“What shouldn’t be black?”
“The clothes. Tell people to come dressed in bright colors.”
“I can do that,” I tell her. “And by sidecars I assume you mean the drink, not the motorcycle attachment?”
“Do Ilooklike a Hells Angel?” She pushes herself up higher on her pillows. “Oh, that’s something else. I don’t want one of those photos of me on an easel that looks like it was airbrushed.”
“We can pick a photo that you like,” I suggest.
“Maybe later,” Win says. “I remember thinking at my wedding that it was the only time, other than my funeral, that all the people I cared about would be together in one room.” She turns to me. “What do you think happens? After?”
“I have no idea,” I say. “But then again, in utero, we probably can’t imagine any other existence. And once we get here, we don’t rememberthat.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Win asks.
“I believe in the figments of someone’s grief,” I tell her. “I had a client whose wife died, and she still set her a place at the dinner table every day.” I hesitate. “I think people assume death is all or nothing. Someone is here, or they’re not. But that’s not what it’s like, is it? The echo of you is still here—in your children or grandchildren; in the art you made while living; in the memories other people have of you.”
“Well, I think ghosts stick around because there’s something they didn’t finish,” Win says. “Which is why you’d better help me write that letter to Thane. If you don’t, I’m going to haunt the fuck out of you.”
I picture that painting in the locked room.
“I’ll help you find him,” I tell Win.
—
EVERYTHINGIKNOWabout tears I learned from Meret, who had to do a science presentation on them once. She had four giant photographs on easels, X-ray crystallography of onion tears, tears of change, laughing tears, tears of grief. Close up, they look completely different from each other, because they are. Emotional tears, for example, have protein-based hormones in them, including a neurotransmitter called leucine-enkephalin, which is a natural painkiller. Onion tears are less sticky, and disappear more quickly from a person’s cheeks.
Although all tears have salt, water, and lysozyme—the main chemical in tears—how the crystals form differs, due to other ingredients. So onion tears look as dense as brocade. Tears of change resemble the fervent swarm of bees in a hive. Laughing tears are reminiscent of the inside of a lava lamp, with smarter angles. And tears of grief call to mind the earth, as seen from above.
—
BRIAN IS GIVINGme a lecture. Well, technically, he’s practicing in front of me. I am supposed to be paying attention, but I am also on my computer, trying to find Thane Bernard, the man Win left behind.
“In the 1990s, physicists started running high-tech experiments to figure out how neutrons broke down into protons. That in itself wasn’t so special—it’s the core concept behind radioactivity. But weird things happened.”
He pauses, so I smile and give him a thumbs-up.
“Neutrons that were created in particle beams—”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a particle physics thing, a nuclear reactor that shoots out billions of—”
“Never mind.”
“Anyway, neutrons created in particle beams lasted approximately fourteen minutes and forty-eight seconds before breaking down into protons.”
There are over a million Google results for “Thane Bernard.”
“But neutrons that are put into a lab bottle break down a little faster. Fourteen minutes andthirty-eightseconds,” Brian says.
Add “France” to that search and the results drop to five hundred and thirty-seven thousand.
Bernard is the second most common surname in France.
“I know what you’re asking yourself.”
Was Thane even French, or was he only visiting, like Win?
