“What should I do?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Hilary. Sometimes things get to the point where it’s just too late.”

“What are you saying?”

“I think I’m saying you should start looking for other jobs.”

Hilary didn’t show it, but she was weeping. It was then that I had the realization that this was not the first of such conversations she had had. I was not special. She was no doubt seeking out colleague after colleague in search of either a strategy, or at least encouraging, even if misguided, optimism.

“Sometimes it’s just too late.”

Truth and satisfaction.

While waiting with my daughter to see her pediatrician, my wife and I held hands. I could not remember the last time we held hands.

There was a large aquarium embedded in a wall shared by two waiting areas, one for sick patients, the other for well. We were on the well side.

Sarah studied a movie magazine. We held hands. My phone sounded. I turned it off and shoved it into the pocket of my newly acquired jacket. In that pocket I found a small slip of paper, the kind of slip that often says something like “Inspected by 53.” But this slip of paper said, “Ayuadame.”

“What’s that?” Meg asked.

“It was in my pocket. It says, ‘Ayuadame.’”

“What’s that?”

“That’s ‘help me’ in Spanish, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder where it came from. I just bought this jacket.”

“It’s not new,” she said.

“No, it was pre-owned, as they say.”

The nurse called for us.

Phalarope fulicarius. The proximal end of a right ulna was recovered at the 35–40 cm level. The phalaropes are similar osteologically to the small sandpipers.

A note in a gutter. Does it mean anything? Is there any propositional content without a context? The note says, “the horse is yellow.” Found in the city street, does it mean anything? Is there a horse? Is it yellow? Was a child practicing her handwriting? Were the letters typed by a monkey? A sentence by accident? Marks on a page? What if the note read, “the horse is and is not?” It is senseless, but what does it mean?

My daughter loved the infinite monkey theorem. She realized, of course, that the idea did not concern actual monkeys, but she wondered, rather correctly, why that mattered. She laughed and asked, “What if Shakespeare was just hitting keys?”

“Shakespeare didn’t have a typewriter,” I said.

“What if he was just making marks on paper? And that’s how he came up with Macbeth?”

“I doubt it. Maybe Measure for Measure. I could see that with Measure for Measure. Not Macbeth.”

Dr. Terence was a very young woman. My wife didn’t trust her age and lack of experience. I figured because she was young she was up on all the latest journals. And perhaps because she was young Sarah liked her. That was important.

“So, what’s going on?” she asked.