Yesterday she was young, and pretty too. Her academic career was deeply satisfying, most of the time. The world circled the sun every day and her life followed in predictable rhythms.
Today a team of doctors and aides and nurses, paper gowns flapping and lanyards clanking, flank her as they escort her out of the hospital. One last clunk as the chair skids over the threshold, and she is free. She can almost hear a triumphant hallelujah chorus as the sun hits her face, bare and smooth as an egg.
She has no hair, no eyebrows; she left them behind at this place, but she is joyful, because she left the tumor there too. Her skin is sallow and wrinkled like parchment but she is told it will come back. She felt nothing during the chemotherapy procedure—anesthesia in the last months before the year 3000 CE and 14th year of the Quiet Revolution is a wonder—but now she feels a disquiet when she looks at the stranger in the mirror, as if she is not sure what happened at all because she didn’t feel much at all.
Ah well, all the right things and all the comprehensible feelings will come back---not the tumor though, not the bad things, she muses. They will never come back, she has been assured.
Her doctor holds up the scans to the light board.
“Before,” he says and points to the first one, the one with the dark circle right behind her right ear.
“And after,” he smiles as he points to the second. The grey and white image on the left matches the corresponding space on the right perfectly. Symmetry restored.
She giggles.
“But now what,” she asks playfully.
“Live,” he says, “l' chaim,” and he takes her hand in his and pats it.
“I will,” she answers. “And thank you,” she says, hoping he could read the fullness of her joy and gratitude.
“Every day is a gift,” he says.
“What will I do with all these gifts?” she muses.
“You do have a destiny,” he says as her nurse pulls her wheelchair out of the office.
I, Isabelle Grant, she marvels, senior European history instructor and lover of all the Romantic era music—now disappearing, but that’s another story—she studied in university, before the war and all that, have a destiny.
Graciella, her assigned guardian, never leaves her. Isabelle wakes up the next morning and goes to the kitchen, and there is Graciella, quite small or quite young, she can’t really tell, as the navy skirt, khaki blouse, and navy-like military cap obscure her features. Her smooth olive skin and dark eyes are ageless, like many from the Latinate Sector, and most of the guardians are young anyways. The glittering insignia of her corps pinned to her beret, the white sash edged in gold braid that the higher-ranked guardians like Graciella wear completes the ersatz-military look. Throughout the city, as the guardians smoothly guide rush hour traffic into an orderly flow or rescue a cat stuck in a tree, they remain focused and serene and always efficient.
An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house. Maria Callas
Ivan, her former lover, once picked up an LP of arias sung by Maria Callas and read the biographical notes on the back. “Sentimentality,” he sniffed, and slid the album back on the shelf.
On her second day home, Isabelle pulls on a bathrobe and slippers and pads into the living room. She has a need for Callas. It is still dark outside, and Graciella has not yet begun to prepare breakfast. Isabelle goes to the bookcase and slides open the door where she keeps her collection of DVDs and ancient vinyl records. She would often play them in class as background on a history lesson. When she taught the French Revolution she would end with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, heroic and glorious, written as Napoleon’s siege of his city raged around him. Oh, they were valuable once, before the state banned them. Private use is still allowed, but sale and resale have been terminated. But she would never part with them for any price. The purity of sound from Horowitz on his triumphant return to Russia, the Christmas music of Handel—these are treasures, irreplaceable. But something was amiss. She came to love the music as a young girl protesting for justice and reason, cheering the destruction of all the old heroes and gods. But it seems now that when the alabaster statue of what she once thought was God came down, it shattered into pieces, and a thousand little gods were born. Where had they gone wrong?
“Graciella,” she calls out alarmed. “Oh, there you are, dear,” she continues, surprised that Graciella had quietly walked up to the bookcase.
“Yes, Isabelle,” Graciella answers, and places a cup of coffee for Isabelle on the table.
“My things…my CDs, they are not here,” she answered. “What happened to them?”
Graciella looks at her with sympathy. “Isabelle, don’t you remember? You signed a paper in the hospital. We took them away.”
“No, but…why would you take them?”
“To study them,” Graciella answers quietly, as if Isabelle should recognize this. “They are from old European males,” she sniffs.
“But… but I had a permit!” Isabelle says.
Graciella holds up her finger to her lips to silence Isabelle.
“Graciella, I would like my music back,” Isabelle counters.
With a small smile on her oval face, Graciella again puts her finger to her lips, then clicks a button on the media center and returns to the kitchen. Isabelle ignores her coffee and dutifully listens as Graciella’s music fills the house. It is horrid.
Later Isabelle rests on her bed, not really napping, simply exhausted. The harsh atonal music from the media center echoes in her head still. At least the old approved operas like Red Detachment of Women were tuneful imitators to the Western operatic tradition. Perhaps it was simply fatigue brought on my too much stimulation after the chemo. Graciella enters with a glass of water and a pain pill.
“You are a dear,” Isabelle sighs. Pain pills are no longer addictive, so she welcomes the warm lightness, the respite from stimulation that seems to so aggravate her head. Graciella was a dear though and considerate, so she would try again. Maybe tomorrow.
The next morning, she awakens feeling so much better. She tries Graciella’s music in the shower and quickly clicks it off. She chooses a jubilant Bach cantata, itself a miracle like the faith he celebrates.
Suddenly a jolt of pain strikes her, starting from behind her ear then down the base of her skull to the spot where the neck meets the trunk of her body, where it fades to a steady, low throb. Her hands fly to brace herself against the walls on each side of the shower. She takes a breath and shouts for her helper.
Plato said that “music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything”.
“Nothing to worry about,” the doctor assures her after the x-rays and scans. “The nerves are still raw and learning how to operate together again.”
“It was quite a shock,” Isabelle answers, from across the desk.
“Understood. I should have warned you but I didn’t want to plant that idea in your head,” he replies with a little laugh at his pun.
After the doctor leaves, the nurse re-bandages the area behind her ear.
As she walks out into the hallway, she sees Graciella and the doctor talking near the stairs, Graciella nodding solemnly. They look up surprised at the sound of her footsteps on the hard floor.
“The nurse sees some little buds of hair growing back,” she says excitedly as she joins them. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it?” Isabelle asks. Graciella brightens.
“Absolutely,” the doctor replies.
That night, Isabelle lies awake. She throws off the covers and stands before her dressing table. She takes the hand mirror, turns around, and scans the back of her head. Yes, she did see the buds of hair, and sees silvery grey. She looks at the thick white gauze covering behind her ear. She had never changed it herself, but she could manage it. Of course she could.
She whirls around as a shot of light comes from the bedroom door. Graciella, of course, clad in her own bathrobe and slippers, checking in on her. Her usual calm affect was only slightly marred by her eyes, widened in what must be surprise.
“Here, let me do that,” Graciella says quickly, now smiling her usual smile, as she approaches Isabelle.
Isabelle acquiesces and slowly sits at her vanity. Graciella tenderly removes the adhesive and the patch itself.
“Isabelle, I believe you are healing,” she says enthusiastically, as she smiles at Isabelle’s reflection in the mirror. Then she carefully places a new patch in place. She playfully orders Isabelle back to bed, and Isabelle obeys.
Ivan has not been in touch. Although they had decided not to sign the papers for a committed partnership, he had always been solicitous and kind throughout their relationship, and his absence seemed strange. She preferred these partnerships over the strictures of a love affair or marriage. Marriage seemed a quaint relic of the troubled, unstable past. Most people agreed with her. She had introduced him to some of her music collection. Ivan, a provost at her university, would roll his eyes and say, “Oh, Isabelle, not everybody can have a big life,” when she talked about these composers. But he was silent and quite moved, she could sense. He took her for wine and dinner a few more times, really picking her brain about her thoughts and feelings on Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach, all of them. He was so eager—and then, nothing.
And so she was pleased and surprised when a former student, Frederick rang the doorbell. He had been one of her most enthusiastic pupils. She could see him leaning forward, his chin in his hand, clearly touched by the aural accompaniment to her history lectures. His name was actually Fred, not short for anything, but she liked to call him Frederick. He seemed uneasy today. Perhaps because of her illness? Seeing his mentor in distress? To some students, teachers are indestructible spirits. When he leaves, he presses her hand warmly. On his hand is scratched in pen, “they are watching.”
She lay in bed later, unable to sleep. It is after two a.m. and the pain pills aren’t working. She really doesn’t want them to work, actually. She cannot shake off Frederick’s warning. Who was watching? Of course she knew, or guessed, it had to be the ministry of education, always returning to the same old “improvement” suggestions that she throw out the reactionary music—and ideas, by implication.
She throws off the covers and tiptoes to her vanity. After staring at her reflection for a few seconds, she carefully removes the gauze from behind her ear. She sets up the mirrors to show her the back of her head, and sees a clean, scar free area behind her ear. Well, perhaps the dark smudge was a residual scar? She rubs it gingerly, then with vigor, and looks with surprise at her finger. This was black ink behind her ear, not a scar! She feels her stomach flip flop. Can they be lying to me, she wonders.
She has a dream that night. She is on her deathbed, clad in a white gown and tucked in with clean white linens and a baby blue duvet. Old family and friends, some long passed, surround her. She smiles and utters one word: “destiny.”