I slept for days when I got back to London, slept as though I were practicing for hibernation. My sleep followed the law of inertia: when I was asleep I tended to remain asleep, and when I was awake, I tended to remain awake. When I rose, the anemic light by which it was possible to trace the passage of the sun behind the unbroken gray was already disappearing. I would go far enough to buy myself mineral water and drinkable yogurt and chilled soups: the things I could consume without a kitchen and without cutlery and without any china but the bathroom cup that sometimes held my toothbrushes. It was too much effort to boil water. Then in the twilight I would practice, on until well after dark. I buried myself in music I knew well, but I did not learn anything new. And so days merged, with the regularly paced interruption of friends coming to inquire after my state of mind and my mother’s health.

The precision of modern medicine is among its many punishments. You still have the nasty surprises of chance symptoms and unusual side effects, but you also have the knowledge that certain events will occur on certain dates; if the surgery is on such a day, the chemotherapy will begin on such a day, and you will have the first indication of its effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) on such a day. And so I spent my first week back in London with the image of a certain Thursday always ahead of me, as the next day for bad news. The news always came on Thursdays at about five o’clock New York time, and even now, years later, I have a sense of uneasy suspense attached to Thursday afternoons. It was like being a prisoner attending the electric chair and awaiting a pardon, counting the minutes in dread and intermittent hope, and feeling, by the time Thursday rolled around, that it was better to have bad news than to go on waiting in this agony of suspense.