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By Root 1586 0

I’d fallen asleep, I’d gone into the kitchen to get a drink of water, and a mouse had run under the refrigerator. It startled me, but then tears sprang to my eyes because if Richard knew there were mice—mice polluting the environment he was trying to purify with air ionizers, and humidifiers that misted the room with mineral water—he’d make us move. The idea of gathering up the piles of holistic-health books, the pamphlets on meditation, the countless jars of vitamins and chelated minerals and organically grown grains, the eye of God that hung over the stove, the passages he’d made Ned transcribe from Bernie Siegel and tape to the refrigerator—we’d already moved twice, neither time for any good reason. Something couldn’t just scurry in and make us pack it all up again, could it? And where was there left to go anymore? He was too sick to be in a hotel, and I knew there was no other apartment anywhere near the hospital. We would have to persuade him that the mouse existed only in his head. We’d tell him he was hallucinating; we’d talk him out of it, in the same way we patiently tried to soothe him by explaining that the terror he was experiencing was only a nightmare. He was not in a plane that had crashed in the jungle; he was tangled in sheets, not weighed down with concrete.

When I got to the bedroom, Ned was trying to pry Richard’s fingers off the door frame. He was having no luck, and looked at me with an expression that had become familiar: fear, with an undercurrent of intense fatigue.

Richard’s robe dangled from his bony shoulders. He was so wet that I thought at first he might have blundered into the shower. He looked in my direction but didn’t register my presence. Then he sagged against Ned, who began to walk him slowly in the direction of the bed.

“It’s cold,” Richard said. “Why isn’t there any heat?”

“We keep the thermostat at eighty,” Ned said wearily. “You just need to get under the covers.”

“Is that Hattie over there?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Ned is trying to get you into the bed.”

“Rac,” Richard said vaguely. He said to Ned, “Is that my bed?”

“That’s your bed,” Ned said. “You’ll be warm if you get into bed, Richard.”

I came up beside Richard and patted his back, and walked around and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to coax him forward. Ned was right: it was dizzyingly hot in the apartment. I got up and turned back the covers, smoothing the contour sheet. Ned kept Richard’s hand, but turned to face him as he took one step backward, closer to the bed. The two of us pantomimed our pleasure at the bed’s desirability. Richard began to walk toward it, licking his lips.

“I’ll get you some water,” I said.

“Water,” Richard said. “I thought we were on a ship. I thought the bathroom was an inside cabin with no window. I can’t be where there’s no way to see the sky.”

Ned was punching depth back into Richard’s pillows. Then he made a fist and punched the center of the bed. “All aboard the S.S. Fucking A,” he said.

It got a fake laugh out of me as I turned into the kitchen, but Richard only began to whisper urgently about the claustrophobia he’d experienced in the bathroom. Finally he did get back in his bed and immediately fell asleep. Half an hour later, still well before dawn, Ned repeated Richard’s whisperings to me as if they were his own. Though Ned and I were very different people, our ability to imagine Richard’s suffering united us. We were sitting in wooden chairs we’d pulled away from the dining-room table to put by the window so Ned could smoke. His cigarette smoke curled out the window.

“Ever been to Mardi Gras?” he said.

“New Orleans,” I said, “but never Mardi Gras.”

“They use strings of beads for barter,” he said. “People stand up on the balconies in the French Quarter—women as well as men, sometimes—and they holler down for people in the crowd to flash ’em: you give them a thrill, they toss down their beads. The more you show, the more you win. Then you can walk around with all your necklaces and everybody will know you’re real foxy. Real cool. You do a bump-and-grind, you can get the good