She wonders now where in the hospital he might be, what floor, what room. The night nurse won’t say, perhaps so she and others don’t storm the building and rush to those floors to hold their loved ones’ hands. The nurse simply says that they are taking good care of him.
“I know,” she says, much in the way he might have. “I know you’re doing the best you can.”
She thinks that tonight on the phone she will play some of his favorite Nina Simone again. Last night she played “Wild Is the Wind” 16 times—for the 16 weeks they’ve been married. At their wedding, everyone was expecting some kind of gag, a hip-hop interlude in the middle of their first dance and his abysmal break dancing interrupting the mournful jazz, but they danced the entire seven minutes of the live recording, cheek to cheek. You kiss me. With your kiss my life begins. You’re spring to me. All things to me. Don’t you know you’re life itself ?
She could call back and ask the nurses to play the song for him right now, but the ward might be too busy during the day. Both words and melody might be muffled by the stream of hurried movements and rush to beeping machines. In any case, the night is when relief might be most needed from both his and her nightmares.
She doesn’t realize that she’s nodded off until the phone rings and in one swift movement she grabs it from the folds of the yellow duvet on their bed, while wiping the sleep from her eyes. She can hear the Creole news broadcast blasting from the radio that’s always on in her parents’ apartment as they thank her for the groceries she’s had delivered to them. When they ask how her husband is doing, she says, “Same.”
When his parents call, she asks if they want her to add them to her call to him later on that night. They could tell him stories, folk tales or family anecdotes, remind him of things he’d loved and treasured when he was a boy.
“Give him a reason to come back to us,” his mother says, summarizing what Marie-Jeanne is struggling to say.
“It’s not fully up to him, is it?” his father interrupts. He sounds distant, as though speaking from another extension, in another room, rather than on speaker on his wife’s cell phone.
“I know he wants to come back to us,” her mother-in-law says. “We’re praying all the time. I know he will.”
There’s a funeral that maybe she can help them watch online, the father says, a service for good friends who have “fallen.” He says “fallen” in such a literal way that Marie-Jeanne at first thinks his friends have slipped in the tub or on the stairs.
“We were sent a link and a password,” her mother-in-law says. She sends the link and password to Marie-Jeanne via text, along with the instructions, and somehow Marie-Jeanne manages to talk them through joining the private funeral group on their laptop. Before she hangs up, Marie-Jeanne hears her mother-in-law ask her husband, “Are you sure you can watch?”
Marie-Jeanne uses the link to connect to the service. The camera seems to be recording from a corner of the funeral home chapel’s ceiling. It’s a double funeral, a couple, married 45 years, who died three days apart. They’d been at her wedding. They contributed $200 to the honeymoon funds. They are among the oldest friends of her in-laws. The couple’s three daughters, their husbands, and four of their oldest grandchildren are sitting on chairs arranged on what looks like every other square of a giant chessboard. The two coffins are draped with identical velvet purple palls. Marie-Jeanne swipes the screen before hearing a word.
Her namesake cave is three miles long and more than a million years old. The first chamber, with the ecru-colored floor, is two stories high, he’d said. Farther in, there are chambers with stalactites shaped like the Virgin Mary and wedding cakes. Inside one of the cave’s deepest and darkest chambers, which explorers have named the Abyss, you can hear echoes of your own beating heart.
Tonight she might retell him everything he’d told her about the caves. She would remind him too of how when she seemed hesitant to “plunge in” so soon after they’d met, he asked her to pick one thing about him to focus on at a time, one thing that could make her forget everything else. Today that thing is the caves. Tomorrow it might be Nina Simone. Again. The next day, it might be the bobbing of his head when he was talking about something he loved, or how she could predict his next move by looking past the nerdy glasses and into his eyes.
The phone rings once more, and her arm instinctively reaches for it before she realizes what she’s doing. The same nurse who was trying to sound so upbeat a little while ago is now carefully parsing her words.
“I intended to mention this earlier,” the nurse says. “There are a few words meant for you on your husband’s admission file. I don’t know if they were shared with you.”
Waiting for some graver pronouncement to follow, Marie-Jeanne answers “no” in such a low voice that she has to repeat the word.
“Would you like me to read them to you?” the nurse asks.
Marie-Jeanne pauses, purposely stretching the time, so if there was some other news, she might delay it for a while. Whatever the words are, she does not want to hear them in a stranger’s voice.
That much she knows. She wants to hear herself reading them, or better yet, she wants to hear him saying them.
“I can email you a screenshot,” the nurse says. “Someone’s already taken a picture.”
“Please,” Marie-Jeanne answers.
When the email alert pops up on her cell phone, she knows even before she reads the words what they will be. Ray had written on a plain white piece of paper: “MJ, Wild Is the Wind.”
The words look as though they’d been scribbled, in a hurried cursive, with a trembling hand. “MJ” is written in a straight line, but the rest of the words glide down the paper, degenerating, in shape and size, to the point that she’s not 100 percent sure that the last word is not “Wing.”
She remembers him once telling her that inside the Marie-Jeanne cave, sounds carry weight and travel in waves strong enough to possibly crack some of the most fragile karst. She imagines herself standing at the lowest depths of this cave, in the Abyss, and hearing again what he whispered in her ear during their wedding dance. One thing, MJ. This is our one thing now.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began as an issue of The New York Times Magazine. Like every issue, especially those produced remotely since the pandemic began, it was only possible because of the hard work and dedication of the entire magazine staff. In particular we wish to recognize Caitlin Roper, Claire Gutierrez, Sheila Glaser, Rachel Willey, Gail Bichler, Kate LaRue, Ben Grandgennett, Blake Wilson, Christopher Cox, Dean Robinson, Nitsuh Abebe, Rob Hoerburger, Mark Jannot, and Lauren McCarthy. Thanks as well to Rivka Galchen, whose pitch for an essay on The Decameron was the project’s point of origin, and to Sophy Hollington, whose linotype illustrations were its point of completion. We are also indebted to Nan Graham and Kara Watson at Scribner for their support and vision; to Caroline Que, who oversees book development at The New York Times; and to Seth Fishman, of the Gernert Company, who represented this book. Most of all, we wish to express our gratitude and admiration for the 36 authors and translators who contributed to this collection with work that has helped us, in ways large and small, understand our place in a changed world.
CONTRIBUTORS
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, essayist, and poet. Her latest novel is The Testaments, and her new collection of poems is Dearly.
Mona Awad is a short-story writer and the author of the novels 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Bunny, and the forthcoming All’s Well. Born in Montreal, she currently lives in Boston.
Matthew Baker is the author of the story collection Why Visit America, out now from Henry Holt.
Mia Couto is an author and environmental biologist from Mozambique. The second novel of his Sands of the Emperor trilogy, The Sword and the Spear, was published this fall.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of many books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker; and, most recently, Everything Inside:
Stories.
Esi Edugyan is the author of Washington Black, Half-Blood Blues, and Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
Julián Fuks is a Brazilian journalist and author. His novel Resistance was published in English by Charco Press, and his latest novel, Occupation, will be published in English in 2021. He lives in São Paulo.
Rivka Galchen writes essays and fiction, most recently Rat Rule 79, a book for young readers. She lives in New York City.
Paolo Giordano is an Italian writer. His book How Contagion Works was released by Penguin/Bloomsbury, and his novel Heaven and Earth was published by Pamela Dorman/Viking Books.
Sophy Hollington is a British artist and illustrator. She is known for her use of relief prints, created using the process of the linocut and inspired by meteoric folklore as well as alchemical symbolism.
Uzodinma Iweala is a Nigerian-American writer, a medical doctor, and the chief executive of the Africa Center. He is the author of Beasts of No Nation, Our Kind of People, and Speak No Evil. He lives in New York City.
Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer whose latest story collection, Fly Already, was published in 2019.
Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, and The Mars Room. A book of essays, The Hard Crowd, will be published by Scribner next spring.
Laila Lalami is the author of The Other Americans. Her new book, Conditional Citizens, was published by Pantheon this fall. She lives in Los Angeles.
Victor LaValle is the author of seven works of fiction. His most recent novel is The Changeling. He teaches at Columbia University.
Yiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End and Must I Go.
Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, including most recently All Our Names. He is director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College in New York.
David Mitchell is the author of Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks, and Utopia Avenue. He lives in Ireland.
Liz Moore is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her fourth novel, Long Bright River, was published by Riverhead Books. She lives in Philadelphia.
Dina Nayeri is the author of The Ungrateful Refugee and Refuge. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories.
Téa Obreht is the author of the novels The Tiger’s Wife and Inland. She lives in Wyoming and serves as the endowed chair of creative writing at Texas State University.
Andrew O’Hagan is a Scottish novelist and editor at large of the London Review of Books. His novel Mayflies will be published by Faber & Faber in the spring of 2021.
Tommy Orange is the author of the novel There There. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he lives in California and teaches writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Karen Russell is an American novelist and short-story writer, most recently of Orange World and Other Stories. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Kamila Shamsie is the author of the novels Home Fire and Burnt Shadows. She grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and now lives in London.
Leïla Slimani is a French diplomat and the author of The Perfect Nanny and Adèle. She was born in Rabat, Morocco, and now lives in Paris.
Rivers Solomon is the author of An Unkindness of Ghosts, The Deep, and Sorrowland, which will be published in 2021.
Colm Tóibín is an Irish writer and the author of nine novels. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in New York.
John Wray is the author of the novels Godsend, The Lost Time Accidents, and Lowboy, and is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Mexico City.
Charles Yu is the author of four books, including his latest novel, Interior Chinatown. He lives in Irvine, California.
Alejandro Zambra is the author of My Documents and Multiple Choice, among other books. He lives in Mexico City.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-1-9821-7079-0
ISBN 978-1-9821-7080-6 (ebook)
The Decameron Project Page 17