Every Note Played(5)
Yet he knows with absolute certainty that it will stop. At some point, the twitching in every single muscle group—in his arms, his legs, his mouth, his diaphragm—will stop forever, and so he should embrace the twitching. Be grateful for it. The twitching means his muscles are still there, still capable of responding.
For now.
His motor neurons are being poisoned by a cocktail of toxins, the recipe unknown to his doctor and every scientist on the planet, and his entire motor neuron system is in a death spiral. His neurons are dying, and the muscles they feed are literally starving for input. Every twitch is a muscle stammering, gasping, begging to be saved.
They can’t be saved.
But they aren’t dead yet. Like the fuel light in his car that alerts him when he’s low on gas, these fasciculations are an early-warning system. As he lies naked and cold on his bed, he starts doing math. Assuming he has about two gallons left in the tank when his fuel light is triggered and that his BMW conservatively does twenty-two miles per gallon in the city, he could go forty-four more miles before running out of gas. He imagines this scenario. The last drop of gas used. The engine gears ground to a halt. Seized. The car stopped. Dead.
The right side of his bottom lip twitches. Without understanding the biology, he wonders how much muscle fuel remains in his body and wishes the twitching could be enumerated.
How many miles does he have left?
CHAPTER THREE
As Karina walks a little over five blocks to Commonwealth Avenue, she’s barely aware of her surroundings—sparrows nibbling on crumbs of a dropped muffin beneath a park bench; a fierce dragon tattoo covering the bare chest of a skateboarder; the aggressive whir of the board’s wheels as he whizzes by her; a young Asian couple strolling hip to hip, hand in hand; a breeze perfumed with cigarette smoke; a baby wailing in a stroller; a dog barking; the alternating choreography of cars and pedestrians at every intersection. Instead, her attention is held inward.
Her heart races faster than required for her walking pace, making her anxious. Or maybe, likely, she was anxious first, and her heart rate responded. She speeds up in an effort to synchronize her external action with her inner physiology, which only makes her feel as if she were rushing, late. She checks her watch, which is utterly unnecessary. She can’t be early or late when he doesn’t know she’s coming.
She’s worked up a sweat. Stopped at the next corner, waiting for a WALK signal, she pulls a tissue from her purse, reaches under her shirt, and blots her armpits. She digs around for another tissue but can’t find one. She wipes her forehead and nose with her hands.
She arrives at Richard’s address and stops at the base of the stairs, looking up to the fourth-floor windows. Behind her, the spires of Trinity Church and the sheer vertical glass of the John Hancock building rise above the rooftops of the brownstones on the other side of Comm Ave. He has a lovely view.
This street in the Back Bay is especially posh, housing Boston’s Brahmins, cousins to their neighbors on Beacon Hill. Richard lives on the same block as many of Boston’s elegant and elite—the president of BioGO, a Massachusetts General Hospital surgeon, the fourth-generation owner of a two-hundred-year-old art gallery on Newbury Street. Richard makes decent money, exceptional for a pianist, but this address is way out of his league, probably his version of a midlife crisis, his shiny red Porsche. He must be mortgaged to the hilt.
She hasn’t seen him since Grace’s high school graduation, over a year ago now. And she’s never been here. Well, she’s driven by twice before, both times at night, both times ostensibly to avoid traffic, purposefully rerouting from her preferred course home from downtown Boston, slowing to a crawl just long enough to avoid instigating honks from behind her, barely long enough to capture a quick blur of high ceilings and a nonspecific golden glow of a home inhabited.
She resents that Richard got to be the one to move out, to start over, fresh in a new place. Memories of him haunt her in every room of their once-shared home, the rare good as unsettling as the common bad. She replaced their mattress and their dinnerware. She removed their framed wedding picture from the living-room wall and hung a pretty mirror there instead. It doesn’t matter. She’s exactly where he left her, still living in their house, his energetic impression left behind like a red-wine stain on a white blouse. Even washed a thousand times, that brown spot is never coming out.
She could move, especially now that Grace has gone off to college. But where would she go? And do what? Her stubbornness, that impenetrable bedrock of her personality, refuses to give these questions actual consideration beyond calling them nonsense. So she stays put, frozen in the three-bedroom colonial museum of her devastated marriage.
Grace already had her license when Karina and Richard separated, so she was able to drive herself over to her father’s “house.” His bachelor pad. Karina walks up the stairs to the front door of his brownstone, and her mouth goes sour. At the top step, her stomach matches the taste in her mouth, and the word sicken grabs the microphone of her inner monologue. She feels sick. But she’s not sick, she reminds herself. Richard is.
The sour in her stomach turns, fermenting. Why is she here? To say or do what? Offer pity, sympathy, help? To see how bad off he is with her own eyes, the same reason drivers rubberneck when passing the site of an accident—to get a good look at the wreckage before moving along?
What will he look like? She has no reference point other than Stephen Hawking. A hand puppet with no hand in the body, paralyzed, emaciated, unable to breathe without a machine, his limbs, torso, and head positioned in a wheelchair like a little girl’s floppy, cotton-limbed rag doll, his voice computer generated. Is that what Richard will look like?