by Jacob M. Appel

When the third neurologist confirmed that Conrad's words were evaporating, the fifty-nine year old journalist took up jogging. Every morning at the crack of dawn, when the Broadway merchants were pulling open their storefront gates, and again every evening, when those same iron gratings were being drawn shut, he squeezed into a pair of grey sweatpants and a matching hooded top and huffed his way around the park until his breath hurt. His first fifty-eight years, his healthy years, had been sedentary. He'd avoided high school sports, later eschewed the squash matches and golf rounds of his colleagues for the comfort of lazy weekend mornings. His greatest joy in life had been cuddling beside Dora on their soft feather bed and exchanging sections of the Sunday The New York Times. But now, his grey matter flagging, his words drying up like the flow of a seasonal stream, Conrad couldn't resist the urge to build his body into a fortress. He didn't know whether he was running towards something or away from something. Therein lay the beauty of the crisp autumn air, the panacea that was endorphins and sweat. For two brief intervals each long day, his brain, which with increasing frequency ran in circles like a disconnected engine, didn't need to ponder Goering's teeth or Dora's illness or his own impending silence. It was as though his exercise routine occurred outside of real time, as though no calamity might befall him if he simply placed one foot before the other on the asphalt.

Dora challenged him during the third week of his training. They sat in their Italian restaurant, in their booth, the red-and-white checkered tablecloth and the decorative jeroboams as familiar as Conrad's own reflection in the wall mirror. His wife had aligned her capsules on the table top. She'd just finished counting them and was preparing to self-medicate shamelessly in front of the waitstaff, when she peered at him over her thick-rimmed spectacles, throwing him the glare that had intimidated generations of plagiarizing English students, and demanded, "Okay, Connie, what in heaven's name has gotten into you?"

"What now, doll?" he asked.

"This running amok, this pretending you're a twenty-five year old kid. What's going on?"

"It's nothing," he said. "Nothing at all."

His words lacked conviction. He tried to find the vestiges of beauty in Dora's pain-creased face — the high cheekbones which rose like barbicans, the silver flecks in her transparent grey eyes — but it was hard to permeate the sheen of illness, the chemotherapy hidden under a lime green hat. There had been five sisters once, five spring beauties growing up across from the Union Carbide facility; now four were dead under sixty, pestered to the grave by the proddings and zappings of modern oncology, and only Dora remained as a living monument to an anti-weevil pesticide long since banned in the industrialized west.

Conrad recalled his fifth grade spelling bee, the journey to the national championships in Washington, the orthographic miracle that enabled him to spell “kaleidoscope” before a throng of overanxious parents cheering on their own lisping beauties. He'd won. First place: the blue ribbon, the scholarship. But his motivation had been Ms. Lublin, glorious Ms. Ida Lublin with her flowing auburn hair crying out to be touched like a precious gemstone. That hair had been the ultimate temptation, the hair and the warm hug she offered him for victory. What he hadn't known then, what he knew now, was that the nickel-sized lump had already taken hold of Ms. Lublin's thirty-one year old breasts, that Ida Lublin was fading, fading like old newsprint, and that when she'd swallowed him against her diseased bosom, she'd shielded him against a deadly secret. Now Dora had the lump — the ripple in her pancreas which had exploded like a firework, metastasized, beset her nodes and blood — and he possessed the secret.

"It's something," Dora persisted, her voice sharp from suffering.

"I can still tell something from nothing, Connie. Now out with it."

"Amaurotic," he replied. "Do you remember amaurotic, doll?"

“Amaurotic” had been his second orthographic miracle, Dora's winning word at the adult spelling competition which had led to their introduction. He'd agreed to judge grudgingly, fresh off covering the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. His irritability had mounted on the flight to Clearwater, Florida, his frustration that American Heritage preferred stories on quaint Americana to exposés on the fate of war criminals, but when Dora spelled “amaurotic”, he'd been so captivated by her coastal drawl, by her soothing pronunciation of a word at once both erotic and amorous, that he'd proposed on the spot. Later she revealed her secret, that amaurosis was a degenerative ailment of the eye, but that was only after they'd discovered the joys of pillow-talk and downscale Italian dining and moments such as this one. Conrad reached for his wife's hand; memories pooled behind his eyes.

"Connie?" his wife asked. "Are you all right?"

"Do you remember ‘amaurotic,’ doll?"

"Yes, I remember," she said cautiously. "But why? Why now?"

He clasped her hand more tightly, pressed his thick flesh into her premature bone. Because I'm running out of words, he wanted to say. Because soon all that will be left is a shell of inarticulable images, because my mind is fading faster than your body, because our entire relationship is based on words and soon I won't have any.

"It's nothing," he said.

He hated himself for the pique in his voice. Dora didn't deserve his irritation, his frustration at the injustice of their fate. After three decades, Dora deserved the truth. And she deserved it from his own lips, in his own vocabulary, chosen words worth a thousand pictures. But while he still had the words, precious words, he didn't have the heart to tell her.

Two weeks later, after the hospice nurse slipped the ring off his wife's cold finger, Conrad ran all the way home from Brooklyn.

Conrad's first impulse had been to run; his second impulse was to work. He cloistered himself in his oak-paneled study, sat beneath the hanging spider plant, scrawled rivers of words across the virgin pages of his legal pad. He phoned the retired pathologist who owned Herman Goering's teeth and conducted the interview as he had thousands of others, trapping key quotations, jotting potential leads in the margins, churning out a four-page profile as though Dora were waiting in the next room to proofread his copy. Conrad understood the business of death from his parents, her parents. He anticipated his responsibilities: combing her leather-bound address book for the whereabouts of distant cousins, the outdated telephone exchanges still printed in her hand; contacting their new lawyer who'd inherited his practice from their old lawyer. When his mother had died suddenly, as rapidly as was required for the blood clot to coast from her thigh to her brain, Conrad had coped by proclaiming her death to the world. My mother is dead! Take heed and mourn! But the world hadn't blinked an eye, time hadn't stopped. So now, his wife refrigerated on a concrete slab, Conrad donned his sweats and tennis shoes and jogged into the park.

His path followed the river, mimicked Hudson's expedition up the Great American Rhine. To the north rose the bleak dome of Grant's Tomb, the sandstone tower of Riverside Church, the suspension bridge which connected his small patch of familiar territory to the rest of the planet. He tried not to think in these terms, tried to concentrate on his feet and his pulse, but the slap of sneakers on asphalt could not erase creeping bursts of invidious thought. The first neurologist popped into his skull, a broad-shouldered Hopkins graduate whose diagnosis blended the rough language of team sports with the rougher language of rudimentary capitalism. His metaphors compared brain cells to line-backers, his prognosis sounded like an audit. Conrad still remembered his precise phrasing: "Seventy-five percent of patients lose eighty percent of their verbal abilities within six months." That had been one month and two neurologists earlier.

Conrad's mind jumped. He found himself pondering Goering's teeth again — the glass jar which contained the last remnants of Hitler's henchman. The story about the preserved teeth was a fitting climax to his career, Conrad thought, a career that had begun covering Eichmann's hanging and led him to the foothills of the Andes and the village record bureaus of Austria on his quest for the truth about Mengele, about Bormann, about the perpetrators of the ultimate evil. There was a finality to Hermann Goering's teeth, those haunting incisors and molars bobbing in formaldehyde in a testament to the final triumph of good over evil. But then why this? Why was Dora cheated out of her golden years? Why his own last days abandoned to isolation and precocious senility? It was an injustice! Mengele sipping mint juleps into his seventies while he could no longer complete a crossword puzzle! Conrad's brain refused to relinquish these thoughts. When he finally succumbed, halted beside a stand of barren trees and sprawled himself across a bench, he felt cold tears stinging his cheeks.

Conrad ran both hands through his hair, his palms spreading across his scalp. His wet eyes made him feel drowsy and self-consciously ugly. He fought off the urge to vomit. Several minutes passed before he built up the wherewithal to orient himself, to remind himself that his wife was dead and that his own thoughts were dying and that he had an obligation, both moral and practical, to walk home quickly, to shower, to phone his wife's humpbacked cousin in Tel Aviv. But when he tried to rise, he stumbled. The bench lacked arms. He clutched air and tumbled. A female jogger rushed to his assistance.

"Conrad!" she cried, almost bleated, "Conrad Lempke! Are you all right?"

Two orange mittens assisted him onto the bench.

"Conrad Lempke," she said. "Linda Thorne. Murray Thorne's wife. Are you all right?"

He squeezed his rescuer into focus and found himself inexplicably surprised that she was Murray Thorne's wife, or rather Murray Thorne's widow, and not a would-be mugger prowling the dusk. He instantly recognized the hand-drawn eyebrows and the mane of red hair drawn into a tuft behind her sweatband. He'd shared an office with Murray at The Associated Press for twelve years and had grown to know Linda socially. He vaguely recalled that she traded in collectibles.

"Can you talk?" she asked.

He nodded. Slowly his thoughts were falling into place and he vividly remembered their last meeting, at the previous year's Christmas party, when she'd talk his ear off about antique glassware and hadn't so much as mentioned her late husband. He'd hated her then. Hated her for abandoning Murray's memory while Dora's condition deteriorated, but now he was thankful for her presence, her soft features gazing at him in a beam of concern and hope, and he surprised himself when he blurted out, "Dora is dead."

"I'm truly sorry," said Linda. "How long?"

"This morning," he answered.

"Oh," said Linda. She slid down next to him on the bench and tentatively patted his gloved hand. He expected her to offer condolences, to drown him in her false grief. Or alternatively to berate him silently for jogging on the evening of his wife's death as though Dora had taken his sanity with her to the grave. Instead, she said, "I took up running when I lost Murray. I'd always done a morning warm-up, told myself that someday I'd run a marathon, but the morning the state troopers told me about the accident I ran all the way out of the city. All the way to Yonkers. I had to take a cab home."

"It's easier to think," said Conrad.

"Or harder," she answered.

They sat on the park bench for another five minutes, his mind finally blank with exhaustion, and then she clasped his glove in her mitten and led him through the waning light. They'd nearly reached Broadway, her leading, him following at an appropriate distance, when the most possible and odious of thoughts emerged from deep within the recesses of Conrad's cranium: he could marry Linda Thorne.

He didn't love her. He barely knew her, in fact, this middle-aged widow of his colleague who'd fallen from the overpass. She'd always seemed like a nice enough woman and she was reasonably attractive — but Conrad realized these qualities hadn't sparked his thoughts. They were ridiculous thoughts, after all. Absurd contingencies. Strategies to avoid returning to his apartment alone. He'd only thought of marrying Linda Thorne because she was a woman and she was there, in his presence, and because her companionship appealed to him more than the alternative.

Conrad wondered if she would accompany him home, imagined that she might brew him a cup of warm tea and wrap his afghan over his knees. Or she might lead him into the bedroom and seduce him on the soft feather bed. This was wrong, he knew, thinking of sex on the night of his wife's death, but it had been months since he'd been with Dora, decades since he had been with someone other than Dora, and he conceived of his hypothetical intercourse with Linda Thorne as a mechanical act like running that might block out his impending responsibilities. He tried to divert his thoughts and focused on the names of common objects (store, sidewalk, sewer) as the third neurologist had prescribed, but he couldn't concentrate. He dreaded the prospect of the empty apartment.

When they arrived in front of his brownstone, he realized that his companion did not intend to accompany him over the threshold. All she offered was a matronly hug. Her arms pressed into his shoulders. She smelled pungently of lilac. Conrad was overwhelmed with the sudden desire to unburden himself, to reveal the plight of his vocabulary and his desperate fear of solitude and his overwhelming need for her to talk to him. He had so much to say, he realized. He was drowning in words.

She broke their embrace.

"Linda," he said. "I —"

"Don't," she answered. "Trust me. Don't. I remembered from when I lost Murray. It doesn't work. At your age — at our age — everything has already been said."

Then she kissed him on the cheek and was gone.

He sat at the kitchen table into the early hours of the morning. He didn't shower; he didn't phone Dora's cousin in Tel Aviv. Instead, he opened the afternoon's mail (the electric bill, three Get Well Soon cards, an invitation to judge a spelling bee in San Antonio), he watered the plants (two colii, the jaundiced dieffenbachia, the spider plant) and he smoked two packs of stale Carlton cigarettes he found in the bottom drawer of his desk. He thought about Dora, thought about her intentionally to induce tears; he thought about what the next days might be like, the next weeks, carrying him ever closer to the six month wall; but mostly he thought about Linda Thorne, contemplated whether he could call her and whether she might console him, but he kept telling himself one more cigarette, one more cigarette and then I'll phone, so that
when he finally built up the nerve to say what he hadn't said on the porch — calmed momentarily, as he was, by the specious conviction of her words — it was already three in the morning and he realized he didn't even have her phone number. This is ridiculous, he warned himself. Obsessive. She's a total stranger. He curled up on the sofa and drifted to sleep in his clothes.

She returned the following afternoon, the doorbell rousing him from his slumber. She returned and — to his sheer amazement — she brewed him a cup of hot tea. She also made the funeral arrangements, called Dora's address book, ordered him blintzes and whitefish from the corner deli. Meanwhile he sat on the sofa chain-smoking cigarettes until his throat burned. In her absence, he'd gushed with words; now that she was in his kitchen, washing his dishes, he found that he had absolutely nothing to say. Linda, for her part, spoke in concrete facts.

"I called your wife's brother-in-law," she said. "The one in Florida."

Conrad nodded. He'd given her a list of names.

"He's dead. Three weeks ago. Your nephew sends his condolences."

"Good enough," said Conrad.

"I told the AP people they could stop by this evening," Linda continued.

"Fine."

"I have a dance lesson at six o'clock," she explained. "I'll come back at eight."

"You don't have to," he said. He feared his tone sounded peevish. "I mean, you've done so much. I'll be okay."

"I want to," she answered. "I know what it's like."

What truly stunned him was that Linda did seem to know what it was like, understood when she should listen and when she shouldn't, when he might say something he'd later regret. At the very moment when he lamented how few intimate friends he had, she poured him a glass of ginger ale and said, "It's hard. Murray was my closest friend." Later, after she'd greeted the mourners and unwrapped their pastries, after the courtesies had been offered and the hollow memories exchanged, she instructed him to take a shower and added, "You have to be alone. It's hard, but it has to be that way." Then, before he could say anything foolish, she went home.

Linda Thorne played den mother for six consecutive days. She selected a tasteful flower print blouse and tan slacks for Dora, stood by his side as they lowered her into the earth. She scribbled copious phone messages on the pad in the foyer. Conrad wanted to hate himself for depending on her, for letting her replace his darling wife, but his initial desire for sex gave way to a tacit understanding that Linda wasn't trying to be Dora — that, if anything, she was trying not to be Dora. She refused to stay over, to occupy Dora's bed, even when he'd firmly ensconced himself on the couch. She deftly avoided moments of potential intimacy. After the first evening's embrace, she offered no opportunity for physical contact. Her behavior puzzled Conrad. Why is she here? he wondered. What does she want? All he knew for certain was that he enjoyed her company and that at times he hated her, wanted to lash out at her, for not being Dora. For not being someone he understood.

As his week of mourning drew to a close, Conrad grew restless. He needed to say something, he knew, something that might keep Linda from leaving. He also knew that he needed to tell her about his inevitable fate. If she knew his future, he wondered, would she still greet him each morning with such alacrity? Would she indulge him if she knew he passed the nights boosting his memory with flashcards? Twice already he'd forgotten the names of household objects, searched in vain for words as simple as bannister and hamper. If she'd only give him the opportunity, he told himself, he could lay his cards on the table and define their relationship — but she refused his confidence and withheld her own thoughts with the tenacity of a silence-sworn monk.

On her seventh visit, Conrad finally built up the urge to confront her. He followed her into the kitchen after breakfast. She turned on the faucet to wash the dishes. He turned it off. Then they stood, face to face, her rump pressed into the countertop like a television mother about to greet her breadwinner. He resisted the urge to kiss her.

"Don't," she said. "Don't tell me."

"What?" he asked, surprised.

"What ever you were going to say, please don't tell me."

Conrad stepped backwards. He'd intended to tell her about the previous month's spelling bee in Miami, the publicity stunt sponsored by a Florida-based honey manufacturer. It had been awful. He'd shared the judging duties with Miss Confectionery Sugar 1981. Dora's health had taken a turn for the worse. But the true horror had occurred after the competition, during the awards ceremony, when he'd stepped to the podium to announce the winner, and the decisive word, the preposterously fixed decisive word, had slipped through the folds of his brain. Apiary. He'd thought honey, he'd thought bees, he'd thought hives — it was almost too easy, his knowing it was a publicity stunt and knowing that the word had something to do with bees and honey production, and still he'd been unable to find it. He'd had to ask Miss Confectionery Sugar to spell the winning word, tried to play it off as a joke — and then, as he realized the significance of his lapse, realized that he needed to see a neurologist, the damn nitwit misspelled the winning word. That's what he'd intended to tell Linda Thorne.

"There's a spelling bee in San Antonio next month," he said instead. "I thought you might want to come with me."

"I can't," answered Linda. "I have my dance lessons."

"I just thought —" he said.

"Please don't," she said.

She knotted a dishtowel in her hands and started to cry.

"Please don't."

"I'm sorry," said Conrad.

"No," she said. "No. It's not that."

She slid into a kitchen chair and folded her face into her hands. He wanted to console her with his touch, to run his fingers through her glowing hair, but he feared that might upset her even more. What had he done? This woman had come into his home, cooked his meals, helped him bury his wife. For him? Of course not! For her husband, his colleague. For Murray Thorne. Not for him. Conrad leaned back against the stove, pressed his palms into the dials of the gas range. Linda's sobbing blended with the metallic clamor of the ceiling fan — the fan he'd long ago promised Dora he'd repair. The word “amaurotic” suddenly popped into his head.

Linda Thorne wiped her eyes on the dish towel. "It's not that at all," she said. "It's all okay, really. I just don't want to talk about it. Talking about it ruins it. Don't you understand? I'm not Dora. You're not Murray. There's nothing we can say to each other that we haven't already said to them. Nothing. That's what I meant the other night, Conrad. The morning Murray died, I wanted to share everything. I tried to tell the goddamned state troopers how he proposed to me, as though that could make any difference. They listened, too. But they couldn't possibly understand. I was only better when I realized there are some things you can't share, some things you need to keep to yourself."

She walked to him, clasped his hand, led him down the stairs in silence. They stood hand in hand, bathed in the pure, early morning sunlight of winter. And then, just as Conrad was about to speak, she started to run, started to run in a way that dared him to follow. He stared after her momentarily, searching for his secret, rummaging his brain for the name of a disease he could no longer remember, and then he too was running, tracing her steps on the concrete, his entire vocabulary reduced to one word: keeping.