of the organism, this rosy, glistening, underground labyrinth, coiled, folded, furled, lobed, branched, and connecting, each a part of the quick, mysterious response to life.

Standing under the lamp, leaning into the terrible exposure of the wound he had made, Edward was focused and intent, drawn into himself, to a place without connection to the rest of his life. He felt utterly aware, calm, capable. Masked people stood silently by, all of them part of it, ready to suction out blood, hand him instruments, take them away, raise or lower the level of consciousness. The thudding heartbeat steady on the monitor, a bass line of reassurance. Edward heard the sound without attending to it, aware only when it changed. His own breathing was muffled and magnified by his mask. He probed delicately among the glistening tissues; he took a narrow-bladed instrument.

All this was present for him still, but gone now, vanished from the real world like the house on the Cape. He had saved people's lives, their senses, their movement—but it was now like a movie about someone else.

His skills were gone, his hands were mitts. Edward could no longer even shave himself properly. It still looked all right, or at least he hoped it did, but his cheeks were unevenly smooth, rough in places, though he drew the razor carefully across them every day. He passed his hand across his jaw. It was worse on the left, the stubble coarser there. That was the side away from the window. He turned his head slightly, offering the others the smoother side of his jaw. It was humiliating. The flesh had no business betraying him.

“What are they doing right now?” Katharine asked.

For a moment he was confused, but it was the children again, Julia's children.

“Well, Steven's been in Seattle,” Julia said. “You know, he's been working for a conservation group there.”

“Oh, that's right,” Katharine said. “I can never remember what a conservation group is. Is it people who are conservative?”

“The opposite,” Julia said. “Very liberal.”

“That's right,” Katharine said. “And what's he doing for them?”

“Trying to save the forests.”

“Good for him,” Katharine said stoutly. “Somebody should save them.” She took a bite of sandwich. “From what?”

“Logging companies, mostly,” Julia said.

“I bet that's tough,” Edward said. “How's he doing?”

“He's kind of burning out. He's thinking of moving back East and doing something different. He's coming up here to talk about it.”

“Well good for him,” Katharine said again. “I'd love to see him. Will we get to?”

Julia shrugged. “I don't know. It's impossible to pin him down. My children come and go as the breezes of the air. They answer to no woman.”

“I think he should come up here,” Edward announced.

“I hope he will,” Julia said.

“And dear Jack?” Katharine asked. “Where is he?”

Julia frowned. “Jack's in Brooklyn.”

Julia offered no further information. She didn't like to talk about him, Edward could see. He couldn't blame her. Jack had always been a problem.

“Dear Jack,” Katharine said again. “Does he have a job? Or what is he doing?”

“He doesn't seem to have a job,” Julia said carefully. “It's not exactly clear what he's doing.”

“He must be living on something,” Edward pointed out. “He must be,” Julia agreed, “but it's impossible to say on what. He's still playing music, but there's no visible means of support.”

There was silence for a moment. Far out on the horizon, the line between sea and sky was becoming indistinct.

“Well, I'm very fond of Jack,” Katharine said loyally. “Give him my love.”

“I will,” Julia said, smiling at her.

“I'm very fond of him,” Katharine said. “And what is Steven doing?”

Julia looked at her for a moment.

“That's fog, out along the horizon,” Edward announced. His voice was flat, absolute, as though he dared anyone to contradict him. “That gray line.”

THREE (#u8815bb42-acb5-5c6a-8775-683c39af4d03)

Steven shifted again, his seat entirely numb. He had been traveling for years, it seemed, for most of his life. These last two hundred miles would take as long as the first three thousand, and were the longest.

The bus roared steadily northward, the engine playing without pause its single plangent chord. Steven leaned, bored, against the window. Along the unfolding ribbon of the highway ran a high wooden wall topped by a dense mass of trees. Foliage foamed over the wall, as though from a container.

Next to Steven was another young man, his raised knees crammed against the seat in front. His head had fallen sideways, and he was snoring faintly on the indrawn breaths. The sound was mild and childlike. It was oddly intimate, listening to the soft exhalations of a stranger. Steven wondered if his girlfriend complained—though who would mind this faint high whistle?

Anything might tip the balance, though. Anything might make you recoil from certain flesh. The body had its own life. He thought of the dark line of damp clay beneath Eliza's nails, her moist pink fingertips.

And maybe this guy didn't snore in bed, maybe he did it only on long bus trips, sitting upright, head lolling. He was younger than Steven, in a grimy T-shirt, pocketed cargo pants, grubby running shoes. He and Steven were the only people their age on the bus. Of course he'd sat here, next to Steven: age was the great divider. You understood only your own cohort; shared experience was the essential thing. Older people's lives were wholly different. They had no idea what Steven and his friends were like.

Nor could Steven imagine his parents’ world, that dim twilight epoch before his birth. People standing in the sun beside old cars, eating prehistoric food, their long hair and weird hippie clothes. Who knew what it had been like? All you knew of your parents came from them. There were no unmediated moments, you were handed history as your parents had written it. The material was theirs.

His father's childhood had been like this: the memory of his father coming home to the house in New Canaan, letting in a rush of cold air. Taking off his overcoat in the front hall, his first words a greeting to the dog. His mother, growing up in the stone house in Villanova, hiding in the forsythia bushes. The stories of his parents' childhoods made Steven feel strange. It was weird, thinking of them younger than he, still small and vulnerable, their adult lives ahead of them.

He picked up his paperback, wrapping the cover punishingly around its back. The book was bad, but he had nothing else to read. The video, played on the bus's tiny screens—a thriller, with pretentious dialogue and slow-motion gunplay—was over.

The roadside fence ended abruptly, and a string of chain stores ran smoothly past, their signs bright and urban. He wondered how the mall employees up here felt. Proud to be part of a national network? Angry at the exploitative wages? Glad to have a job, most likely. Steven shifted again, jamming himself into the corner, resting his head against the hard, humming window.

He wondered what his mother would say about graduate school. It would be the opposite of whatever his father said. One of them would ask, “Are you certain you need a law degree, Steven? Have you thought carefully about this?” The other would say, “Education is the highest privilege, of course you should go.” Probably Wendell would be in favor of it; Julia, more cautious, would have reservations. “What do you want to do next? What does it mean for your future? I want you to think ahead,” she'd say.

Both his parents had gone to graduate school, but when they were planning their futures, things had been different. People spent years at one place, their whole working lives. Loyalty was rewarded. You worked your way first to the outside wall, then the corner office. All that was over now, there was no such thing as job security. The idea of it seemed foolish and old-fashioned, like those big-brimmed brown hats men wore. A lifetime spent at one place, a gold watch at retirement: bizarre. Now no one stayed anywhere longer than five years; you worked somewhere until the next downsizing. There were no offices, people worked in cubicles without doors, with walls that didn't reach the ceilings. Or you worked at home, sitting before the screen in your sweats and a T-shirt, coffee rings on your papers, bagel crumbs colonizing the keyboard. Work was fluid now, a ribbon running through your life, not a box which contained you.

Everything was fluid now. The Internet, cell phones, communication, everyone was in touch all the time. On the sidewalk, people around you staring straight ahead, looking through you as they spoke into unseen ears. In a bookstore in Seattle he'd been ranging through the shelves while a woman nearby talked loudly to a friend. “You're going to have to get rid of her, Richard,” she said. “Her needs are not in alignment with yours. She's very, very demanding, and you're going to have to recognize this. You like to keep these women hanging around, but it's not healthy. Remember that time in the sauna?” He wondered who Richard was, and if he wanted an assessment of his private life broadcast so clearly and specifically in the Travel section of Elliott Bay Books.

But people talked to each other all the time, everywhere, loudly, in public; there was no privacy protocol. It was while you were traveling that you most wanted to connect. Everyone in airports had phones clamped to their heads, talking, talking, talking to make sure their lives at home were intact, that their places in the world were still held, that they were still connected to something. On 9/11, all those doomed people on the airplanes, calling home, as though the connection itself could keep them alive.

Steven gazed out the vibrating window and felt the humming of the bus through his body. He'd read somewhere that all engines hummed in the note of E. He wondered if it were true and, if so, why? Was it metallurgical—was all metal intrinsically tuned to the same key? Or to do with the way engines worked? Engines all over the world—mopeds in the Philippines, vacuum cleaners in Edinburgh (DC current), hairdryers in India, trucks in Detroit—all humming a jubilant, unheard, universal chorus.

Outside, the trees were in place again, foaming thickly over the fence. Behind him, unimaginably distant now, was Seattle: the low friendly city, with its glittering waterside, the peaceful rhythm of the streets.

He thought of Eliza at the café on the last day. Her silky blond hair, short and thick as suede. Her hands curved around her coffee mug: her stubby, bitten fingers, like a child's. The clay rimming the bitten nails, she was a potter.