“My life is like the space shuttle exploding,” my friend Harriet says into the phone and makes a KABOOM! noise with her lips. She takes a deep breath. “While it’s in mid-orbit, and a chunk falls off and lands in someone’s back yard and catches fire and the whole block burns down.”

Harriet and I have been friends since we were twelve. She recently gave up her dream of becoming a brilliant biologist, dropped out of graduate school, and moved into shaggily-carpeted apartment overlooking the town’s recycling plant. Last week she called in hysterics because she discovered that one of her arms was several quarters of an inch longer than the other. She thinks her life is an unmitigated failure. I sometimes think that talking Harriet down from ledges is the one actual skill I have. I know how to handle this.

“Your life is not a -”

“I’m pregnant!” Harriet blurts out, and then it sounds like the phone falls off a truck and tumbles into a stream. There is a soft gurgling sound that goes on for a little while and I start to picture fish swimming up and nibbling at the microphone to which my ear is connected.

Then Harriet comes back. “Sorry, I’ve been not peeing all day so I would have enough pee for these tests. I’ve done seven of them. I thought my bladder would explode.”

It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m on my couch, holding up the phone with one hand, and with my free hand flipping through a brochure filled with pictures of people in wheelchairs, smiling. Three weeks ago my doctor told me that I have MS. I’ve told Harriet, my parents, and the pimply kid at the supermarket who found me crying in the bakery section. Having MS is the kind of thing one never expects to actually happen in real life. There is a support group that meets tonight at eight that I have circled on the brochure’s rainbow-themed calendar.

“Wow,” I say. “Ok.”

“Seven tests,” Harriet says, like she’s finally gotten the answer to a really tough math problem. Then she starts sobbing.

I know how to handle this. I start piloting responses in my head. Things come to me like: ‘Do you think it’s the cop’s? From the night in the cab?’ or ‘At least your mom will stop nagging you about a grandkid,’ or ‘Remember when I called godmother on your first-born?’ I am usually pretty good at times like this. There was one time, during a death of the family affair, when I found a book of the most absurd knock knock jokes and read it to her until she laughed. But now I am nervous.

There is silence for a little while, so Harriet says: “How are YOU feeling?”

I abandon my responses and toss the smiling cripples brochure into my bag. “I’m fine. I’m driving down. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

Behind linoleum-covered tables in the small kitchens of their small apartments, the Old Russians are sitting down to lunch. They are ladling borscht into floral bowls that they pull from their china cabinets. Their fingers are stained purple. The Old Russians are not age-old, but their minds are worn around the edges, like the Beatles albums in their cupboards. They call St. Petersburg Leningrad, imitating their parents. The Old Russians are thinking about the money under their mattresses. They listen to the radio and shake their heads. Their hair smells like cabbage. Their frowns grow into furrows around their mouths. Their teeth are yellow. The Old Russians do not trust anyone, not even each other. They listen to the sound of utensils against plates and think about governments. Their children’s feet find each other under the table. They do not ask questions, the Old Russians’ children. They watch their parents’ backs. They avert their eyes. They refuse seconds. The Old Russians go to the market on Saturday and haggle with other Old Russians for potatoes. They wear clothes that were made in Poland. They call their mothers on rotary phones. They get postcards from Vienna and hide them behind books on their living room shelves so as not to appear traitorous. They watch TV. They make love. They stand in line for butter, and then again for chicken breasts. They carry two at a time. Deep in their mouths are silver fillings that do not get radio signals. They are not surprised.

“Above ground, the miners’ families waited for word. Passing much of the week sequestered from the news media, they huddled together in an open-air warehouse on the mine’s sprawling property, eating pizza, whispering consolations to each other, and sometimes praying.”

The weather – tuned as it is to the irony of things – is beautiful. The sun comes up in the mornings the way I remember it when we were kids: happy and clear. I get here early. Don’t want to miss anything. Don’t know what else to do. None of us sleeps. I say hello to Mitch, who is always here before me. It must be dark when he gets here. Mitch has a son in the mine. Or had, maybe. Maybe had. We do not know how to say these things to each other, so we just sit and watch the sun come up from behind the little ragged woods at the edge of the property. Then more of us show up, a dozen or so in all. We stay close to each other even though there is plenty of space.  We are like a small tribe of pagan worshipers on open ground.

By mid morning someone has the radio on.  It’s a small plastic thing with barely any speakers.  The reception is garbled and static-y. Even when you’re close, voices sound broken and you can’t tell what they’re saying.  So we settle on the oldies station. Someone is humming a little, which helps fill in the spaces between sounds.  There are birds everywhere this time of year.  You can hear them up in the maples.  The maples have just started to give out leaves.

Around noon we get the kid with the flower tattoo and the feint smell of that old rough soap mama used to wash us with. He’s about thirteen and he brings the pizza.  Pizza seems like the most wonderful, ordinary thing.  We each take a slice.  The pizza is warm.  By this point the sun is high up and there is nowhere to get away from it.

On the regional train to Philadelphia I sat in the cafe car and tried to remember why I was there, while the tables around me filled up with middle aged men smelling of coffee and aftershave, and thirty-something women with perfect hair. They chatted about their weekends as they settled into the plush, faux-leather seats.  The red-head to my right picked a folded copy of Elle out of her handbag and started to flip through the pages.  I thought about how elegant she looked.  I added reading Elle to the list of things I hadn’t done and should try.  At least, I thought, I would pick up a copy at the corner bodega and try carrying it around, in case any of this feminine charm could be gotten by osmosis.

The train car was getting full and loud. A dark man with a square chin and eyebrows like two giant caterpillars took the seat across from me. He did not look at me at all, which left me disappointed, in spite of myself.  Instead he clicked open his laptop so I could just see his chin floating, disembodied, above the back of the computer.  For a moment, looking at him, I missed my father.  The train began to move, and I sank deeper into my seat.   The train moved slowly at first, then it jolted forward so suddenly that the red-head gave out a nervous laugh, high pitched and feminine.  I wondered what her husbands looked like.

We got through the tunnel to Jersey and were flying

The phone rang on a Tuesday morning, at 10:28 am. At first she didn’t recognize the sound, but when it went into its second repeat loop she dove her hand into the pocket of her overcoat and fished around for the tiny vibrating device. She thought how stupid it was that they kept making them smaller, these phones, as though the world was not already full of these diminishing returns. She glanced at the area code on the display and noted that it was a New York number. The other digits didn’t seem to amount to anything in particular, so when she answered, she used her best receptionist voice to say “hello?” taking care to sound just a little bit annoyed so that whoever it was would not think that she’d been sitting on a park bench sipping lukewarm coffee out of a Styrofoam cup, which in fact she had been. The voice on the other end of the line was husky but young.

“Hi, ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you but I am here with Darlene Slevens, and in her wallet she had a card with your phone number on it, and I thought -”

“What are you doing in her wallet?” She’d said the first thing that had come to mind, and would find later that she regretted this above all else, because it had betrayed her unpreparedness for what was to come next.

When I sit here late at night and look at the lit up windows of the building across the courtyard from mine, I sometimes try to imagine what they see when they look into my window, and I think it is something impossibly small.  Not that anybody looks.  I don’t think, anyway.  But if they did look, I wonder what they would think looking at me, always at my desk except for when I am sleeping.  I wonder if they would imagine that I am disciplined and studious, or sad, or just strange.  I wonder if they would imagine me as some weirdo, gamer, second-life dork, or as a book nerd who doesn’t know how to dress properly or talk on the phone.  Or sometimes I wonder if they look in on my little existence and envy it for how small and contained it is, how it’s not spilling over the edges with mortgages and kids and responsibility.  I can tell which of the lights across the street are lamp lights, and which are TV lights.  In some apartments I can see bookshelves, and I like those apartments best.  Eventually the lights snap off, one by one, and they all go to bed, these people who live in the apartments that look into mine.  Then it’s just me and no people.  And eventually I will go to bed too.

First person internal narrator. Mood is loss. Tone is revealing, chatty, unashamed. Working on: staying inside, being in someone’s skin, not focusing on external world. Worried about revealing character.

The trees left shadows on the snow and the light seemed to be coming from nowhere in particular, as if the sun were just some blotch of white somewhere that I couldn’t even see. We were swaying pretty badly on this little bench dangling a dozen or so feet above the ground. The motor of the ski lift was making a terrific noise and I had to focus to keep my skis from getting tangled with the skis of the girl sitting next to me, though she hadn’t looked at me, so far as I could tell. She was talking to her friend and they were both blond and ponytailed and their teeth were perfect, and I could feel the insides of my own teeth growing plaque, or maybe mold. I noticed that I was clinging to my armrest. I was clinging to my armrest as if maybe one of these girls was about to lean over and push me over the edge, down into the trees. The trees were getting farther away and we were going higher and higher, and I wondered how it was that they had gotten all of us up here, with the wires and the poles and the little loops that dangled from the poles. I wondered who had thought of it first.

I was thinking this when the lift surged upward, past the last copse of trees, and suddenly everything was white and blinding and once my eyes adjusted I could see nothing but the mountain, angled like a beast. I wondered if there was a reverse button I could push, or a lever or something that would take me back down, but there wasn’t. My bladder tightened into a fist and I thought it might let loose on all the white snow down below. I hoped it didn’t because these girls were sitting next to me, and I didn’t know what they would do if I just started urinating there like an old dog. I couldn’t take my eyes off the snow, and the people down below in their multicolored coats shoop shoop shooping on their skis. After a few seconds of looking I felt my fear turn into something that wasn’t fear, and whatever it was seemed to get tangled up in my gut and squeezed on my lungs. If I had had to describe it, if anyone had been there to ask me, I would have had to say that what I felt was a kind of vice-grips-on-the heart longing. It was strange to be thinking this, dangling from a wire with these two high-pitched girls. But for a second I wanted to turn and touch them, just to reach out and touch them, or at least smile at one of them or something. And I was glad to be here. I realized that I was glad to be there. I was glad and I was looking up and I thought that if there was a God up there watching, if there was a God who might have turned to look at the mountain just then, and me dangling there next to it, we might have had something to talk about, Him and me. We might have had something to discuss.

My heart was pounding and we were getting higher and higher and I could feel the blood pulsing inside of my blood vessels – the big one, the vena cava – and I hoped that I wasn’t having a heart attack, because surely they didn’t have any defibrillators up here. I thought about those Bayer commercials, how Bayer was supposed to prevent heart attacks, and wished that I had taken some Bayer down at the bottom of this mountain, because then maybe my heart wouldn’t feel like it was about to burst. I looked over at the girls and decided that they would be completely useless to me in an emergency. We were a good ways up the mountain by now, and I could see, way up ahead, people starting to get off of the ski lift – just up and get off and leave their benches dangling on the wire – and I wished that my heart would stop pounding, and I wondered what happened if you didn’t get off at the top, if you just kept going with all the empty seats. But they never let you keep going, do they? They always make you get off.

I am having a real day of it. Silences stretch like spider-webs between the hours, imperceptibly growing in the corners. I get up from my bed thinking I am headed somewhere, but by the time I get half way across the room I seem to have forgotten where I’m going, so I stand there with my bare feet on the cold floor, reading up the spines of coffee table books, thinking  how do these things happen? The light outside the windows is soapy with the early morning and I can hear the trucks – big trucks, eighteen-wheelers – on the street, tossing their weight over the potholes. A pile of clothes sits bunched on a suitcase where I never unpacked; I think about laundry. In the kitchen the teakettle is cold on the stove. A head of garlic has sprouted a brilliant green arm, like an alien trying to reach up to the pots. I kick a shoe in the hallway and it tumbles to where the garbage sits waiting to be taken out. I feel a kind of sympathy for the shoe. The quiet by the door is thick as fog.

Things edge like this into full blossomed morning, when the sun climbs out from behind the cement of the city and my apartment starts to chirp. The radio announcer is talking about crosswords. The tea kettle hums a quirky Italian harmony, imported and re-gifted to me by my parents, who seem to think that Italy’s the only country worth a dime. My best friend on the phone is talking about love; she’s in it or she’s out of it – I’ve lost track – but I like the sound of her voice on the line, like a song I’ve heard before and missed. I think about the wires, telescopic, stretched along a highway for miles, over the heads of truckers pulling into rest-stops for gossip and Mona’s coffee: the sounds of humanity in motion. “Hello?” she says, and I think “I’m still here” but say only “uh-uh,” as if not wanting to assert too much too soon.

And then I am alone again, the quiet, soft and pliable, like wax on a hot day. The sun collects in puddles on the floor, catching the yellow edges of my plant, which I have forgotten to water. I go into the kitchen, stare into the fridge, open the freezer, close it.  I stare into the fridge again. I close the door. An empty feeling grows inside my stomach. I go back to my desk, where the computer’s screen is blinking cheerfully, and for a second I can see myself turned inside out, bones and guts and organs out in the open for anyone to see, perfectly clean and presentable, like an anatomy doll. The image is so vivid I look down at my shirt, and, mentally, I fold myself back up. I wonder if I am losing it. I wonder who could tell me.

Close third person.  Tone: journalistic.  Mood: dread/loss.

The trains came in like giant caterpillars and exploded, their guts spilling out through their pores onto the platform and scuttling away until the body was left hollow and lifeless, all skeleton and no flesh.  Jonah was one of the last to leave.  He watched the train’s crew emerge from their cubbies, disoriented like post coma patients in a hospital.  He heaved his bag onto his shoulder and exited out into the cement damp of the platform, gulping the November air like a drowning man, letting it fill his lungs until he felt bloated with breathing.  He did not know where he was, exactly.  He had found a phone number scribbled on a torn off scrap tucked into the back of his address book, and had caught a train thinking that maybe he would call the number when he got there.  Now he wasn’t so sure about his plan.  What if nobody picked up?  What if the person who picked up didn’t know who he was?

He walked into the departure hall and paused by the ticket teller’s window.  None of the other passengers had stayed around, so the hall was empty except for the few homeless who seemed to be unaware of each other, or of him.  The teller behind the barred window was deep into a book.  A tiny bit of spittle had collected at the edge of his mouth and his tongue idly glided across his lips trying to find it.  He clung to the edge of the book with his hands as though it might blow away in a sudden gust of wind.

“Excuse me” someone said, in Czech, and Jonah felt a flutter at his neck.  He spun around, too quickly, in time to see an old man tumble into one of the marble benches behind him.  His skin was taught and thin like paper.  Jonah didn’t know any Czech, but he reached over to try and grasp the old man by the elbow to help get him back on his feet.  The old man shrugged him off.  He wrestled his body to its feet, and walked past Jonah.  His flannel shirt gathered in folds between his shoulder-blades.