14

I could move my tongue.

Just a little, pressing it against the ridges of my palate. My tongue had a life of its own, an inquisitive gastropod.

I was somewhere safe. Very safe. And very quiet. Every thought was heavy, and I let myself drift, encouraged that people would take care of me now.

I tried to remember the ambulance. I tried to invent the memory of a surgeon, intelligent, helpful men and women. This taste in my mouth must be anesthesia. I’ll open my eyes in just a few seconds. Just a few more—I’m gathering my strength.

I let myself drowse.

The first time I looked through a microscope was on a summer afternoon, using the big olive-green Bausch & Lomb scope my father kept under a cloth on his desk. My father had been a distant man, but kind, in an impersonal way, as though trusting that something in my chromosomes would guide me where I had to go. He was, however, visibly pleased that hot day when I asked him to show me something under the microscope, and he came back into the study smelling like someone who had been making sandwiches—there was a smell of onions about him, which was explained when I saw the membrane of onion skin on the microscope slide.

He touched the transparent skin with iodine, and the entire membrane was transfused. He rotated the lenses to get the power he wanted, and then turned to me and said, “There you go.”

It took a moment to see into the tube, and not at its side, or at the obscuring filter of my own eyelashes. At last the disk of light was clear, and even more distinctively patterned when I touched the focus dial.

I saw a city. The buildings, seen from above, were rectangles, worn, or crafted, into modestly irregular patterns, like pueblos, or drawings of biblical towns. There was no single identical geometry to the long, corral-like shapes of this village, and yet there was a general similarity, so that after even a moment or two one could sketch a typical structure, locate its purple-stained center, and describe the thickness of the walls.

We were made of these little prisons, flush to each other, wall to wall. Life consisted of confines. It was constructed of prisons, tiny castles. What could not define itself was so much fluid. To live was to be a fortress.

I felt my teeth with my tongue.

It had its own life, this searching morsel, probing. Soon I would open my eyes. Soon I would make a sound.