World And Town Part 41

And unlike Joe, Carter cries-something else he does quietly, with his shoulders hunched up and his chin to his chest. She kisses his wet eyes, his wet cheeks; she can still smell the cabin smoke in what there is of his hair. That smoke. "Carter." She holds him as she held Joe and Lee toward the end, climbing into their hospital beds to comfort them. Joe. Lee. Everett. Reedie. And Cato-Cato. She's pained for Carter, pained for them all, though she does not cry herself-having no tears left, it seems. Da gun-she's attained some sort of terrible detachment. So that even as she mourns, she's aware how fleshy he is, how healthy and uncolonized. Never mind his hairs and moles and patches of eczema, it is a strange loveliness to hug someone with back muscles over his ribs.

Carter, at least, has come back to her.

She squeegees his eyes. "Reedie," she says.

"Reedie."

"I'm so sorry."

"It was terrible."

"You blame yourself."

"Was there something I could have said. Was there something I could have done. About how he saw the world-about how he saw himself. Of course, to do that, I would have had to see him. And I didn't see him, did I? You said that once. And now Everett. Was there something we could have done about Everett?"

She holds her tongue, or maybe sleep does. Exhaustion. It's been a long day. Her body is a dead weight. A steady thing, though, at least. A thing that can be leaned against, snuggled into. Big as he is, Carter nestles into her like a child, crying himself to sleep, only to wake again.

"Chhung," he says. "It could have been Chhung."

"Chhung?" says Hattie, groggily.

"The only difference between Everett and Chhung," he says, "was you. You saw the Chhungs. Sarun. Sophy. They were part of your picture."

Hattie opens her eyes, then closes them-nothing to see in the dark.

"If only Everett had been as clear to me as the Chhungs," she says.

"Could we have saved him, do you think? Was there something we could have done? Something we could have said? People say you can't stop them. People who are going to kill themselves, that is. That they just have trouble with impulse control. But I still wonder if there's something we could have done."

"Maybe." If only it weren't true! But that moment they could've taken a different tack-maybe it was. And her anger at Ginny, which she sees now was one part Ginny's reminding her of Carter-keeping you around when it was convenient but kicking you out when it wasn't. And what about Carter himself? Contributing for better and worse to her life, and to the lives of others. "Let's talk about it in the morning," she says.

Half expecting he'll say, Now, let's talk about it now.

But he turns over instead, taking the covers with him. They recede like a tide in thrall to a moon on his side of the room; she has to pull and pull to keep covered. Yank.

He wakes again.

"I'm not Everett," he says.

"And thank goodness for that." Hattie struggles to wake herself again-that lead ap.r.o.n. "Poor Everett's dead."

"I didn't even know what that was. To be Everett. I was so unable to imagine such a man, I didn't even know that wasn't what I was. I only knew I wasn't Anderson. Reedie wasn't me, and I wasn't Anderson."

"That was hard enough." She opens her eyes out of habit. Blinking, though there's nothing to see.

"He really loved Ginny, didn't he? I gave my life to science. He gave his life to her."

Annie makes a snuffling noise.

"He stuck with her through a lot," says Hattie, slowly. "Too much, maybe."

"A man like that was beyond my ken. Do you know what I mean? He was beyond my ken."

They are lying on their backs. She straightens out her nightgown, which has bunched up under her, then finds his hand. His hand is not papery, as it tends to be, but almost moist. Warm.

"He was a madman," she says.

"He could have used some of your what. Your Confucian moderation," agrees Carter. "If you don't mind my bringing up your sage."

Her sage.

"He was a vet, you know. Everett, I mean," she says. "Vietnam?"

"Yes."

"Which explains something, everything, or nothing. Something, everything, or nothing."

"Exactly."

"He had my number all the same. What was that he said? 'You'd have thought better of that plan.' "

Hattie hesitates.

"He knew I couldn't love like that. Love you. Another person. In that headlong way. Regardless of the consequences. He knew I'd second-guess myself. Weigh and consider. Cut my own heart out if that was required."

How wrong it would be to cry as hard at this as at Everett's death, or at Reedie's. Yet Hattie feels as though if he goes on, she might.

"What a match we were," he goes on. "Two smart people who cut their own hearts out. What did Everett say? All them years. We were as good a match as they were, weren't we. As good a match as they were."

"All them years," repeats Hattie.

Carter snuggles up to her, turning on his side. His arm reaches across her body like a shoulder belt.

"Why did you leave the lab? Tell me. I should have asked you this years ago, I know, but let me at least ask you now. If I may. Why did you leave research?"

How wide awake he is; that Hatch intensity. She should have known he would be this way even in the middle of the night-a train. Whereas her breathing is still slow and rolling, her thoughts still stuffy. "Let's talk about it in the morning."

"No, now," he says. "Now. Don't back away. Don't shy away-that's the word, isn't it? You don't stonewall, you shy away. Maybe as a matter of nature, though it could be nurture, too, of course. All those years as an outsider. As a-how do you say it in Chinese?"

"Yangren. Though today people mostly say waigoren. Waigoren or yangizi, but not yngren." She should explain the differences, but yawns again instead.

"There was something else you used to say."

"Wailaide, maybe?"

"Wailaide, that's right. 'Come from outside.' You were wailaide. Though it isn't even from everything, is it? That you back away. Only from things close to your heart's wound, as Meredith would say."

You always were well insulated, Hat. Probably you had to be.

She doesn't answer.

"The lab," he says, gently. Not putting her back on track like a grad student-just returning to the subject. Drawing her out. "Why you left the lab."

"I needed a home, and the lab wasn't a home. It wasn't-what did you call it?-an experiment in living. It was an arena."

"An arena."

"That's what Amy Fist called it. She said I could love the lab, but it wasn't going to love me back. And I thought she was right about that."

"But a lab is like a lake, Hattie"-Carter forgoing, for once, a dig at Amy. "You can love a lake, but it's just for swimming. You don't leave it because it doesn't love you. You leave because you're done swimming."

She can feel him breathing behind her. They're holding hands, their fingers interlocked.

"It was about me, wasn't it?" he goes on.

"I suppose you were a factor," she says. "In the final a.n.a.lysis."

"A factor in how you viewed the whole enterprise."

"I suppose. Yes."

"What a shame." He squeezes her hand. "What a G.o.dd.a.m.ned shame."

"It wasn't the disaster you imagine," she says. "I was sick of repeating experiments anyway. You had more stamina for all that what-went-wrong."

"We did have some terrible luck with our samples."

"It drove me crazy. And I was good with kids. I changed a lot of lives-broadened their horizons. Made them see reason." She pauses. "They loved me."

"I'm sure. But did you love it. Did you love it. Did it enlarge your spirit, was it what you were put on earth to do. Did it draw more out of you than you knew you had, did it change your very substance. Was it a gift." His free hand strokes her hair.

"It was satisfying, Carter," she says. "It was worthwhile. I am not going to let you tell me it was a waste of my life, because it wasn't. I gave a lot and got a lot back. You should have seen my retirement party. I had some fifty kids come back."

"But no molluscs."

Molluscs.

"How many people came when you retired, Carter? Tell me. And of the people who came, how many people came who didn't have to? How many came wholeheartedly?"

Reveille parks his head on her foot.

Carter goes on as if he didn't hear her. "And there's something special in those moments of discovery, isn't there. When it's not you and your circ.u.mstances. When it's you and the universe, and you feel that. That you're engaged in a most worthy enterprise and have come to stand on some isle of certainty, to boot. Some small, lovely bastion of certainty."

She rolls a little away from him, freeing her hand. "You know, Carter, not everyone can have such exalted work. You've always worn special boots and done special things. Other people have regular boots and regular jobs."

"But you can't deny you know what I mean." He grips her waist. "About the petty world we deal with every day but that we can hardly bear calling our lives. And the feeling that you've escaped, and are finally in the right precincts. The precincts we were made to inhabit."

She hesitates. The precincts we were made to inhabit-no. That you and the universe, though-you and the universe, you and the unknown, which you were helping to make known for now and forever: Maybe it was just a web of significance, but it did seem like more than that. You did feel that you were adding a brick to an important and immortal edifice-to a cathedral worth building. Who knew what its final meaning was? Who knew but that its truths were as partial as any the mind perceived? Still, it was far larger than you, and descriptive, too, of something yet larger and more beautiful. Beyond you-it was descriptive of something so far beyond you that you could see why some people believed it divine.

Yet still, she asks, "Were you loved?"

"Hattie, listen. What you did was worthwhile. It was a reasonable way to spend your life. Or more than that. It was n.o.ble. It was a n.o.ble way to spend your life. You had fifty students come back for your retirement, and I'm sure there were five hundred more whose lives were changed by your cla.s.s. They were lucky to have you-that's a fact. Very lucky. And they loved you, I'm sure. Loved you as no one in the lab ever loved me, probably. So, all right. But what went on in the lab through this time period, Hattie-can you not admit it to have been something special? Can you really not admit it?"

His breathing body presses against her back.

"It was extraordinary," she says finally.

"Wasn't it?"

"A religious experience, in a way. An experience to which you could attach religious feelings."

"Interesting."

"To which your whole family attached religious feelings. That hall where you hung your father's picture was your chapel."

"We were like patrons in the Renaissance, you mean. Except that we hoped to attain immortality with brains instead of money."

She nods. "Something like that."

She can feel him nod back. "That being our web of significance. Well, perhaps you are right, or partially right. My guess is that we accrued earthly advantages from our quest as well. Stimulation such as resulted in the growth of new dendritic spines, and so on. Status. Things that could well ultimately contribute to our longevity and quality of life."

"If it didn't kill you, you mean."

He is quiet a moment. "Touche. But what about you." He props himself up on an elbow; his head moves in closer, his voice. "You've followed the field, haven't you? Who knows but you've been reading the papers coming out of my lab all these years."

It is her turn to be quiet.

"What a time you missed, Hattie. The explosion. Thanks to computers and fMRIs and all the rest. Do you remember how we used to record everything from the oscilloscope onto film? No one knew what neurobiology even meant, what it was. Do you remember? When it was the 'Nerve-Muscle Program.' Remember?"

"You went on to work on plasticity, didn't you."

"The generation of new synapses, yes. Can you imagine? To have built from the isolated synaptical transmissions you worked on to the whole live dynamic of synapse initiation and growth? It was extraordinary."

"Human adaptation at the cellular level."

"Precisely."

"Change and growth. What learning does to the brain-how it changes."

"How it stores new ways and new knowledge and is itself transformed."

"How it comes to see differently, even."

"Yes."

"How it blinkers itself in new ways."

He laughs. "If you want to put it that way. How it refocuses, maybe. Re-frames. Selecting in either a narrower or a broader way. Every way, of course, having some cost, and every way limited by our poor prehistoric hardware, but the plasticity itself offering some small hope for benighted mankind, don't you think?"