Degrees of Nakedness by Lisa Moore Page A

sentences, faltering.
    She thinks of memory only as a muscle that must be exercised to keep the whole mind sharp. She is interested in sharpness. If asked, she can recall exactly what she did on any date two years before. She will remember what she wore, what Julian wore, what they ate, the content of any conversation that occurred on that day. But this is just a game.
    Marika thinks about infinite tracts of time, about meteorology, about hummingbirds, about measuring the erosion of coastlines, and whether the continents could still lock together like a jigsaw puzzle, or a jaw grinding in sleep. She thinks about the Tower of Babel, or about fish that swim up the walls of fjords as if the walls were the lake bottom. What such swimming against the stream does to their skeletons. When she isn’t thinking things like this, she watches soap operas, or drives in her car, or she and Julian make love.
    Julian has watched Marika simulate theoretical galaxies on the computer. She has found this program mostly to amuse him. He has seen two galaxies blinking together, dragging their sluggish amorphous bodies toward each other across the black screen. Each blink represents a million years, until they pass through each other. The gravitational pull of each galaxy affects the shape of the other until some stars are clotted in the centre, and the rest spread on either side of the screen like giant butterfly wings. Marika has shown him thousands of things like this. She has described the path of the plague in the Middle Ages, drawing a map on a paper napkin at a donut shop. She told him that in Egypt they have found the preserved body of a louse, on the comb of Nefertiti. A drop of human blood, perhaps Nefertiti’s blood, was contained in the abdomen of the louse. They have discovered many things about ancient disease from that drop of blood.
    Julian collects the stories Marika tells him, although they often lose their scientific edges. He can’t remember how old the louse was. For some reason the only thing he remembers about the plague is a medical costume, a long robe with the head of a bird. The doctor looked out through two holes cut in the black feathered hood, over a protruding beak.
    When he is awake, Julian pursues the morals of these stories, something other than what lies on the surface. Just as he can’t imagine how much time it took to create the universe from a black hole, he can’t get at that hidden meaning.
    Recently Marika contracted a virus that caused a nervous disorder. If not diagnosed, this disease can spread quickly through the body and destroy the tips of all nerve endings irreparably. It started with a numbness in Marika’s left cheek. She had it checked immediately. Of course, she had access to the best medical care in Toronto. The disease was arrested before any serious damage was done, but the nerves in Marika’s saliva ducts grew back connected to one of her tear ducts. Now when she eats her left eye waters.
    Julian has begun to suspect that Marika doesn’t talk about her past because she is afraid she will seem like an old woman. It was her eye, filling of its own accord, that started him thinking this way. The eye is the first sign of Marika’s age. When her eye waters he’s filled with fright. That fright causes its own involuntary response in him. He’s remembering things he hasn’t thought about in years. He has noticed that the skin on Marika’s face looks older than before. The pores are larger. There are more wrinkles. The soft white pouches beneath her eyes are larger. That skin seems as vulnerable to him as the flesh of a pear he is about to bite.
    He was going through their wedding photographs. Julian took them himself, so most of the pictures are of Marika. She is wearing a white silk jacket, cut like a lab coat, and the apartment is full of white blossoms. Her face looks so much younger that for a moment he has the feeling the photographs have been doctored.
    They’re eating a dinner of