"You have to tell me, Babette. You've taken me this far, put me through this much. I have to know. What's the condition?"
The longer she wept, the more certain I became that I knew what she was going to say. I felt an impulse to get dressed and leave, take a room somewhere until this whole thing blew over. Babette raised her face to me, sorrowing and pale, her eyes showing a helpless desolation. We faced each other, propped on elbows, like a sculpture of lounging philosophers in a classical academy. The radio turned itself off.
"I'm afraid to die," she said. "I think about it all the time. It won't go away."
"Don't tell me this. This is terrible."
"I can't help it. How can I help it?"
"I don't want to know. Save it for our old age. You're still young, you get plenty of exercise. This is not a reasonable fear."
"It haunts me, Jack. I can't get it off my mind. I know I'm not supposed to experience such a fear so consciously and so steadily. What can I do? It's just there. That's why I was so quick to notice Mr. Gray's ad in the tabloid I was reading aloud. The headline hit home. FEAR OF DEATH, it said. I think about it all the time. You're disappointed. I can tell."
"Disappointed?"
"You thought the condition would be more specific. I wish it was. But a person doesn't search for months and months to corner the solution to some daily little ailment."
I tried to talk her out of it.
"How can you be sure it is death you fear? Death is so vague. No one knows what it is, what it feels like or looks like. Maybe you just have a personal problem that surfaces in the form of a great universal subject."
"What problem?"
"Something you're hiding from yourself. Your weight maybe."
"I've lost weight. What about my height?"
"I know you've lost weight. That's just my point. You practically ooze good health. You reek of it. Hookstratten confirms this, your own doctor. There must be something else, an underlying problem."
"What could be more underlying than death?"
I tried to persuade her it was not as serious as she thought.
"Baba, everyone fears death. Why should you be different? You yourself said earlier it is a human condition. There's no one who has lived past the age of seven who hasn't worried about dying."
"At some level everyone fears death. I fear it right up front. I don't know how or why it happened. But I can't be the only one or why would Gray Research spend millions on a pill?"
"That's what I said. You're not the only one. There are hundreds of thousands of people. Isn't it reassuring to know that? You're like the woman on the radio who got phone calls from a missile base. She wanted to find others whose own psychotic experiences would make her feel less isolated."
"But Mr. Gray said I was extra sensitive to the terror of death. He gave me a battery of tests. That's why he was eager to use me."
'This is what I find odd. You concealed your terror for so long. If you're able to conceal such a thing from a husband and children, maybe it is not so severe."
'This is not the story of a wife's deception. You can't sidestep the true story, Jack. It is too big."
I kept my voice calm. I spoke to her as one of those reclining philosophers might address a younger member of the academy, someone whose work is promising and fitfully brilliant but perhaps too heavily dependent on the scholarship of the senior fellow.
"Baba, I am the one in this family who is obsessed by death. I have always been the one."
"You never said."
'To protect you from worry. To keep you animated, vital and happy. You are the happy one. I am the doomed fool. That's what I can't forgive you for. Telling me you're not the woman I believed you were. I'm hurt, I'm devastated."
"I always thought of you as someone who might muse on death. You might take walks and muse. But all those times we talked about who will die first, you never said you were afraid."
"The same goes for you. 'As soon as the kids are grown.' You made it sound like a trip to Spain."
"I do want to die first," she said, "but that doesn't mean I'm not afraid. I'm terribly afraid. I'm afraid all the time."
"I've been afraid for more than half my life."
"What do you want me to say? Your fear is older and wiser than mine?"
"I wake up sweating. I break out in killer sweats."
"I chew gum because my throat constricts."
"I have no body. I'm only a mind or a self, alone in a vast space."
"I seize up," she said.
"I'm too weak to move. I lack all sense of resolve, determination."
"I thought about my mother dying. Then she died."
"I think about everyone dying. Not just myself. I lapse into terrible reveries."
"I felt so guilty. I thought her death was connected to my thinking about it. I feel the same way about my own death. The more I think about it, the sooner it will happen."
"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise."
"What if death is nothing but sound?"
"Electrical noise."
"You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful."
"Uniform, white."
"Sometimes it sweeps over me," she said. "Sometimes it insinuates itself into my mind, little by little. I try to talk to it. Not now, Death.'"
"I lie in the dark looking at the clock. Always odd numbers. One thirty-seven in the morning. Three fifty-nine in the morning."
"Death is odd-numbered. That's what the Sikh told me. The holy man in Iron City."
"You're my strength, my life-force. How can I persuade you that this is a terrible mistake? I've watched you bathe Wilder, iron my gown. These deep and simple pleasures are lost to me now. Don't you see the enormity of what you've done?"
"Sometimes it hits me like a blow," she said. "I almost physically want to reel."
– "Is this why I married Babette? So she would conceal the truth from me, conceal objects from me, join in a sexual conspiracy at my expense? All plots move in one direction," I told her grimly.
We held each other tightly for a long time, our bodies clenched in an embrace that included elements of love, grief, tenderness, sex and struggle. How subtly we shifted emotions, found shadings, using the scantest movement of our arms, our loins, the slightest intake of breath, to reach agreement on our fear, to advance our competition, to assert our root desires against the chaos in our souls.
Leaded, unleaded, super unleaded.
We lay naked after love, wet and gleaming. I pulled the covers up over us. We spoke in drowsv whispers for a while. The radio came on.
"I'm right here," I said. "Whatever you want or need, however difficult, tell me and it's done."
"A drink of water."
"Of course."
"I'll go with you," she said.
"Stay, rest."
"I don't want to be alone."
We put on our robes, went to the bathroom for water. She drank while I pissed. On our way back to the bedroom I put my arm around her and we walked half toppling toward each other, like adolescents on a beach. I waited by the side of the bed as she rearranged the sheets neatly, put the pillows in place. She curled up immediately for sleep but there were still things I wanted to know, things I had to say.