She saw it from a distance, like a reef, the whitened glimpse of danger. She was frightened by the idea of age, she could too easily imagine it, she searched daily for its signs, first in the harsh light from the window, then, turning her head slightly to erase some of the severity, stepping back a little, saying to herself, this is as close as people come.Her father in distant Pennsylvania towns already had within him the anarchy of cells that announced itself by a steady cough and a pain in his back. Three packs a day for thirty years; he coughed as he admitted it. He needed something, he decided.“We’ll take some x-rays,” the doctor had said. “Just to see.”Neither of them was there when the negatives were thrown up before the wall of light, dealt into place as rippling sheets, and in the ghostly darkness the fatal mass could be seen, as astronomers see a comet.The doctor was called in; it took only a glance. “That’s it, all right,” he said.The usual prognosis was eighteen months, but with the new machines, three years, sometimes four.
