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feels at once too overwhelming and too silly to fully contemplate. And yet it became relevant to the story of my mother’s death and my grandmother’s death before that. In fact it’s part of the same story, a third act that got rewritten at the last minute, a narrowly dodged bullet from the gun that went off in the first.
    It started with a fever. Actually it started before that. Of course it did. Nothing ever begins when you think it does. You think you can trace something back to its roots but roots by definition never end. There’s always something that came before: soil and water and seeds that were born of trees that were born of yet more seeds. The fever may have been the first thing I bothered to pay attention to but there was so much before that. It’s possible I’d been getting sick all along, that my immunity had begun slowly eroding from the week my grandmother died and my mother became a cancer patient. Throughout it all, I hadn’t so much as gotten a cold. But in October 2010, right around the one-year mark of the wedding and the screaming at Thanksgiving and the buying of Depends and the administering of the morphine and then the Haldol and then the methadone, I returned to New York for a visit. I wanted to attend a friend’s wedding, see the leaves, escape the taunting, pitiless heat of autumn in Southern California. It was my first time back in New York since my mother had died and I thought it might be possible to claim the streets as my own again, to seal the preceding eighteen months in plastic and toss them in a trash can where they could await collection alongside the Greek paper coffee cups and the dog shit.
    The fever was perplexing, as I am rarely sick, so rarely in fact that I didn’t have a primary care doctor at home in Los Angeles, much less in New York, where I’d lived during my entire twenties without health insurance. Not that there seemed any need for one. It was the flu, obviously. The only cure was time and fluids. For three days I staved off the fever with aspirin, huddling under blankets in a friend’s Brooklyn apartment and canceling one plan after another. But time was curing nothing. Each day I woke up to more weakness and more fever, body aches that felt like I’d been thrown down the stairs the day before, thirst that no amount of orange juice could quench.
    The day after returning to Los Angeles I went to a walk-in clinic, where I was put on an IV for rehydration, told I had a nasty virus, and sent home. The next day I couldn’t stand up and my eyes were yellow. I returned to the clinic and was put on another IV and then in an ambulance to the nearest hospital, where I was asked what year it was and couldn’t think of the answer. Formless, meaningless words rolled out of my mouth like worms. There was no grabbing on to them. They had no edges, no consonants, no meaning. A doctor came and held his fingers up and asked me to follow them. He furrowed his brow as he wrote notes in his chart. When my husband showed up from work I was suddenly compelled to express grave concern for a friend back in New York. She was the last person I’d seen before I got the fever. We’d had dinner in Carroll Gardens and then I’d stopped at a drugstore for vitamin C pills. Now, after closing my eyes in a hospital bed and then waking from a half-sleep involving some half-dream in which this friend was being held against her will (metaphorically speaking, that is; it was as if I were witnessing her life from afar and seeing all the ways in which she was an indentured servant—to her husband, to the publishing business, to New York City itself), the words fell from my mouth like food dribbling down a baby’s chin. Somewhere in my mind there was a concept, an urgent, hulking, planetlike idea that I had to get out. But it seemed composed of invisible gases. It was an abstraction within an abstraction and now it was sliding out of my