I follow the sexton up a broad veined marble staircase. The next room we enter is considerably wider, more spacious than the first, and there is a handsome dresser in the corner with a jug full of bright orange marigolds. Here, in yet another hospital bed — this time with the rails down — lies my grandmother, exactly as I had last seen her — skinny, beak-nosed, sharp-eyed and eminently Louisa-like.

“You’ve passed the test. That’s why they let you come up here. You didn’t believe the black box, did you?”

“No, Grandma.”

“This is me. Or is it ‘I’? That always confused me in English.”

It suddenly strikes me that I could be dead, too; or that maybe everyone is both dead and not dead, alive and not alive — depending on the dimension one happens to be occupying at the moment. Or maybe we’re all no more than billions of mechanical talking boxes to be sloughed off in some eternal lunatic asylum called Hades or Hell, Sheol or Gehennah, Elysian Fields or Paradise — depending on our religious persuasion.

“Are you … are you comfortable, Grandma?”

“No. But was I ever comfortable … anywhere? That’s the way it is. Like here, like there, like everywhere.” She tries gesturing with her pitifully thin arms, but the effort is too great and she lets them fall back on the bed cover.

“Can I do something for you? Talk to the landlord?”

Louisa doesn’t answer me at first. She gazes toward the window as if searching for a tree-lined street somewhere.

“It never stops … the wanting … that’s the problem.”

I’m not sure I heard her correctly, so I repeat, “Can I do something for you?”

“Actually, yes,” she turns her alarmingly intelligent eyes on me. “Yes,” she says, “tell your father to pray for my soul. Tell him.” Then she adds, “And you pray for me, too. Never mind that nonsense about women not counting in a minyan…”

For a moment I think Louisa might be referring to her Kabbalist forbears’ belief that prayers for the dead release wandering souls for reincarnation into a higher sphere on the Tree of Life. It then occurs to me that she isn’t referring to religion at all, but to poetry, hoping that even a woman’s prayers, murmured in dutiful haste, might rescue hers from the purgatory of the forgotten.