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The Fourth Noble Truth of Enlightenment is the truth of the path that frees us from suffering. Humans aren’t meant to have our desires satisfied, or to achieve personal satisfaction. This is a false road. The true quest is for
bodhi:
to be awakened, to be aware. In this search, a doctrine of activity is demanded. Diligence. Manner. Process. Utility. Habit. The path to
bodhi,
therefore, cultivates concentration, develops character, and nurtures inner wisdom, showing the way to live a virtuous life, so that, finally, one blossoms, becoming compassionate, becoming wise. An enlightened being. I feel myself separating from the physical world, slipping into something else, and very much doubt that I need to worry about walking whichever path, living any doctrine. There is no pain.

When I was eighteen, before I went away to college, I was deeply in love with a boy, and one weekend I lied to my mother and we went away to Burlington and I ended up pregnant. I know termination was the right thing, but I have always thought of that little baby, it stays with you, and maybe that fueled the desire in me to get it right someday. I don’t know. I do wish I’d had the chance to really get it right, to raise and love my little girl, to know her and to let her know me. I know I did get a chance to love her, that is one thing I believe is infinite.

On the morning of my wedding, Tilda and Julie and my mother and my other dearest women friends surprise me in my hotel room with breakfast and all join me, crowding into bed. During the ceremony Oliver and I embrace one another, and our gay Unitarian minister wraps us in a prayer shawl, and as he recites the final benediction Oliver and I hug each other so tightly, I feel the world whirling around us. We spend the next day driving through Vermont in his cousin’s old station wagon, feeding one another remains of our wedding cake. On my lips I can still taste the buttercream icing, the cake’s moistness.

I am alone in my bedroom with scissors cutting up fashion magazines for my wall collage. I am rushing home so that I can be on the phone with the same friends I spent the entire day with at the high school. On the final night of our goodbye trip before we head off to different colleges, we’re sitting on the steps of Sacré-Coeur, staring at Paris spread out below us. All around us cute European boys party and dance; immigrants rush to try to sell us single Heinekens out of their six-packs. My friends have spread a map of the city and try to reconstruct our path tonight, figure out where Jill might have left her wallet. Jill is half-hysterical. We are buzzed, slurring. I stare out into the black night, more than ready for life to move forward.

It is 4:00
A.M.
and the day is just getting light and down the corridors of the city streets there is not much traffic and I am heading home from that party in Williamsburg, holding my heels in one hand, and I have a bit of a buzz, and am biting into an apple and feeling a sense of possibility, a weird inevitability, as if a key had been discovered to a lock I didn’t know was inside of me. The city feels like it’s mine.

My dad drives us out to Putney and the biker barbecue place that is our special secret getaway-together spot, and we sit on the picnic benches and swat away bees and share a big plate of ribs and get lemonade and after, he helps me clean my face with Wet-Naps and lets me have a black and white milkshake.

How much I love shopping for baby clothes—little girls’ clothing makes me so jealous; I would wear so many of those little outfits if they came for adults. Why didn’t I ever design a line of little girls’ clothing for grown women?

If and when there is a memorial for me, it would be a nice thing if they play my favorite Stevie Wonder song, and let it be known that it is for my beloved friends. Maybe use the chorus, where Stevie is happier than the morning sun, and that lovely refrain, thanking friends for being allowed inside their lives.

Waiting to get my first period and waiting for it to happen and it will never happen ever—then that afternoon I am lined up with the other girls doing jumping jacks for Miss Rutman and there it is.

Mother loading bags of candy in her purse before we head into the gorgeous old art deco theater downtown and watch a matinee.

The joy of finding that compact changing kit that I could travel with, unsnap and lay the baby onto. The utilitarian pride I feel whenever I whip out that kit, I am a soldier mommy, able, taking care of business.

They
should
have a memorial for me. I deserve that.

Oliver and I are on the couch and it has been a long day; he is squeezing and massaging my feet; I finish rolling the joint, light up, release the smoke toward him.

I stroke a few lines with my L square as a guide, and complete a drawing of an empire skirt, and the garment seems so simple and perfect and elegant, as if it were the shape that my body had been waiting for, all this time and all these struggles to get it right, but look how easy it is.

People should not get too sad. I just hope they remember how much I loved them.

The blue stripe on the tester. It is staying blue.

Those long moments not knowing whether my baby is a boy or a girl but just holding, appreciating, feeling relief and panic, her body so small and wrinkled and red, holding this little bundle of weight, the tears flowing, finally I give in and say,
Okay, tell me
.

Those walnut-large eyes looking up at me, that little potato of a face, delighted.

I don’t believe that I am going silent. I am joining everything that’s ever been alive. If my vision of the universe is right, I will be helping from the other side.

But I enjoy my voice. I think I might miss it.

—

How the game worked: nurses and orderlies on a floor each ponied up ten bucks every pay cycle. From the desk, they got the bowl. You pick a slip with some random number. Payday comes, the attending physician goes down to the cafeteria, gets a coffee, brings back a dollar bill, a five-spot, whatever piece of paper money. Last two numbers on the serial. Whoever has the lucky number wins the pot. Anywhere between four and seven hundred dollars. You didn’t miss ten bucks from any check, but, baby, when your number hit, you felt that win.

Glendora had cut deals with her friends who worked on other floors. If their kids got sick or some emergency happened, the nurse agreed to cover shifts; in exchange, her friends agreed to enter Glendora in their lotteries. On four different floors, she was in lotteries. With her winnings she’d gotten dental work, paid off the fuckos from Internal Revenue, she’d bought herself little getaways to South Beach and Puerto Rico and Costa Rica. She’d gotten her new couch off a win. She’d also learned that, on other floors, patients didn’t hold back, complaining about all kinds of nonsense, pitchers being out of water, room temperatures, batteries in the remote controls being on low power so it was difficult to flip around—that was a biggie. Glendora would think:
You have no idea
. What her stem cell transplants went through was living hell. With the rare exception, her transplant patients were so nice. So grateful and polite. Glendora had been working this ward for twelve years now and was sure she could never work anywhere else.

—

Devanshi Bhakti had devoted her doctoral thesis and three postdoctorate fellowships to researching the specifics of genotype and phenotype relationships in nucleotide cells—so why was she here serving backup on this patient consultation? It made no sense. She should have been back in the lab. Any resident could have been standing here instead, and she was three times smarter than the specialist anyway; she’d solved simple division problems at the age of three, read chapter books out loud by the time she was five; the smartest living thing to ever escape from her back-roads village; the most brilliant student in her London preparatory school. Valedictorian, Fulbright; ninety-seven percent on her graduate school exams; nearly perfect on her med exams; she’d come so far, had worked so hard, even eventually accepting that it was okay for her to be ambitious, it was okay to desire attention, to want to match her wits against the unsolvable, to take on Manhattan and cancer and every big challenge. There were larger reasons she slept in stolen two-hour stretches on a cot in the doctors’ lounge. There was a greater good behind her social life of reruns and movie rentals and reheated lasagna, all that shitty 3:00
A.M
. take-out from diners. She was of prime childbearing age (her mother reminded her of this every single time they spoke). She had curves and hips that turned
her
on, just looking at them. She kept finding herself in this or that trendy bar, accepting a drink from another man with an expensive haircut and a name-brand suit; on the phone and apologizing for having to reschedule dinner at another three-star restaurant; having some version of a conversation in which this hedge funder swore he wasn’t like the other hedge funders but was really a nice guy, possessed a soul and everything, and could handle her weird schedule, he worked long hours, too. High points like a rock-climbing weekend getaway. Gifts of pendants and earrings. Bhakti always got to discover, usually inside of four months, that this hedge funder actually couldn’t handle it, was just like the others. The inevitable rebound rut followed; zipless, sloppy, partaken with that same sweet, boring, but mostly inoffensive resident, held in a romantic locale like some empty patient bed, or—once—the test cylinder of a magnetic resonance imaging machine (after which she at least got to check out what a scan of two bodies fucking looked like). Devanshi Bhakti saw males, doctors and patients and orderlies alike, stare at her. She knew the nurses called her princess. Jokes circulated about the smell of her privates. She kept reminding herself of the greater good. She stood without emotion in the back of the exam room and thought about the experiments she’d get done later. She caught herself playing with a strand of her hair and halted—remembering one of the photos on the bureau; how this patient’s hair had once been long, too.

—

Sergio Blasco wished he could just explain, step by step, the science of what was happening to the man’s wife. The obvious stuff he’d already said: she was in a delicate place, it could go either way, she needs time so the marrow can take hold, the big question is whether her body can hold out. The husband understood all these things but right now was looking for something else, saying,
I just don’t see how you can take this every day.
The husband seemed to expect an answer.
It’s much easier on me than on the patients and family
was what Blasco said, followed by
The truth is, you never get used to it.
These sentences were his twin stalwarts, though Blasco’s mood also could change things. Sometimes when his eyes were bleary and he was coming off a marathon twelve-hour shift, he just started spouting and had no idea what he told the family members. He knew his answers deflected the real question, the thing family members really wanted to know:
How am I supposed to deal with death?

In fifteen years of practice, your database racked up a lot of names. Your case folders filled more than a few back-room file cabinets. But you never got used to a patient going into a spiral. Never. Blasco also had a marriage to keep afloat. He had kids to raise. He was a scratch golfer, a collector of expensive cigars. Every Thanksgiving he took his family and worked at a soup kitchen. He’d built his wall of defenses.

Still, he couldn’t pass a certain block on the Upper West Side without thinking of Mikhael Bishop. Sometimes just heading to the Upper West Side made him think of that night: he’d ducked into a sports bar to grab a beer and watch the Yankees, had received the page about Mikhael. There also were mornings he looked into his bowl of krispy flakes and saw the reflection of Joy Washington staring back at him. Miss Washington had been in her early twenties when she’d gone through the transplant, and, nearing the one-year anniversary, she was throwing this big party to celebrate the milestone and her recovery. Blasco had gone so far as to send in his RSVP card. Then her stomach began having problems. She’d started feeling really not so well, that’s what she said,
really not so well.
He’d had her come in for a blood test and a biopsy.

He’d forgotten other names, but the tilt of a head on a subway might rush one back. He’d be sitting, sipping tea, and would see the liquid brightness of a set of eyes. The infinite would open.

He tried to keep a lid on his drinking. Some nights were better than others.

—

No movement or food or responses from her for days now. He didn’t leave the room. Then he had to leave. For this. The second Oliver was off the floor, he felt the gravity of his mistake, the pull of centrifugal force back toward her orbit. If anything happened, he needed to be there. It bothered him to think it was possible he wouldn’t be.

Ruggles was already at Blauner’s office, confabbing with the lawyer who had helped Oliver with medical insurance, as well as Jonathan, the three of them forming a small group. Ruggles greeted Oliver with a strong handshake, acknowledging how Oliver looked, asking in a serious voice how she was hanging in. Oliver answered that he was hoping for the best, and needed to get back as soon as possible. All the men understood. The contracts were unveiled.

“I wouldn’t be pressing this if we didn’t have to,” Ruggles insisted, apologetic but firm. He explained to Oliver that a finished project was the only hope. “I talked to the Brow. I guess he’s on board,” Ruggles said. “Whatever. I know it doesn’t really matter in comparison.”

Blauner stepped in and explained the terms. Without much fuss, Oliver signed over his controlling interest of the company to Ruggles for a named sum that, given the circumstances, was more than generous. Items including the computer terminals were included in the price. As the lease to the apartment was a commercial one, with the company name on the document, Ruggles would assume control of the space, but clauses ensured that Oliver’s family would have no deadlines to move.

“Buddy, the last thing I want to do is hurt anybody,” Ruggles said.