The Illumination

Carol Ann Page

It was Friday evening, half an hour before the light struck, and she was attempting to open a package with a carving knife. The package was from her ex-husband, who had covered it in a thick layer of transparent tape, the kind fretted with hundreds of white threads, the latest step in his long campaign of bringing needless difficulty to her life. She was sawing along the lid when she came to a particularly stubborn cross-piece of tape and turned the box toward herself to improve her grip. Her hand slipped, and just that quickly the knife severed the tip of her thumb. The hospital was not busy, and when she walked in carrying a balled-up mass of wet paper towels, her blood wicking through the pink flowers, the clerk at the reception desk admitted her right away. The doctor who came to examine her said, “Let’s take a look at what we’ve got here,” then gingerly, with his narrow fingers, unwound the paper from around her thumb. “Okay, this is totally doable. I don’t mind telling you you had me worried with all that blood of yours, but this doesn’t look so bad. A few stitches, and we should have you fixed right up.” She had not quite broken through the nail, though, and when he rotated her hand to take a closer look, a quarter-inch of her thumb came tilting away like the hinged cap of a lighter. The doctor gave an appreciative whistle, then took the pieces of her thumb and coupled them back together. She watched, horrified, as he fastened them in place with a white tag of surgical tape. “Miss? Miss?” The room had begun to flutter. He took her face in his hands. “What’s your name? Can you tell me your name, Miss? I’m Dr. Alstadt. Can you tell me your name?” His hands were warm and soft, like the hands of a fourteen-year-old boy deciding whether or not to kiss her, something she remembered feeling once, a long time ago, and she gave him her name, which was Carol Ann, Carol Ann Page. “Okay, Carol Ann, what we’re going to do is bring in the replantation team. They see this kind of thing all the time, so I don’t want you to worry. You hang in there, all right? Is there anyone we can call for you?”

“No.”

“A husband? A parent?”

“No. Not in town.”

“All right then. It shouldn’t be longer than a few minutes. In the meantime, I’m going to give you something to ease the pain,” but instead he jotted a few sentences onto a clipboard and left the room. She lay back and closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, the doctor had been replaced by a nurse in dark green scrubs, who said, “You must be the thumb,” wiped the crook of her elbow with a cloth that smelled like chlorine bleach, and gave her a shot. The shot didn’t extinguish the pain so much as disguise it, make it beautiful, ease it, she supposed, just as the doctor had said it would. The nurse hurried out, and Carol Ann was alone again. A moment later, when she saw the light shining out of her incision, she thought she was hallucinating. It was steady and uniform, a silvery-white disk that showed even through her thumbnail, as bright and finely edged as the light in a Hopper painting. Through the haze of drugs, it seemed to her that the light was not falling over her wound or even infusing it from the inside but radiating through it from another world. She thought that she could live there and be happy.

After the surgery, when she woke, her hand was encased in an odd little glove that immobilized her thumb but left her fingers free to open and close. Her neck was stiff, and her lips were dry, and in her mouth she detected the iron-and-butter taste of blood. At first she thought she was making a sort of mental clerical error, mistaking the aftereffects of thumb surgery for the aftereffects of dental surgery, but when she swept her tongue over her teeth, she brushed up against a pad of cotton batting. She pushed it out onto her palm. A pale glow flickered from somewhere and then went out. She remembered her dream of light and consolation, the sensation of peace and abundance that had come over her, and a voice saying, “This is really freaking me out. Isn’t this freaking anyone else out?” and a second voice saying, “We have a job to do, Clayton. Nothing here changes that fact,” and then the feeling of escape as she stared into the operating lamp and sleep pulled her under. She was thirsty now, but when she to tried to sit up in bed, a boy in mocha-colored scrubs appeared by her side and said, “Whoa, there. You’re still zonked out from the operation. What do you need? Let me get it for you.” She asked for something to drink, and he took a bottle of Evian from the tray beside her bed, twisted the cap off, and brought it to her lips, his hand performing a slow genuflection in the air as he tipped the water out. She drained nearly the whole bottle without once pausing for breath. When she was finished, he nodded, a short upward snap of the chin, impressed. “Is there anything else I can help you with? The doctor should be in to check on you soon.”

“My mouth. I cut my thumb—just my thumb—but when I woke up, I found all this… stuff in my mouth.” She was still holding the square of spit-soaked gauze she had discovered. When she opened her fingers to show it to him, he made a nest of his two good hands beneath her broken one so that she could dump it out. An image of her father came suddenly to mind: the sun was bright and the sky was clear and he was kneeling beside a stream in a state park, making a nest of his own good hands to give her a sip of water, and she paused and frowned, staring into the tiny pool he had created, transfixed by the way the light sent gray blooms of shadows gusting over his palms, and when she pointed it out to him, he laughed and called her his little Impressionist.

The orderly had taken her chart from the foot of the bed. “Says here you bit down on your cheek during the operation. Normally that doesn’t happen. Just sometimes if there’s an anesthesia problem you might wake up for a second and feel a little pain, and you’ll have what they call a bite response. A B.R.—that’s what this stands for.”

“Brrr.”

“Are you cold? I can turn the heat up if you want.”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Okey.” That was how he pronounced it. “I’ll be back in to check on you in a little while.”

She had spoken to him for only a few minutes, and she felt so weak, and he was no one who loved her, and when she propped herself up on her elbows to watch him go, her head swam with a thousand colors. She spent a while studying her room: the television pinned by a metal arm to the ceiling, the window looking out on a stand of pine trees, the empty bed, with its sheets in a dead calm. In the hallway, a man walked by wheeling an IV tower with a sack of clear fluid on one of its hooks, his stomach glimmering through his hospital gown. Then a woman stumbled past carrying a flashlight in her left hand. By the time Carol Ann thought to wonder why she was pointing her light down a corridor that was already so clearly illuminated, the woman had slipped out of view. Her arms were trembling from supporting herself, so she lay back down again. The bed’s side rails rattled as the mattress took her weight. The pillow rose up around her ears like bread. More and more she had the feeling that she was missing something.

It must have been another hour before the doctor who had first inspected her thumb, Dr. All-That-Blood-of-Yours, Dr. Alstadt, arrived and pulled a stool up to her bed. He sat down and asked her how she was feeling, then leaned in with his stethoscope. He was so close that her gaze was drawn to the smooth spot on his neck, a shape like Kentucky just above his Adam’s apple, where the stubble had failed to grow. He smelled like mouthwash, and he used her whole name when he spoke to her. “Well then, Carol Ann Page, let’s take a look at that hand of yours, shall we?” He undid the Velcro on her glove so that the material fell away like the peel of a banana, then unwrapped the bandage from around her thumb. Later she would find herself unable to remember which she noticed first: the quarter-inch of her nail that was missing, a straight line exposing the featureless topside of her thumb, or the way the light she thought she had hallucinated was still leaking out from around the wound.

“Your color is good,” Dr. Alstadt said. “Can you go like this for me?”

She flexed her thumb in imitation of his. A thrill of pain passed through her hand, and the light sharpened, flaring through the black x’s of her stitching.

“Range of motion good, too. It looks like we got to you before any major tissue damage set in. Let me wrap you back up, and you can get a little shut-eye.”

“Doctor, wait. What’s happening to me? Don’t you see this?”

He didn’t need to ask, See what? She noted it right away.

“I forget you’ve been sleeping all this time. Well, I don’t know much more than you do, I’m afraid. It started at eight-seventeen last night. That’s locally speaking, but this isn’t exactly local news. In fact, I bet if we… here.” He picked up the remote control and turned on the television. An episode of an old courtroom sitcom filled the screen, the one with the lecherous prosecutor and the hulking bailiff, but when he changed the station, Carol Ann saw footage of what looked like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Silver sparks appeared to swirl through the bodies of the traders like the static on a broken television. The doctor changed the station again, and she saw a child soldier with his arm in a sling and his shoulder ablaze with light. Then the president of the United States stepping into a helicopter, raising a hand glowing with arthritis at its joints. Then a pair of boxers opening up radiant cuts on each other’s faces. The images came one after another, so quickly that she barely had time to identify them. A woman in a blue burka, long pencils of light shining through the net of her veil. A team of cyclists with their knees and feet drawing iridescent circles in the air. A girl with a luminous scrape on her arm, her face caught in an expression of inquisitive fear. When the news anchor addressed the camera, saying how from all around the world today we are receiving continuing reports of this strange occurrence: light, pouring from the injuries of the sick and the wounded, Carol Ann noticed his eyes narrowing and saw something like the flat pulse of heat lightning flashing from his temples. A phenomenon so new and unforeseen—the anchor winced almost imperceptibly as his forehead grew momentarily brighter—that scientists have not yet devised a name for it.

Dr. Alstadt had finished dressing her thumb. Gently, as though cradling a bird’s egg, he fit the glove back onto her hand. His voice came out tired and ragged. “Funny how quickly a person can get used to a miracle. Or how quickly a miracle can come to seem commonplace. If that’s what this is, a miracle.” He stopped, gave himself a derisory sniff, and for the first time since he had entered the room looked her directly in the eye. “See what I mean? ‘If that’s what this is.’ The problem is we’re in a hospital. Not exactly an environment conducive to quiet reflection. Well, Carol Ann Page,” he said, and he smacked his knees as he stood up. He told her he would be willing to discharge her that afternoon, but that the hospital would be more comfortable if she would consent to stay until Sunday morning so they could watch the area of the injury for any signs of tissue rejection.

Those were his exact words.

The hospital would be more comfortable.

The area of the injury.

Tissue rejection.

When she agreed to remain overnight, he returned her hand to her stomach and said, “That’s my girl.” He muttered so softly that she wondered if he realized he had spoken. As he left the room she caught the briefest glimpse of the nape of his neck, where a hundred threads of light were twisting like algae in an underwater current.

She filled the morning with daydreaming and television and eating amorphous sogs of peach and pear from the fruit cup on her breakfast tray, and around noon she swallowed some blue tablets a nurse gave her out of a Dixie cup, and shortly after, she came to understand that there was no such thing as pain or solemnity in the world, as remorse or exertion, an anxiety that would not be stilled or a mourning that would not be comforted. She was not sure how long she spent idly pinching her arm, watching the light on her skin bud open and fade like a pair of lips, nearly outside of time, but eventually a couple of orderlies wheeled another patient past her, a woman her own age, and lifted her onto the second bed. “One and two and—” Three, Carol Ann finished for them. They brought the woman’s blanket up to her chest and tucked a pillow under her skull, allowing her long hair to catch beneath her shoulders. Her head was fishlined to one side, exposing her neck to the air, but the orderlies did not seem to care, and who could blame them, who could blame them, in a room that drifted so lightly through the universe, who could blame them? They left a stack of the woman’s belongings on the cabinet by her bed—a journal, a pocketbook, a plastic bag with her clothes and shoes inside it. She had the flawless features of a fashion model, and a face as placid as a kitten’s, but there was a wound inside her so bright that Carol Ann could see it burning all the way through the layers of sheets and blankets.

“Are you awake?”

The woman’s eyes were open, blinking every so often in a way that seemed almost deliberate, but she did not answer right away. Eventually she said, “I hope not.” It was a hope Carol Ann understood, though it was not her own. From the earliest days of her childhood she had harbored the opposite hope—that when she was sleeping, she was actually awake. Her dream life had always been filled with fantasy, whimsy, beautiful reminiscence—never a chase scene, never a nightmare. She would follow a lost ball into a forest where she could understand the conversations of the animals. I hope that I’m awake, she would think. She would take two steps into the air and begin breaststroking over the rooftops. I hope that I’m awake. She would lie down next to her husband in the years when their kindness to each other was easy. I hope that I’m awake. Every morning she rose from sleep with the same feeling of vague disappointment she experienced when she picked up a ringing phone and heard only a dial tone. Someone had hung up on her.

The pills must have been losing their effect because she no longer felt as if her hands had been cast off from her body, and a thorn of pain went through her thumb when she tried to bend it. She was lying on her side, looking directly at the woman in the second bed, whose blue eyes watched her as she winced and gritted her teeth. “I cut my thumb. What happened to you?”

The other woman struggled free of her reverie. When she spoke, it was like a small bird pausing to appraise the landscape as it hopped across the grass, carefully forming each sentence before moving on to the next: “The car flipped over on the interstate,” and then, “We hit an ice slick when we were going over the river,” and then, “There was the truck carrying the steel rods, which we missed, but after that there was the concrete pillar,” and finally, “Jason was driving. Not me.”

“Who’s Jason?”

“My husband.”

“Is he all right?”

“They won’t tell me. They say I need my rest. But I don’t see how he could have …” Her voice sank out of hearing. “I kept asking him if he was okay—‘Are you okay? Answer me if you’re okay’—but he wouldn’t, wouldn’t answer. He just hung there upside down in his seat belt.” Already Carol Ann had seen several hours of footage about the strange illumination of the injured. She imagined an incandescent lightbulb flooding the car with light until it burned out with a pop. She watched the woman swallow and then bow her head, inadvertently pulling her hair taut. “Every morning he left a note for me on the refrigerator with a different reason he loved me. He never missed a day. I write them down in my book. Would you like to see?”

She indicated the journal lying on the cabinet between their beds. Carol Ann reached for it and let it fall open to a random page: I love those three perfect moles on your shoulder—like a line of buttons. I love the sound of your voice over the phone when you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re doing a crossword puzzle from me. I love your lopsided smile. I love the way you leave a little space between each piece of bacon on your plate: “amber waves of bacon.” I love the way you sway and close your eyes when you’re listening to a song you like—a dance, but only from the waist up. I love that moment in bed when you first climb on top of me, and the uprooted smell we leave behind when we’re finished. I love the feel of your hands on my cheeks, even when they’re “ ‘cold as tea.’ ‘Hot tea?’ ‘No, iced tea.’ ” I love the fact that when you accidentally pick up a hitchhiker, what you’re worried about is that he’ll steal the DVDs you rented. I love your fear of heights and bridges. I love the way you can be singing a song, and all of a sudden it will turn into a different song, and you’ll keep on singing and won’t even realize it.

Carol Ann shut the journal, letting the silk bookmark trail over her wrist. “That’s beautiful.”

The woman in the other bed nodded, and it might have been intuition, or commiseration, or just the last timed dosage of the blue pills Carol Ann had taken, but she could tell that what she meant to say was, Yes, it was beautiful. It was. It was.

“You keep it,” the woman told her.

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do. I couldn’t bear to read it again.”

“You don’t want to give something like this away. It’s too intimate.”

The silence that followed had a strange bend to it. It drew itself out while an old man pushed a walker with tennis balls on its feet to the nurses’ station at the far end of the hallway, then pivoted around with a series of metallic clacks. Eventually the woman let her breath run out, turned her face away, and said to Carol Ann, “You don’t understand at all.”

Later that day, around four in the afternoon, Carol Ann was watching a hawk wheel over the pine trees outside the window when the woman in the other bed lit up like a signal mirror. The glare was so bright that it suffused the glass, extinguishing the hawk in midflight. A team of doctors and technicians rushed to the woman’s side. Carol Ann shielded her eyes as they worked over her body with their equipment, saying things like, “She’s in full arrest, cardiac and respiratory,” and, “Sunglasses! I need some sunglasses here!” and, a few minutes later, “S.C.D. at four… thirteen. You can stop now, Miriam. I’ve called it.” One by one the doctors left, and the room fell quiet. The outlines of the shadows began to soften again. The light arising from the woman’s bed slowly dwindled until her skin held only a cool spectral glow, like phosphorescent moss in a cave. Carol Ann did not have enough faith in her powers of observation to tell exactly when the light winked out, only that there came a moment when it appeared the woman’s pain was no longer radiating from her body. Her hair had been freed from beneath her back. She lay with her eyes closed, her lips parted as if to take a breath. Once again, it seemed, she was confined to the borders of her flesh.

When the same orderly who had helped Carol Ann drink from the Evian bottle that morning came to box up the woman’s possessions, Carol Ann stopped him from taking the journal. She slid it to her own side of the cabinet and pinned it down with her bad hand.

“No, that’s mine.”

The orderly shrugged. “If you say so, ma’am.”

He turned his back to her as he finished his work, avoiding her eyes as he emptied the woman’s lunch tray, folded her blanket, and with the help of another orderly hoisted her onto a gurney. Carol Ann knew that she would probably never see him again, and also that it would not matter if she did, for in that instant she had become a thief to him.

Soon after she left the hospital, Carol Ann developed a preoccupation with her wound, testing it a dozen times a day for signs of light and pain. Dr. Alstadt had warned her to avoid the temptation, but she could not resist it. At work or at home, whenever the thought crossed her mind, she would remove the glove splint from around her thumb so that she could trace the cut with her index finger. Her nail had grown over the top line of the incision, but the front and the sides were still exposed, and a narrow welt had formed there, healing up around the stitches. The pain was not as pronounced as it had been before, and neither was the light, but if she bent her thumb just right, guiding it into the injury, it would begin to radiate from the inside, pink and warm, showing a tiny net of capillaries and a curved silhouette of bone. It reminded her of the sleepover parties she used to attend when she was in elementary school, how all the girls would take turns shining a flashlight through their hands, making their palms sway around in the dark like Japanese lanterns. When she was finished examining herself, she would put the glove back on and seal the straps, and she would think about the hospital and the stand of pine trees and the tranquillity the blue pills had brought her, and if she was at home she would let her eyes drift to the light from the window, and if she was at work, to the light from the computer. She was employed by a subscription news service, compiling accounts of the day’s major stories for various players in the stock and banking industries. Every day she devoted a portion of her assortment to what people had begun to call the Illumination. There was the story of the presidential task force that had been formed to investigate the phenomenon. The story of the Midwestern teenagers cutting luminous tattoos into their skin. The story of the Korean scientist who had spliced a gene of fluorescent jellyfish protein into a feline embryo to create a kitten that glowed in the dark. The story of the Palestinian suicide bombers who interpreted the footage of their brothers’ lives ending in an explosion of golden mist as a sign that their cause was blessed by the Lord. She knew that some of these incidents would have no foreseeable effect on the marketplace, but since neither her boss nor her clients seemed to object to them, she kept including them in her packets.

Frequently her mind returned to the woman she had met in the hospital. Maybe it had something to do with her office door, which swung closed with a hitch at the three-quarters mark, brushing against the carpet and then continuing on with a pair of clicks, a sound that suggested the way the woman’s voice had broken. Or maybe it was the simple fact that Carol Ann had never seen another person die. She remembered the woman’s clear blue eyes, and her deliberate style of blinking, and how long it took the incandescence to fade from her body after the doctors pronounced her gone. And why, Carol Ann wondered—why would it have lingered like that? Were we outlived by our pain? How long did it cling to the world? She had held on to the woman’s journal, and every day, after she got home from work, she allowed herself to read a page as she relaxed on the sofa: I love the ball you curl into when you wake up in the morning but don’t want to get out from under the covers. I love the last question you ask me before bedtime. I love the way you alphabetize the CDs, but arrange the books by height. I love you in your blue winter coat that looks like upholstery fabric. I love the scent of your hair just after you’ve taken a shower. I love the way, when I take my wedding ring off to do the dishes, you’ll put it on your finger and walk around the house saying, “I’m married to me, I’m married to me!” I love how nervous you get when I’m driving. I love the way you say all the things you dislike are “horrible”—and how, when you’re really upset, you pronounce it “harrible.” I love the little parentheses you get beside your lips when you’re smiling—the way the left one is deeper than the right. I love the fact that I know I can keep telling you things I love about you for the rest of our lives and I’ll never run out.

Sometimes she liked to imagine that the journal had a voice and that it was speaking directly to her—a gentle baritone that developed a bit of gravel when it used her name.

I love to wake up in the middle of the night and listen to you sleeping (Carol Ann, she added): the funny noises you make when you dream, the tiny pop of your lips separating.

“You’re too sweet. Stop it.”

I love kissing your tattoos one by one—first the bracelet on your ankle, then the heart on your shoulder, then the Celtic knot on the small of your back.

“That’s some imagination you have. There’s not a single tattoo on my body.”

The truth was that she could extract any line from the book, any line at all, and find more kindness in it than she had heard from her husband in their four years of marriage. In the beginning, when they first started seeing each other, she had been just young and naïve enough to mistake his parched inhumanity for an elaborate comic routine. She still remembered the feeling of uneasy awareness shading into panic when she realized he meant every word he said, that Nothing smells worse than an Asian who’s just discovered dairy and Fat is still fat, even if it’s only your wrists were not examples of insurrectionary humor, as he saw it, but precise statements of fact. The day she arrived home from the hospital, she had mopped the blood from the kitchen floor and cleaned the tacky brown deposits that dotted the wall and table. She had even washed the carving knife that she somehow found the presence of mind to put in the dish drainer before she left. But she ignored his package, the one that had caused so much trouble, allowing it to sit there on the counter in its jacket of threaded tape. Maybe it was no more than a trick of the subconscious, but every time she saw it, she felt a sudden glinting sensation in her thumb. A week passed before she finally built up the nerve to finish opening it. This time she used a pair of scissors, wincing as each white thread burst apart like a tendon. Inside, beneath a mound of excelsior, she found that month’s alimony check. His idea of a joke.

She spent eight hours a day sifting through stories about the economy and the Illumination, the vaccine shortage in Africa and the latest defense postures in the Middle East, so much misery that it made her head ache, and the last thing she wanted to do when she got home was watch the news. Usually, after reading a page of the journal, she would make a simple meal of soup or pasta for herself, take it to the dining room, and flip through one of the catalogs that had arrived in the mail that afternoon. Sometimes, in the endless inventory of throw rugs, wool sweaters, and fireplace cribs, she would momentarily forget everything that had ever happened to her, closing the last page and returning to her own life like a moviegoer stepping out of a darkened theater, dazed by the angle of the light.

She found it relatively easy to cook while she was wearing the glove, and to eat and type and drive, but not everything came so effortlessly. Shoes were a problem. Washing the dishes. Shaving beneath her right arm. She liked to knit every night before she went to bed, but knitting was impossible now, so instead she took to lying on the sofa watching rebroadcasts of various daytime talk shows—the one with the straight-talking Texan who walked offset holding hands with his wife, the one with the people who threw chairs at one another. Whenever the talk shows’ guests were blindsided by grief, a kind of nimbus would settle around them, a colorless shimmering cloud that seemed to be exhaled directly from their pores, fainter even than the light from a hangnail. Was she seeing their emotional pain, she wondered, or its physical counterpart, like the raw throat that followed a bout of crying, or the stomach cramps that accompanied a wave of anxiety, or the gripping sensation you felt in your chest when you realized the man you were married to despised you? Physical or emotional, it didn’t matter—the aura was unmistakable. Even on her old eighteen-inch Curtis Mathes, she could always tell when the people on the talk shows were really suffering and when they were merely playacting for the cameras.

She began to notice the same aura when she was out in public. She saw it on crossing guards, panhandlers, neighbors, coworkers. It was a simple matter of training herself not to dismiss the sight as a mirage. One day, a couple of weeks into the Illumination, she was on her lunch break when her joints began to ache and her skin felt cold to the touch and she knew she was coming down with a fever. The bottle of Advil in her purse was empty, so she pulled up to a convenience store and ran inside for a packet of pain relievers. A man was blocking the pharmaceutical shelf. Even from behind, she could see that he was distraught about something. The air wavered over his body like the air around the edges of a flame. He took a bag of cough drops from a hook, then looked up at her and gave a weak smile. “Carol Ann Page,” he said, and tapped his thumb with his index finger.

In an instant she recognized him. “Dr. Alstadt.”

“How’s that thumb of yours?”

It was stinging, she realized, stinging and cold. A frigid glow had spread down through her glove, radiating past the bones of her wrist. “Not so good today. Are you all right? Did something just happen to you?”

He touched his brow, a nervous tic, smoothing down a cowlick that must have stood far back in the thicket of his hair when he was younger but projected from the bare curve of his forehead now like a minnow leaping out of a still pond. “And here I thought I was hiding it so well. A bad day at work, that’s all. But here—let me take a look at you.” He undid the glove from her hand, a gesture that seemed strangely intimate in the buzzing luminosity of the soda cabinet. A noise of concern escaped him. “Oh, Carol Ann. My. How long has it been like this?”

“Like what?”

“Do you see how the color changes here at the scar line? That’s a sign of severe vasoconstriction. Let me ask you, does it hurt—does it light up and sort of tighten when you expose it to the cold?”

“Yes. It does do that.”

“And when did you first notice the symptom?”

“ ‘The symptom’? I didn’t know it was a symptom. It’s been sensitive to the cold ever since I came home from the hospital. Is that what you’re asking?”

“No, that’s to be expected. What I’m asking is when did you notice the color change?”

Just now, she supposed. Just this moment. When she cut her eyes across the floor, she saw a starfield of spinning dots, and she had lived in this world for so long, and she wanted so desperately for someone to be in love with her, and for a moment she had to lock her knees to prevent them from buckling.

“Dr. Alstadt, I’m not feeling so well.”

He took her by the elbow. “Are you good to drive? I think we need to get you to the hospital.” She waited to see if the dots would leave her head, and when they did, she straightened her back and nodded. “All right. Just to be on the safe side, I’m going to ask you to follow me, okay?” he insisted. “Let me check out first, and then we’ll go.”

He took the cough drops to the counter. While he was paying for them, she called the office and explained that she would be late returning to work that afternoon: “A medical emergency. I’m not sure really. Hopefully by three o’clock.” She hung up and put the phone in her purse, listened to the cashier clearing his lungs. Glancing at him, she saw two dim blossoms of what must have been cancer showing through his polyester shirt. Cancer or maybe emphysema.

A mid-afternoon gloom had settled over the city, making the trees darker than the sky. A light rain was falling. As she followed Dr. Alstadt to the hospital, she thought about all the times she had sat in the backseat of the car when she was small and her parents were young and they were driving her to church or to school, watching windblown fleets of raindrops chasing one another across the glass.

The hospital’s main doors opened onto an atrium with a gently sloping ceiling of metal trimmers and polished glass. She kept looking up at the rain on the roof and then down at its reflection on the floor, hundreds of semitransparent shadows that flowed across the tiles like snakes. A bird had built its nest into one of the ceiling’s upper struts, and she wondered what it did on days like this: Did it tuck its head beneath its wings or just stand there stolidly and wait for the weather to turn?

She followed Dr. Alstadt down a chain of hallways and through the emergency ward, where a nurse was sorting patients into admission groups, saying, “Green group, green group, yellow group, green.” In the last few weeks, it seemed, the hospital had established a system of treating patients based on the strength of the light emanating from their bodies. The Illumination had ushered in a new age of critical care. Doctors no longer had to rely on their patients to tell them how badly they were suffering. “Head light and heart light take priority, of course,” Dr. Alstadt told her, “along with any obvious major traumas. Then we take all the other lights and make a visual determination of their severity.”

The walls were tilting toward Carol Ann suddenly. She became aware that he had paused between sentences, and she made the noise she seemed to recall normal people making when they wanted to show an interest in something. The doctor steadied her with his hand. “Good Lord. You’re really not feeling well, are you? Let’s get you a bed.”

He showed her into an examination room.

“You rest here a minute, and I’ll go find the vascular specialist.”

The curtains ballooned outward as he left, then settled back against the window. She saw that the pain assessment chart, with its six faces transforming from glee to agony, had been taken down from the wall. It was no longer necessary, she supposed, now that the Illumination had taken hold. She felt a pulse of blood traveling through her thumb, too much of it for so small a space, and she closed her eyes and waited for the twinge to pass, and before long Dr. Alstadt had returned with a young Indian man he introduced as Dr. Kimberley, his neck starlit with a fresh shaving rash.

Dr. Kimberley said, “I understand your injury has been misbehaving on you, Miss Ann-Page. Let’s see what we can do about that. May I?” He removed her glove and took the base of her thumb between his fingers, pressing against the two indentations the splint’s metal stays had left there, compacted to a smooth pale sheen. He was like a carpenter using a wood clamp, and as he tightened his grip, she watched her thumb change colors, instantly reddening below the line of the cut and gradually pinkening above it.

Dr. Alstadt made a grimacing noise with the corners of his mouth. Dr. Kimberley shook his head. “You see,” he said. “This is what happens when you skip your follow-up appointments.”

“But I didn’t skip my follow-up appointments. I had a follow-up appointment last week. I have another follow-up appointment on Thursday.”

“Oh. Well. Then sometimes these things happen.”

The rest of it seemed to transpire very quickly. Once again she was given a shot in the crook of her elbow, and once again her skin began to tingle, and once again she had the sensation that all her life until just that moment she had been falling toward the ground and suddenly, instead, she was floating above it, and the world looked so handsome, and the light so sweet and welcoming, and she cried as she lay there waiting for the orderlies to take her into the strange, blue, humming, capacious elevator. When she woke up and tried to wipe the grit from her eyes, she found that there was a boxing glove on her hand, and then her mind cleared and she realized that the boxing glove was a bandage, wrapped so tightly that it had fixed her fingers together into a sort of trowel. A machine beeped next to her left ear. A woman in dark green nursing scrubs came in to check on her. When Carol Ann asked her how the operation had gone—where was her glove? could she go home now?—the nurse looked at her chart and said, “Maybe we should wait for the doctor to explain things to you,” and then, “Calm down, now, Miss, calm down. There’s no need for us to raise our voices, is there?” and finally, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your thumb has been amputated at the knuckle.” It took almost a full minute for Carol Ann to understand that the schools of fish swimming in slow spasms across her vision meant that she was holding her breath. The nurse opened a water bottle, placed a pair of the blue pills on her tongue, and helped her swallow them. Then came the long hours of careless assent and easy reminiscence she had dreamed about while she was sitting behind her desk at work. Memory after memory leafed open in her mind like buds on a tree. The time she found her babysitter rubbing one of her mother’s bras against his cheek. The night she spilled her popcorn on the usher at the movie theater. The Matisse and Duchamp posters with which her college roommate had decorated their dorm room. The fountain outside the library where someone had arranged the coins to spell Mike Rules! Her recovery suite had a single bed this time, and she could run the lamp or change the position of her mattress without fear of disturbing anyone. She did not recall turning the television on, but on it certainly was, and she watched two men in cheap suits debating how the Illumination had affected our duty toward animals, or “the lower creatures of the world,” as they kept calling them. One of the men’s ties was sending irritated little glimmers up his neck. An abscessed tooth was radiating from the other’s mouth. Every so often there was a film clip of a stack of poultry pens in the bed of a trailer, the wire cages giving off innumerable white flashes; or a jockey hieing a horse around a track, its knees and shoulders burning with the strain of the race; or a gang of children flinging gravel at a stray dog, beads of light opening on its body as it tried to twist out of the way.

Dr. Alstadt must have gone home already, because the girl who came to replace her bandages that night could not have been older than twenty-five, fresh out of medical school, her hair held back with a pair of tortoiseshell barrettes. At first Carol Ann was too apprehensive to look at what remained of her thumb, and she kept her eyes fixed on the ceiling until the girl was finished, but a few hours later, when the same doctor returned to change the dressing again, a nurse had fortified her with a second dose of the blue pills and she was able to investigate the amputation. It was not as gruesome as she had imagined it would be. She had a neat little half-thumb now, homely but not repulsive, the crease along the center sewn so tightly together that the stitching looked like one continuous black thread. The injury shone like a penlight where the tendons had been sliced apart, and she was aware of the pain, but she did not mind it nearly as much as she suspected she should. The doctor swabbed her thumb with a clear, sharp-smelling liquid that evaporated almost immediately, then cushioned and rewrapped it. She was saying something about the importance of keeping the area disinfected when Carol Ann drifted off to sleep.

She woke with a start. It was three in the morning. For a moment she thought she had left the television on, but the flickering she saw from the corner of her eye turned out to be her own arm, flung haphazardly over the pillow. Waves of light were following each other all the way from her hand to her shoulder, a display she might have found hypnotic if it hadn’t hurt so much. Her head ached, and so did her back. She was grinding her teeth, and there was an awful tightness in her stomach. Obviously, the pills had worn off, and with the sickness came the desperation—it had always been that way. The serenity she had accepted so naturally just a few hours before was gone now. She could hardly remember what it felt like. Here, in this place, her life seemed like one long litany of wounds, ending in these sweat-drenched sheets with half her thumb missing and stretching back through time in an unbroken sequence of bone fractures and muscle strains, sunburns and concussions, black eyes and canker sores. There was a light in her hand, and a light in her head, and doubtless a light in her memories, too. She had known days of happiness and beauty, rare moments of motionless wonder, but trying to relive them after they had vanished was like looking out the window at night from a partially lit room: no matter how interesting the view, there was always her own reflection, hovering over the landscape like a ghost. That face, it was the problem. Those eyes and that skin. She wished that she could throw the glass open for once and see things as they really were.

If she remained absolutely still, she thought, then maybe, just maybe, she would fall asleep again, and she lay on her side for a while watching the bands of light travel up her arm. When she realized the cause was hopeless, she got up to use the bathroom. After she was finished, she made the mistake of reaching for the faucet with her left hand and was hit by a jolt of pain so severe that her legs locked upright and she had to Frankenstein-walk back to her bed. It took a long time for her knees to loosen up, and even longer for the glow in them to subside.

Shortly after the sun rose, an orderly brought her a breakfast of orange juice and scrambled eggs. A nurse followed behind him with a chaser of blue pills. A few hours later, Dr. Alstadt found her staring out the window at the cars on the freeway, just sedated enough to be comfortable but just sober enough to be clearheaded. “Hello, Carol Ann,” he said. He reached out as if to take the loop of hair that was dangling over her eye and brush it back with his fingers, then thought better of it and dropped his hand. “How are you holding up?”

“Where’s Dr. Barrettes?”

“Dr. Barrettes?” He looked at her chart. “You mean Dr. Clovis. ‘Dr. Barrettes’—that’s good. Dr. Barrettes has gone home for the day. So, Carol Ann, I want to talk with you about what you said to me after the operation,” which made no sense, none at all. She would have remembered if she had seen him after the operation, and she hadn’t.

He gave her a quizzical look and pulled a chair up to her bed. “You don’t remember, do you? That happens sometimes when you’re still shaking off the effects of the anesthesia. Carol Ann, I sat here in this room with you for almost an hour yesterday. You were only half-awake, but you said something that implied your ex-husband had caused your injury. I’d like to know if that’s true.”

“What did I say?”

“Well, you were in kind of a daze. You kept talking to him about your alimony check. You said, ‘You didn’t love me. You didn’t even like me,’ and then, ‘Are you happy now, you sad—?’ You repeated the word sad a few times. I think you were trying to say sadist. ‘Are you happy now, you sadist? It nearly lopped my thumb off.’ ”

She felt her face coloring—something that hardly ever happened to her now that she was an adult. She told him the story of the carving knife and the tape-sealed package and how she had found her alimony check buried beneath a pile of wood curls. “So I guess he did cause my injury, yes, in a roundabout way, but really it was my fault. One stupid mistake, and …” She made a sound she did not think she had ever made before, a sigh like the beginning of all sighs.

“Well, concerning that,” Dr. Alstadt said. He told her about the physiotherapy she would need after her wound had healed—“not a lot, but some. The thumb is important. You can expect to lose about twenty percent of the function in your left hand. Twenty percent might not sound like much, but you’ll probably have to learn a new way to tie your shoes, for instance. Brush your teeth. Trim your garden—do you garden? Hold a knife and fork.”

The prospect of resuming her life after she left the hospital depressed her. Dr. Alstadt perched his glasses on his eyebrows and rubbed his eyes with his index fingers. He still wore a barely visible aura of emotional turmoil. She wondered where it came from. “Yesterday in the gas station you said you were having a bad day at work. You look like you’re having another one.”

“That’s nothing you need to worry about. I’d rather talk about you.”

“I’ve been learning how to tie my shoes and use a fork without my thumb for two weeks now, remember?”

He paused, made a decision, nodded. “Right. Well. The situation is that the hospital is facing a budget crunch. We either have to cut hours or cut jobs. I’m supposed to make the decision for the A&E.”

“Arts and entertainment?”

“Pardon? Ah. No. Accident and emergency.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Make life a little harder for everyone, as opposed to a lot harder for someone. The staff won’t be happy about it, but I’ve weighed all the options, and it seems like the one that will do the least harm. You know, ‘First do no harm’ and all.”

“That sounds like the responsible choice.”

“Yes. Well. Nobody can say I’m not conscientious. It might be my one shining virtue.”

“What’s your one shining vice?”

He amused her by pondering the question. “Nostalgia,” he answered eventually, and a few seconds later, “Self-pity.”

“I think we share a shining vice.”

She spent another day lost in pain and reverie, staring at the patients bearing their light past her door and dozing off between outbursts of noise from the television. Every so often someone would arrive to feed her, medicate her, or change her bandages, and if she was sleeping she would rouse herself, and if she was hurting she would try to hide it. The tip of her thumb was gathered together in a smart little pucker around her stitches. She could only presume that, like a sausage, it had been hollowed out to make room for the skin to close. There was a fairy tale that had disturbed her when she was a child, too young for school, and she thought about it now, the one about the quarreling couple who waste all their wishes attaching sausages to each other’s noses. Her mother used to read the story out loud to her, and whenever she reached the illustration of the poor wife tugging at the sausage on her nose, a look of cross-eyed fury on her face, Carol Ann insisted that she turn the page. She always rushed to put the book away the second the story was finished. There it would stand on its shelf, giving out an aura of indignation and menace, just as her teddy bear gave out an aura of sleepy affection, her toy box an aura of cheerful excitement, but the book was fixed against the backdrop of her room, and it had been for as long as she could remember, and it never occurred to her that she could simply get rid of it. She must have fallen asleep while the nurse was working over her because she seemed to spend the next few hours locked in a small stone house with her husband, the two of them trading wishes like insults. She woke up just in time to see the same orderly who had watched her claim the journal a couple of weeks ago take a few steps into the suite, shake his head as he realized who she was, and say, “Perfect. Just great. Wrong room.”

That evening, before he left for home, Dr. Alstadt stopped by to ask her how her day had gone—and also, she could tell, to allow her to ask about his. Somehow, without trying, over a scant few conversations, they had transformed themselves in each other’s eyes from doctor and patient to two fragile human beings, both afflicted by nostalgia and self-pity. When she asked him how everything had gone in the field of arts and entertainment, he said, “About how I expected it would. Everyone hates me a little, but no one hates me passionately.” He reached up to grip his shoulder, rolling his head in a slow circle. She saw a dozen vines of light swaying on the back of his neck. They were thicker than the ones she had noticed before, and he said, “Ah, yes, my neck. It always gets like this by the end of the day.”

“Turn around.”

He must have thought she wanted to take a closer look at the spot because she surprised him by using her good hand to work the tension out of his muscles. Each white tendril grew brighter as she bore down on it with her fingers, then much softer as she eased away. When she was finished, Dr. Alstadt made a tiny halting sound of pleasure.

She was in the hospital two more nights before he allowed her to go home.

I love the photograph of you your parents keep by the front door, that little girl in her glasses and her Holly Hobbie dress. I love the way you kiss. I love the way you shake your head when you yawn. I love the “magically delicious” doodles you make when you’re talking on the phone: stars, moons, hearts, and clovers. I love to look up and see you sitting beneath the lamp in the living room—reading a book, or staring out the window, or chewing the end of a ballpoint pen. I love how soft your hands are, even though hand lotion is disgusting goop and you’ll never convince me it isn’t. I love the way you line your brushes up on the vanity like silverware. I love knowing that if there’s a restaurant I want to try, I’ll get to try it with you; if there’s a movie I want to see, I’ll get to see it with you; if there’s a story I want to tell, I’ll get to tell it to you. I love your giggle fits. I love the names you’ve had picked out for 25 years: “Mira” if it’s a girl, “Henry” if it’s a boy.

The journal lay on the walnut table by Carol Ann’s sofa, and though she had finished nearly a quarter of it, she still had to remind herself that it was not a continuous outpouring of unbroken passion, that every sentence represented a small, isolated profession of love, separated from the ones that came before and after it by the hard line of a night’s sleep. The book was like the row of squares on a calendar: each piece held nothing more than the bare outline of a single day. It seemed to reveal the couple’s marriage as fully as any diary, though, and the further she read, the more intimately she felt she knew them. The husband’s name was Jason, and the wife’s name was Patricia, and their relationship was as open and playfully chiding as it had been on their wedding day. They drove to the lake to picnic and swim, and they rented Woody Allen movies on the weekend, and though she liked spicy food and he did not, they took turns cooking meals for each other on their old gas stove. Carol Ann had seen the light fade from the woman’s body but had failed to learn her name until she reached the journal’s seventeenth page, when she came across the line, I love sticking your name in songs where it doesn’t fit the rhythm: “Patricia Williford, why don’t you come to your senses?” The fact that the two of them were no longer kissing each other’s shoulders, or taking their rings off when they did the dishes, or dancing but only from the waist up—it seemed like a frightening mistake. And even if there was a Heaven, she thought, and even if they were together in it, that would not make it right.

She was finding it difficult to concentrate at work. In part it was the weather, a sudden string of gentle blue days that had lured thousands of birds into the air, but mostly it was her thumb, which still throbbed with pain, throwing up obstacles around even the easiest tasks. Answering the phone, punching the space bar on the keyboard, opening the window, retouching her makeup, maneuvering a bag of chips through the sliding gate of the vending machine—every hour presented her with another puzzle to solve. She knew she was in trouble the moment she got home from the hospital and found a pile of newspapers scattered on her welcome mat. Right away she realized she could not pitch them up to herself with one hand while she held on to her pocketbook with the other, as she ordinarily did, so she slipped off her shoes and spent an aggravating few minutes trying to kick them inside. The glass door kept swinging shut in the wind, though, and the papers came bounding back at her with a terrible banging noise, and finally she had to give up, put her purse on the accent table, and kneel down to collect them one by one. As soon as her wound finished healing, she knew she would be able to use her left hand again, but until then she would just have to keep bobbling through her days like a steel marble in a tilting maze game.

On Tuesdays and Fridays, she left work early for an appointment with her physical therapist, a briskly competent but slightly abstracted woman who seemed to view human beings as a simple collection of joints, muscles, and nerve bundles. At the beginning of each session, she would greet Carol Ann with a short conversation like—

“How are you doing this afternoon?”

“I’m all tangled up inside.”

“Super! Now let’s focus on that hand of yours.”

—then lead her through a series of exercises designed to improve the strength and dexterity of her thumb, or what was left of it. There was the “thumb press,” which involved flattening a barrel-shaped lump of clay into her palm. The “thumb abduction,” a maneuver resembling a leg lift with her hand filling in for her body. The “isometric thumb extension,” in which she made a hitchhiking gesture while her therapist applied pressure with an index finger. And then there was the “putty pinch” and the “prayer position” and half a dozen others. Her therapist had her repeat each of the exercises in three sets of ten, counting off the repetitions—one, two, three, you’re doing good, five, six—while Carol Ann nodded along and pretended she thought it was helping. The glow that had been concentrated in her thumb would gradually spread across her entire hand, following the extensor in a long line up her forearm, and by the time the hour was over, anyone who saw her stealing through the back hallway to the parking lot, balancing her palm before her like a waiter carrying a bowl of soup, would know immediately how much her hand hurt. But then that was true of everyone now. Everyone, everyone, everyone, and all the time. The world had changed in the wake of the Illumination. No one could disguise his pain anymore. You could hardly step out in public without noticing the white blaze of someone’s impacted heel showing through her slingbacks; and over there, hailing a taxi, a woman with shimmering pressure marks where her pants cut into her gut; and behind her, beneath the awning of the flower shop, a man lit all over in a glory of leukemia.

At work, Carol Ann took to scouring the Internet for images of political and business leaders with the angry flush of renal disease, the barbed-wire knot of a blocked artery, or any of the hundreds of other telltale patterns of resplendence she had learned to recognize. She included these pictures in her news packets without comment. And if her hand flared with pain while she was delivering a hard copy to her boss, and if the silver light of a toothache shone from his mouth as he said thank you, the two of them might make a small motion of their heads in sympathy, but they would not say a word. It was important that the workplace remain professional. They all tried their best not to acknowledge one another’s suffering. Even when one of the receptionists came in with belt-strap bruises radiating through the front of her shirt, wincing each time she reached to open the filing cabinet, the rest of the staff avoided saying anything to her. It was almost noon that day before Carol Ann found the woman inspecting her stomach in the bathroom mirror and was forced to ask her if she was all right. She met Carol Ann’s eyes in the glass, shook her head in disbelief, and repeated the question: “Am I all right? Am I all right? Am I all right?” It was like a chant or a song, four hard beats, and for the rest of the day, as Carol Ann sat hunched over her computer, surveying the leaders of the world, in all their wounds and illnesses, the phrase kept replaying itself in her mind: Was she all right? Was she all right? Was she all right?

Nearly a month had passed since she sliced through the tip of her thumb. One evening she arrived home to discover another package from her ex-husband waiting by the front door. This time the seams were covered by only a few strips of masking tape. Even with her good hand cramped from typing, she was able to steady the box against the kitchen counter and open it. Immediately beneath the lid was the front section of the Financial Times, and beneath that was a magazine called How to Spend It, and beneath that were hundreds of red plastic drinking straws. She knew how his mind worked, knew that wasting her time was a favorite mean little game of his, and right away she guessed what he had done. She still had to sort through forty or fifty straws, though, blowing into each of them with a hard blast of air, before she found the one into which he had rolled her alimony check. It shot out with the quiet phut of a spitball, landing upright between the ribs of the dish drainer. His usual petty degeneracy. She could picture him leaning back in a chair somewhere, grinning triumphantly, bowing his hands out to crack his knuckles. I love the way your face falls whenever you see my handwriting on an envelope. I love how easy it is to aggravate you. I love waking up next to someone else in the morning. For a moment she allowed herself to contemplate leaving an angry voice-mail message for him—she could threaten to file suit against him for her medical expenses, or for malicious wrongdoing—but the truth was she had injured her thumb by her own carelessness, she and no one else, and anyway he had changed his phone number, and she did not know the new one.

That Friday, she had an appointment to get her stitches removed. They were the dissolving kind, designed to be absorbed into her body, but her physical therapist had noticed that the tissue around the threads was inflamed and suggested that she look into having them taken out by a professional. On the highway a car had wrapped itself around a bridge stanchion, spilling blue cubes of windshield glass over the carpool lane. Carol Ann merged into the long line of drivers slowing to gape at the light show, creeping past the police cars, the ambulance, and the curve of orange cones, until her exit opened up and she could punch the gas and speed free of the fold. The hospital revealed itself through the flowing green of the pine trees. She parked and went inside. Soon an orderly in brown scrubs came to escort her into an examination room. The doctor who had lectured her about missing her follow-up appointments, Dr. Miss-Ann-Page, Dr. Misanthrope—she could not remember his real name—arrived to inspect her amputation. In a tone of weary reproach, he told her, “Fortunately for you, the wound has already sealed itself,” and, “Some people have a negative reaction to the proteins in the suture. The result is a poor tissue response. That’s all I’m seeing here, not the world coming to an end,” and finally, as he braced her hand and picked at the knot with a pair of angled scissors, “Now I don’t want any flinching from you, Miss, understand? This won’t hurt a bit.” Surprisingly it didn’t. She watched the thread sinuate through her skin, flashing in and out of sight like a black snake moving through white sand. The first time a doctor ever took her blood, she was not yet three years old, and he had pacified her by telling her that her body was filled with red water, asking, “Did you know that? Would you like to see some?” She had sat there fascinated while he pricked her arm and his syringe filled with cherry Kool-Aid. She felt a similar fascination as she followed the surgical thread passing out of her thumb. Afterward, she was left with only a pale impression of stitches on her skin, barely glowing at all. A few lambent blood-vessel blotches traced the edges, and a checkmark of scar tissue rose above the knuckle. The whole procedure took less than ten minutes.

She was on her way out when Dr. Alstadt chased her down, placing a hand on her wrist. “So how did everything go with Dr. Kimberley?” he asked.

“Kimberley! That’s it. I think he was angry with me about something.”

“People always think that. He just has this manner. But your thumb is feeling better? You can get back to doing the things you love?”

“Like tying my shoes and brushing my teeth.”

“Exactly.”

She found herself adopting the pose of the woman she wished to be, someone coolly self-deprecating, confident, willing to puncture her own seriousness with a shrug and a wry remark. “My plan is to take it slow, start with one tooth and work my way up.”

“Good idea,” he said.

He smiled nervously, looking down at the chart in his hands. She could tell that he was mustering up the courage to continue.

“Is there something else, Doctor?”

“Actually, yes. We’ve transferred you over to primary care. Officially, you’re no longer on the A&E registry, which means I’m not your doctor anymore. So I was wondering …” He cleared his throat. “We’re not supposed to do this, but I was wondering if you would consider letting me take you out to dinner sometime.”

“Doctor! I don’t even know your first name!”

“It’s Tom. Thomas. Dr. Thomas Alstadt.”

“Dr. Thomas Alstadt.” She indicated the file he was holding. “Is that me you’ve got there?”

He nodded.

“Does it have my phone number in it?”

He nodded again.

She tapped the chart and shifted on her heel and did not glance back until she had left the building. She happened to spy him at the exact moment he stopped watching her. He was turning his face away as an orderly in mocha-colored scrubs approached him with an outstretched hand, and so he did not see the call-me gesture she threw him. But it didn’t matter—she was sure he had gotten the message.

Her legs carried her beneath the blue sky and the pine trees with that drifty roller-skating feeling she remembered from the sunlit summer Fridays of her childhood. She kept replaying the sound of his voice—It’s Tom, Thomas, Dr. Thomas Alstadt—and laughing to herself. Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It was a joy to be alive, a strange and savage joy, and she stood there in the warmth and destruction of it knowing it could not last.

That it was too big for her to contain.

That it would ebb as quickly as it had risen.

And sure enough, late that night, she woke to find that she had not yet finished healing. Her hair was pasted to her forehead, and her hand shone with a sharp pain. She was afraid that it was starting all over again, all the hurt and debility. She could hear the high sustained note of a fever in her ears. Her life was a waste and a failure, and she had never loved another human being, and she wanted nothing more than to escape the planes of her skin and appear in some other place. The world was unreliable. The world could turn on a dime. It was a joy to be alive when it was a joy to be alive, and it was a terror to be alive when it wasn’t. What else had she ever learned?

It was several hours before the light subsided and she was able to fall back asleep. In the morning she drank an extra cup of coffee to clear her head. She did the dishes and watched a few hours of television, and at noon Dr. Alstadt—Thomas—called her to ask if she would be free for dinner that night. She had no other plans, and she started to give him her address, but he interrupted with, “Actually, I already have it. Your chart, remember. I hope that isn’t creepy.”

“I never want to hear from you again. So six-thirty, did we say?”

“Six-thirty.”

That day, grocery shopping, her eye was caught by one of the newsweeklies in the checkout lane. The headline read, “History Is an Angel,” and beneath that, in smaller print, “Bringing Light to the Past.” She decided to buy it. When she got home, she sat down to read the cover story, a long essay about the pictorial history of the twentieth century and how it might have differed had the Illumination commenced a hundred years earlier. It was illustrated with a four-page foldout of famous photos, digitally altered to show new varieties of light emanating from them. A Spanish soldier reeling from a bullet strike, his head ringed in a silver corona. A man in a naval uniform crying as he played the accordion, a bright cloud of grief surrounding his face and fingers. The motorcade in Dealey Plaza, November 22, 1963: the president leaning into the eruption of light at his temple. A group of civil rights marchers hunching against the blast from a fire hose, the tightly contained spray of pain from their bodies matching the tightly contained spray of the water. A young girl with napalm burns running naked in a dazzling aurora. A famine victim staring out of the radiance of her hunger. A dozen men in fire helmets floating like lanterns in a field of smoke. There was a terrible beauty to the images, and Carol Ann found it hard to look away from them. Her job had made her a student of popular imagery. The pictures would be reprinted in all the papers and on all the current affairs sites, she was sure of it, broadcast again and again on all the cable news networks. She began to feel uncomfortable with herself. Maybe she was just another driver who couldn’t stop gawking at a car crash. But then, in this case, wasn’t the car crash hers—or not hers alone, but hers in part, hers along with everybody else’s: the great shared car crash of modern history?

Her thumb was still aching a little, but by that evening the glow was weak enough that she could cover it with a Band-Aid and ignore it. Dr. Alstadt arrived promptly at six-thirty. He was wearing a green silk tie, a blue oxford shirt, and bull-nosed brown shoes with a rolling pinprick pattern on top. With a comb and water, he had attempted to flatten the lock of hair on his forehead, and though he had not quite succeeded, she found the effort endearing.

She made a gesture that encompassed his entire outfit. “Spiffy.”

He wrinkled his lips. “Thank you very much. So are you ready to go? I’ve made reservations for us at Jacques and Suzanne’s.”

“Just give me five more minutes.”

She showed him into the living room and left to brush her teeth and reapply her lipstick. She looked herself over in the full-length mirror, kicking her leg up to tug a thread from her skirt, then smoothing a ruck out of the fabric. It was years since she had been on a date, and though he had already seen her at her worst, or at least what he must have presumed was her worst, high on narcotics and stained with her own blood, she said a prayer that if she presented herself to him with enough poise and self-possession she might erase that other woman from his mind.

She returned to the living room just in time to see him taking the journal up from its spot on the walnut table. “What’s this?” he said.

“That—it’s not mine.”

He let the book fall open and read aloud the first lines that met his eyes: I love the concavities behind your knees, as soft as the skin of a peach. I love how disgusted you get by purées: “Who would do that to a poor defenseless soup?” I love waking up on a wintry morning, opening the curtains, then crawling back under the covers with you and watching the snow fall. “I know what this is,” he said. His voice quieted as he spoke. He shut the book and looked up at her. “An orderly told me you had this, but I told him it wasn’t possible. Carol Ann, Mr. Williford has been looking everywhere for this book.”

“Wait. Mr. Williford? Jason Williford? But he died. He died in the accident.”

The prickliness in his voice made her stomach tighten. “Obviously he didn’t die. Obviously if he had died he wouldn’t be phoning the hospital all day long asking if we’ve found his wife’s book yet.”

“You don’t understand.”

“You’re right about that.”

“His wife asked me to take it. She said he was dead and she couldn’t bear to read it again. That’s what she said, those words exactly. I told her it wouldn’t be right, but then she died, too. Right there in front of me. I watched her go, and I thought it was what she would have wanted.”

“Well—” He shook his head. “All that may be true, but I still have to tell him we’ve found it. Excuse me a minute,” and he tucked the journal protectively under his arm and flipped his phone open. Within seconds he was talking to someone at the hospital. “Hello, this is Dr. Alstadt. I need you to get a patient’s number for me. His name is Jason Williford. That’s Williford, spelled W-I-L-L… yes, that’s right. Thank you.” She tried hard to listen as he dialed the number, but the sound inside her head was so much louder than the sound outside that she could barely distinguish his voice. It was like a rainstorm beating against a tin roof, thousands of drops landing like little round stones, and by the time the storm faded, she was sitting next to him on the sofa and he was repeating her name, meeting her gaze while he cocked his head to the side. He waited until he was sure he had her attention before he said what he had to say.

“Mr. Williford wants to come over right away. I gave him your address. He’s a mess, Carol Ann. I don’t know whether he plans to build a shrine to this thing or burn it,” he told her, brandishing the journal, “but one thing I’m sure of—if he’s ever going to move on, he needs it back.”

He was silent for so long that she thought he might have finished, but eventually, pausing to take the weight of his words, he continued. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m sorry about that. I believe you when you say it was an accident, and I’m sure you never intended to hurt anyone. But you need to know that you’ve taken the most terrible month of this man’s life and made it that much worse.”

He gave her hand a consoling squeeze. She felt as if he had slapped her face.

For a while the two of them waited on the sofa. She thought, This is not really happening, and also, In an hour this will already have happened, the same phrases she had found herself repeating as the orderly wheeled her onto the elevator to have her hand disfigured.

Soon enough a taxi arrived in the driveway. Its motor halted, and she heard a pair of crutches tapping up the walk. A few seconds later the bell rang. She followed Dr. Alstadt down the front hall, rushing ahead of him at the last second to open the door. Outside there was the flexing coolness of a spring breeze. She stood there in it with her hand on her chest, the doctor beside her in his shirt and tie, before them a man with a look of breaking sadness in his eyes, all of them glowing in the darkness.