When Margaret Hughes found out she had a brain tumor, she stared at the black-and-white images illuminated on the screen behind her physician’s desk – “slices,” he called them. She was surprised to see that her brain looked like two halves of a desiccated walnut.

Language left him gradually, a bit at a time. One would expect words to depart predictably, in reverse order – the way a row of knitting disappears, stitch by stitch, when the strand of working yarn is tugged off the needle – but that was not the case. Cody’s earliest and most used words – mama, daddy – were the first to go, while more recent acquisitions lingered. Eventually though, all of his words abandoned him.

It’s so hard to explain what the dead really want. Not to be alive again, heavens no, never that: a passenger buckled into that depreciating vehicle of the body, that cramped one-seater with it structural flaws and piss-poor mileage, its failures and betrayals its worn, nonfunctioning, irreplaceable parts. Even the body’s sensual ecstasies don’t have any allure for the dead, not anymore.

There are necessaries for our journey. Like soldiers, we must assemble a kit.

Small tins of herbs and spices; torn scraps of fine, variegated silk, its yellows the marigolds of India, but of British cowslips too, and trefoil; a manuscript, its pages lightly bound by one of those scraps; a small copper cooking vessel; a pair of wooden clubs with an elegant, attenuated shape; pieces from a child’s jigsaw puzzle; an English translation of Gitanjali by Rabinath Tagore bearing a handwritten inscription.

This inventory fits neatly into a Gladstone bag, bearing the monogram EMJ.

Objects can acquire tremendous power, as you know, becoming talismans, protections, relics. There are times to hold them close; times to let them go.

Centered on our foreheads we wear a colored dot, a bindi. Its color – a deep, brownish maroon – suggests an admixture of mud and blood from No-Man’s-Land. It identifies us as seekers, travelers.

In medicine, the cartography of the face is described in three ways – superficial, muscular, and skeletal; it offers labels that are both obvious (tear trough, chin boss, marionette line) and obscure (glabella, ala, and philtrum). Make use of those labels if they serve; if not, invent others.

Above all, believe the wisdom of the sages: that whatever imperfections or irregularities you perceive will save you. That the wound is the gift.

            Your face, an entire countryside, its own nation. The country you were born into.

A land that you carry, wherever you go. Name it what you will.

*

I have inhabited three identities in my life. At the outset, I am called Enid.