What do you think about there, in that room of fawn and putty wallpaper, blond wood and green floral upholstery, in the Women’s Oncology Center, looking up at the pepper-spackled ceiling tiles, waiting? Do you think, what are the odds? Do you think, we shall persevere, we shall not be deterred? Do you think, we were lucky to get a space so close to Ambulatory Surgery, and the moon above the parking lot in the predawn sky aligned with a single star and fat Venus shining, two good omens? Do you think how much this resembles the morning eight years ago to the month when Jackson was born, or, wait, how many years? Do you think, looking at those around you, that they resemble refugees lined up for soup or Red Cross blankets, that they suggest bundled bodies at the door of some Soviet ministry to beg information, the location of a son, the cause of a wife’s disappearance? But what was her crime, Commissar, what was her crime? And still they disappeared, year after year, by the thousands and the millions, into Stalin’s unfathomable slaughterhouse. To promulgate death! To surrender to it as we surrender to the bright machinery of hope, the ring of invisible rays that will reveal our fate, the instruments and stoppered vials, latex gloves, floors being mopped and in need of mopping, the nurses’ station with its teddy bears and beribboned photographs of high school graduations, doctors gliding silkily past, attendants to the mystery, acolytes gowned in caustic white and surgical green? Do you think, with a smirk, how much this resembles the waiting room at the Toyota dealer as they clean the carbon buildup from the fuel injector system, all the valve jobs and tune-ups to slow the engine’s inevitable decline? Do you think how much the worn linoleum reminds you of the North Dade Justice Center, crowds arrayed to receive their fateful dispensation from blunt, impersonal representatives of the system, young women battling obesity lined up for new driver’s licenses, young men straggling into traffic court in flip-flops and torn camouflage pants, in gold chains and Snoop Dogg T-shirts, old women dozing in the corners, middle-aged men in service uniforms—janitors, security guards, parking attendants—filling out forms in a version of the language they will never master, a smiling family attired in matching soccer jerseys from the Selección Nacional de Honduras waiting for which adjudication to be handed down, which fateful dispensation? Do you feel how powerful a force compassion is, and that to open its floodgates here would be to risk inundation? Do you think, studying the amoeba-shaped plaster patches and water stains on the walls, that the mind resembles an amoeba, pulsing and probing, negotiating obstacles, searching out nutrients? Do you think that the earth is a waiting room from which we shall depart only when summoned by death? They are ready for you now, Mr. McGrath, please go in. Do you think, secretly, in the inmost chamber of your being, take them all and spare mine? Take them all into your black dominion, Commissar, even the healthy ones, if so you require, even the visitors reading magazines and the sour-faced children, the fear-stricken mothers and the husbands watching TV—take them all and leave for another day those I love—take even from mine in fair measure if you must, take the ovaries for they have been duly productive, take the uterus for it may be honorably relinquished, take a kidney if it so pleases you, take from the liver that it may regenerate, take, take, take, leaving only what cannot be spared. Do you think, even the second time the hand grasps your shoulder, that it must be an echo or self-inquisition when that voice begins to speak? The doctor would like to see you. Please come with me. And another voice, like a fiery blazon, saying The surgery went well. Pathology indicates all the tissue is benign. Your wife is going to be just fine.