It must be there. Look into my eyes. Tell me, can't you see it? No, no, look deeper. It's there. I know it's there. Hidden perhaps beneath the shallows of pale blue. Don't you see it? Like a swift shadow.

It must be there. I felt it touch me. I sensed it leave her and imprint itself. Weightlessly. Transferring itself with the last sigh through cracked lips. What had been fevered, what we had worked so hard and long to relieve, to comfort with pills and shots, to cool with compresses, was already turning cold.

A fixing of the eyes. It was then I sensed the glimmer, the fleck of light reflected in her iris and passing on to mine. No illusion, it was real. The slightest refraction. I swear it.

It must be there. I've been searching but can't catch it. Standing before a mirror in a dark room, deep into the night. Close in, tight, looking back into my own eyes. Waiting for it to show itself. Watching for the smallest shift, the slightest change. But all I've seen is vacancy. And breath rising, clouding, then receding across the glass. All that reveals itself is the washed-out blue of my eyes. I search for a piece of her and am caught in myself. In vain. In vanity.

How abysmally ignorant I was! How horrendously callous! Could I use youth as my excuse? That infantile sense of immortality. I mean, to recognize in thought but not in the bone, to hear clearly but not understand. Good god! Fall to the floor, you idiot, gnash your teeth and wail into the night!

But it was so far away, I never felt its presence. Not deeply enough. If it had come with a gun, I could have fought it. If it had knocked on our door, I could have locked it out. But it slipped by so innocently. I couldn't know everything, after all. I couldn't be ever alert, always sensitive. Could I? Or is that only a weak justification? God knows, I need one.

"This stupid thing won't go away," she said.

"What won't?"

"This zit." She was embarrassed, so she pursed her lips and pronounced it zeet. "This zeet."

"Quit fussing in the mirror," I said.

"It's really a pain."

"I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't pointed it out."

"But it's been here a few weeks," she said.

"I've had boils on my ass last longer."

"This is not my ass." She struck a lovely look of annoyance.

"And clearly not my boil."

"Perhaps we should see a doctor," she said.

"Perhaps we should be less vain."

One in the morning and yet it was still hot. Unseasonably hot. Everyone said so. After all, it was New England. It shouldn't have been this hot at night even in a heat wave.

We were lying in a great field. The stubble from the first cutting was stiff and rough against our backs. The stars bristled down at us. Fireflies hung low to the moist ground. It was panting hot, but the grass was damp with low mist and the smell of clover. The cicadas cried in waves out of the darkness, up against the mountains and down across the pasture.

"They wish to draw us to them," she said.

"Who?"

"The stars. They want to lift us up. Do you feel it?"

"I'm not going,” I said. “It's alien up there."

"Are you afraid?"

"I love you."

"Don't worry, darling,” she said. “The doctor says it’s benign." In the shadows her face was gray mist.

"I know, I spoke to him,” I said. “A long time."

"Just a silly little lump that won't go away."

"He said there was nothing to worry about. He said it was an anomaly."

"Do you believe our spirits live after us?" she asked.

"That we float about in the air?"

"That we live on after our bodies are gone."

"No, it's alien up there,” I said. “I don't want to be lurking about."

"Give me your hand," she said. She placed it on her breast, under her blouse. Her nipple was hard, even in the heat. "Feel my heart."

"Such a young breast."

"Feel my heart. It's full of you." Her chest rose and fell beneath my hand.

"A mother, and still such nice young breasts." The stars rolled across the sky, drawing us upward from the shadows.

After the second operation on her neck, I began to catch an uncertainty in their voices, an edge of nervousness in their repeated assurances. Their thesis seemed logical. Two organisms were working together for survival against the antibiotics, some sort of symbiosis. Once the doctors found the right course, they would have it conquered. They were sure of it. These things happened sometimes.

They called in specialists of infectious disease from New York City. They had long conferences, but they failed to agree. They studied the patient further and conferred again, then spoke to me in low confidential voices. But it was clear they were less sure now.

They had to cut away several inches of skin from her swollen neck to open the diseased flesh to the air. They prescribed heavy doses of intravenous penicillin. But suddenly the underlying tissue swelled and blossomed from the wound like an obscene tropical flower.

It was then, and only then, that I rebelled and took her to the cancer specialists.

When they explained where the tumors were, when they showed me the x-rays and pointed out the enlarged lymph nodes, it got so I could watch them in my mind. Not only the x-ray tumors, but her tumors, under her skin. Like moving along a series of roads and seeing a map at the same time. And when she was asleep I stood over her and concentrated on them. I saw into her and found them. I pressed my mind against them and felt them give in. I did everything I could to make them wilt. It wasn't a simple thing, the way it must sound saying it. They didn't give in easily to me. They resisted with everything they had. I worked so hard sometimes I grew faint. Right at the edge of blacking out. It was hard to breathe. My vision blurred. As she lay there sleeping, I clutched the bed rails and squeezed the life from her tumors. One by one, I shrank them, crushed them, made them dissolve and pass away. Hugged them, whipped them, stomped on them, beat them with my mind's fists.

The important thing was to believe. And it was so easy to lose faith. But what could I do? Does that sound crazy? Yes, I thought so myself sometimes. The exercise of a lunatic. But what could I do, give up? It was me against them. I couldn't quit.

After the autopsy, her doctor wrote me that they found her tumors greatly reduced. "Surprisingly small," he said. Of course, he believed it was the chemotherapy. That was his field. Just as the other believed it was the deep radiation therapy. That was his field. But I believed only that I didn’t concentrate hard enough. That I had failed her. That I wasn't up to the job.

In truth, she died of pneumonia. That's the way they usually die, isn't it? And she was far too tired to care anymore. In truth. But who was dealing in truth?

My son was just four and a half. I was driving him to the hospital. It was going to be the last time he would ever see his mother. She had been in a coma and even though she was awake now, she was very weak and tired. I told him he would have to be very quiet when he saw her because she was so sick. He didn't say anything. He didn't even look up.

"You understand? We won't be there long. But I know she wants to see you. She wants to see you more than anything. It's that she's so sick. She wants to be with you always, but she can't. We have to be very quiet. No running around. Just be there and talk to Mommy."

He didn't say anything. He looked out the window.

"Do you understand?"

"I don't like the hospital."

"I know, but Mommy's there. You want to see Mommy, don't you?"

He shrugged. I wanted him to understand. I needed him to understand.

"This might be the last time you see Mommy."

He looked out the window. He wouldn't speak. He seemed not to care. I was in such great pain, I couldn't understand how he could be so unmoved. Even someone that young had to feel some sympathy.

"You understand? You might not see Mommy ever again."

I waited for him to tell me he understood. Finally he mumbled something.

"What?"

"I can get another mommy," he murmured. I was dumbfounded.

"You won't ever get another mommy like this," I said. "Even if you're lucky and get another mommy someday, she won't be like this." I knew it was cruel. I wanted it to be cruel.

Then I was silent, driving along the highway, looking straight ahead. I felt absolutely alone. I wouldn't look at him. For a long time it was as if he was not there.

Then he screamed. Not a human cry. It was the shriek of an animal in great pain. And I knew the hurt was not mine alone.

Some things are worth nothing, but still you must do them. They have no value but mean everything.

"Her jaundice, doctor. Is it her liver?"

"Perhaps, but her blood is very low."

"Can't we give her some blood?"

"It would be like pouring it in the sand," he said.

"Wouldn't it help at all?"

"Two, three days, perhaps."

"She would feel better?" I asked.

"I don't know. Stronger, perhaps better."

"We are the same blood type."

"I see."

The thin red line left my arm for the plastic bag. The thin red line of life. I pumped with my fist. I pumped it out toward her. Soon my blood would be in her, filling her arteries, coursing to her heart.

That day we spoke softly but happily. She told me how good my blood felt in her. She told me she felt like a vampire and needed to bite my neck. Her color was so much better, it buoyed me to look at her. So terribly fragile, but somehow better.

"I wish I could give you more," I said.

"Thank you, darling."

"I wish I could give it every hour on the hour."

"There's a hole in the bucket," she said.

"I would give it all I've got."

"Yes, like the little boy with his finger in the dike."

The gravediggers were on strike, but had lent me a pickaxe and shovel. It was a hot day, but I had dug deep enough for the law. Deep enough even for my love.

In the bottom looking up, it was trim, perfect in perspective. I patted the firm straight walls, looked up proudly at the rectangle of sky. It was cool in there. I would not be afraid to be shut in. To be covered with earth in this strong house. My mouth would be stopped with clay, I was not afraid. They could burn me to dust, I would not cry. I would dance in the air and drift forever, rise like spume from the sea, converse among the stars.

The earth has its own proud smell. I was still sweating, but now that I was through digging, it was cool. My shirt was sopping. My crotch. My pants stuck tight to my legs. But behind my neck, the moisture refreshed. I could have lain forever here with her. It was our home. I had built it with my own hands. All it needed was a broom to clean out the corners, to sweep the floor smooth as glass.

A small head appeared in a corner of sky. He looked down at me. We looked at each other. He smiled. He looked remarkably like her when he smiled. Since that scream we were bound together. He and I, we are what we've got.

No more than six months later I was in bed with another woman. She seemed surprised by the ferocity of my desire, my need for prolonged pleasure, my lust to know all her femininity.

“My god,” she said. “What was that about?” I was surprised myself. Perhaps I needed to believe I was still living. That I had died and been buried, but now was alive again. “It’s her, isn’t it? You miss her that much.”

"I would have gladly put myself in her place. I would have died over and over. I would die right now. I would sacrifice our son. In a minute."

And that was what horrified her most about me, I think. That a man could kill his own child.

"You wouldn't," she said.

§ § §

William Reese Hamilton’s short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, The North American Review, Puerto del Sol and America West Airlines Magazine. He is currently living in Venezuela and can be reached at whamilton@cantv.net

This piece was first published in INK POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.