Soon he could hear the deep breathing of Melissa in her sleep. In his mind, he could see her lying there on the canopied bed in her silk robe, her hair tangled, her shoulders rising and falling with each inhale and exhale. How many times he had lain there with her, how many years. As if regarding their lives through a telescope, he wondered if he could ever have made her happy. Possibly during the first year, when they lived on Anabel Circle. They both thought it was the prettiest street, with a lilting name. A lifetime ago, gone in the drop of a leaf.
Now he would not wake her to get him into the bed. He would spend the long night in his chair. His pulse was throbbing, the night was pulling at him, the night would not let him sleep.
He listened to her breathing, to his own breathing, and he realized that he was wheezing. He could hear himself wheezing. Were his lungs beginning to fail? In the morning, Melissa would try again to make him go to the hospital. Petrov would order another round of examinations for him. But he would not oblige.
Melissa shifted in the bed, and his thoughts returned to her. He wondered what she would do. He could not imagine her living alone. She would remarry quickly, maybe to someone he knew now, or an old boyfriend. In a vision, he saw her in another house, standing by a great window, her hair longer than he’d ever seen it. Had he gotten some glimpse of the future? He strained to see her face, to see if she was contented, but the image dissolved into the curve of her shoulders. Maybe she would move back to Fayetteville, take Virginia and her children with her. Then he imagined Alex. At college in his new dormitory room, putting photographs on the wall with thumbtacks. Alex’s eyes dark and dewy, his sincerity. Light from a leaded glass window. Alex might live a life.
He listened again to the shallow pantings of his breath. The world had diminished to the most feeble red light, stray thoughts in his mind, inhales and exhales. Pieces of letters formed with his breathing. Inhales ascended with the start of a vowel or consonant, exhales fell with the turning. Slight swirls were c’s, longer flat breaths were b’s, or w’s, or t’s. A world in the breath. His breathing in counterpoint to hers, letter by letter, word by word. What message could he be writing with his breaths? No message. Only intricate turnings, drowning gasps and pants. His breath had almost succeeded in sloughing off his body, now he was a thin line, a thin column of air. Hers, the sharp point of guilt, his the dull edge cutting jagged. And as he listened to his labored breathing, he resolved more than ever not to leave this room. He would remain here in this room. Then there rose in his mind the memory of lying on the hospital bed beside the cellseparator machine. He could see his blood flowing through the clear plastic tube, into the machine and back to the blue vein in his arm. He could hear the thumping and thumping and the doctors standing over him discussing his brain scans and blood counts.
Suddenly a fury ran through him and crushed his chest muscles and twisted his mouth. He screamed, “No.” The scream did not seem to come from his lips but exploded out of his body. The scream rang in his ears, the scream rang through the silent house, Melissa moaned in her sleep. No. His heart pounded. His lungs sliced raw and bleeding. He gasped for air. The invisible room had punctured and collapsed on itself, the ceiling had dropped until it hovered just inches above his head. No. In his last remaining days, his life would be his, his spirit would be his. He was not a cork in the sea. He could act, even if only for himself. He could act.
For a few moments, his body jerked and quivered. Then the terrible grip of his chest began to subside. His muscles slackened. Slowly, slowly, air returned to his lungs. The pounding of his heart slowed to throbs, his blood slackened. His quivering distended to sighs and thinned to a slight tremble and dissolved in a last gentle sway, and then a calm began spreading over him. He would have his dignity. He would have his dignity. He would have this small space of stillness. In his calm, in the stillness, he listened again to his breathing. He listened to sounds, unable to measure time or the hours remaining in the night.
After some moments, he heard rain. He could hear a soft splattering on the roof, a fluttering and tap at the windows. In the distance, shutters creaked in the wind. His neighbors might be listening also as they lay restless upon their beds. He imagined the drops of rain outside his window, small and gray in the night. He imagined the rain moving in slants to the ground, leaving a silver glove on each branch and leaf, washing the sidewalks and streets, washing the blue-shadowed lampposts and the metal fenders of cars and the vast stretch of highway leading to Boston. Rain would be dripping softly on the windows of the Marbleworth Building and on the Prudential Center and, further east, making dimples in the dark sea along the coast.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For help with legal, medical, and other technical matters, I thank Neil Arkuss, Isabelle De Courtivron, Robert Kane, Karla Kanis, William McClaran, Ross Peterson, Chris Sawyer-Laucanno, James Suojanen, Sherry Turkle, Alice Whitehill Wiseberg, and the Harvard Medical School Library. I take responsibility for all factual errors remaining in the novel. Thank you, Robbie Bosnak and Janet Sonenberg, for your guidance at a critical juncture.
While Anytus and Socrates are historical, as is the general narrative of Socrates’ trial and execution, the “Anytus Dialogue” presented here is fictional. Particularly useful texts for me in re-creating ancient Athens and its characters included the Dialogues of Plato, particularly Apology and Phaedo, the plays of Aristophanes, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and the writings of Hippocrates on disease and medicine. For additional consultations on ancient Greece, I thank Zeph Stewart, Ted Lendon, and Rob Loomis.
I am grateful to Don DeLillo, Richard Goodwin, Ilona Karmel, Leo Marx, Agnieszka Meyro, Annie Proulx, Janet Silver, Michael Rothschild, Peter Stoicheff, Dan Terris, and Rosalind Williams for commenting on the manuscript in progress. Thank you, Jim Leahy, for many readings at the early stages and for your support.
A deep appreciation to LaRose Todd Coffey, exacting teacher of long ago, insightful critic, and friend.
Loving gratitude to my wife, Jean Lightman, who has patiently nourished me through the many years of writing this book.
Finally, a special thanks to Dan Frank, for his perceptive and sustained editorial suggestions, to Jane Gelfman, for her encouragement and friendship over many years, and to Liz Calder, for her readings and advice in the last stages.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Lightman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1948, and educated at Princeton University and at the California Institute of Technology. His previous books include two novels, Einstein’s Dreams and Good Benito; a collection of essays and fables, Dance for Two; and several books on science, Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists, Ancient Light, Great Ideas in Physics, and Time for the Stars. He is a professor of humanities and lecturer in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Alan Lightman, Diagnosis
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