For Kings and Planets by Ethan Canin

Author:Ethan Canin [Canin, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83132-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

XX

The next day he walked out to the cove with a pad of paper. He was supposed to be studying.

Dear M,

I have some news.

It sounded abrupt. He tried again:

M—

I’ve been meaning to write for a while. How are you?

He tried:

Dear Marshall—

It’s been so long, and I wanted to let you know what’s happening here. I’m sitting at the edge of Long Island Sound.

The heron stood watching him. He crumpled the paper and sat still on the log, thinking of Simone. He wondered if she’d talked to David yet and what she would say. She’d left yesterday, right after dinner, which they’d eaten on a lawn near the bus station, her hand in his as it grew dark. But nothing else had happened; he’d felt an exquisite restraint. Now, as he sat on the log, he thought of her shoulder through her dress, on the path in front of him. He would write Marshall later, he decided, when the words came more easily. In front of him the heron had resumed its foraging. He watched it. After a time he stood, pulled off his shoes, and walked down to the edge of the water. He waded into the shallows, where the great bird eyed him, now and then blinking its wary eye. Occasionally it lifted its wings, but he moved very slowly and eventually it grew calm; he had always been good with animals. Its beak returned to the water, picking at the silt. He was able to approach within a few feet, from where he could see the odd, ancient-looking legs and the oily waterproofing of the wing feathers. Next time Simone was here he would show it to her like this, wading out into the still inlet. There was sweet mystery to the world; there was rapture in the small things around him.

———

The day before his physiology exam, he took out his textbooks. He was supposed to be studying the circulatory system, and though it was elegant in theory, the details quickly overwhelmed him. He glanced through the pages—the complex passageways of blood, arterioles and venules and capillaries; the efficient, interlinked lungs; the extraordinary heart. His thoughts drifted, to Simone on the steps of the bus; to the huge elms outside the Methodist Church in Cook’s Grange—the first time in weeks he’d thought of home. He stopped on a page showing the opened ventricles: the two sides, right and left, with their different duties—at once too elegant for chance and yet too complicated for God. It was too miraculous to learn the way he knew he was supposed to. He was supposed to memorize the formulas for stroke volume and oxygen exchange; instead he gazed out the windows into the maples.

At last by evening his fear overcame him, and he stayed awake late into the night making flash cards. By morning he was thinly prepared, but he had at least read through all the pages; when he walked into the testing room he felt that with luck he could get through it.

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