The eclipse is always. It never goes away.
Astronomers deploy to sections of the globe to insert themselves into the path of totality. The shadow slides over them on the drive gears of planetary motion. Orbits dictated by Kepler, Riemann, and Einstein expose corona and prominence. Violent plasma vortices swirl to nothingness. These structures can be seen only in the dark the moon provides, for four minutes, when the tables in the ephimeris coincide with your heartbeat in the shadow.
It leaves the earth. The shadow is always darkening something, somewhere. Always drifting, sinuous through spacetime.
It's a vector you could calculate.
If you wanted.
You don't.
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Rosabelle held the key under her tongue, then passed it to her chained husband when she kissed him for luck. No one saw.
Then they threw him overboard. He always escaped the iron locks and boxes nailed shut. There was never a doubt. He could dislocate his shoulders and pass his hips between his bound wrists. He could hold his breath for minutes. He could focus his intention in an energy beam that split the very idea he could be held. Luck was always on his side. Nothing was left to chance.
Rosabelle was surprised I asked for an NGT. Nobody asks for an NGT. It's like asking for a root canal with no anesthesia.
I didn't know it at the time, but it was going to save my life.
"Are you sure?" she said.
"Yeah," I replied, because the pressure in my stomach was unbearable even with my blood full of IV injectable narcotics. Because I couldn't stop my mind from calculating. How can this be fixed?
A nasal-gastro-tube is shoved into your nostril, up into your sinus, and then as the medical professional pushes it inward, it follows the curve of the inside of your sinus until it winds up descending the back of your throat, into your esophagus, and finally into our stomach. First, it feels like suffocation. Then it feels like you've swallowed raw acid. These sensations subside while you get used to it.
"How do you feel?" Rosabelle asked, when she had pushed the tube all the way past my pyloric valve.
"Great," I said. "Good job."
Rosabelle's nursing assistant looked on, taking notes. Rosabelle told her she'd have to do the next one herself.
"Ever had one of these?" I asked the nursing student. She shook her head.
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Today things are changing. They do every day, but also today. There is an annular eclipse outside my window. Shadows all look like the circular sun. My own shadow is blurry, like there are a whole bunch of suns, integrated over the circumference of the circle, summed and shot from 93,000,000 miles to get here in 8 light minutes.
These things were true before I was born, and will be true after I'm gone. I just visited for a while.
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I tell Rosabelle the nurse that her name is the same as the wife of Harry Houdini. She doesn't know who Houdini is so none of my story is of any use.
I have never run into anyone named Rosabelle before, and I have not since.
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So many things are happening in the world. Middle east. Ukraine. Eclipse right here, now.
And Bob's Burgers got serious. They had two poignant shows, almost in a row. I wonder if they're now mixing comedy with real life, which isn't always funny, but the basis for everything we love.
My wife cried at Bob's Burgers last night. I was teary too.
Because it reminds me of reality, now. The plight of others brings tears. Whether it be Ukranian, Russian, Israeli, Palestinian, African, Indonesian - as I get older fighting for life, I see the fight for life in everyone and everything around me. I feel I have no right to harm anything while I myself am vulnerable.
I suspect I will survive this bout with cancer.
And then what?
Then I have a lot to pay back. Then things will be different again.
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Rosabelle saved my life but she didn't know it. Houdini's wife never saved his - he was always going to come back. He didn't need saving.
Until he did.