"I'm just thinking of something a guy said to me today in the shop. We were making small talk, and I asked him how he was doing. He gave me a funny look and said, you know what the answer is to that, don't you? And I said, no, what's the answer? And he said, it's how many toys you got when you die. They can have wheels, buttons, skirts . . . it doesn't matter. Just how many you got on the day you croak."

"You liked that, did you?"

"The guy's an asshole, but yeah. I did. How many toys. I can think of worse ways to measure."

"You got toys, Frank?"

"You know I do." He winked at me, pulled out his wallet and handed me a foil-covered package nestled between two bills. "Safety first, Marty boy. You find her in the dirt, who knows? Maybe she's dirty."

So that was Frank's advice. After he left, I called my sister Carol to complete the family poll. She was on her way to bed, a ritual to be disturbed only on pain of death. She promised to stop by in the morning, which she did, arriving on the dot at seven, dressed for work in a snappy, tailored suit. She took one look at the girl and pulled a phone out of her purse, which she pushed at me.

"Call 911, you jerk."

To my credit, the thought had occurred to me, but the truth was I didn't want to. No doubt this is why I'd called Frank first.

"She's breathing," I said defensively. "How bad can it be?"

"She's breathing. Terrific. Jesus, Marty."

I decided not to mention that she hadn't been breathing before.

"Does she have a pulse?"

"Sure she has a pulse," I said, thinking I don't even know if she has a heart. "She's sleeping."

"Have you tried to wake her up?"

"Carol. Please. I would never wake a sleeping lady. You yourself taught me that."

"Get off it, Martin." She took the girl's wrist and felt for a pulse, then slapped the back of her hand a few times. She spoke in a loud voice. She slapped her cheek.

"Get her to a doctor, Marty. If you aren't willing to call an ambulance, then take her yourself."

I suppose, at heart, this is what I wanted to hear. Sheepishly, I asked Carol to come with me.

"Can't. Got a meeting at eight." She checked her watch, pecked me on the cheek, and hurried out the basement door. A minute later she was back. Irritated but stalwart. My sister. Loyal to the core.

"Let's do it," she said.

"You're the best, Carol, but go on. I can handle it." "You sure?"

I nodded. "I got the whole family behind me. Check it out: you say I should get help, Mom says I should marry her, Frank says I should fuck her. I can't lose. Anything I do is bound to be right."

THE PROBLEM OF CONCEALMENT.

I solved with a blanket, wrapping her loosely, then sliding her in the back of my pickup and securing her with some bungee cords. At the hospital I swiped a gurney without being seen, hoisted her on top, unwrapped her, and wheeled her inside. Because she had no ID and no insurance, they didn't want to take her. I said I'd vouch for her: they looked at me with dried-up pity and shook their heads. I said she was homeless. They rolled their eyes. Was she a city resident? they asked. A native, I replied. Tenth generation (it was a wild guess). Deeply rooted in our illustrious past. They looked at me suspiciously. They looked at her. At length they sighed. Cash or credit? they asked.

We spent a total of six hours in the emergency room, complicated by the fact they couldn't get that brownish covering of hers off. Someone suggested it might be part of her skin, which prompted a call to the dermatologist, who came and discoursed at length on epidermal proliferation, psoriasis, ichthyosis, and generalized melasma, none of which, in his opinion, this was. Blood was taken from a vein in her foot, and all the tests came back normal. A chest x-ray and electrocardiogram showed nothing out of the ordinary. A scan of her brain showed brain. Because they could not find an opening in her bodysuit, they could not get urine, but some of her hair was sent to be screened for heavy metal poisoning. They tested everything they could, and then they called a neurologist.

His name was Dr. Aymen. He had salt-and-pepper hair parted on the side, a deeply tanned face, a prominent jaw. He wore a blue bow tie, and his knee-length lab coat was stiffly starched. His manner, by contrast, was smooth as butter. The other doctors treated him with deference, clumping around the gurney and observing in silence as he poked and prodded the patient. When he was done, he took a half-step back, slid his hands deep in the pockets of his lab coat, and struck a professorial pose.

"Thoughts?" he said.

There was a flurry of them. Encephalopathy, involutional melancholy, prolonged atonic epilepsy, drug overdose: I jotted down what I could, but I missed more than I got. All at once, Dr. Aymen seemed to notice me. He introduced himself, absorbed my name, then politely asked me to leave.

"I'll stay out of the way," I promised.

"Our suppositions are far-flung," he explained. "And strictly conjectural. They are easy to misinterpret. It would be a grave disservice to you if your hopes were falsely raised, or, worse, prematurely dashed. So please. Allow me a few moments alone with my colleagues."

He seemed a nice enough fellow, earnest if somewhat pompous, but I had no intention of leaving. Again, I promised not to interfere.

He regarded me sternly, then inclined his head. "As you wish."

Turning his back to me, he swept out of the room, followed immediately by his retinue of admirers. Twenty minutes later he returned.

"Speculation is inherent in medicine," he told me. "The possibilities of cause are, in every case, protean. This is both challenge and thrill for the diagnostician, but to others the process often makes us seem cold, if not downright callous. Please accept my apologies if such was the case. We are human beings like any other."

I thanked him. "So what does she have? Do you know?"

"Possibly." He glanced at her, then fixed his attention on me. "Are you sure you've left nothing out?"

The implication was clear, and simply by asking, he made it a fact that I had. I thought back. The dirt? The worm in her hair? Family advice?

"No," I said. "Nothing."

He waited, giving me time to reconsider. I didn't need time.

"What's going on, Doctor?"

"THE THEORY,"

he said, "is hard to explain. Suffice it to say, there's definitely a literature on this. It seems that intact bodies are turning up all the time. There's actually a registry somewhere. I suggest we send a specimen of the patient's DNA for fingerprinting. Perhaps there's someone on file who's been lost. Or who's missing. Perhaps in this way we could identify her."

"Okay. Sure. But what does she have?"

He gave me a patronizing look. "What you really want to know is, what can be done."

"I want to know if you've ever seen anything like this." "Certainly," he said.

"Someone buried in dirt?"

"Young man. In forty years I've seen diseases and afflictions beyond your wildest dreams. The range of human pathology, not to mention survivability, is nothing short of miraculous. Our ability to down-regulate vital functions, to enter at need into vegetative states, prolonged metaphases if you will . . . "

His soliloquy, which I barely understood, was interrupted by one of the other doctors, who handed him some papers held together by a clip.

"Yes," he said. "Good. Just as I recalled." He perused the papers, mumbling to himself, nodding. "You made copies for the others?"

"Yes," said the doctor.

"Excellent." Dr. Aymen addressed me. "This is an article . . . " He halted a moment, then resumed with an air of gravity and subtle condescension. "A scientific article comparing the efficacy of three regimens for the revival of found bodies. Cohort study, two-year follow-up, morbidity, mortality, proposed mechanisms . . . all of it. You see, young man, we are not living in the Dark Ages. We are not charlatans, nor do we operate by sleight of hand. No, no." He wagged a finger. "We adhere to science. The language we speak is strictly the language of reproducible results."

So saying, he pulled a pad from his pocket and scribbled out a prescription. "Two in the morning, two at bedtime. In a week increase it to three."

"What is it?"

He said a name so rapidly I didn't get it, handed me his business card with instructions to call for a follow-up appointment, and started out of the room. This put me in something of a panic.

"When's bedtime?" I asked. "She hasn't woken up yet."

He dismissed this with a flip of his hand. "Bedtime, nighttime, it doesn't matter. Just get it in her. The young lady should perk right up."

As it turned out, she didn't. On the other hand, she didn't get any worse. Carol was satisfied a doctor was involved. Frank suggested I try something more direct, more, as he put it, "physically stimulating." My mother, bless her heart, had forgotten everything.

THE KISS.

was something I considered for days. It seemed the obvious thing to do, called for in some intuitive way, but in the end I decided against it, feeling at once virtuous, sexually repressed, and utterly confused. It was a vexing situation, so much so that this is what I began calling her. The closest I came to her lips was spreading them apart with my thumb and finger to pour the pills, which I dissolved in water, down her throat. I returned to the ditch, digging out and piling up dirt. When I got deep enough, I built the forms for the foundation, laid the rebar, and poured the concrete. By then it was three weeks since our visit to the hospital. Vexing slept on. I started on the framing. Her hair was black as coal. Foot plates, joists, studs. Eyelids like butterflies. Headers, rafters. Skin, clothed in parchment, like milk.

"OUR ARMAMENTARIUM is vast," said Dr. Aymen, with the sweep of an arm that seemed to take in as potential allies not just the books and equipment that were in his own office but all information and knowledge that lay beyond as well. "If one pill doesn't work, we try another. It's what's called an empirical approach."

I heard only two words in that. Armamentarium, which brought to mind epic battles on dusty, medieval plains, and empirical, which made me think this guy doesn't have a clue. It was time to stand up for Vexing, who remained incapable of standing up for herself.

"What's this new drug?" I asked.

There was an edge to my voice, and he shot me a glance. Then he leaned back in his chair and bridged his fingers. He appeared to be thinking. Maybe he was. At length he mumbled something to himself and unclipped his pen. Barely looking down, he scribbled out a prescription.

"Start with two at night, go to three if no change in a week, four if no change in two. After that it's up to you. You can split the dose, give two in the morning and three at night, or you can reverse that, give three in the AM and two in the PM, but under no circumstance must you increase more than twenty milligrams in any four-day period, unless you are prepared to watch assiduously for side effects, which of course you should do anyway. And call me."

"Call you?"

"If there's a problem."

I was reeling with his instructions. "What side effects?"

"The usual. Nausea, CI upset, headache, dizziness, twitchy muscles, sudden death." He let that sink in, then dismissed it with a bizarre smile. "Just kidding. But not really. I mention it only to assure you that it's very rare."

"What's the name of this drug?"

"Three, 5 dihydroxy, gamma-endoperoxide PGD. It goes by the trade name Resusinol."

"I've never heard of it."

"Are you a doctor, sir? A pharmacist, perhaps?"

"I work in a drugstore."

"Indeed."

I didn't tell him that the counter I worked was at the opposite end of the store from the pharmacy. I was angry.

"Do you have experience with it, Doctor? Have you used it before?"

"It's an excellent choice," he said. "I have no doubt it will be equal to the task."

"That's what you said about the first one."

He suffered me a look, then took a moment to compose himself.

"I realize your impatience, but understand. All things take time. This is Nature's decree, not ours. There are many conditions whose duration we can predict with great accuracy. Coma, unfortunately, is not one of them. An encephalopathic child may sleep for a day or a week. He may sleep for a year. Your young lady will awaken when she is ready. No sooner. No later." He paused, then added, "With or without drugs, I suspect."

"Then why give any?"

He smiled and stood up, indicating the end of the visit. "Because it's our nature to try. Because you, like us, like everyone, want to be able to fix what's hurt. Because sadly, we're too old for Band-Aids."

A week passed, then another. The cabin took shape, and the smell of fresh wood banished the smell of rot. I framed in a window facing east and one on the opposite side facing west. I had views of English ivy, pine trees, my neighbors' houses, my neighbors. From the roof I could see the bay. I roughed in the front door the third week of June. That Saturday, Midsummer's Day, Vexing woke up.

She stretched. She yawned. A moment later she sat up.

"I feel wonderful," she said. "I love naps."

Her voice was rough from disuse. The sound of it, and the sight of her awake, made me giddy.

"Naps? You've been asleep forever."

"Have I?" She took a few tentative steps. "Well, then I feel even better."

She spun around, arms outspread. Her hair fanned out. She laughed.

"And I suppose I owe it all to you."

I ducked my head. "Shucks. All I did was dig you out." "You're a miner?"

"Not really." I stopped myself. "Sure. Why not. In this case, I guess I am."

Her chest swelled, and she let out a sigh. Her face seemed to catapult into some dream.

"God," she said. "I love miners."

She came to me. She smelled of dry leaves. She wrapped her arms around my waist.

"I guess that means I love you."

What can a man want in a woman? Good manners, good looks, good brains, good sex. Vexing had it all. To boot, she kept telling me how she'd never been so happy. When we made love, she said she forgot who she was.