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.