The Judas Glass by Michael Cadnum

chair in her room, the staff of Herrick allowing flowers, although the rules were against it. And it was like watching a person go to sleep, but a bad sleep, nothing pretty. Drowned-looking, at one point during the vigil she spoke. She looked up at me, possibly recognizing me, and asked, “Is it Easter?”
    She was puzzled, I suppose, by all the flowers, the colors she could make out without her glasses on. And later I would tempt myself with the consolation that it was for her, the one, main holiday, the open door, the easement, the way out. From that moment I never respected my father as much as I had before.
    Glass crunched under Stella’s feet. This was something I could not change, a page I could not turn. The people around me could not see what I did, looking up now at the sky. This pregnant woman I did not really know very well, despite our years of association, was calling to me to hang on, hauling at my jacket, trying to awaken me from what I knew was a kind of justice. Not punishment, but right.
    â€œBe careful,” I said again.
    I was echoing the last coherent words I had spoken, and having found them plausible enough when I could still think, I uttered them when I barely could open my eyes to look.
    I would describe a last insight, a prayer, a loving memory. But there was in me an empty certitude. Everything solemn, everything profane, was gone. If there was a thought at all it was of Rebecca, not as a person—I could not form a clear memory any longer. Not even as a creature with a name.
    But as a conviction—that she had gone ahead of me. Into this.

Part Two

14
    I could move my tongue.
    Just a little, pressing it against the ridges of my palate. My tongue had a life of its own, an inquisitive gastropod.
    I was somewhere safe. Very safe. And very quiet. Every thought was heavy, and I let myself drift, encouraged that people would take care of me now.
    I tried to remember the ambulance. I tried to invent the memory of a surgeon, intelligent, helpful men and women. This taste in my mouth must be anesthesia. I’ll open my eyes in just a few seconds. Just a few more — I’m gathering my strength .
    I let myself drowse.
    The first time I looked through a microscope was on a summer afternoon, using the big olive-green Bausch & Lomb scope my father kept under a cloth on his desk. My father had been a distant man, but kind, in an impersonal way, as though trusting that something in my chromosomes would guide me where I had to go. He was, however, visibly pleased that hot day when I asked him to show me something under the microscope, and he came back into the study smelling like someone who had been making sandwiches—there was a smell of onions about him, which was explained when I saw the membrane of onion skin on the microscope slide.
    He touched the transparent skin with iodine, and the entire membrane was transfused. He rotated the lenses to get the power he wanted, and then turned to me and said, “There you go.”
    It took a moment to see into the tube, and not at its side, or at the obscuring filter of my own eyelashes. At last the disk of light was clear, and even more distinctively patterned when I touched the focus dial.
    I saw a city. The buildings, seen from above, were rectangles, worn, or crafted, into modestly irregular patterns, like pueblos, or drawings of biblical towns. There was no single identical geometry to the long, corral-like shapes of this village, and yet there was a general similarity, so that after even a moment or two one could sketch a typical structure, locate its purple-stained center, and describe the thickness of the walls.
    We were made of these little prisons, flush to each other, wall to wall. Life consisted of confines. It was constructed of prisons, tiny castles. What could not define itself was so much fluid. To live was to be a fortress.
    I felt my teeth with my tongue.
    It had its own life, this searching morsel, probing. Soon I