A red dot was someone approving of some limb of her life on Cathexis, but Alexandra did not answer her phone. She was searching so this time she would not fail him.
Once, she’d predilected secrets. The way they protected you from yourself, your own shame. Or sometimes just the contained thrill that carried through the day, all that tabloid inside. But now there was diagnosis. There was typing Shel’s symptoms. There was checking results. There was seeing the overlap, the match, and there was seeing the names explode out into more websites, dissenting opinions. She moved through variations of the body. She was, for her brother, finding an illness with a cure.
Stress or depression was always the least dangerous. Or the most. She wanted to differentiate in language, zip up a disease, because if a formless wrong broad as time crushed her very small, a rattled little thing with an overheating phone, it stood to reason the certainty of a name would invert it, would give her something to stand on.
Alexandra thought of their last conversation. She’d asked him if he needed money, and he’d laughed, continued with his inexplicable speech. He’d told her people ardent for numbers sometimes needed to be reminded that zero had to be invented. But zero was intractable. Logic slipped off its rounded form. Its multiplication of another digit diminished the value, yet it adhered to each. It was a clingy void once feared by the West. Boethius concluded evil was nothingness, but that was before A-bombs, weaponized planes. Shel said he refused to make the mistakes of his hemisphere. It was the East that saw zero’s value, the cipher bridge between debt and plenty. Muslim conquerors carried the uncountable to the West from India, where the word then was sunya, empty. And now, Shel said, he’d found a way to teach America to fear the nobodies, to take inventory of the void, so in all the numbers they cleaned and crunched, the bytes of data grown tera, they would not seek to find the nothing yet in everything. He would hold ransom all their irreproachable numbers. Shel had laughed again then. No, he did not need her fucking money. He had sounded insane.
She turned off her phone and shifted into the living room. Jeremy sat on the couch with a textbook, his neck both bent and stretched. It was a reassuring shape, his. She kneeled nearby, seconds swelling with silence until he looked at her.
She spoke symptoms, let the container of a few syllables close around the weedy tangle of what Shel had done, said he had. She enumerated what was factual as though hypothetical. She spoke about Shel without saying his name, and she was not sorry.
She became impatient. Jeremy was explaining the difference between a prodrome and a regular symptom. A prodrome was a precursor symptom before an acute onset of an illness, but sometimes what looked like a prodrome was only a precursor to a healthy life. You would find that it was an aberrant event, he said. He said and he said and he said.
“And what do you do if someone you know has it?” she said, when finally he ventured an illness.
“Stay far, far away.” Jeremy winked.
He returned to reading, and she closed her laptop. She crossed the room and slung one buttock over the arm of the couch, so that her left foot touched his. “You wouldn’t do that.”
“Once,” he said, laying down his book, “I had a friend like that. He was very dear to me, and then he wasn’t. This man clamped on to anything he didn’t know and saw murder in it. And there were many things he didn’t know. So no more, I decided.”
“But what if this person was lodged deep in your life?”
He looked over his reading glasses. “Then I would have gotten rid of every part of my life he was in until he was eradicated.”
“What if it was most of your life?”
“Then I’d have started over,” he said. And when she didn’t say anything, he put his eyes back behind his reading glasses.
She remembered now a story he’d told her once about his first merger arbitrage deal. Rumors had made their way to him that Vodafone, the British mobile company, would make an unsolicited bid on the German mobile company Mannesmann. Mannesmann’s chairman might play angry at first, might even be angry. But he’d know it was accept the offer from the English raiders or suffer total stock carnage. Jeremy’s job had been simple: Push to take a fifty-million-pound position long on Mannesmann and short Vodafone. Work the spread. Prepare for windfall. He had told her this, and she’d thought it meant he was a man who understood what must be done. But now it seemed callous.
She went to their room and turned on Stravinsky. As a college student, Alexandra had thought this was what collected people did to mollify their nerves: lie in bed listening to classical music. She had not known the hopped-up urgency of Stravinsky, the near doom. People who’d grown up with violin lessons told her it was strange, and still she listened, still to her it was not doom but imminence, and it was the sound she turned to when she needed to brace up whoever she was to be strong as she ought to be. There was something very true and beautiful to it that Stravinsky, this dead man who’d never known her, could fix a clear note of anticipation to her life, and if that was possible, of course it was possible, too, that she could bring Shel to haven.