CHAPTER 8 #3
"Mia," he said. Once. Sotto voce, just at my ear, almost for himself, but I heard it and he had meant me to hear it. The single Italian syllable carried a word and a vow at once. He left it untranslated. I knew the translation already.
"Una sola volta," he said next. Only once. He left the word open; his breath stayed at my ear, and the silk held the answer for both the word and the night.
"Ho aspettato quattro anni," he said, after a long quiet. I have waited four years.
He held a heavy glass of water to my mouth. The rim against my lower lip. He tilted it slowly. I drank. He held it for me to drink again. The glass was for me alone; he set it back on the tub's rim untouched at the lip.
The centrifuge in Lab A on the other side of the office wall was faintly audible through the plaster — the constant ambient hum, the four-second swell, the room's tonic frequency — and I lay between his knees in the water with my head on his thigh and the hum settled under my nape and the angel of the medallion was at my sternum and his hand was at my sternum, and I thought, distantly, of the long stainless-steel table out there, and of the strap which he had brought into the bathroom and laid folded on the marble counter beside the sink — black silk on white marble — and I thought about the table being the room and the room being the table and how a body is a load-bearing structure that holds more than it knows.
I had held what I had asked to be given. I am the one in the room.
He washed my hair last. He had brought a small glass pitcher.
He tipped my head back against his shoulder and poured the water through my hair until the water ran clear.
He worked a small amount of plain soap through the lengths with his fingers.
He rinsed. He took a square of towel from a hook and dried the medallion against my chest with the corner of the towel before he dried any other part of me.
He replaced the medallion at my sternum. He put it back where it had been.
He carried me out wrapped in towels and laid me on the couch in his office while he found his black roll-neck — the one he had worn under the lab coat — and dressed me in it.
The roll-neck fell to mid-thigh. He put on his trousers and his lab coat, tied his hair back with a fresh elastic, and brushed mine back from my forehead with the flat of his palm.
"Stay. I will verify the manifest."
"I can do it. That is what I came for."
"You came for what you came for. The work is mine tonight. You are tired."
I let it stand. I was tired in the deep way you are tired when your body has held what it knows for as long as you have asked it to hold. He came back twelve minutes later with the folder closed and signed.
"I will drive you home."
"Kostya."
"No. I am driving you. We are not handing you to a driver after this."
He helped me into my scrubs and my coat.
He folded the strap into his left pocket — three folds, exact.
He set the lights of Lab A down to the night-setting at the wall switch by the door.
He took me up in the freight elevator with his left hand on my hip; the cage hummed.
He drove me home in a charcoal Mercedes I had learned of only that moment. He drove in silence.
He held my right hand in his left at the gearshift. He pulled up at my Murray Hill walk-up. He waited at the curb until I had keyed the inner vestibule. I looked back once. He was still there. He raised his hand.
I climbed three flights. I keyed my apartment.
I turned the chain and the deadbolt and stood for a moment in the cool of the entryway.
The hallway light was off. The kitchen light was off.
The only light was the streetlamp at the bedroom window and the cold blue of the digital clock on the microwave. Three-oh-three.
I undressed in the bathroom. I kept my eyes on the floor tile a long moment. I washed my face. I lifted my face to the mirror.
The wrists were clean. The pink line where the silk had held had faded to a faint warmth, the kind a watchband leaves under a long shift.
The hair was wet at the ends from the bath.
The medallion was at the sternum. The hairline crack across the angel's wing caught the streetlamp's light from behind at an angle that made the silver look like it had been folded along a seam.
The woman in the mirror had her hands flat at her hips. I stood and looked at her.
"What am I doing," I said, quietly, just once.
The line landed as a statement, the period intact at the end of it.
I turned the bathroom light off. I walked to the bed.
I pulled the cotton blanket up over my legs.
I touched the medallion at my sternum, once, with the pad of my right index finger.
I let the centrifuge and the lamp and his hand pass out of mind.
I thought of the word in my mouth and as he had repeated it back to me.
Hippocratic. He had said it as you repeat a patient's allergy when you take the chart.
He had said it as you mark a thing you intend to remember.
I am Elena Rossi. The medallion is at my sternum.
I will sleep.