Dry Ice Read Free

new chairs opposite the water feature. Despite the profusion of blood—the glimmering mess covered his hands, arms, and face as well as the front of his shirt, his fleece vest, and his trousers from the knees up—he seemed reasonably serene.
        The waiting room was having the effect that Diane so cherished—for Kol her design intervention seemed to be having an anxiolytic impact equivalent to high-dose beta-blockers or IV Valium.
        "I tried to wash up," Kol said without looking at me. Although he sometimes glanced toward my face, his gaze never settled higher than my mouth.
        On closer examination, the rosy mess on his delicate hands and arms did appear to be diluted. I was still thinking I don't need this, but I was also reflexively preparing to try to do something useful, even—well—therapeutic.
        I reminded myself of a lesson from my distant internship training in a psychiatric ER: The single most important thing to do during an emergency is to take one's own pulse. After that? In the current circumstances I had no idea. I didn't know whether Kol needed a seventy-two-hour hold, an ambulance, stitches, or a big roll of Brawny.
        "Are you still bleeding?"
        "No," he said.
         Okay. "Is that . . . your blood?" The alternative was worrisome.
        "Yes."
        I was somewhat mollified. I put on a serious, concerned expression and said, "Kol? Are you all right? Don't you think you need to . . . maybe see a doctor? That's a lot of blood."
       He said, "You are a doctor, Dr. Gregory."
       Kol had me there.

THREE

    I HAD misread the early clues.
        Over the first couple of days of the previous week the musical soundtrack that accompanied the bustling early-evening family time in our house had traveled from the familiar territory of the White Stripes, Oasis, and Neko Case to a surprising but far from disquieting pause at the second and third U2 albums. After Bono's extended cameo the musical selections moved back in time to Joni Mitchell, the young Van Morrison, Dusty Springfield, the Doors, Don McLean, and then on a particularly wacky turn, to Leonard Cohen— Leonard Cohen? —before settling for a couple of evenings on a repetitive set of Erik Satie interspersed with some alluring tracks from Tord Gustavsen.
        Other artists made brief appearances. Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash each got two-song auditions in advance of dinner one day, and a Keith Jarrett piano improvisation lasted all of five minutes late the next afternoon while Lauren was deveining shrimp for stir-fry. John Coltrane didn't even get to finish introducing a haunting little melody before he was banished into the digital ether as I was loading the dishwasher after supper.
        Although I recognized that changes were occurring in the score that accompanied our lives' pulse—Leonard Cohen's laments as counterpoint to the delight of my daughter's bath time was a contrast that was hard to ignore—I was too intent on trying to force the data into the confines of my experience to see it for what it really was.
        Since her previous birthday my wife, Lauren, had become the family DJ. Why? She had a new iPod. Although I was the gift-giver, I didn't share her enthusiasm for the device; I had only recently started feeling comfortable with CDs.
        Lauren moved into the digital world without me. Her wireless network humming, she'd curl up with her laptop in our bed in the evening and download songs and develop playlists in the quiet hours after Grace was in bed. All that was left for her to do was to stick the iPod into a slot in front of a pair of speakers and we would have music coursing through the house.
        The tracks she plucked from her iPod's inventory hinted at her moods. The better she was feeling—pick a category: about life, about her health, about work, about her husband— the more contemporary and upbeat was the music she chose. The more troubled or reflective she