Oh, I said to myself, since Calvin was still in the bathroom, touche. That's a very good point. There's a skeptic so obsessed with upholding his skepticism that he turns to the Bible. As orthodox in his skepticism as a born-again Christian.

"Can we watch the hockey game now?" Calvin asked, rematerializing in the doorway and swan-diving onto the bed. "If you're into blood sport, I guarantee you hockey's more interesting."

What Calvin despised, it seemed to me, as I puzzled it out in the darkness that night while he snored, is how people make such fools of themselves in their quest for meaning. He was afraid of that. His best defense against heartbreak and sorrow was to dismiss hope. Illusions could only be shattered.

17.

At work on Monday morning, I tried Don Yancy's conversion in Costa Rica out on Avery, hoping for a more enthusiastic response.

"Ho," he exclaimed, twisting his arms and scratching his neck, "hmmm. At least he didn't claim that angels danced on his teeth."

I stared at him.

"That's not a very compelling counterargument, Avery."

"No, I suppose it isn't."

We both started laughing.

"I haven't read any literature on NDEs," Avery reflected, "but I imagine the argument could be made, uhh, that they fall within the Gnostic tradition. An experiential knowledge of G.o.d that you can neither prove nor disprove."

"Why not? Why can't you disprove it?" I leaned forward on my elbows and tapped my pencil against my chin.

"Well ..." Avery toyed with an elastic band as he thought of how to put it. "If I said that I loved you, and you said, 'Prove it,' how would I? How would I prove it?"

I mulled this over for the rest of the morning, as I thumbed through new books and jotted down notes about whom I might call to review them. How could someone prove love?

That afternoon, the hallway in our building was abuzz with the news that the Moral Volcano had lost its bushy-bearded senior editor, Leonard Greenberg. It was a major blow. Greenberg was a star. A former opera critic whose innate sn.o.bbishness had drawn him to the Volcano at its much hoo-hawed inception, he had flourished in the ensuing months as an editor and columnist, displaying the talent of an idiot savant in his singular ability to ridicule liberals. But now, at least according to the gossip, Greenberg had done an abrupt volte-face and was running off to start a blog excoriating his former conservative friends, apparently after being trapped in the elevator at Robarts Library for several hours during a power outage with a kind, knock-kneed opera-buff librarian liberal, who soothed Greenberg's claustrophobic panic by humming arias from Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel.

By late afternoon, the Volcano's editor-in-chief, Sherman O'Sullivan, having looked around wildly for a replacement editor, suddenly discovered me. I heard later that he learned through the grapevine that I had edited at New York's Pithy Review some years earlier before coming home to raise Lester. For Torontonians, word of a gig in New York invariably trumps all other considerations, such as competence, and thus O'Sullivan immediately trotted down the hall and knocked on our door.

Avery, tipped back in his wooden swivel chair, glanced up from his reading when he heard a loudly cleared throat, and then gazed at me with a sly and expectant smile. Lo, it is Sherman O'Sullivan, declared Avery's expression: he of the impeccable suits and boyish face whose blue eyes are so round and ingenuous that they must have been stolen from the Gerber baby. That happy child-man we have often discussed.

"I'm sorry to intrude," O'Sullivan said, smiling brightly. Beads of perspiration dotted his forehead, from which his blond hair was swept back in an insouciant wave.

"Oh, h.e.l.lo," I said in surprise. "Have you run out of coffee? We have tons, if you need some."

"I have sufficient coffee, thank you," said O'Sullivan. "What I lack just at the moment is an editor."

Avery and I stared back, uncertain what he meant by reporting this to us.

"What I mean to say," Sherman added, offering me another warm smile-he tended to trust in his own boyish charm-"is that I would be very obliged if I could discuss the possibility of some ..." He shifted his gaze to the floor and shook his head, as if he couldn't quite believe the absurdity of his predicament. "Well. Emergency editing, I guess."

"You need an extra pair of hands down the hall?" I asked.

"Yes, I do, I do need that," he glanced about our office. "Of course I will arrange for suitable compensation. I don't expect you to perform a favor." He gestured vaguely back toward his own office. "I need a pair of experienced eyes. A read-through of my editor's letter. Hilary would do it, but she's up to her eyeb.a.l.l.s, and Leonard was the one I always trusted with the task."

I crossed my arms. "You want me to do this because I used to edit Paul Graham's work in New York, is that why?"

O'Sullivan brought his hands together, tilted his head and smiled. "Suffice it to say that I would very much like to borrow you, Frances, for a bit of untended editorial business."

I shot a questioning look at Avery, who bent his head and busied himself winding his watch.

"Alright," I offered, tentative. It flew through my mind that the Moral Volcano might net me some extra cash, and that could not hurt me. Our own publisher, Iris McKeen, had turned eighty this year and paid little attention to the Dandelion Review beyond funding it in honor of her bookish deceased husband, Ed.

That night I stayed up late, sitting cross-legged on the fold-out futon couch in my living room, laboring over O'Sullivan's column. He was pooh-poohing liberals, as was his wont.

"Apparently," he had written, and I inserted punctuation as I read, "the liberal approach to foreign affairs leaves experienced warriors at the Pentagon cold. Shivering, one might even say. For this, if I may summarize, is liberals' foreign policy: in military defeat, appeal to Europe. In military victory, run for a hug from the Russians. To capture terrorists, go crying to the French. When dictators are caged, turn them over to Europe's princes of power for a slap on the wrist." Whereupon he concluded: "Deep down, liberals are just Euro-weeny traitors. They yearn to surrender everything to the French."

Rubbing my forehead, I thought about how to edit this for what we, in the business, call sense. Editing for sense. You put small queries in the margin, such as "Is this the right sense of 'appeal'?" Although I wasn't a foreign-policy a.n.a.lyst, I had not observed any American liberals attempting to appeal to the governments of Europe concerning American defense policy. Better to use a word like "noticed"? They "noticed" the Europeans? Or "consulted"? Or "thought to confer with" them? I provided these alternatives in the margin. Then I suddenly wondered, did he mean that liberals were appealing, were attractive, to Europeans?

Also, I worried over his last sentence: "They yearn to surrender everything to the French." Could this be construed as accurate? The French once turned over Louisiana. Was this a turning-back over to them of Louisiana, and other territory, strictly speaking, or was "everything" a metaphor for turning over the reins of sovereign decision-making? In either case, it was a striking allegation. Getting up from the futon and shaking out my leg, which had fallen asleep, I decided that O'Sullivan was probably just speaking metaphorically. To err on the side of caution, though, I circled the word "everything" and wrote in the margin: "More specific?"

I went to bed, let my mind wander, and began wondering how Don Yancy would be greeted by a neo-conservative. Would the fellows down the hall applaud him for having found G.o.d? Were they religious? I had a.s.sumed that their tendency to describe daycare as "socialist warehousing" arose from some sort of cosmology. But in truth, I had never asked.

18.

At last, a phone call from Bernice's oncologist.

Calvin answered in the kitchen, and I listened on the extension in our bedroom, lying down, legs scissored half in and half out of my duvet, watching CNN with the sound off. Lester made roaring noises in the hall, where he'd set up his African animals with a roasting pan full of water for the hippos. The news scrolled by on the bottom of the TV screen, out of synch with Wolf Blitzer's dour expression, since he was apparently divulging news about Iraq, whereas the bottom of the screen was revealing that Paris Hilton had lost her chihuahua.

"Alright," said Dr. Pereira, in a voice that sounded hoa.r.s.e with fatigue, "sorry for the delay, but I am one of only two oncologists on the island of Cape Breton, which has, as you may know, the highest cancer incidence in Canada. If you wish, you might complain to your MP. I have certainly done so, myself." He paused, perhaps scanning the chart in front of him. "So. Ah yes. Your mother. I see. She did very well in the surgery."

"The surgery," Calvin repeated dryly.

"Yes, of course, the surgery."

"And what surgery would that be?" I could picture Calvin slouching over the table in the kitchen below me, trying to swallow his raging frustration.

"Oh," said Dr. Pereira, sounding surprised. "I see. Your mother did not discuss this surgery with you?"

"Uh, no. She didn't mention it the other day."

"I see. Well, she is recovering very well. We removed her right arm from immediately below the humerus, and, I believe, successfully excised the malignancy from its primary site in the bone."

"You cut my mother's arm off?"

"Yes. Oh. No." Dr. Pereira clucked his tongue. "I see. Your mother is not Bernice Potter?"

"No."

"Oh. Yes. No. One moment. Forgive me. I have not been reviewing the correct chart." There was a rustling of paper. "If I may clarify, your mother still has two arms?"

"Yes! She does! As a matter of fact, I was really hoping that I could finally have a conversation about my mother and what's wrong with her that didn't revolve around her f.u.c.king arms. You have no idea how sick to death I am of my mother and her arms. So, please, find the chart for Bernice Puddie, and tell me something that does not include the word 'arm'."

"But we can certainly talk about her legs," I interjected, worried that Calvin's outburst would put the oncologist off of limbs generally, and there Bernice was all swollen up and hobbled.

"I see," Dr. Pereira said after a paper-rustling pause. "Have I removed your mother's legs, then?"

"Oh for Chrissake," said Calvin, "can you just consult your notes?"

"Yes, yes, of course. I can review the correct chart and call you back. That's no trouble."

"NO!" shouted Calvin. "No, please don't hang up. If you hang up, you'll get busy and you won't phone me back for weeks, and I've got a job, and I need to figure out my schedule, and my aunt is being useless, and I can't-I need to know what is wrong with my mother. Now. That doesn't involve her arms."

Dr. Pereira complied. For a while, all we heard was the contemplative in-and-out click of his ballpoint pen. At last, he exhaled loudly and began.

"So. Yes. Your mother's primary cancer has metastasized from the breast, and the CT scans tell me that it has now seeded throughout her abdomen. Into a number of organs. This is a difficult predicament. We treated her with tamoxifen, and that eventually ran its course of efficacy, and then I a.s.signed her Femara, which also ceased to work after a time, so I am now recommending fulvestrant, which sells under the brand-name Faslodex. This is a treatment for hormone-receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer in post-menopausal women whose disease has progressed, following anti-estrogen therapy. You should know it has certain side effects, the most common of which are pharyngitis, peripheral edema, vasodilatation and asthenia. But there are a variety of drugs I can prescribe that will counter these effects, also."

"What do you mean?" Calvin asked.

"I'm sorry?"

"I'm literally trying to get the gist of this. You're saying that my mother is riddled with cancer, and you're proposing to riddle her with drugs?"

"Yes, well, Faslodex has only recently been approved, so it is difficult to predict its long-term efficacy, but your mother has responded well, for periods of time, to hormonal therapies, so it is certainly the best course of treatment in her case."

"She hides her Gaviscon in her shoes," I interjected, hoping to sound informed. "Is that okay? Or should we be pushing her to take that, as well?"

"Gaviscon is for her comfort, only. If she does not wish to take it ..."

"And I just have another quick question," I added. "Bernice thinks she has asthma and it's swelling up her legs. That's not right, right?"

"I see. Well, a bilateral edema could be caused by systemic vasculitis, renal or liver failure, protein-losing enteropathy, or, as I mentioned, it could be a side effect of drug treatment."

"Look, Dr. Pereira, I need to get to the bottom line, here. Are my mother's chickens coming home to roost?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Is my mother dying, or is she not dying?"

"In the long run, yes, I think that you will find that Falodex is not a cure, although it is possible. But mainly I am hoping that it will give her some time."

"Time for what?"

"For what?" Dr. Pereira reiterated, sounding puzzled.

"For what?"

"For what." The doctor seemed to consider this question for a spell, and then he took a deep breath and answered, his voice soft and almost rueful, "I believe that is a question you will have to put to your mother."

19.

"Endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness.... Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?"

It was Monday morning, and Avery was indulging in his typical routine of quoting authors out of thin air in response to my account of the weekend.

"So, who are you copping from this morning?" I asked, attempting to roll up the rim on my Tim Hortons coffee cup to see if I'd won a prize.

"T. S. Eliot," he said, ordering the papers on his desk. "'The Rock.'"

"Oh, interesting," I mused, "I was thinking about Eliot when I was out in Cape Breton at Christmas. How he made more sense to me when I was a teenager than the Church did."

"Well, Eliot was a great devotee of the Church of England," Avery offered, "but in his later years. At some point, he came around from, I suppose, agnosticism, I'm not entirely sure."

"The b.a.s.t.a.r.d died of emphysema, did you know that? It is perfect." So announced Goran, who was fixing himself an espresso, his wavy gray hair falling into his eyes as he bent over the little machine beside his design table. It was one of his rare days in the office.

"What do you mean, 'perfect'?" I asked. You never knew with Goran. He was fluent in English, technically, but his use of idioms was somewhat unpredictable. I'd heard him employ the word "perfect" as a catch-all for a variety of meanings, ranging from "amazing" to "ironic" to "feeling well."

How are you today, Goran? "Perfect."

How was the Pixies concert? "It was perfect".

Would ya look at that, it's snowing in August. "Yes, it is perfect."

"I mean," he said, fixing me with deep-set gray eyes that drooped along with his jowls so that he had a slight ba.s.set-hound look, "that Eliot knocked five, maybe ten years off his life by smoking. But he is memorial! The whole world knows of this man! What if he had quit smoking, like good boy, at my age?"

I wasn't sure how old Goran was. I thought perhaps forty-five, although he carried on with women and dressed like a man in his twenties.

"I ask you," Goran continued, "would he have written Murder in Cathedral? 'Ash-Wednesday'? Or bounced off walls for wanting to smoke, and offered nothing of genius to world?"

Goran was an adamant chain-smoker of Camels. Come to think of it, I had yet to meet an Eastern European intellectual in Toronto who gave a rat's a.s.s about healthy living. "This mother-in-law you have," he argued, "why should she take these drugs? You say she is religious. Why not let her go to her G.o.d? She has lost her husband, you said? So, it's perfect. Don't listen to technocrats. Life should be full, and short. Write your poems, love your lovers, drink your fill. And smoke."

"Do you believe in G.o.d, Goran?" I asked, cupping my chin in my hand.

"I believe that people have right to believe in their G.o.d. My G.o.d, I have not met yet. He looks after my parents, and He waits my arrival. I look forward to our introduction." On that note, he strode off to suck on a Camel in the stairwell.

"What about you, Avery?" I asked, feeling bold, for we usually leapt away from intimate questions and communicated, instead, through anecdote and quote.

"Well, uhh," he replied, his arms beginning to make their serpentine moves, "it's a complicated subject for Monday morning, Frannie."