Jesse's Blog

The last time I held my wife was when I carried her over our threshold, out to the car, and to the hospital.

She was so small, and yet I nearly staggered as I crossed the doorway. It was the memory of carrying her through in the opposite direction on our wedding night that nearly knocked me down.

I was in two places at once, as I both drove to the hospital, calling out “it’s going to be ok, talk to me, it’s going to be ok, please say something” over and over again, and I was also back to meeting her for the first time.

She was a friend of a friend, and I knew right away that she was different from any other woman that I’d ever met. Most men aren’t aware of the empty place inside them, yet we’re all created with it. I’d known, and it didn’t take much conversation with her to feel that empty place calling out to her. I felt physical attraction, certainly, but this was something else, something like magnets pulling towards themselves.

She hadn’t felt that right away, though, and why was I thinking about this while I was flashing my lights, weaving around slower cards, and saying “stay with me, we’re nearly there”? Was it because, if I wasn’t back in those first few moments with her, I’d be here and now instead, thinking about how this might be what losing her is like?

No, she hadn’t been sure about me at first, not at all. She’d been 19, gorgeous, unapproachably angry at the world, but not in a way that hates you, so much as a way that wants to evade your notice. She hadn’t known that she was beautiful. She hadn’t known that talking to her was more fun than anything else that I could do, because she was intelligent, quick witted, and challenging in ways that I’d never experienced before. She was completely unaware of how her past relationships had failed because most of the men she’d met didn’t know how to take her strong willed sense of self, or her sharp sense of humor. She’d taken some convincing. She’d taken some time.

She’d been taken by men in white, I’d been left behind in some small room with a television, a couch, and the strong smell of antiseptic. I sat there alone and ignored the daytime tv dramatics, much as she and I had ignored similar such behavior around us once I’d won her over. I’m sure there was talk, among our mutual friends, just as much as I’m sure neither of us really cared. It’s not that we didn’t care for other people. They just faded into the background. As I did, waiting..

Stroke, he says. Uncorrectable, damaged completely beyond repair, and I’ll never see her again. Teddy, that mutual friend that introduced us. I wonder whatever became of him; I never saw him again, after that day we met. He‘d be, what, forty five now? His granddad was bald, would he be bald? Can’t remember if that was his Mom’s dad or his Dad’s dad. Hard to remember. Hard to remember what he sounded like.

This doctor, now. He sounds like whatever he’s talking about must be important, so I listen a listen more closely as he describes some radical new form of medicine. He talks about the recent legislation to allow cloning of humans to allow for organ transplants. I remember she and I arguing about that, couple years back. She always said that she thought the idea of transplanting organs from one human to another was ghoulish, that it was a form of cannibalism and that she wanted no part of it, even if it meant saving her own life. I wasn’t sure that I agreed, but I did agree that it encouraged murder, body theft, so we reached a kind of detente on the subject when that bill passed. I’m still not listening to this doctor.

He’s telling me that once the donor is artificially matured, that they can transplant the healthy sections of brain from the original using nanotechnology and some other drugs that I don’t understand. He says that there are limits to the rapid maturation, that the neural grafts are experimental, and something about risks.

What does he know about risk, with his empty left hand and his “let’s be nice” bedside manner that still has the price tags hanging from it? How can he not see the risks we took, the two of us, pouring into each other‘s fragile bodies and minds all that we were? How can he know anything.

I‘m nodding along to whatever he’s saying, signing something while I remember.

It didn’t work.

Four years later, and I’ve gotten used to the empty house, the soundless halls, and it‘s a jump scare when the doorbell rings. Forgot I had one, and when I answer the door, she’s there.

She’s about twenty five years old, and there’s not even the faintest sign of recognition on her face.

“John?” she asks.

Nodding again. She was never slow at reading people, and I can see the reaction to my face on hers. I know that face so well.

”I.. I’m sorry. I know that I shouldn’t be here.” Her eyes leave me, her hands dart to the hair by her temple, and I know before she does it that she’ll twist it three times round her index finger before curling her finger and pulling. I always thought she’d end up balding herself that way. She’s expecting me to speak, but I can’t.

She looks back to my face. “There are some things of mine that I believe you have, things from my childhood, and I was wondering..” The hair yanks.

Photo albums. Diplomas. Stuffed animals. I should have sent them on, I knew that, but i didn’t. Was that because I had wanted this moment? I couldn’t have. I shift back and right, wave her inside.

She steps in, and it takes a moment before I realize that she doesn’t know this house. None of the grafts from her teenage years forward took, and so to her, there is no meaning for the door frame over which she has just passed, nor sense of place for anything inside, so I show her where her things are.

It takes us two trips to carry her things out to the waiting car. A man sits in the drivers seat, and I don’t recognize him.We wordlessly fill the trunk and the back seat.

All the while, I see her. I see the way she moves, the small sounds that she makes. Even the scent of her, and I am trying with all that I have left to keep myself under control.

There’s only a shoebox of photos left, and I’m behind her up to the doorway when she stops just outside the doorway, box in the left, hair in the right. “Are you going to say anything?” she says.

Twenty six years flicker through my mind, I watch her age before me, and my hand lifts up, the urge to take her hand stronger than the urge to breathe, but it’s the door I take as I say the only words that can be said.

”Good bye.”