His wife was returning home that evening. Ten-day trip away. New York City. Visiting a friend. She’d accumulated ten days’ leave by working late. Tagging feet and cleaning scalpels. Before she left she said she’d tagged someone with her own name, Emma Heron, how about that? John said it was a common name. She said she’d painted the corpse’s toenails. John said nice touch. She said she thought about sending a big dose of electricity through her and sending her home to John in her stead. John said he probably wouldn’t notice. She said no he probably bloody wouldn’t and stalked out. John said he was joking. She said he wasn’t funny. He said he was Unfunny John, what did she expect? She said she expected something much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much better than this.

Perhaps she’d left for good. Perhaps this was why he was edgy.

He’d been told by someone, a therapist on a phone-in maybe, that correctly identifying a fear made the physical symptoms go away. Bringing it to the conscious mind, expressing it verbally, stopped the shakes. Or might.

“My wife’s coming home today,” he said out loud.

The three other stand-ups looked up from their papers.

“What?” said one. Shelley.

“My wife. Emma. She’s coming home today after a short trip abroad.”

There was a small pause.

“Jamaica?” asked Shelley.

“No. New York.”

There was another pause.

“I don’t get it,” said a thin pale man.

He still shook. The phone-in must have gotten a B-list therapist.

Could be this club, thought John. It’s new, I don’t know anyone.

818

The divine wind that John’s wife referred to was a tempest that saved Japan from Mongol invaders in the thirteenth century when Kubla Khan dispatched an immense armada to conquer it. Realizing that they were outflanked and outnumbered, all the shrines in Japan prayed to the sun goddess, Amaterasu. Suddenly a typhoon appeared out of nowhere and struck the Mongol fleet, sinking or beaching most of the ships and killing over one hundred thousand of the Mongol troops. The resident pathologist at Emma’s morgue was Japanese and talked to her about his native land while removing spleens and weighing brains.

“I think I am dead,” Emma told him once.

“Do you want me to feel your pulse?” he replied.

“That won’t tell you anything.”

“Divine wind,” or kamikaze, Emma wanted John to have it in his mind as she boarded her plane. Though John also thought a lot about death, Emma didn’t think he thought about it seriously enough.

817

Beth Davies was sick on the floor. She hadn’t been able to make it to the supermarket to buy proper food so she’d eaten old lentils and dried fruit. It’d been coming out of both ends.