EPILOGUE

BELLA

(To the audience) When I wake up, some seventeen hours later, Christopher’s gone.

The second and third hypos are resting on the chair where he was sitting beside my bed, their syringes still full, untouched.

I shuffle out to the kitchen and see that the stationery box containing Christopher’s novella is still on the table.

I remove the lid. I read the cover page, which I only half noticed the first time:

To Lie Facedown in a Field Full of Snow.

Nothing else.

A work of fiction attributed to no one and without a copyright line.

Oh, and a short epigraph on the other side of the title page:

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word is spoken.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

*

BELLA

(To the audience) Christopher doesn’t show up in class that week. His body was found by a fellow student, on the New Haven Green, in the middle of the night. He was lying facedown in the snow. The cause of death, hypothermia. He was wearing his gas-station-attendant jacket. No hat, no scarf, no gloves.

His death is hardly known around campus. It’s barely a footnote, scarcely legible.

It turns out that he’d been attending his other classes more and more infrequently as the fall term came to its end; one class not at all.

His other professors barely knew him.

In late December, while campus is quiet, Christopher’s mother comes to identify the body and take it back to Burlington, where he would be buried in some minor cemetery near Lake Champlain.

It’s strange considering a winter burial during the holiday season. A pair of anonymous men shoveling through a hide of heavy snow only to break the earth and shovel more.

Christopher Corbit Dunn, interred in the cold earth.

In January, I begin chemotherapy treatments.

I take the spring term off and watch my hair fall out in clumps.

Six months later, at my bimonthly checkup, my oncologist informs me that the tumors in my stomach have all but disappeared. My cancer has gone into remission. He says he’s never seen anything like it. He sounds disappointed.

I walk home. Over three miles. I walk past houses and lampposts and trees and office buildings with big glass windows.

It feels as if I’m made of yarn.

I spend the next week eating like a horse. Oysters and sardines and cold ravioli right out of the can.

I devour a whole chicken and lick the bones dry.

I feel as if I will live forever.

For the better part of a month I read and reread Christopher Dunn’s novella. I carry it around from room to room in its stationery box like some perfect woodland creature that should never be touched. I sleep beside it. I wake with it. When I take a bath I place it on the top of the toilet tank.

He failed to number page seventy-eight. It goes seventy-seven, then nothing, then seventy-nine. He was so caught up in the writing that he forgot to enumerate a page.