Page 26 of You Can't Hurt Me

“He’s running late again,” says Jade when she answers the door to Algos. She turns quickly and I follow her in. “He called and said you can go straight down to his study. There are some background notes on his desk, he says, which you can get started on.”

She shows me downstairs, hovers in the doorway as if reluctant to leave me alone. I feel her eyes on my back as I sit down at his desk but when I turn, she has closed the door silently behind her.

The walls are lined with reference books. One theme dominates.Pain: The Science of Suffering;Why We Hurt;From Prayer to Pain in the Nineteenth Century. I spot an old copy of Virginia Woolf essaysOn Being Illand a collection of poetry by Emily Dickinson. Idly, I remove it from the shelf, curious—is it Eva’s or Nate’s? I turn to where the spine has been bent open and begin to read.

Pain has an element of blank; it cannot recollect

When it began, or if there were

A day when it was not

I flip back to the opening page and see an inscription written five years ago on Nate’s birthday.

Thank you for putting up with my element of blank. Yours forever, Eva.

I find myself checking the door again, wary that Jade could be watching me. I sit for a moment in his swivel chair, feeling his authority resonate as I examine the piles of clinical notes on the floor, the old papers and discarded ink cartridges. Next to his computer is a small anatomical model of a brain on a white plinth. I draw my hand along its bumps and ridges, the network of red veins running along its surface. An A4 file is placed neatly next to it, a Post-it on the cover.

Here are a few notes and reflections I’ve been working on over the last week or two. I’m keen to weave them in somehow, if you think they’re suitable. Speak shortly.

Nate

There’re only a couple of pages, no more than a thousand words of thoughts and reflections, and yet somehow it seems longer.

I stifle a yawn as I read through it. Paragraphs pile up, dense and impenetrable, swimming before my eyes. How best to distinguish acute from chronic pain? What are the long-term benefits of spinal cord stimulation? I search for anything that hints at a glimmer of personal insight, self-awareness. As an introduction to neuroscience, it’s passable. As the seeds of a personal memoir, it’s a disaster.

I do a word search. Eva’s name lights up only once. Buried in the last chapter I finally locate her, hoping for a glimpse of emotional complexity.

Eva was lying on her side, her back exposed, where I observed little blood but a deep staining of the skin, indicating a passive distention of the inert vessels which takes place within an hour or two of death.

I draw breath, shake my head, press my fists into my eyes. So your wife dies and your first observation of her in a memoir isa passive distention of the inert vessels.

Anxiety curls through me. Does Nate really have the emotional intelligence to drill down that far? I glance up at his books. Philosophy and art and cinema. Travel and medicine, memoir and biography. All those words that should connect him to raw experience. Yet, somehow, it’s all so lacking in these reflections, as if he buried his emotions long ago. Even the best ghostwriter is only as good as their raw material. I have to try to get started on something.

Every dead body is trying to tell us something. It’s there waiting for us to listen, if we look carefully enough. What was Eva trying to tell me? We know that she died at approximately 4:00 p.m. on the Friday, before I returned home to discover her body the next morning. The truth is I don’t remember a great deal about the rest of the day. I know I called the police and later, after they’d gone, I felt numb, unable to process the reality of what had happened.

I look at the picture of her on Nate’s desk, her face angled away from the camera, oddly beautiful. I want to let her tell her own story but, for now, Nate is her gatekeeper, the only connection I have to her past, the only hope of ever knowing the truth. And yet his memories of his own wife are about as passionate as a lab report.

“Good to see you’re deep in concentration.”

Head in my hands, I jump at the sound of his voice, his looming presence behind me. How does he do that?

“Hi, Nate. Didn’t hear you. Sorry.”

“The power of good prose,” he says lightly, picking up the textbook lying open next to me. “You must be desperate if you’re readingThe Oxford Guide to Neuroscienceas light relief.”

“What? Oh, that. Translating some of your terms.”

He pulls up a chair next to me, apparently ready to get to work. I tie my hair back up in its band, assemble my features into something that reflects enthusiasm.

“I see that. You found my notes too heavy going?”

“No, not at all. There’s some really useful stuff in here,” I say awkwardly. I shuffle the pages together and place them next to me as if I am laying something dead to rest. Above us I can see the light and shadow of Jade’s movements through the square of glass bricks in the study ceiling, hear the reassuring clatter of lunch being prepared, dishes being stacked. How I wish I were up there. Even Jade’s froideur seems preferable to this.

“Nate,” I hear myself say, “I really think we need to talk. It’s my turn to tell you something, before we get started.”

He looks at me, expectant.

“I should have said it when we first met but somehow it didn’t seem relevant. You see, I actually spoke to Eva once. I interviewed her. Over the phone, not for very long at all. I mean, she was amazing.” I pause, try to gauge his reaction, but his expression is set, inscrutable.

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