The Fugitivities, стр. 89

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His room hadn’t changed. He put the letters on the bed, walked to the window, and opened the shutters. The accordion wings swung open with a dull thud. There was a gray, empty sky over Paris. The motor of a moped went snarling by. A car was honking. Downstairs on the corner of the rue de Tocqueville, traffic was piling up. Two black men were operating a municipal truck as it lifted a green apple full of jingling recycled glass to be towed away. Jonah went back to the bed and sat down by the pile of letters. He looked up at the big map of the world on the wall. Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Porto Alegre, Santiago, Buenos Aires, New York. Places and people went spooling through the projector, their memories played to the inner eye. The distance between life and inner life, as between life and its sudden evaporation, a leap incalculable. Inside the names and the abstract points was a tangle of stories, and more than that, a string of choices that led right to his very last footsteps, to sitting on the bed, to his room with the window open onto the gray afternoon. If he were a wandering poet, perhaps he would have known to make something of it. But he had always been a terrible poet, a wannabe poet, worse than corny, a phony. He felt very small. He thought of what Isaac had said, and Nathaniel, and Uncle Vernon. And he wondered if he had done the wrong thing.

He also knew it was a stupid thought. For him everything was still possible. His privileged path and all that he might do with it was just beginning another cycle full of abundant second chances. His life was not the one that hung in the balance.

Tomorrow, he knew, would be an important day. They would move Arna into an operating room sometime after noon and then she would go into surgery. In the morning he would have breakfast, then go out to Neuilly to meet her parents who were staying overnight in the neurology unit of the American Hospital. If all went well, by midnight they would know.

He heard the muffled sound of his mother coughing in a far room. He cut the string, and Arna’s letters fanned out on the bed. He ran a thumb over the stamps, over his name in her writing. Her handwriting. Her hands. His mother was calling from the kitchen. He could hear her opening cupboards, pulling down pots and pans. She was making something to eat. He looked at the letters. No, he thought. No. Not now, not like this. It was impossible. But he didn’t know. He heard his mother coughing again, coughing, coughing. He opened the first letter and began to read.