I can come back later.
Not necessary. Sit for a while if you want. Maybe you could hit the nurse button. I’d like to get them to bring some juice.
Sure.
They sat there in silence. After a while a nurse came by with apple juice in a small cup with a sealed cap and a straw protruding from it. Hospital equipment, disabled people accommodated as well as could be; he drained it in a single suck.
I can probably find a water fountain and refill that, Mary offered.
Please.
She wandered the hall, found a water fountain near the restrooms. Sealed cap hard to get off, but she could do it. Cup too small. Trying to keep patients from choking, from overhydrating? She didn’t get it.
She dragged her heels getting back to the room, but there was no avoiding it.
Back on the chair. He avoided meeting her eye, she thought. She would have to exert herself to make this work.
We had a good meeting, she said.
Yeah? Tell me about it.
So she did. It was interesting to try to summarize the whole event in a way he would appreciate. The day of accomplishments, the day of outstanding problems. The difficulty in reconciling the two. The difficulty in giving up any sense of influence on the process, much less control. When you ride a tiger it’s hard to get off. The Chinese had known this feeling for a long time.
How were the Chinese? he asked, curious. Are they on board with all this?
Yes, I think so. I get the impression that they feel confident they’re at the center of the story, or one of the main players. For them, it’s not just the United States anymore. They have rivalries with Russia and India that are also collaborations. They have contacts everywhere. I think they know they’re crucial. I don’t see the Party beating the drum about the century of humiliation anymore, or not as much. It doesn’t make sense to the Chinese alive now. Including the leadership. So they seem to be relaxing into a feeling of confidence, of being taken seriously. No one can bully them anymore, not even the US. It would be stupid to try. And they can see that everyone’s beginning to do things more like them. I mean state-owned enterprises. Everyone’s taking over money and energy and even land, they’re all seen as public trusts now, and that’s how the Chinese have always treated them. So the containment of the market, of finance— they must feel they led the way on that, or gave everyone an example of how to do it.
So it’s really America that is the main problem, Frank said.
Mary sighed. I suppose. It’s so easy to blame you for everything, you lead with your chin, but I’m never comfortable with that. There’s so much good along with the bad. The country of countries, that kind of thing.
I wonder if people said that about Britain when it was the world power.
I don’t know.
Not in Ireland.
Well that’s true! She laughed. Although it has to be said, there was some good in the Brits and their empire, even in Ireland.
I bet you don’t say that when you’re there.
No, I don’t.
Suddenly he winced. His forehead popped sweat.
Are you all right? she asked.
He didn’t reply. He buzzed the nurse, which was a reply of sorts. When one showed up, he asked her for pain relief. Mary felt her stomach clench. Of course. Pain. Enough to cause sweat to pop out of you, to cause your face to go gray. Break-out pain, they called it. She had seen this before, but it had been a long time.
Maybe I’ll come back later, she said.
Okay, he said.
95
I am a thing. I am alive and I am dead. I am conscious and unconscious. Sentient but not. A multiplicity and a whole. A polity of some sextillions of citizens.
I spiral a god that is not a god, and I am not a god. I am not a mother, though I am many mothers. I keep you alive. I will kill you someday, or I won’t and something else will, and then, either way, I will take you in. Someday soon.
You know what I am. Now find me out.
96
In the weeks that followed she began to take her pad with her to the clinic where Frank was being cared for. A period of surgeries and interventions had given way to a routine of palliative care. He could get out of bed, and with help shuffle out into the clinic courtyard, a pleasant walled space dominated by a big shade tree, a linden. He would sit there looking up into the leaves and the sky. There were flowerbeds, well-tended, but he never seemed to look at these. As far as Mary could tell, his ex and her daughter never came back to visit again. Once she asked him about it and he frowned and said he thought they had come by once or twice, but he couldn’t be sure when it had been. She even asked one of the nurses about it, and was told it was not information they could share, that she would have to ask him.
It didn’t matter. Acquaintances from the apartment co-op he had so briefly occupied came by, and friends from jail. So he said. Whenever she came by he was alone and seemed like he had been that way for the whole of that day, no matter when she came. It could have just been his manner, which was getting more and more withdrawn, but she began to think her impression was right; he was seldom visited. As his condition worsened, and he was more and more confined to his room and even his bed, on an IV drip of pain meds and who knew what else, she began to spend more and more time there. She realized that she believed, as much as she believed anything, that when someone was dying, it wasn’t
