25

Irene stood on the Golden Gate Bridge. The red metal of the railing was cool under her hand and very solid, but there was a fog over the bay hovering just below the bridge itself, so that the bridge seemed truly suspended. It was a dream bridge floating over nothing, as if one could just fall off the edge of it and be buoyed up by the air.

So many people had jumped off this bridge that there was a plaque next to Irene on one of the girders, advertising a crisis hotline, with an emergency phone under it that you could call if you were feeling sad. The plaque told her the consequences of leaping from the bridge were fatal and tragic. The first she could not dispute. The second, she pondered as she leaned out over the fog, was not so clear. Maybe death was not so terrible. How could it be, when she had practiced it so many times? What was waiting for her on the other side: A leafy island? A new, more cheerful Hinterland? George?

Irene listened to the dampened sounds of the seabirds, the hiss of the cars passing behind her over the bridge. There was no city, and there were no mountains. Only fog and the strangely transmitted few sounds: water lapping, a ringing bell, the thump of her heart under her armpit. She thought about what George said about inhabiting the transitional point between life and death. Did she do it because she was a suicidal coward, as she believed, or because she was victorious over the weak impulse for death, as George suggested? Empirical evidence suggested she was not a jumper. She had never jumped. The data supported George’s hypothesis.

Irene’s phone barked. She took it out of her pocket and looked at it as if it were an artifact from another world. At the conference, physicists were walking around, going out and in the doors of the different meeting rooms at the hotel, along with the businesspeople who gave physicists their money. Maybe she was late. How long had she been standing here? The area code was from Toledo. It could be someone at her lab, someone with a problem. Maybe one of the pieces had come back from the fabricator already. Maybe it was ready to be installed.

“Sparks,” she said. Her voice echoed a little bit.

“Irene,” said Sally. “It’s Sally. George’s mother. You know.”

Irene imagined Sally standing in her office in Toledo, perfectly groomed. She pictured her standing on a pedestal, clothed in a drapey robe, blindfolded, holding up a set of scales. She pictured her presiding over Sam Beth’s marriage with George. She would wear the clothing of a high priestess of Babylon, and it would be pretty strange on such a Norwegian-looking lady, but then Sam Beth was Korean and seemed to pull it off alright.

“Hello,” said Irene. “Is everything alright?”

“Well actually, it’s about George.”

“Did he go to the doctor? Is there something wrong with his brain?”

“How did you know that?” Sally asked, her voice suddenly sharp and accusing.

“Never mind,” said Irene. “Is he sick? What did the doctor say?”

There was a long pause, and Irene chewed on her lip. She reached into her pocket and found a pen there, began stabbing it into the railing of the bridge, making a very small blue mark there.

“Irene, it’s actually … George has a brain tumor, the doctor said.”

She paused, and Irene scraped the railing with her pen. “It’s threatening—” began Sally. Irene could hear panic leaking into the older woman’s voice, and felt horrified that she might start to cry. But Sally didn’t. She went on to explain the tumor, its shape, its slow rate of growth.

“They can do a needle biopsy,” she said. “They can drill down into his—head”—her voice caught but she continued—“and pull out a piece of it and see what it is. Or they can do an open biopsy, where they go in to take out the tumor and biopsy it during the operation. Right there at the same time.”

“That sounds better. The open biopsy. When are they going to operate?”

“That’s the thing,” said Sally. “He doesn’t want them to operate.”

“Why not?” Irene asked. “Why would he not want that?”

“He says the symptoms have been steady for so long, it cannot be growing at a dangerous pace.”

The consequences of jumping from this bridge are fatal and tragic. A person falling from this bridge would surely die. In her mind, she had always felt she would die in Toledo, in the Maumee River, like an Ohio person. But the feeling she got from inhaling deeply on this bridge, so tall the biggest ships could pass beneath it, made her feel that something else was possible. She could do a world tour of suicide bridges. She had never seen the Brooklyn Bridge, the Gorge Bridge above the Rio Grande. She could explore the possibilities of not jumping from every vantage point in the world. The towers of Europe, now that she could fly. The minarets. Everywhere she could find to not die.

After falling asleep so many times, she could only die once. After slipping under every night of her life, she could only crash into one water.

“He has a brain tumor!” Irene screeched into the phone. She turned and leaned her back against the railing, kicking at the barrier with the heel of one shoe. A young couple passed in front of her on the walkway, and the woman looked at her with a concerned frown, as if to say, Are you alright?

“Calm down,” said Sally. And the crying sound was gone from her voice. She was all business. “You don’t know everything about this. OK? So listen.”

“Fine,” said Irene. She was pacing up and down beside the railing now.

“The tumor is in two parts,” she began. “And the operation is dangerous. He could forget who he is, a little bit or a lot. Forget who he knows, or what he knows. Or not, it just depends on what happens in the surgery. So he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to lose anything.”

“But that doesn’t matter, does it? Could he die?”

“The doctors would like to operate immediately, as apparently the pressure on his brain is serious.”

Sally stopped talking, and Irene could tell by her breathing that she was choking down another crying jag. “But he is refusing treatment,” she clipped out. “He wants to continue as he has been. He’s in a lot of pain, and they won’t give him his drugs. They don’t want him on the opiates when he goes into surgery.”

“Who’s with him?” Irene said. “Where are you, and who’s with him?”

“Sam Beth is with him,” said Sally. “But she doesn’t—”

“Oh, I see,” said Irene. “Sally, what do you want, from me? Why are you calling?”

“I want you to come home.” The words came out in a rush. “I’m sorry I shouted at you. I’m sorry I treated you so badly. Come back.”

“You’re sorry for how you treated me?” Irene pushed on. “Not sorry for what you did to us? To me and George?”

“I’m sorry for what happened to your mother.”

“My mother was a drunk and a suicide,” said Irene. “I don’t know what you ever knew of her, or what she did to you to make you hate her, but to me she is—”

“She’s what?”

“She’s the reason I’m standing here!” Irene snapped. “She’s what I am: worthless, expired, a golem, a suicide. This is what we are. Used up, and then too shamed to go on.”

“No,” said Sally. “She wasn’t a suicide.”

“She was,” said Irene. “She killed herself! I know! You don’t know where I am right now. You don’t understand anything.”

“No, she didn’t kill herself, Irene.”

“How could you possibly know? Were you there? Will you tell me the truth?”

“Irene, I was there. I was there!”

“Why?” Irene asked. “Why?”

“I was there for George,” said Sally. “I was there to yell at her, because she wouldn’t leave him alone. Stalking him, feeding you information about him, tailoring your life to his. After I had told her no!”

Irene swallowed. “Did you push her? Did you kill her?”

“No. And she did not kill herself. She was drinking, and she fell, and she died. We were talking, arguing, and she just fell.”

Sally coughed and went on. “I didn’t ignore her, you know. All those years. I looked in on her, you know, only to make sure she was alright.”

Irene took a deep breath in. Just a drunk. Just a fall. This must have been the client Mrs. Betty had seen. Just an old friend, an old fight. Nothing more complicated than that. “That’s fine, that’s fine. She needed all the help she could get. And look at me,” she said. “I’m just like her. You know I don’t belong with him. You said it yourself: I’m ragged. I’m ruined. I’m not for him.”

“You stop that,” said Sally, her voice savage. “And you listen to me right now. You worry that you’re just like her?”

“I do,” said Irene. “I came from her and I am her.”

“Of course you are. Of course you’re just like her,” said Sally. “And you should be. Your mother died drunk, Irene. And that was horrible. But Bernice lived beautifully, and she loved forever. You’d be lucky to be as good as she was, but damned to be so unlucky. It was not her fault, falling down those stairs.”

“Then whose was it?” Irene sobbed. “I couldn’t do anything more than what I did. I did everything I was supposed to do.”

“I should have helped her,” Sally cried. “I should have been there, not to yell at her, but to be her friend. But I was a coward, and I left her all alone. It was me. I did it, twenty years ago. I made this happen. And I will pay. I’ll pay whatever you want, but please come home. He needs you here, and I need him to be well.”

Irene paused.

“Don’t bear the weight of this down on his head. I’m begging you,” Sally said. “I am so, so sorry. You have to forgive me. I wanted to help you. I wanted to save you! Both of you, don’t you see, we were a family. I—”

“Why did you leave her? Why did you leave us?”

But Sally was silent. Irene chewed furiously on her lip, and with the phone still stuck to the side of her head, she began to march off the bridge. All she could think about, suddenly, was Sam Beth. She thought, How dare she? How dare she stand there where I should be standing? How dare she, with her little gold snake armbands and her weak understanding of string theory and her dark eyeliner? I belong there. I belong with him. And she could say it was her doubt and her fear that kept her away, or her loathing for herself or her desire to die or not die or her mother’s awful failings. She could say whatever she wanted, and stand on whatever bridges, and take whatever positions she wanted, but that was all bullshit. Who cared about being right?

She was bound to him, heart and soul, and had been for as long as she had been alive. As she ground her teeth into her lip and felt the skin break and tasted the iron in her own blood, she realized what a stupid idiot she would be, to keep on punishing herself, and him, for their mothers’ crimes. Their mothers didn’t care. One was dead and one was crazy. There was no score to keep, no justice to be served. There was either a life of loneliness with death at the end, or love and happiness, and Irene was in control of which she had. She resolved at that moment not to be stupid about this any longer.

“Alright, I’m coming,” she said. “And I don’t care what you have to say about what happened. And I don’t care who you are, or who my mother was, or what happened twenty years ago, or on those stairs, or what star was in what sky, or what planet was orbiting what star, or what lunatic was standing on what landing. It doesn’t matter. I’m coming home.”

“Please come,” said Sally. “Please come. I need you. Please forgive me, and come. You have to know, in all of this, I only wanted to help George. And that’s what you want, too, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

“I’m coming on the first plane I can get on.”

“Don’t fly,” Sally said. “She always said—”

“Now come on—pull yourself together,” Irene growled. “And don’t be ridiculous. Don’t you get it? All of those plane predictions, all those dreams she had about a plane, are really about George! His plane, his symmetrical plane in the universe, all of his research—this is what she must have been seeing. She just had the wrong kind of plane.”

“I don’t know,” Sally said.

“I flew out here, nothing happened, and I’m flying home. But I don’t know how easy it will be for me to get out of here, how long it will take. If you can’t get him into surgery, you find someone who can. Where is Dr. Bryant?”

“He won’t see anyone from the institute except Sam Beth.”

“What about his father? Where is his father? Have you told him about this?”

“I don’t even know where he is. We were fighting—”

“Find him,” Irene said. “Find him, and get him to the hospital, and get him in the room. Tell him he must convince George to have this surgery. And I will be there as soon as I can.”

As Irene marched off the bridge she was filled with an emotion she could only identify as sympathy, and the target of this emotion was her mother. Or maybe it was pity. Or respect. It was too unfamiliar to properly understand, but in the forefront of Irene’s mind, a phrase pounded in time to her heels tapping on the sidewalk: it worked. Her mother had created her to be a golem, a monster. She was the Bride of Frankenstein. And she should be angry about that; she should hold on to the rage that made her frown, the resentment that made her hate. But in the end, I do love George, she thought. Could she argue the path that brought them here? Could she blame her mother now? Maybe, in the end, it had all been motivated by love, and love had been the result. After all the murky circumstances, and the trials and failures and right and wrong moves, she loved him. And as she flew to him now, all she could think to say to her mother was: thanks.

Whether love, or faith, or science, or machinery, it worked, and they loved, and that’s all that mattered.

*   *   *

George’s father entered the hospital room where they were waiting to begin preparing George for surgery, if only he would consent. Dean was wearing gray pants stained with red and orange paint, work boots, a checked shirt, and a tweed jacket. He had a slouch hat on his head, which he took off as soon as he entered the room. He set it down on the bedside table next to George with a reverent gesture.

“George,” said Dean.

George started, as if he hadn’t seen Dean properly, or hadn’t expected him to speak.

“Dad!” George said. “It’s great to see you.”

“Your mom asked me to come, actually,” said Dean. “She asked me and then she drove me here. It was really astonishing. I was wondering if it might be your mother who has the brain tumor.”

George smiled. “So they told you about it.”

“They did,” said Dean. “Well, she did. Did you want to tell me what you know about it?”

“No,” said George. “I’m sure she presented an accurate picture. There’s a tumor. It’s got to come out because it’s pressing on my brain. If they take it out and anything happens while they’re knifing around in there, I could wake up thinking my name is Diana and parading around in high heels.”

Now Dean smiled. “Was that really presented as an option?”

“It’s a possible side effect of going insane.”

Dean sat down on the side of the bed and took George’s hand in his, in a way that was gentle, paternal. George remembered feeling his father’s hands on his when he was learning how to paint, or how to push a seedling into the ground, or cut rootstock, or hold a charcoal pencil. His father had never hit him, never yelled at him, never told him what to do, never been that interested, George thought.

“I want you to be completely honest with yourself right now, George,” said Dean. “And I want you to really think about what you’re doing here. Why are you refusing to let them help you? You can’t keep on living like this forever.”

“I know, but I can’t change what I am either,” said George. “If I change what I am, then what do I become? What happens to the me that was?”

“You’ll stay the same,” said Dean. “You just won’t have these goddamned headaches all the time.”

“You don’t know that I’ll stay the same,” said George. “And by the way you don’t know the tumor won’t come back.”

“Its rate of growth is slow,” said Dean. “I’m ashamed, ashamed that your mother and I never realized it was there. We really let you down. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, but I never realized it either, and it was in my head.”

“It’s just your symptoms were so obtuse, son,” said Dean. He patted George on the head. “And then there’s the fact I wasn’t really paying attention.”

George was taken aback, but his father seemed undisturbed, just patting away at his head and smiling warmly.

“I’m sorry about that, George,” said Dean.

“You couldn’t help it. Mom kept you away.”

“Well, I’m more powerful than your mother,” said his father mildly. “In fact, I’m really powerful. It’s my fault.”

George let his head sink back into the pillow. He closed his eyes and opened them again, and there was his father, paint-stained, crazy-haired, wrinkled by the sun.

“It seemed like you said you were really powerful,” said George. “That’s funny.”

“Would be nice to have an all-powerful father around, wouldn’t it?” Dean’s eyes twinkled. “Might almost make up for missing out on visits from those other half-assed deities that have been pestering you all your life.”

George sat up quickly, his head pounding.

“What?!” he yelped.

“George, I know about your visions, remember?” said his father. “You told me. And now I’m here to tell you—I see them, too. I see them because I am one of them. Do you understand? I am one of them.”

As George watched, his father’s teeth began to straighten, his skin to smooth and pull up out of its folds and stretch firmly across his bones. He saw the paint stains on his father’s hands fade away, and then he said, “Whoa, Dad. What the hell is going on?”

“I want you to have this surgery done now, Son,” said Dean. “And if you lose the visions you’ve been having, just let them go. You will never lose me. Never. Shit as I’ve been, distracted as I’ve been, worthless as I’ve been, I will never let you down again.”

“You’re a god, too?”

Dean didn’t have to explain—George could see it in every hair on his head, every pore of his skin, and he understood his mother, and his visions, and himself.

“I don’t want to lose them,” said George. “They tell me things, things I need for work! They have given me all of my ideas, and everything I’ve done in astronomy is because of them.”

“I know you are afraid to let them go. But you should never let yourself make decisions out of fear,” said his father. “Fear is a bad reason to keep a tumor in your head. I think you should pass on, pass on to what is next.”

“What if I die?”

“Then that’s next,” said his father.

“I met that girl, Dad,” said George. “I can’t lose her. She’s so great, she’s really mouthy and smart, but she’s kind of shy and she’s really good at math.”

Dean laughed, and folded his hands over one knee.

“George, I know her. You know this. You two grew up together, when you were small, so of course I know her.”

“Right,” said George.

“And I’ve known her father forever. Like literally forever.”

George felt like his head was about to pop off, tumor and all. “What? Uncle Ray is a god?”

“Just another holy shitbag,” said Dean.

“You have got to be kidding me,” said George. “I thought he died!?”

“Yeah, that’s his out, for now. Deadbeat. Now, listen, let’s not waste time on this stuff. Let’s get your head fixed, Son. And then we can find that girl and set everything straight.”

“I have so many questions for you,” said George.

“I already promised I would be around for you more, from now on,” said Dean. “You can ask me whatever you want.”

“But what if I don’t remember? What if I don’t even remember this, that’s happening right now? What if this is just another vision, and it all goes away?”

“George,” said Dean. “I’m sorry I can’t fix it. If I could, I would.”

“I could die, Dad. I could die. I’m afraid to die.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“What if it does? What will happen?”

“If you die, you will just dream. The best dream. A dream that never ends.”

*   *   *

Within hours, George was on his way under. He was immobilized, his head shaved, his body loose and drugged, and he felt better and worse than he ever had in his life. His mother and his father were both with him. He was not alone. But he felt as though he needed just a bit more time, just a bit more practice before he went to sleep. The surgeon would peel back his scalp, would take out a piece of his skull, would operate via monitors with little radioactive knives, and take out the thing that was causing him so much pain, but also the thing that was causing him so many ideas, so much insight, the thing that made him who he was. And the reason he was sitting here doing it, instead of back in his room, or at home, or anywhere else but here, stubbornly refusing, was because his father had come into his hospital room and claimed to be a god.

The bad thing about having a brain tumor is that you can’t trust anyone, including yourself. But ultimately, it wouldn’t matter, because he would probably wake up not remembering anything, except that his name was Diana, and that he preferred thongs to bikinis. At least if I wake up empty, thought George, then I can fall in love with Irene again, and this time she will believe that I love her, not because of what I remember or how I was taught, but because of who I am.

*   *   *

Irene sat on the plane on the last leg of her journey from San Francisco back east. It was a little plane, hopping from Chicago to Toledo, and Irene was again in a window seat, but with no one sitting next to her. The curved hull of the plane made an arc around her body. Irene refused a gin in favor of an orange soda, and quickly read two article abstracts written by people she’d met at the convention. Her heart felt sick, her head thick and clouded. She found as the plane made its way east and the night deepened that she could not take her eyes off the window, could not help but look ahead to where she knew that he would be. She leaned her forehead against the cool plastic of the window and looked out into the night.

Up above, she saw all the fixed stars. The same ones Aristotle had seen when he imagined them lodged in perfect crystal spheres, hung sparkling above the dead, decaying earth. How beautiful they were, these perfect points of light, spread wide over the messy, fragile humans down below. How perfect were the gods. Irene looked down toward the earth and saw the bright streets outlined in shining lights, the clusters of houses, buildings, long stretches of parking lots, and here and there a lonely beam, a point of light in an expanse of darkness, like a single star. It reminded her of standing with George on One Seagate and looking down over all of Toledo, when he asked her how to tell the difference between the stars above and the earth below. Now it made sense to her, looking up at the sky rippled with constellations, and down at the black earth crisscrossed with roads and sparkling towns. And she knew the answer to the question: what is the difference?

Irene closed her eyes and felt the movement of this little plane. A bump, a silence, and then a shift, a deep shuddering. She felt herself slipping under that familiar fog of sleep, letting go of her senses as she crossed that grand chasm that was really as quick as a breath, as light as the flutter of a wing, between herself and what lay beyond, that stunning outerwhere: she lost herself, the plane thumped, shook, and she began to dream.

She was outside the plane and falling, falling into the city of Toledo. It was lit up and alive, cars buzzing along, boats motoring up and down the river, little clumps of people on the sidewalks, crossing streets, running to meet each other in the dark. And when she turned her head up, looking into the night sky, and all its distant perfection, all the majesty of its timelessness, its immeasurable depth, she knew. This is the difference between gods and humans. This is the difference between divinity and what exists on earth: Toledo is moving. It’s alive and changing. The myths, the stars, the fixed stories—these are static, measured only by math and memory. The men, the science they make, the roads they travel—these move, they change and grow, they cannot be mapped. It moves, she wanted to say to George. That’s the difference between Toledo and the night sky. It moves.

I love it, thought Irene. Her heart froze with happiness. Her arms spread out, as she fell down through the air, her body the shape of a star, plummeting, sailing downward into Toledo. I love what I am, this human, even if this is where I cross over, bleed, and die. This is where I become human. This polluted, human town, this love, this is what I am, more than the stars, even though they are so big, and so vast, and so perfect. They’re just so far away.

Irene fell down into the orange constellation that was Toledo, that shape that was moving, dirty, changing, alive. She closed her eyes, and passed through.