The Scan

The CT scanner was a white ring, a toroid, a shape that Oren recognized from his work because it was the shape of the pouring cup at the top of a ceramic shell — a cylinder with a void at its center through which something passed — and Lina lay on the narrow table that slid through the ring and the ring hummed and rotated and the X-rays passed through her body the way the bronze passed through the sprues, penetrating, filling, mapping the interior, and the images that resulted were cross-sections, slices of Lina's torso rendered in grey scale on a screen that Oren could not see from the waiting room but that he imagined with the precision of a man whose profession was surfaces and who could not stop himself from imagining the surface of his wife's interior, the grey landscape of organs and vessels and the mass in the pancreas that was the reason for all of this, the mass that the chemotherapy was supposed to be shrinking and that the scan would reveal to have shrunk or not shrunk, and the difference between these two outcomes was the difference between continuation and cessation, between the treatment going on and the treatment being reconsidered, and Oren sat in the waiting room and did not read the magazines and did not look at his phone and did not do anything except wait, which was the thing he was worst at, which was the thing that the lost-wax process had been trying to teach him for thirty-one years — how to wait, how to let the kiln do its work, how to let the shell dry, how to let the bronze cool — and that he had never fully learned because the foundry's waiting was waiting with a known outcome, waiting for something that would definitely happen, while this waiting was waiting without a known outcome, waiting for something that might or might not have happened inside his wife's body while the chemicals dripped and the weeks passed and the summer advanced.

The hospital in Pisa was air-conditioned.

This was a relief after the heat outside, the late-June heat that had settled over the coastal plain like a lid on a pot, trapping the humidity and the marble dust and the exhaust of the trucks on Via Aurelia, and the hospital's cool was artificial but welcome, the way an artificial patina was artificial but beautiful, the controlled environment providing something that the natural environment could not.

Lina had gone into the scanner at ten.

It was now ten-forty and the scan was supposed to take thirty minutes but had taken longer because the technician had wanted additional images of a specific area — the area around the superior mesenteric artery, where the tumor had been growing into the vessel wall, the invasion that made the tumor locally advanced and that made surgical resection unlikely — and these additional images required additional time and additional waiting and each additional minute was a minute in which Oren sat in a plastic chair in a fluorescent-lit waiting room and thought about the memorial bronze under its cloth in the studio and the cracked shell at the foundry that was being re-invested and the schedule that had shifted and the patina that had been postponed and the installation that was uncertain and the entire structure of tasks and deadlines that he had built to hold his days together, the armature of the professional life supporting the weight of the personal life, and the armature was flexing, was bending under a load it had not been designed to carry.

At eleven Lina emerged.

She was dressed again, her face composed, her walk steady, and she sat beside him in the waiting room and said, The technician said the images are good. Clear. The radiologist will read them today. Dr. Marchetti will have the results by Thursday.

Thursday was two days away.

Two days was forty-eight hours was two thousand eight hundred and eighty minutes and each minute would contain the question and the question would not be answered until Thursday when Dr. Marchetti would open the images on his screen and read the grey-scale landscape of Lina's torso and compare it to the images from the previous scan and determine whether the mass in the pancreas had shrunk or stayed the same or grown, and each of these outcomes would lead to a different path, a different set of decisions, a different future, and the branching of these paths was what Oren could not bear, the multiplicity, the uncertainty, the not-knowing that occupied the space between the scan and the results the way the void occupied the space between the burnout and the pour.

They drove home.

On the autostrada Lina said, I am hungry.

This was a good sign. Hunger was health. Hunger was the body asserting its needs, which meant the body was still asserting, was still making demands, was still in the business of living, and Oren said, What would you like, and she said, Gelato, and this was so unexpected and so perfectly Lina — the precision of the desire, the specificity, not food in general but gelato in particular — that Oren laughed, actually laughed, a sound that surprised both of them because laughter had become scarce in the apartment, not absent but scarce, rationed, the way the good weeks were rationed between the bad weeks.

They stopped in Viareggio.

The gelateria was on the lungomare, the broad promenade that ran along the beach, and they sat at a table outside and ate gelato — pistachio for Lina, nocciola for Oren — and the sea was thirty meters away and the beach was full of bathers and the umbrellas were arranged in the precise rows that Italian beach culture demanded, the regimented leisure, the organized pleasure, and Lina ate her gelato with the slow attentiveness of a person who was tasting not just the flavor but the experience, the being-here-ness of it, the sun and the sea and the cold sweetness on the tongue.

She said, Whatever the results are, I want you to start the patina in July.

He said, The schedule has shifted. The New York commission is delayed. I may not have time.

She said, Make time. The memorial is more important.

He said, The New York commission is paying the bills.

She said, The memorial is paying something else.

He did not ask what the something else was because he knew. The memorial was paying the debt that all makers owed to the material, the debt of completion, the obligation to finish what had been started, to give the bronze its surface, to close the process that the wax had opened, and this debt was not financial but existential, was the maker's contract with the work, and Lina understood this contract because she had been married to it for twenty-six years, had lived with its demands and its rewards, had watched Oren honor it with every patina he applied.

He said, I will start the patina in July.

She said, Good, and she ate the last of the pistachio gelato and the green of it — the green of ground pistachios, the green of the Bronte pistachio that Sicilian gelaterias used and that was a different green from the green of patina but that was still green, still the color of things that were between — was on her lips for a moment before she wiped it away with a napkin, and the wiping was Lina, was the precision, was the surface maintained.

They drove home and the rest of the day passed in the way that days passed now, in the particular time-sense of people who were waiting for results, a time-sense in which every ordinary moment was both ordinary and not ordinary, both routine and charged, the routine surface crackling with the electricity of the unknown, and Oren went to the studio and worked on a small patina commission — a garden figure for a client in Germany, a simple brown, routine work that his hands could do without his mind — and the work passed the hours and the hours were passed and the day ended.

Wednesday was a waiting day.

Oren went to the foundry and worked on the re-investment of the cracked shell. The wax for the right leg-and-base section had been cleaned and re-sprued and was ready for the new shell, and he applied the face coat with an attentiveness that was born of the previous failure, checking the coverage at every angle, looking for thin spots, running his finger over the wet slurry to feel for gaps, and the face coat was good, was complete, was paranoid, and he set the form on the rack to dry and stood back and assessed it and it was right and the rightness was a small comfort in a day that had no other comfort.

In the afternoon he walked.

He walked alone, which he did not usually do, because walking was a shared activity, was something he and Lina did together, but Lina was resting and the afternoon was hot and Oren needed to move, needed the physical fact of movement, the legs carrying the body through space, the body encountering the town, the town holding the body the way it always held him, loosely, without demand.

He walked to the church of Sant'Agostino, the fourteenth-century church at the end of his street, and he went inside, not because he was religious — he was not, had not been since adolescence, since the Icelandic Lutheran faith of his parents had ceased to answer his questions and he had stopped asking — but because the church was cool and dark and quiet and because the walls were marble and the marble held the coolness the way the ceramic shell held the void, structurally, essentially, and the coolness was a relief.

He sat in a pew.

The church was empty except for an old woman in the front row who was either praying or sleeping, her head bowed, her hands folded, and Oren sat in the back and looked at the altarpiece, which was a painting of the Annunciation, the angel delivering the news to Mary, and the painting was dark with age, the varnish having yellowed over the centuries, the original colors buried under the patina of time, and Oren thought about the analogy — the news, the annunciation, the moment when the future announced itself to the present and the present had to accommodate it — and the analogy was too neat, too literary, and he rejected it because he rejected neat analogies, preferring the messy ones, the analogies that did not quite fit, that had gaps and overlaps and places where the comparison broke down, because these imperfect analogies were more honest than the perfect ones, the way an imperfect patina was more honest than a perfect one.

He left the church and walked to the studio and worked until evening.

Thursday.

They drove to Pisa in the morning and the drive was the same drive, the same autostrada, the same landscape, the same silence, but the silence was different because it contained the question and the question was about to be answered, and the weight of the imminent answer made the silence heavier, made the landscape brighter, made the car smaller, the two of them compressed by the anticipation into a space that was barely large enough for their bodies and the question between them.

Dr. Marchetti's office was on the third floor of the oncology building.

It was a small office, a desk and two chairs and a bookshelf and a window that looked out on a courtyard where a magnolia tree was blooming, the white flowers enormous and waxy and improbably beautiful against the grey stone of the building, and Oren looked at the magnolia while Dr. Marchetti pulled up the scan images on his computer and compared them to the previous images, the current and the previous side by side on the screen like before-and-after photographs of a patina, the same surface at two different points in time.

Dr. Marchetti was a man of about sixty, silver-haired, precise, with the manner of a person who delivered difficult information frequently and who had developed a technique for it, a surface, a way of presenting the facts that was neither falsely optimistic nor gratuitously bleak but that was, in its way, a patina — a controlled surface applied to the raw data to make it bearable.

He said, The tumor has not grown.

He paused, letting this fact settle, the way a patina coat settled on the bronze before the next coat was applied.

He said, It has not shrunk significantly either. There is perhaps a marginal reduction, three to five percent, but within the margin of measurement error. Essentially stable.

Stable.

The word landed in the office like a bronze landing on a worktable after being removed from its shell — heavy, definitive, real. Stable meant the chemotherapy was working, was at least doing what the minimum expectation was, which was to prevent the tumor from growing, to hold the line, to maintain the status quo, and the status quo was not a cure and was not a resolution but was a continuation, a going-on, and going-on was, at this point, the best available outcome.

Lina said, What does this mean for the treatment.

Dr. Marchetti said, We continue. The same protocol. Every two weeks. We scan again in three months. If the tumor remains stable or shrinks further, we continue. If it grows, we consider alternatives.

Lina said, What alternatives.

Dr. Marchetti said, Different chemotherapy regimens. Possibly radiation. Possibly — and here his voice took on the quality of a patinator applying a coat he was not sure the surface could hold — surgery, if the tumor becomes resectable. But that is not the expectation. The expectation is continuation.

Continuation.

They drove home and the drive was different from the drive that morning because the question had been answered and the answer was stable and stable was not good and was not bad and was the middle, the between, the space that Oren occupied professionally — between the raw and the finished, between the bronze and the patina, between the thing as it was and the thing as it would be — and this between was familiar territory, was in fact the only territory Oren knew, and he drove through it with both hands on the wheel and the windows down and the June air blowing through and Lina beside him, stable, continuing, going on.

At home Lina made coffee.

The sound of the moka pot was the sound of normalcy, the sound of the ordinary asserting itself after the extraordinary, and Oren sat at the kitchen table and drank the coffee and the coffee was strong and good and the afternoon light was on the mountains and the mountains were the mountains, unchanged, stable, going on, and Lina sat across from him and drank her coffee and the marble fragment from the quarry was still on the table, still showing its two faces — the cut face and the weathered face, the present and the past — and between them the coffee steamed and the day continued.

Oren said, I will start the patina next week.

Lina said, Good.

He said, It will take about two weeks. The memorial first. Then the New York piece.

She said, The memorial first.

He said, The memorial first.

And this was decided, was settled, was the plan, and the plan was the armature that would hold the next weeks in their shape, and the shape was this: the patina, the green, the surface that would transform the raw bronze into the memorial that Valentina Conti had commissioned and that Margherita's garden was waiting for and that Lina wanted to see, wanted to watch being made, wanted to be present for, because the patina was the part of the process that was most Oren's, most his, the part where his skill and his knowledge and his thirty-one years of standing at a worktable with a torch and a brush converged to produce something that no formula could produce, something that required the hand and the eye and the accumulated judgment of a life spent looking at surfaces, and Lina wanted to see this, wanted to see him do the thing he did best, wanted to watch the surface come into being under his hands, and he would let her watch, chemicals be damned, oncologist be damned, because the watching was what she wanted and what she wanted was what mattered.

The scan was done.

The results were stable.

The patina was next.