The seventh year we were married, our wedding rings fell off our fingers. This is not a metaphor. We loved each other; we were faithful; we just couldn't get our rings to stay on, and so they fell.

They fell into toilets and pots of soup. They fell into trash cans and open shoes. They fell down the laundry chute and onto sidewalks. They fell, worst of all, into the throats of our two poodles, at the same time, and for no reason at all. (Our vet was not pleased with us. Nor were the poodles.) They flew, they swung, they leapt from our fingers, gleefully, eager to leave.

We could not account for this at all. We had not lost weight. We had not moved to a frigid climate. We did not spend our days rubbing olive oil onto our hands or dipping them into melted butter. We were not old enough to be shrinking.

We tried everything. Of course, we had the rings resized, more than once, by different jewelers. It made no difference. They tumbled off in the car when we went to buckle our seatbelts. We dabbled—and succeeded—in gaining weight. We ditched our gold bands—too traditional, we decided, so plain as to be near mythological, sinister, akin to gold of Gollum—and purchased silicone rings of dull gray. But those fell off, too, and at that point we decided that if we were going to be on our knees all the time, hunting for objects, the objects might as well be beautiful.

Were we dying? There was only one way to be sure. We surrendered ourselves to the doctors. They gazed in our mouths and borrowed our blood. They scanned and they scraped and they listened. One of us had no cause for concern. The other one was me.

***

We sat in a waiting room of pale blue and sailboats. We crossed and uncrossed our legs to keep them from sticking to the cracked vinyl seats, cursing our choice to wear shorts. We rolled our eyes at all the jokes in Reader's Digest, which are never funny but often profane. We hushed when they pushed a long, pasty man on a gurney through the double doors.

Then they came for me. I had to go alone.

A bone scan, they said, first of the hands, then the body. A radioactive injection. Two hours. Then they'd scan me again.

The first technician was eager for conversation. He strapped my hands to the table. Would I like a warm towel for them?

I would.

Did I possibly have late-stage metastatic cancer? This scan was often reserved, he said, as if speaking of wine, for those with metastatic cancer.

I did not know. The doctors, I said, did not say so.

***

I do not feel the injection. I hold my breath and I wait for a tingling, some indication that my body is now radioactive, that I will soon have the ability to walk on ceilings and push around glasses of milk with my mind. But there is nothing.

The second technician does not want to talk. But I want to. I am frightened by the men (why only men?) we pass by in the other rooms, shrunken men, silent, tethered to this world by a thread.

Lovely weather we are having, I say to the tech.

Go empty your bladder, she says. 

After, I lie on a hard plastic slab, wrapped up mummy-tight in warm weighted blankets. I can feel the technician's frozen scowl through the pane of glass that separates us.

I hold my breath when the camera passes over my face, only inches away. It is leaning in for a kiss. They told me it would be loud. It only hums.

When the kiss passes, I look up at the monitor and I see a picture not of my body, but all of the particles that are not my body. My body is a black hole, swallowing light. My ring is still on my finger. Suddenly, I wonder if I should have removed it, if the rays and particles will fuse it right to the bone. No matter. Let them be fused.

I watch the particles dance around my darkness and I find them very beautiful, find myself feeling sad that this is a wonder I will never see again. Then I remember that I do not know if I will never see it again, that I could be on the precipice of something that is a beginning as much as it is an end.

I look up at the ceiling and there, for my comfort, is a beach scene printed on vinyl. And I begin to see the truth of it all: that this warm weighted blanket is only the sand. That the glow of the bright lights is the sun. And this ring, this circle of gold on my finger, is no gold at all: it is ice and rock and dust, the rings of Saturn, orbiting the world of me.

Rocked by the waves of this world, I sleep. I dream. He and I go hand in hand between the trees and the dumpster outside Trader Joe's where we once walked each evening in search of apple seltzer. Though the mud is deep and cold, though the trees reach down and snatch the light from our faces, we walk on, for this path is the only path, the only way to reach that day that has no evening. He stops to tie his shoes, as he always does—once, late and frustrated, I advised him to try velcro—and I slip ahead, knowing he will come find me when he can. I don't look back, because I am neither Lot's wife nor Orpheus, and I'll arrive unscathed. This is not a metaphor.

I awake unshrouded, and I see him hunched over, still tying his shoes, and I wave, and I wave, and he doesn't see me yet, and I'm caught between this moment and the moment after, when he will finally look up, and I wait, and I wait, and I wait. 


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