I can’t stand the droning of the heart monitor. Sometimes, even though I know she’s awake and waiting for me, because I’ve just spoken with her on the phone, I’ll pretend that she’s dead. The doctors have covered her face with the white sheet and are carrying her away to a holding place beneath the earth, in the basement. Isn't it strange that they always put the dead underground? But our souls are so light they go to heaven. Our hearts weighed against a feather. Bodies float only in water, of course, in the stuff that heaven is made of only the soul has sufficient buoyancy to remain.

Anyway, I sit inside the car sometimes with my hands on the steering wheel, my foot delicately pressing the brake as though I were waiting in traffic. Sometimes I want to just drive away. And I feel guilty. And I remember what she did to me and I imagine driving away, just driving, and there is this stomachache of satisfaction, so intense and vital, that inevitably I’m frightened out of the car, and practically running, sprinting towards the automatic doors.

She’s never looking at the door when I arrive. I can see her face for a few seconds through the little window with the mesh, the kind they put in mental institutions to watch the prisoners. Her face is turned toward the windows. I asked the doctors to give her a high room, with big windows, but sometimes I’ll close the curtains when she sleeps, and I’ll leave them closed, intentionally.

She has the nurses open them I suppose.

“No flowers today?” she asks, teasingly.

My hands are in my pockets. I’m not dressed up today, it’s my day off, and I slump down on a chair across the foot of her bed, almost as far as I can sit from her.

“Is Benjy OK?” she asks, suddenly concerned.

“He wants to visit,” I say, “but you know. His finals are next week.”

She throws her hand back as if giving a half-hearted salute. “How’s he doing?”

“Studying.”

“Impeccable timing right?” she says, opening her palms and indicating the room.

I don’t laugh.

“Hey, so–”

“I wanted to ask–”

She touches her hands together. The urine in the box at the foot of the bed, covered poorly by the little clipboard, rises a little in level. I know what that’s like. That loss of autonomy. I know it even better than she does.

“You wanted to ask me something?” she says.

I want to talk about what the doctor said. I told him that I would break it to her first and then the three of us could have the conversation together. But I don’t know how to broach the subject. I’m not like her. I have a great intolerance for pain. In all those years of oblivion there was never any pain.

She pours herself a glass of water from the tray beside her. I go and sit down again. Before I know it I’m holding my watch in my hand. It’s a new watch, a gift. I forgot to leave it in the glove compartment of the car and now I quietly slip it into my pocket. I’m pretty sure she saw me though, but if she did, even if she guessed, she wouldn't say anything. How can she?

“You know it’s hard for me,” I say.

“I know, baby,” she says. “Hey, let's go somewhere after this. Some place with a beach.”

I love her then. Her relentless optimism. I lift the chair I’m sitting on and place it beside her bed. Her hands feel as fragile as knitting needles wrapped in rice paper, but they smell the same. Like flowers.

“I spoke with the doctor a couple days ago,” I say.

On her face is a pained expression. She presses a button on the remote and in a second her hand slacks. They’ve got her on the good stuff here, not like the last hospital, but the doctors were hopeful then.

The nurse comes in later and asks her how she’s feeling. She has the pain chart with her, the one with the different faces and the numbers to indicate severity. The one at the very bottom had its teeth out and its eyes in one big horizontal “X”.

Is death painful? I guess I should know. Except I was never really dead. The dead don’t come back to life–save for Jesus. But then, maybe he was in a coma too.

“No flowers today?” the nurse asks me, smiling, just before she leaves. She had a nice smile.

What would Jesus do, I wonder.

Before the accident I was tenure track at Columbia. When I came back, they were exceedingly nice and polite and firm about their rejection. A seven year absence without publications was terminal regardless of the circumstances.

I work at a community college now with students that are refreshingly practical. You would think that it would be an impediment with a subject as lofty as moral philosophy but most of these kids have greater closeness to the things we discuss than any of those who attend the elite institutions.

Although I’m not at Columbia anymore, I like to dress up for the lectures. I’m fastidious about my suit, the polish of my shoes. My son, whose mind is for the colder truths of mathematics and computation, regards it as some tenuous grip on the seven years I have lost, an exercise of the will to unite the past with the present in the way it stands in my memory.

At any rate, the students seem to like it. This watch, I think it cost two hundred dollars, is not the kind I usually wear, but, in fact I hate watches as a principle. I don’t even allow a clock to hang in my office. It was a gift from one of my students. Melissa O’hara.

I only felt comfortable accepting it because she was already a star student and I knew the gift would make no difference in the “A” I would eventually award her. Also, she wasn’t young. Not some shy ingénue with a crush, but a widow with a masters, working toward a law degree with the considerable fortune her husband left her before he passed.

Though nothing has happened between us yet, I confess I sometimes fantasize about the possibility of elopement. It is then that I remind myself of the points against her favor. Her smoking. Her provocative dress. Her discomforting directness.

She is the only one that comes regularly to my office hours. So regularly that I have given up on my original plans to work on my book.

“You must remember something,” she says, in one of these sessions. We are alone. I have a pen in my hand but I am not writing. She is carefully consuming the contents of a Ceasar salad. Her teeth peel a grape tomato and suck the flesh and juice out without consuming the delicate skin.

“It wasn’t even like sleeping, you know?” I say. “You go to sleep. You wake up in the morning. There’s a sense of time passing. Even if you’re in the dark, you can sense the hands of your internal clock have moved.”

“It’s like going under,” she says.

“I don’t know.”

She covers her mouth, nodding, swallowing before she speaks again. “When I had my ovaries out, they put me under. It was like a light switch. On. Off. On again. But to me I was never off. Closed my eyes. Opened my eyes. No gap. Just a seam in time.”

“Right. Exactly. A seam in time.” You click your pen. On. Off. On. “Sorry, you had surgery?”

“Oophorectomy. Ovarian cancer.”

“Oh.”

“They got it all though.”

“That’s good.” I’ve already told her about my wife.

She crushes the paper bag, places it in the empty plastic container, and throws it in the garbage, where it hovers malevolently over reams of discarded hand-outs.

“Did they get the guy who did it, at least?” she says.

“Who’s that?”

“The guy who–” she makes a kind of washing motion around the side of her head.

“Oh. I don’t know. I mean, yes, they got him. It was caught on camera, after all, but I don’t know what they did to him. If anything.”

“You never looked him up? I know a policeman–”

You shake your head. “What would be the point?”

She scoffs and folds her arms. “The consequences of moral philosophy,” she says, tutting.

You laugh. “Honestly, I hope they didn’t punish him too harshly.”

“No death penalty for the man who put you out of commission for seven years.”

“Nine, actually. It took two more years before I could even walk again.”