Dawn Raffel: Further Adventures in the Restless Universe

“What cousin?”

“I told you,” I said. “So rather than go back to Poland alone, she stayed as a tutor or governess — whatever they called it—”

“In Germany?” my sister said.

“I said that,” I said. I put a book on the shelf. I was straightening up as I was speaking to my sister. “A friend of the family played the violin — a star of sorts. Anyway, he fell in love—”

“Aha,” my sister said.

“Not yet,” I said. “She didn’t care. He played for her. He courted her. Nothing could move her.”

“But,” my sister said.

“Finally, the story goes, she agreed to marry him only on condition that he take her to America — Chicago, where her sister had settled.”

“And?” my sister said.

“This was all before the war. Meanwhile, the cousin said — meanwhile, the lover who’d left her married someone else and had a family with her. Of course — you know. The lover, the children — none of them survived. And now that I think of it, the family in Poland…what?”

“Your phone.”

“It will stop in a minute, I think,” I said.

“That’s horrible,” my sister said.

“Listen, there ought to be a moral to the story, or anyway a point.”

“Like what?” my sister said. “God has a plan? What kind of a—”

“God?”

“Plan,” my sister said.

“Hang on,” I said.

“But anyway, did that man—” my sister said.

“If you change your name,” I said.

“Don’t interrupt. The father. The husband. Aunt’s X’s father. Did he, when he came to Chicago, continue to play?”

“What?” I said.

“The instrument.”

“Well,” I said. “Great Aunt X could sing, I’m told. Although I never heard her. But what I was saying—”

“What are you saying?” my sister said.

“There is someone who apparently really needs to reach me.” My sweater was itching.

“Wait,” she said. “Just tell me this. Who do you think she loved in the end?”

“Who?” I said. “Great Aunt X? Or Great, Great—”

“The mother.”

“I’ve really got to go,” I said. “What are you asking? The one who broke her heart or the one who saved her life?”

“Which?” my sister said. “And how do you know that one of them didn’t do both?”

“Or maybe her child.”

“Or maybe her sister,” my sister said.

My hand was on the button. “Forgive me,” I said.

And so there were two of them, boys, snug in their little knit caps. One boy was sleeping. “Mama,” said the other, the one who was riding upright, in front in the front-and-back stroller.

“See there,” the mother said. “The moon, do you see it?”

“Undo me,” the boy said. He tugged beneath his chin.

“Not yet,” the mother said.

“Hold on,” the mother said. “Your hat!”—for he’d flung it.

The stroller reversed. There issued sounds: a wheel against something, a stump or a root, the howl of a creature summoned, arisen — frantic for the breast.

The woman was screaming murder down the hall. I could hear her through the door. The man I was with lay in bed, tilted up. “Will you listen?” he said. I was wearing a mask.

I was married to him.

The linen was a mess.

It had been this way, like this, for days. There was a portal in his arm and a tube in his nose, and out the window lay the city, alive. We could see downtown, the river too. There was oxygen in there, in the tube. On TV there was a scandal. A colonel was speaking. “Ahem,” the colonel said.

He had been coughing, my husband had, and losing weight. His lungs were filled with fluid. The fluid was red.

The colonel said “contra.”

Data was taken, a quantity of blood.

“Consumption” was a word not said. Nevertheless, they were frightened, it seemed, the servers with the trays, and left them lying in the hall.

Underneath the mask, my face was hot. It was summer — the Fourth of July, in fact. I went out to get the tray.

The woman had thoroughly quieted herself when the doctor came to look, and so, the nurses said, he discredited reports. She waited until he was just beyond hearing. “Murder,” she hollered. “Call the police!”

The dinner on the tray — there was cutlet, I think, and cubes of things — looked good to me.

There was a little chocolate cake with a toothpick flag.

I was that hungry.

The woman with the basket of wash is me. I am a failure at folding. The bedding is crushed. The shirts are getting bigger: boys’, men’s.

I am sensitive to noise in this house of ours, where until rather recently we have not lived.

I have failed to even make an appropriate attempt.

The teacher was giving us a lesson in faith. She said, “Faith is a process,” or something like that, to that effect. She gave us examples, and passages to read. I left the pages elsewhere, I believe.

At night, each night, I left the hospital for home. Where we lived, more or less, at that time, was a box. My husband was confined to isolation in the ward but the bathroom was shared with a patient who, going by the evidence, was stricken with a terrible and new disease. My husband had an old disease. “I think I am a danger to him,” my husband said.

The woman was screaming as I walked down the hall to where the elevator was. “Call 911!”

I rolled my sleeves.

The nurses went about their night and did what nurses do.

I have often been accused of disregarding the subject. But while we’re on the topic, they used bleach to clean up with after a procedure.

The teacher was saying, “God’s voice is on the waters.” She told us, if we could, to dress in white.

“Listen, I can listen to the hearings,” he said. He was watching an investigation into weapons. I could hear it on the phone. I was sitting at work, eating fish from a container. At the time it was important — who said what and what we did. The woman sitting next to me was listening in. “Eee-rahn,” she said. “Don’t say ‘I ran.’”

I went there with batteries and tissues and socks, and something to sip through a straw for myself, which I could do if I adjusted the mask, inadvisably.

“Opportunistic”—the word we kept hearing. The cough had been suppressed by then.

The view overwhelmed me. Taxis and taxis; yellow, yellow everywhere, and gray, and rain; the tallest of structures — only one, on account of the angle, its double obscured. I had once had a drink at the top, on the deck, with a man who liked to talk about dreams. The man was from Chicago. He’d had the dream, he said, where he flew, and also the one we had shared about teeth.

My teeth were partly real.

The tube had been removed.

The man who had shared the toilet was missing, or so we had to guess.

I was learning to use the computer at home. I was processing words. I kept violating something.

I was calling my husband at the hospital for help.

My doctor had told me I needed to be tested.