through that brownish filter, casting its rays to the ground, illuminating those items which had been in the bicycle's baskets and were now several feet away from the red cloth which had safeguarded them, two bundles wrapped in fishing wire: a packet of flat, slender lengths of polished metal; another packet of narrow, unfinished planks of wood; the metal and wood being of equal size — approximately twelve inches long and two inches wide, fifteen to twenty pieces per bundle — with hanja characters meticulously carved or etched lengthwise upon each one. A few metal pieces glinted brightly in the increasing sunlight, catching Hollis's attention and blunting his sight for a moment when he flicked the cigarette butt at them.
“Is he a goner?” someone in the patrol asked.
“If he isn't,” someone else replied, “he's about to be.”
Then while McCreedy held the monk, Hollis knelt in front of the old man's possessions, inspecting the bundle of metal pieces which glimmered back at him and reflected his ruddy face. Presently, he reached for the wooden planks, studying the ornate, scroll-like writing, the characters filled in with black ink — messages which would forever be impossible for him to fathom, as cryptic to his memory now as the words he once saw imparted into a fallen monk's ear.
8
“Wood and metal? What on earth is that going to do to me?” Debra had wondered, upon learning that her chemotherapy infusions were to be a mixture of two drugs: Taxol, derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree, and carboplatin, from the valuable metal class used to create jewelry. “I'll probably become a robotic tin man with an ax.”
“Surely a tin woman,” Dr. Langford said. “But right now I wouldn't worry too much about that.”
Then the autumn after her five-month therapy had commenced was passed in waiting, the slow, indeterminate days initially marked by the long strands of her hair discovered all over the house; sometimes the hairs ended up in unforeseen places — plastered on the TV screen, resting at the bottom of a coffee mug, hanging from the front doorknob — until, as an act of empowering herself, she decided to take control and buzz-trim her head to a fine quarter-inch stubble. “If it's going to happen anyway,” she said, “why prolong the agony of it?” But soon the velveteen stubble also began shedding, dotting their sheets and pillows like benign, identically made splinters. In a further attempt at empowerment, she eventually stripped off whatever was left of her hair with a lint roller, emerging from the bathroom balder than she had been at birth, her eyebrows, too, no longer existing on her face. She stood before Hollis in an untied terry-cloth robe, her naked body lacking a single pubic hair (the absence of which, she realized soon enough, hampered her ability to use the toilet without making a mess — the thick, curling pubes having previously funneled the urine flow into a well-aimed stream). “Just call me Mrs. Clean,” she told him, clutching the hair-matted lint roller in one hand, concealing her self-consciousness with a grin, even as he appeared mortified by just how thoroughly the job had been done.
“My lord,” Hollis said, rising from where he had sat at the foot of their bed, walking gingerly toward her, his gaze traveling the circumference of her oval-shaped head.
“Well, what do you think?”
“I don't know,” he said. “You look like you, but not like you.” He extended a palm outward, bringing it to her tender scalp, letting it glide about on the smooth surface. “You look like a blank canvas, Deb.”
“If only that were true,” she replied, and at that moment a shiver shot through her body, producing goose pimples on her bare shoulders and arms, as if to signal the premature arrival of the dry, brisk winter months. Then the colder season found her coughing and sneezing more than ever before: surely a weakened immune system, she and Hollis had concluded; for a while, each abrupt wheeze from her mouth or nose — every single hack or sudden nasal eruption — was accompanied by an uncontrollable release of urine, to the point where Debra began relying on what she liked to refer to as adult diapers. “Never saw myself as the depending-on-Depends type,” she'd told Hollis at Costco, after he had lowered two bulk-size packages of the moisture-absorbing undergarments into their shopping cart.
Since they hadn't yet formed any close acquaintances at Nine Springs, no one sought them out during that first winter, and, for the most part, the weeks between Debra's treatments were spent in relative solitude. Hollis whiled away the hours by doing landscaping in the backyard, cooking their meals, and strolling the aisles of Home Depot or Costco. There was also his increasingly questionable, slow-going autobiography, resumed now and then whenever Debra had urged him to keep writing, given the working title of
So on Friday afternoons, Hollis attended the two-hour Painting Your Life class at the local Funtivities Center, where — for a $58 monthly enrollment fee — he was supplied with colored pens, pastels, oil paints, watercolors, brushes, and large sheets of white construction paper. With a single assignment given at the start of every session (Compose a dream you've had — Depict your favorite place — Make a self-portrait — Sketch something you like to eat) and offering a minimal amount of instruction, the classes were reserved, meditative affairs set around four circular tables which could each seat five to eight participants. Under the roving presence of the soft-spoken and diminutive Mrs. Ambrose, a retired art-history adjunct professor from the University of Arizona, Hollis completed every assignment in less than an hour, always excusing himself before those around him had finished their pieces (his weekly creation carried across the parking lot in one hand, rolled up tightly as he headed for the Suburban, destined to be placed on a garage cabinet shelf).
But a couple of his paintings had caught Mrs. Ambrose's attention, bringing her to hover above his shoulders, her bifocals dangling from a silver chain and brushing against his neck. “Oh, I like this, very unusual,” she had said while watching him add a light blue sky to a pastel-based image showing a half-naked man and boy, their heads concealed behind gas masks; and then, two weeks later, she repeated the sentiment when gazing down at a self- portrait which had Hollis surrounded by a purple-crimson background, arms at his side as he stood near a white cow and in front of a blackish tree with bloodred leaves. “Oh, I like this, Mr. Adams. I like what you're doing here — the symbolism of the tree, the colors you've used — figurative while also abstract. Now tell me what you're trying to convey in this?”
Lifting a red pastel he was using from the construction paper, Hollis regarded his self-portrait as if he were viewing it anew. “You know, I can't say for sure,” he said, his words preceded by a faint sigh. “I guess I don't really know. It sort of just came to me, I suppose.”
Mrs. Ambrose raised her bifocals, holding them at her nose like a magnifying glass. “Well, it seems rather personal, don't you think? Perhaps you're addressing something about your childhood, a longing for days gone by.”
“Perhaps that's it,” he said, lowering the red pastel to the paper. “It could be, sure,” and with that he began working again.
Debra, on the other hand, occasionally took tai chi and ceramics classes at the Funtivities Center, although she usually occupied herself with escapist fiction, managing to track down and read the forty-six novels of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series; at the same time, she could not resist owning another escapist collection of sorts: shunning the typical line of chemotherapy wigs, she acquired instead various specialty hairpieces which added an elegant or humorous touch to her otherwise barren appearance (Illusion by Eva Gabor, Encounter by Revlon, Action by Raquel Welch, as well as a blond beehive, and a Princess Leia wig), wearing whichever one suited her mood when heading to the grocery store or into Tucson for treatment. But she quickly grew tired of such novelty items. In the latter half of that winter, she began leaving the wigs at home, deciding to venture outside adorned only with a bandanna or a purple Arizona Diamondbacks baseball cap, sunglasses, and a charcoal-filtered surgical mask to help protect her lowered immune system; although none of what she wore could hide the lethargy which had finally descended upon her — a deepening lethargy, Hollis believed, not based solely on the effects of the monthly chemo infusions but, rather, because she could also no longer deny a feeling of having been horribly betrayed by her own
