I am in for my lungs. I spend a lot of time staring at my chest as it goes up and down and thinking telepathic thoughts at my internal organs. Though I guess maybe it’s not called telepathic when the recipient of your telepathy is inside of you, and a lung. There is a plastic tube with two little offshoots coming out of my nose that is tucked around my ears like a pair of nose glasses, and is hooked up to a tank, like the tanks they use to fill up helium balloons, only smaller. Sometimes I take the tube out of my nose to see if maybe my lungs have kicked themselves into gear while the nurses were busy following the elderly around the halls. When I start feeling lightheaded and like if I tried to stand up I would maybe fall back down, I put the tube back in. One time I forgot and fell asleep and woke up with a nurse sitting by my bed, looking at me with her most stern “I may not be your other, but I am not above calling her if I have to” look. The plastic tube had been taped to my face, on booth sides. My mother died two years agp. This is how they do it here at the hospital.

My doctor tells me that eventually I will need a lung transplant. That’s the kind of thing they can do now – take somebody else’s lungs and just stick them in your chest and watch you walk around, the lungs expanding and contracting underneath your ribs like they actually belong to you. It takes a few hours to hook up the tubes, but other than that, no biggie. The doctor smiles his “let me reassure you” game show host smile when he talks about the lung transplant, even though he hasn’t said anything he would need to reassure me about yet. I imagine him practicing this smile in his bathroom in the evenings while his hotshot lawyer wife makes meals out of The Joy of Cooking in their kitchen. I hate the “let me reassure you” smile. I practice giving it back to him while the nurses change the bed-pans of the 60-something woman I share a room with. On these afternoons the head nurse gives me the “oh dear, here we are again” expression that I absolutely adore.

What I have learned so far is that the hospital has its own evolutionary hierarchy. Whereas in the real world survival means killing prey and protecting your offspring, the forces of nature in the hospital have something to do with one’s ability to remain quiet and unperturbed even when the young man next to you is puking his guts out and nobody knows what’s wrong. Hospitals are like Darwin’s islands with the finches.

This fact feels odd to you, because just days ago you lived by daylight, and were the kind of person who never had to ask for directions. You had a small apartment with a balcony and rugs that you could, and would, remove for cleaning and beat with a badminton racket until the dust billowed in plumes and your back hurt and the neighbors offered to help. You had a job on the other side of what was then your town, a job that you hated, some days, but you had never been that great at practical things, so you were happy just to get along. You had friends – not many, and maybe none of them particularly bright, but yours – and a table with an extendable middle that you would set up in the living room and pack with food you’d made for them to have: plates of salads, devilled eggs, and bread with butter and red caviar. You had accumulated things with a sort of affection: a set of pots from Finland, a worn pair of jeans, two pillows from the first year that you were married, five chipped saucers from Czechoslovakia, your grandmother’s china in a cabinet, and a dark red dinette set you had saved five months’ worth of your salary to buy. You were terrible with plants, but you had nurtured a purple pansy in a pot on the windowsill in your kitchen, where it liked the light in the early afternoons, particularly in the fall. Your clothes were always tasteful, if not expensive, and you had a descent personality, which maybe wasn’t a picnic, was maybe more like a picnic during a thunderstorm, but it was something.

Now you are prowling around a dark apartment in the night like a ghost. You are trying to remember the name of the cheese in your refrigerator, and your inability to do so seems absurd, but then you aren’t even sure that the refrigerator is really your refrigerator to begin with, because your refrigerator wouldn’t have those stains, or smell like mold. You lie on a sheet on the floor and wonder if refrigerators here work differently than they did back home. The people here work differently. The people at the airport and the people on TV: they seem happy, more like the people in movies than real people. You stare at the ceiling and swat at the fleas that are staging expeditions up your arm.

After a few days of this you start to feel Iike maybe you could just let things go on the way they are for a while and maybe that would be ok. The faces on the television give you the sense that you are part of the real world, which is something you so sorely miss. You start to figure out the patterns – commercials come on around the fifteen minute and the half hour marks. Sometimes the program you are watching will last thirty minutes and sometimes an hour, but never more, like these Americans decided that that was the length of your attention span. You start to tick off your own day by the half hour – episodes of brooding despair (the 6pm slot), of making dinner (2am-2:30am), of watching a single flea attempt to climb your wall (5am, one hour, as dawn breaks). Your husband starts sleeping nights and going out in the mornings, you are not sure where or for what. You assume he is doing things that will readmit the two of you to the land of the living, but that is only a guess because you know your husband pretty well, and know that he has little motivation besides accomplishing the basics of survival. You start to think that this move has been oddly perfect for him, lowering the bar of ambition to just his level. You try to not resent him for leaving you here to stare at the 9am walls. You try to tell yourself that he is doing it for you. You kill a flea with your fingernail against the bare skin of your leg.

Then it is Saturday – you know this because the people who are usually on TV at 5am aren’t there and instead you are watching a program that seems to be entirely about coining stains out of carpets. You take mental notes. You wonder if in America they have super-effective ways of removing carpet stains. You have never seen anything before that works as fast. You wonder if the TVs in America ever lie. Your husband doesn’t leave on this particular morning. “Everything is closed,” he says. This is the first time the two of you have spoken in a week.

“You shaved,” you say, looking at his white skin carefully, like you are a doctor or a rabbi. He just looks at you. You wonder if that look on his face means he is worried about you. What right does he have to be worried about you?

“I got us a bank account,” he says. It sounds like the right thing to have done, so you nod. You look for the pile of money that used to sit on the table by the TV, but it is gone. You imagine your husband talking to the clerk at the bank, holding his $400. “We can get it out whenever we need,” he says, having followed your thoughts. You married him because he was the only one who had ever been able to imagine what you were thinking. His telepathic abilities had once been your favorite party trick.

She smiles at the boy behind the counter, who is her age, with black wavy hair and dark, smart eyes. He smiles back, and she gets a little jolt in her gut. She has never stopped to buy anything, so he doesn’t know that she’s deaf. She feels like she is pulling off a magic trick. The theater lobby is sweet with the smell of popcorn and burnt sugar. Besides the boy, the lobby is busy with beautiful, lanky girls with floral print dresses and smudged lipstick leaning into their boldly bespectacled boyfriends. Along the walls old couples stand together in that way that old people have of filling in each other’s spaces. Some of the older women wave to her, quietly, the gesture barely noticeable, and she waves back. She feels at home among these foreign-film-goers. These Friday trips have become the anchor in her life – the bit she always comes back to when she starts to feel like she’s drifting out at sea. She walks into the theater and picks a seat up front, where she’ll have no trouble seeing the subtitles. She’s made it, and now everything is easy. The people next to her chat amiably and reach for the phones to set them to vibrate. Then the lights dim and they all disappear.

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 a 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 am glad to hear her voice.

“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, using my non-phone hand to flip 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.

“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.

For a second it’s like my brain kicks into a gear for the first time in weeks. 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, right?’ or ‘Remember when I called godmother on your first-born?’ I am usually pretty good at times like this. But now I am nervous.

Neither of us says anything, so I abandon my responses and toss the smiling cripples brochure into my bag. “I’m driving down. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

—

I buzz Harriet’s door 5 minutes early – it’s like I’m an overachiever, even just at showing up – but Harriet answers almost immediately. Her apartment has that weird system where you have to press the talk button before you press the door button even when you know exactly who it is, and when you press the talk button it’s weird if you don’t say anything, so I hear Harriet’s static-y voice singing “I Will Survive” for a few seconds before the door clicks and the singing recedes back into the wall. A climb two flights and when I turn the corner on the last flight of stairs, I see Harriet outside her open door in her rocketship pajamas, looking like death.

“You’re pregnant, not dying,” I say too loudly. Harriet gives me a look, like: great, now everybody knows. I give her a look back, like: oh, give me a break, like you talk to your neighbors anyway and walk into the apartment. It is messier than normal. The one houseplant has wilted in its faux-basket on the coffee-table. Harriet closes the door and throws herself onto the couch, limbs flailing. I sit down next to her. The cushions are too soft and I sink about a foot towards the floor. We don’t say anything for a bit.

“So, what are you going to do?” I ask.

“Don’t know,” Harriet says.

“You’re not dying.” I am all about the basic and irrefutable truths. I can see one of the smiling cripples popping his head out of my bag. He looks happy. “We’ll figure this out,” I say to Harriet.

After another 30 seconds I extract myself from the couch and walk over to the computer room, which is also a kind of walk-in closet that Harriet’s filled with old books and clothes that don’t fit and all of the graduate school stuff she was too depressed to throw away. Boxes and boxes of stuff. The computer isn’t on, so I hit the button. It whines and sputters, like it might have a steam engine or an elaborate wrench and pulley system that powers it. Harriet walks in and I swivel to look at her, trying hard to project my best “everything is under control” pheromones in her direction. It is a new approach I’m trying. I think it might be called denial, but I’m trying not to think about it.

“If we’re going to go see a doctor,” I say, “you’re going to have to change.” I’m not sure when i decided that this is what we were going to do, but it sounds like the kind of thing I would decide. I generally like to get all the facts. I know how a refrigerator works. I can tell you the distinguishing characteristics of the world’s deadliest mushrooms.

“How, exactly, are we going to find a doctor on a Saturday?” Harriet is the pessimist – every relationship has one.

“I don’t know. But I know you’re going to need some clothes.”

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.

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

“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.

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.