everywhere. going everywhere.

What We Shoot When We’re at War

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2010

8:47 p.m.

The radiologist fingered the mouse, moving the picture back and forth to illustrate it from various angles. His hand guided the mouse over the square rubber pad, clicking to give us sharper views of the spot. There was an uncomfortable silence that weighed on us in the room, my oncologist, my wife, the radiologist, and me. A strange inarticulacy had certainly come over my wife, Emily, and I. Moreover, while we were being shown the results from the CT scan, there was the feeling of being unable to look at one another. It felt like we were a little embarrassed by the disease and shamed by our own response to it having come back again. We were totally unprepared. We didn’t think it’d come back in the lungs. Shamed because we naively believed that the cancer would stay in my abdomen and pelvis (where it was originally diagnosed). How dare it move around to other parts of my body? How dare it change the way I know the disease? How dare it thrust upon us this new, terrible experience? The more he zoomed in, the more we blushed. My ears grew warm. My wife’s face flushed. It was like we’d been made fools by the tiny bit of remission we’d experienced; made fools by, in remission, falling back into some naive position, taking for granted the power of the disease; and now, awash with the news, we were ashamed to look one another in the eyes. I’d convinced myself of health. She’d convinced me of health. We’d convinced one another. It wasn’t so much a deceit we’d played with, but it certainly wasn’t the truth of things. We let the cool waters of remission bathe us and invigorate us. My initial thought, staring at the new images, was to damn myself right to hell for the stupidity for which I’d hoped remission was forever, a state of being we’d forever be able to swim in.

            Breaking the silence that weighed on us, the radiologist asked, “See here? See how they’re along the edge of the lung?”  He moved the image around to illustrate, from another point of view, the extent to which the cancer had dug in to the soft tissue cells of my right lung.

A couple of days ago my oncologist, Dr. V—, told me bluntly and very simply, “Two spots. Right lung.” I remember sitting on the examining bed and growing very warm and sick. I wanted to cry, but there was the sense that I’d forgotten how to do it. I began to think, as he was telling me more about the recurrence, that I didn’t really know how to cry. I wondered if it was truly involuntary because if there was any time to cry then this was the moment to do it. I grew angry. I know actors can make themselves cry, but it is fake. It’s not really crying. And I sat there listening to him, now a ludicrous mouthful of noises — like Charlie Brown’s teacher — and I thought about crying, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I was angry and sad. I was sick and tired. A lump was growing in my throat and there was a tightening in my chest. I peeked over at Emily, who was sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed, across from the doctor. By “peeked” I mean I looked over at her like she was a stranger on a bus, interested in knowing what they were doing but couldn’t just turn my head to see what was what. It was a moment when she ceased to be my wife at all or even somebody I knew. The whole peeking out the corner of the eye at her made me feel terrible. The tightening in my chest grew worse. I thought I’d have to tear my shirt off for breathe. I wanted to cry or to do something that gave the illusion of caring, an outward depiction of care for self; but, alas, nothing. The lump in my throat throbbed. Emily was crying. She just let it go when he told us. She wasn’t sobbing or anything, but tears were freely running from her eyes. She was asking him questions even, not afraid to be crying, to have tears run freely from her eyes. She had no tissues to clean up her face so she just let it all pour down her face. Finally, after some time, the doctor had handed her a box of tissues of which she took a couple. She’d been able to stay rationale and coherent even in the process of shedding tears. I think I was sitting there beyond ruddy, grown mute, hearing but not hearing. I was incoherent at best.

What was so ridiculous about it is that it’s nothing new. I’ve been dealing with cancer for three years now. I’ve been beating it pretty soundly. At the beginning of the first go-round, three years ago, I was told I had four months to live. Then I had two chemotherapy bombing campaigns and surgery. I was suddenly clean. I was in a kind of remission for 22 months, until in August of 2009, when the same doctor said, “Spot in pelvis, about this big.” He held up his index finger and thumb, measuring about an inch. “Surgery will take care of it.” So surgery it was. They opened me up and extracted the stuff.

If one were keeping score it would be Cancer: 2, Me: 2.

And yet, here we are. “Two spots. Right lung.” It’s not the pelvis anymore. It’s more serious, I suppose. It’s the lung. The place that takes in all the air you have and then disperses it through the blood to all the other parts of your body. It’s now the new host to the same knockout, lights-out treatment. Four rounds of Ifosfamide and Doxorubicin. It’s like killing daisies with a nuclear bomb. The insurgency of my cancer has come back with a vengeance.

If one were keeping score it would be Cancer: 3, Me: 2.

I’ve barely recovered from my surgery in November of this past year. I’m probably about 15 pounds underweight, and my wife and I were looking at the new cancer in my body. It was a startling image. We were looking at the sum total of rebel cells that are multiplying on their own accord, radicalizing without rhyme or reason like the insurgents in Iraq who could harness and disperse terror but couldn’t secure a path to the airport. It was mindless and random. There they were. We looked, hunched forward, peered: two gray smudges pulsating either from the life they lived or the static quality of the screen we watched them on – a couple of grey blotches on the black canvas of space known as “my right lung.” It looked like the New York metropolitan area by night from space – a web of lights, a grid of circuits. I was going to tell my wife that, but I didn’t. She stared into the monitor. She stared so hard that it seemed as if she thought she could bore into the meaning of it with her gaze.

There’s a strange feeling of being removed from the thing being studied even though there you are, in hi-def, on the screen of a computer in a back room of an oncologist’s office. There’s actually two of you: the old you (August scan) in one screen and the new you (most recent scan) on another screen. There’s you, your lungs, two spots of cancer. There’s your wife and your oncologist and your radiologist. There’s the computer, the double screens, the spots and the rest of your life. There’s the reality of intense chemotherapy dawning on you, beginning to gnaw on the back of your brain like feedback in a Jimi Hendrix song. “And so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually …” you think briefly, before your doctor, adding to your own disbelief, acts surprised. He is saying, “Yeah. They’re bigger than I first imagined.” He’s sucking in air like he’d spilled milk and was waiting for his mother to scold him.

In my body cells are multiplying in ways that causes other cells to try and kill them or coerce them to commit suicide – a last-ditch effort in the counterinsurgency happening at the biological and molecular level. The healthy cells are losing the battle right now. If my body were in a political season, this kind of anarchy would spell defeat for any incumbency.  I wonder if they’re giving in or letting it happen. I wonder to myself, Do the cells in ones body even know how to quit?  If I wasn’t so bowled over by the possibility of chemotherapy and the sick and the loss of hair and the blunt fact that my being in the world is in jeopardy, I’d want to laugh at how absurd everything is including the machines that illustrate my cancer, the desk they sit on, the florescent lights above my head, the Bluetooth piece my radiologist wears that blinks blue for some reason, the stethoscope my doctor wears around his neck, and the strange geometry of the four of us in this cramped little room. It makes me want to laugh out loud. It’s so funny that I can’t almost stand it.

My wife’s eyes are bloodshot like she’s stayed up all night, a victim of insomnia. Her eyes are a deep blue, more blue than usual as if the trauma, ironically, has taken out the impurities of the blue and allowed her eyes to shine in a some kind of pure state. These are the images I’m committing to memory as if I’m a human video camera. The premiere at a date to be determined.

We woke up the next day after finding out about the cancer, and we decided to go on with the events of our daily lives — however small and minuscule in comparison to it. Sure, there was a great hurt at the heart of things, a weight, not terrible, but poignant with a strange language, we knew not yet its symbols and syntax. It burrowed itself into our hearts. Some kind of ache neither of us could pinpoint; but it was searing. We thought the best medicine was not to acknowledge it at all. When we did look at it, speak to it, we’d grimace in pain. What were the words to employ? How did one speak to it? Shall we speak in hushed tones or raised voices? What were the words to rightly capture it?

It was the newborn elephant in the room of our lives. We walked lightly around it, tried not to wake it up. So we went to work. What else was there for us to do? At first we were to afraid to be alone with it, and so we fell headlong into our jobs, my wife taking care of the brand she was in charge of and me caring for the intellectual lives of my students. Anything but cancer was our silent motto. We had yet to formally talk about it, but it was something we’d come to agree upon.

Anything but cancer. Move ahead. Be anywhere but here.

            Four days later we’d be in New York City. My wife and I had planned a little get away to New York a few weeks earlier. She’s here to shoot a commercial for the company she works for, and I tagged along because it’s the long President’s Day weekend and, because I teach 10^th grade American literature at a private school in Las Vegas, I would have extra time in the City with her before production begins. The day before we went to New York City I talked with my classes about the end of The Great Gatsby, the scene where Nick erases the obscenities that were left behind on Gatsby’s “huge incoherent failure of a house” by some rabble-rouser kid wandering in the last summer days in East Egg — what must have seemed to Nick as the end of days themselves. My students had trouble with the final image of the boats seemingly not being able to go anywhere at all, stuck between the current and the memory of where they’d once traveled.

Most of them thought the novel was terribly pessimistic and it seemed to confirm something they already knew about America. They were almost irreverent in their reading of Fitzgerald; but one of my students, Sameera, the child of immigrants from Pakistan, said that the end of the book was incredibly optimistic. She was the only one. She loved it, thought it the most moving thing she’d read all year — even after “all the violence and insanity of the earlier part of the novel,” she’d told us. She said that she hadn’t expected something so emotionally intense and promising given the debauchery of the rest of it, and for effect she dangled the book by two fingers in front of her face like it was something she’d found in the gutter.

For her defense she noted the phrases, “So we beat on,” which begins the end of the last line of the novel, and the “transitory enchanted moment” that Nick talks about when the Dutch sailors caught their first glimpses of the new world. I didn’t know if I agreed with her yet, but I let her have her moment because I was sick and tired of my kids’ cynicism and flippancy and “everything is terrible” mood. They were so ominous and gloomy, and when I thought about it too much I realized it wasn’t necessarily their fault, that this was their default setting. It transcended their reading of the novel. It was something at the heart of them as kids growing up in Las Vegas, being the offspring of air-conditioning. They were, with the sole exception of Sameera, ironic and cool, recession-weary and modern, doubting Nick’s musings at the end of the novel.

“Like, whatever, man,” was the silence they gave me. “Whatever,” they seemed to say in their way too cool look.

It was at this time that as she was talking the thought came into my mind: “Two spots. Right lung;” but rather than feeling the terror of dying (because, let’s be honest, how many times can one beat cancer?), a strange calm came to me as my sixteen-year-old student told the class about how Nick’s experience with Gatsby reinvigorated his understanding of the American dream and, more than anything, man’s sense of wonder. She said (as all teenager’s do – everything ending as a question) about how Nick’s restlessness was “maybe not cured, but, like, tempered? Which is all we can really hope for? And that’s, like, sort of, good enough for me?”

I didn’t understand it then, the feeling I had, the fact that my melancholy was setting me free. Today, in New York City, the melancholy I have come to know is related to a kind of calm that has come over me, and by proxy my wife. Rather than the despair I felt three years ago after I had first been diagnosed and being told I had 4 months to live in order to get my “life in order,” I feel remarkably cool. There’s really no other word. And yet, there’s this: how many times can one beat cancer? is what I am thinking about right now in this exact moment – sitting in my hotel room, listening to jazz music, and the view of lower Manhattan looming at the edge of my vision where, I can’t help but think about every time I look out into it, the twin towers once stood before two planes slammed into them and they exploded and fell down in a murderous cacophony, the incoherent rumbling prophetic of what would become the very cancer of our age — a so-called war on terror.

Today there’s low cloud cover, and so the city seen is the city in clouds, a heavy gray that is full of snow flurries. It wouldn’t be so bad usually (anything but the potentially grueling, hard sunshine of Las Vegas), but the news we’ve been given paints everything in a new light or at least lets us see things as they may truly be.

 “How many times can one beat cancer?” I say under my breath, as I write, so my wife won’t hear it. It doesn’t mean anything other than that. It’s mere inquiry, almost like one of the many millions of questions we ask ourselves everyday, questions we never even answer. But this question: “How many times can one beat cancer?” It keeps coming back. I think about dying all the time these days. I think about it when I am deep in the midst of six-mile run up the Las Vegas strip at dawn, as Americans stumble out of smoky casinos, braced by the blue orange haze of a desert morning. “Passing away,” I think, as I drive through a neighborhood called the Naked City, a poor, drug-addled, no-man’s land  — three blocks of loosely related apartment complexes where the dark-side of supply-side economics dwells in the shadow of the Stratosphere Casino and Resort, a Vegas icon where people, for money, even in this recession, pay to free-fall from the top of the building, which is really a tall spire (akin to Seattle’s Space Needle) that stabs the sky with its needle. “Dying,” I think, when checking the heft of oranges or inspecting organic broccoli in the produce aisle at Whole Foods. “Going to die,” as I tie up the garbage to take outside, or when I’m in the “Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer;” and the moment right before I fall into sleep there’s always, “Death.” I think about it almost as if it’s a secret I’m keeping with myself because if I voice it, even to my wife, I think I am being morbid or it’ll be used as further evidence to a depression others think I may be suffering, even though the word, “depressing,” can’t even begin to capture the notion or feeling of living with cancer.

I’d originally gotten to thinking about all this as we were at the airport waiting for the flight to take off. I was reading an article about the troops in Afghanistan who had just started a huge, new offensive against the Taliban. It wasn’t so much the article that drew me in or even the political intrigue, but it was the accompanying photo. It was a group of marines taking a knee around their general. All the guys were so young, and yet there was a being-worn-out that I identified with, the squinting of eyes from the brightness of the sun, the hunched shoulders – ever aware of the intensity of each moment in the world. I gazed deep into the picture to get a better look. I was drawn in because the caption said something about them being briefed right before a battle to come.

The general was addressing them, and they were listening to him like he was a beloved grandfather. One soldier had his head down, and you could tell he heard everything and was mulling it over. Looking in from the outside it felt like anything the general could say  about the potentialities of battle couldn’t possibly do justice to the stark reality of what was going to come. His speech probably addressed strategies and tactics, hilltops to capture and somewhere, on the edges of it, what was left unspoken was the misery of it all, to be caught in the gaze of death. The misery of not knowing. The misery of letting go and quite possibly falling away — off into nothing.

They listened. He talked. They watched him. He paced.

Roadside bombs. Friendly fire. Search and Destroy. Everything was peppered with the familiar words of destruction and mayhem, the hard data of war, but behind it was the theoretical — the haunting of something known by all of them but completely unintelligible. They’d volunteered for this, and it was the one thing they knew very little about. It was the thing they signed up to do, but the last thing anyone ever talked about.

All of them were in camouflage (as if they could really hide from it, even up there in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan), their fingers resting over the trigger guards of their rifles. The general, when the picture was snapped, was mid-stride, walking in the middle of the circle his boys left him to wander and talk. He had his hand at his chin. You could tell he was thinking about something else to say.  The boys were paying attention, even to the old man’s silence. 

I peered into the photo, drawn into the tension of the picture. I told my wife, who I’d only been married to a little more than eight months, about it the next day when we were eating brunch at a restaurant in Chelsea, several days after the trip to the radiologist. I told her about it because it made me think about being sick and how maybe I might die soon and we had to give some thought to it, talk about it, give it our voices. We’d have to find the language. The symbols. The syntax.

See, the old man might have been about to tell his boys that they were going to go fight and some would die very soon. He was going to tell them that they’d have these moments when all the fight that was born in them would seem to be all gone — because to be sure, we’d all been born with fight but, ironically, our little daily lives asked us to forget our own default setting. So much of these speeches were to re-awaken the fighting spirit, uncover the thing at the center of us that, while forgotten, pushed into each day we’d found ourselves. I told my wife about it because I thought she should know where I was, what kind of place I was inhabiting in my mind. I said to her a couple of times, like an apology, “I’m not trying to be morbid. I think we should talk about it.”

I told her about the picture and how I thought that the old man was trying to tell them that they’d have these instances where they’d be valiant, but they’d have many more moments where they’d feel shame at just giving birth to the very idea of giving up. He was thinking about telling his boys that they’d be in the midst of the fight and they’d want to lay down and quit.

I told my wife, her eyes welling up, but me grabbing her hand to comfort her because we were in a restaurant on Valentine’s Day for God’s sakes. I was trying to comfort her because I wanted her to know that it was going to be okay, whatever the hell that meant but using the only word I could, the only word I knew to use. I said, “It’s going to be okay.”

And she said, “I know. Go on, tell me. I’m not crying out of sadness.” She let the tears fall down her face. They were big tears that started at the inside corner of her eyes and ran down her cheeks over her rouge. The trail of tears were like tributaries of some larger, more muscular river.

Outside the restaurant there was New York traffic. Cabs and people and dogs and trash. The intensity and beauty of it all was born in the feeling that it felt like it was all going to fall to pieces at any minute, like the world could break apart at the seams at any minute, any second —like it was being held together by the weakest of materials.

She wiped at her eyes, dabbed at her cheeks. But there was no stopping it. It was going to come, I thought.

I made an attempt to tell my wife about fear and dying and fighting on and being there in the world, almost like her and I were drawing up the rudimentary parts of a pact we were making with one another. The city sun was shining a bit from behind some gun metal clouds. The air was very cold. It made the lungs hurt if you’d breathed in too quickly. We’d forgotten this kind of cold living the last year of our life, our honeymoon year, in Las Vegas,  out in the desert in the heat, near the irony and illusion of experience that is so much the thing that defines our newfound city. The New York street was full of people and cars and noise. Everywhere you looked was a photo to be shot and everything was beautiful the way I saw it, just how dazzling and enchanting it is to be in it and have it hold us in its grip, surround us in its vision.

I have cancer. Metastatic Sarcoma. Right lung. Back home the doctors are writing up the orders for a regimen of chemotherapy to try to “cure” me of this thing I cannot shake. Deep down in me I know there is no cure because it’ll just keep coming back. There’s no getting around it, and so here I am.

I didn’t tell her about the photo in those words I used to tell you. But I think she got it, the picture I tried to frame, the picture she readily gazed into with me by her side. Till death do us part. Sickness and in health. Richer and poorer. Etcetera.

To lighten the mood, as our coffees grew cold and our lemon tart warm enough to run all over the graham cracker crust and blend with the ice cream that was losing its frozen form, I told her to look at a building I could see through the window behind her. It was similar to the buildings we knew in Chicago, when we used to live there – a neighborhood by the lake, full of 19^th century brownstones.

I said, asking her to look into the past, “Look at that building behind you. It’s like the homes in the Gold Coast. Do you remember?”

Before she looked, there was a single enchanted moment where she tried to recall the image of Astor, Walton, or Oak Street, a moment where she removed some of her blonde hair from her blue eyes and focused them in such a way that permitted her to not only see outward but also see inward, into some place we used to inhabit and know together. When she had it she turned and I was able to catch a glimpse of her profile. The sunlight that filled the space behind her was odd. It was silver almost. It filled up the space behind her like an overexposed photo, like dynamite had been exploded at the margins of things.

She looked at the building and smiled. Her eyes beamed.

Boy, I thought. Her eyes are so damn beautiful.

I didn’t know what else to say or think. It was all just so beautiful that for a brief, fleeting instant, I almost couldn’t stand it and felt like I would burst out from under my skin and evaporate into the atmosphere like pure light must moving at such incomprehensible speeds. I stared at her and took the shot. It was the only thing I could do, the only control I had in this, the crisis of being eaten by cancer. I shot her there, the image of her, because I’m storing as many as I can get just in case I can peruse them in what I can only assume are the astonishingly quiet waters of eternity.

I sit on my hotel bed and say some kind of prayer, an eight word utterance I’ve imagined seemingly out of nowhere in the last few days in order to keep at bay the worst I can imagine. I say it when my body seems to fail me with a grand fatigue and deep depression that leaves me at times almost immovable. I say it so much in the darkness that it becomes a mechanism of the dark. I say it softly on my lips so there’s just the small zip and sail of sound like what you might hear sitting window-side on a small plane and upon landing you hear a slight “ssssssssss” sound because the wind is hitting the wing just right and a white trail of cloud hisses over. This is what my prayer becomes over time the more times I say it. I sit on my bed and wait for dawn so I can go to the hospital again, have one final test, and then find out the results of the scans I had yesterday to see if this treatment has worked and actually eaten at the cancer I’m so stupidly afraid of. 

For a week now I’ve been trying to keep my mind together. It seems, sitting here in the dark, that this is as close to nothing as I’ve been in awhile. Blanket over my shoulders because the air-conditioning is out of control — the whole world seems air-conditioned right now and therefore fixed and plain, measured and vague — and I’m deeply angry, an anger that could manifest itself in violence, because I have to be here at the edge of what was once some crossroads village now turned an anywhere suburban town. It’s been a long four years and there in the darkness I suddenly feel something break in me. Like a dam has broke and it all just comes pouring out, a great tension released. This is when things get tricky because for two weeks now I sometimes think I’ve been losing my mind. I don’t know if these latest treatments are a last option for me. I have surgeries left, sure. Yet, an extreme sense of being alone washed over me after the chemotherapy and Interleukin doses. I’ve found myself staring off into space. I’ve found myself apathetic and disinterested, restless and vacant. I’d found a me ready to sit and sit and sit but not with the holy OM of a bodhisattva but with the fierce, ridiculousness of a depressive. 

Yet there’s this thing happening here in me. It’s bigger than being sick or being run through the mill, I think. I say to myself, “You’re a funny man, you.”

It’s anger, yes, but anger with knowledge, with not knowing, or bigger than that it’s the knowledge of not knowing and merely grasping. It’s an attempt to right the physical with the metaphysical, which is an impossibility but something that keeps me holed up.

The sun begins its rising I notice between the cracks in the curtains because the gray turns a mellow blue and pink. The moment of recognition reminds me for some reason of one of my earliest memories — a mother screaming and the faint shadow of her boyfriend cutting across the courtyard in the terrible dark with a gun. I’d been awakened by my mother’s yells one summer evening, and when I called to her she told me to stay in my room. I remember ignoring her orders — only 6, maybe 7 — and walking into her room, where her boyfriend (a man I called “dad” for many years because he lived with us until I was about 9, although hardly a father) was swearing under his breath, throwing on a shirt, putting on pants and tying his shoes. 

It was way after midnight. Disorder seemed to stir everywhere like the whole place had some chronic buzz and hum to it. The whole apartment felt like it levitated in the terribleness of my mothers’ screams, his preparations, and my not knowing. She kept asking him what he was going to do. “Look for him,” he’d say. It was a dialogue in repeat. A three way round because my voice added, “What happened, mom?” 

He rose from their bed and opened a drawer and took out a gun. I’d never seen one in real life, only on television. I think I was startled not so much by my mother calling out his name in a kind of hysteria like “Look, is this necessary? Look, the boy” but by how inextricably changed this guy was in my eyes just by holding the revolver. I stood there and stared at it and him and it seemed like hours passed in that second: the whole movement from drawer, the opening of the revolver’s chamber to see if it was full of bullets, the certainty on his face, the closing click of the chamber. The wild theater of it. The three of us in the room. The levitation. The not knowing in all of our hearts. Then he shoving it in his pants like some half-baked character out of a twisted Freudian porno scene written by an MFA student. Being reminded of it now, thinking of this man now — how little and afraid he always was and then making up for it with creepy silence aimed at my mother and I — some 30 years later I have to giggle at the thought of him, but the menace that night was real. He turned, looked at me, then walked through the apartment, which was very small — besides the two bedrooms, one big room that acted as both dining room and living space, a kitchen somewhere in the memory, maybe a wood-paneled galley kitchen. It was 1981 maybe. ’82. 

Video had killed the radio star.

There he went through our place and we followed him single file and she kept saying his name and he didn’t say anything at all and all I remember is, first, the opening of the solid wood door and then, second, the sterile, almost empty sound of our screen door when it opened and the hiss as it closed slowly behind him, and then watching him walk across the courtyard of the apartment complex I grew up in to seek out the man who peeked into my mom’s bedroom one hot summer night. 

What was the gun for? What an absurdity. What was he looking for? Who was he going to find? What was he going to do, threaten or shoot? What anger. What violence, right? Even now, in this uncanny Bethesda Thursday a.m., I can’t help but laugh a little because what was he looking for, this shadow of my mom’s boyfriend, a mere cut-out in my child’s mind (as much as the voyeur was/is in my mind), up against the webbed, glassy white lights that lit up the complex?

It started when the dark outside her window exposed a face to my mother, a white blank gaze probably, featureless because the lights behind the man who stood in the alley that separated our apartment complex and the suburban homes, left him without identity. It was a shape in the dark. It was a specter, the feeling of the gaze that my mom saw in an instant, waking maybe because the gaze was just too much to ignore. And there it was. The yells a sort of questioning. “Who are you?” it may have meant. “Tell me where you’re from,” her cries may have hammered out of the night’s stony senselessness.  

Dawn. 

“You’re a funny man for thinking such things,” I say to yourself, staring now in the mirror after a shower to ready for the day ahead. What do you want to happen? What do you expect? I take my antibiotics and say, “You’re a funny man in a funny situation is all.” You stare at yourself or only the image of you. “So what is it?” I ask. I realize I’ve been obsessed with nothing else but the thought of knowing or wanting to know and I think this is what must be part of some kind of universal human defect, some fallenness, akin to Odysseus ordering his men to tie him to the mast so he can hear the sirens sing, a morbid need to know, even if the whole boat gets smashed up against the rocks and every last sailor goes down.

The television is on. The talking heads down the street in D.C.  

And I realize I’ve taken myself hostage all this time. Bound and gagged and caged and stared at. All because of my terrible fascination and obsession with what’s to come (more cancer or death?) like it’s a marbled stone, a precious bit of earth that I prize so much I want to eat it to get it into my blood and into my heart forever. 

Everybody’s been held hostage you narcissistic bastard, I tell myself. My wife. My unborn kid. My family. I want and don’t want to know everything. How foolish, I think. 

“No. How human,” I declare.

“I always double knot my shoes. I make rabbit ears and then cross them and pull tight and then do it again. I don’t know why. I don’t know. I’ve done it ever since I was little,” I interrupt and say to myself lacing up my tennis shoes.

When I arrive at the hospital, a little ahead of schedule, finding it terribly empty, I’m almost strutting with freedom, a serious freedom of mind and body. I strut with peace because this isn’t faith I’ve figured out but something else I’ve stumbled upon and don’t yet have a word or phrase for it. Faith requires being steadfast, and I know I am not. I know that this thing that has broken in me will pass as easily as a summer storm or a youthful spring crush. This peace is passing, and it is what is the Good, both the peace and passing of it. It’s a what-the-fuck-are-you-going-to-do-about-anything-anywhere, man? and also a holy-shit, what-the-fuck-is-going-to-happen? sort of strut. All at the same time. A knowledge of how wildly serious we take ourselves and also how flippantly we go about discernment.

By the time I check-in with the nurse who’s going to help a young cardiologist, who tells me to call him “Andy,” stick a catheter in my groin and then run it into the artery that runs along my right thigh so that they can draw out my bionic white cells to check-in on them, I’m almost stoned with holy indifference. 

Yes, I told myself. 

“Mr. Torch?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“You’re right on time,” the nurse tells me, smiling. “We’ve been waiting for you.” She’s got a surgical mask hanging around her neck. Her scrubs top is a black shirt with yellow ducks on it. Not real ducks but pretend ducks, things you’d call “Duckies,” something you’d put in a tub with a toddler, a smiling plastic toy.  (Is it a joke? Is she being ironic?) She’s already motioning with her body to a room off to the right filled with a clean, crisp bed in the very center of the room with what seems like a nice pillow. There’s a green blanket neatly folded down at the end of the bed over fresh, white sheets, all of it with army style creases and attention to detail. There’s dire wires and cords everywhere, sweeping the walls and floors, and monitors off to the right and a little steel table, bedside, with all the little mechanisms of choice for a small surgical procedure. There’s a window just beyond and it’s bright blue outside I can see. It’s like the whole world is aflame.

“Are you ready?” she asks.

“Yes,” I tell her. “Yes. I am.”

In the great applauseless, 3 a.m., early gray of suburban Maryland, there’s just the steady drone of the streetlights outside my hotel window. I’m only an hour ahead in time zone but I feel miles and hours away from home and Emily, who has stayed behind because she can’t fly because the baby will be here soon. A weird disconnect crawls across my body and gives me a chill. I shiver in the gray light, my bald head cold. I’m just awake. It was sudden and there was nothing to do about it. Eyes open. Body ready. “Fuck,” I told myself. I looked at my phone to see the time, and I asked, “Seriously?” to whoever was listening.

From my tenth floor window I see a small BP station going full glare and an ugly row of strip mall that rises three levels and cancels out, just barely, the pretty little white houses just beyond it. The strip mall is all air-conditioning units on its roofs from my position, but I can see parts of the doors where the white lettering of what each place does or sells, for example: “Wigs,” “Nails,” or “Tan.” Out in the distance the horizon blooms, like smoke furrowing up out of a volcano, because of what seems like a rolling explosion of hundreds of green trees. Sometimes between them one can see the steeples of churches or the tallest peaks of large homes somewhere in the gloaming. I think about pulling the shades open but cannot for some reason, so I stand there in my underwear, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders staring through the crack in the shades I’ve made, just enough for my face. 

The air-conditioning unit at my knees hums. It’s very cold, blowing cold air up my crotch and dripping onto the carpet, the floor damp at my feet. 

There are very few cars on the street, cabbies working late shifts, driving aimlessly through Bethesda to D.C., on Wisconsin Ave and back again, waiting for the sun to come up in their forlorn cars, windows rolled down because the place is like a swamp with the humidity already, even at 3 a.m. I can feel it at the window. Other than the drone of the streetlights, it’s a vast nothing. Like before the world came into being, some sense I have of otherworldliness that keeps me there watching and waiting. The room behind me is black. Like if I were to close the shades in front of me I’d be made dumb by dark; and so I wait like this. I think I’ll wait out the sun, which will come up on the other side of the building and send wonderful rays of pink light all across the early morning gray and then the sun will do its job and burn off the dopey gray that sits on us. I know I won’t make it because it’ll be at least another hour or more, and so I close the blinds and let myself fall back into what I perceive to be total darkness. 

The day before I had tests all day at the National Institutes of Health. I had a 7:00 a.m. flight to Reagan National delayed out of O’Hare, and so I had to catch the very next flight out to make my appointments on time. When I finally found a cab at Reagan, I found myself with a cabbie who proceeded, after he asked me what my business in town was, to tell me every one of his family members who had cancer. It was a very long list — they were an unlucky lot — but there it was, everyone he’d known with too many cancer cells. He told me, “These were all very strong men, you see. Bulls, you must know. Bulls. All of them.” 

I couldn’t totally understand him because his accent was thick — a still uneasy mix of American English and Arabic. At times his language was hard and others it was free and flowed like a great river. He was from some war-torn African country and had come here as a 19 year-old, I’d found out without asking, six years ago and had never left the area. He’d found a very good living driving cabs. “All of us. My uncle, My great uncle, my cousins. We make modest living,” he told me. 

Anyway, he went on about cancer, “These men went through — how you say — chemotherapy?”

“Yes,” I told him. “You’re right. Chemotherapy.”

“Yes. Yes. These men lost all of their hair,” he told me as he re-adjusted his rearview mirror so that his line of sight was just me and not the road behind us. Occasionally he looked at the road, but it was mostly he and I. All the windows of the cab were rolled down to the max and he was yelling. The Potomac passed smoothly to the right as we rode up the George Washington Memorial Parkway and through what felt like a swamp land northwest of National Airport. I saw Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln’s memorials. 

“So, all of them,” he yelled. “They lose their hair.”

I shook my head. I raised my hat to show him my baldness.

“Yes. Yes,” he yelled and pointed at my head. Then, “They get very sick, but they come out of it and live.”

“That’s great,” I told him, terrified to go through more rounds of tests, terrified there’d be new cancer everywhere. Like right then I was a dead man talking.

“What?” The wind whipped through the whole cab, shaking the car nearly out of our lane.

Louder, “Great. Great they lived. Good for them.”

“You know how this happened, yes?” He looked at me in the mirror. He had turned very serious. The whole mood in the car had changed all of a sudden.

“The medicine?”

He waved his hand away like my answer was a mosquito. He grew very animated. He turned around to tell me, “Ok. Three things. Eat well. Right action. Prayer. This is how they beat the cancer. It is the three things. It is so very easy to get caught up in what doctor’s say, their — how do you say? — I don’t know — what they tell you you have, how many months you have to live and on and on. But who are these men? Where do they come from, and how did they get here to you with such news? Who has sent them? They are not God.” He checked his mirrors and looked through the windshield then turned to me.

“I know it. I hear you,” I yelled. “They are not God.” I shook my head yes.

As we rolled on, in what seemed like a great easterly curve up and down hills, and deeper into what seemed like a jungle, the humidity choked me. I took off my sweatshirt that I wore on the plane to avoid the air-conditioning. 

“You want air? I put on air.”

“No. No. This is fabulous.”

Out of nowhere, “So, you are Christian, right?”

“What?”

“Christian, yes?”

“I suppose.”

“Catholic?”

“Long story.”

“What?” he yelled at me.

“Baptized Catholic. But not Catholic anymore. Disagree. Long story.”

He looked at me sadly. “Then what? What are you? What do you pray?”

I tell him, “Listen, man. My wife, she’s Presbyterian. I do what she does. I like that church. It’s more liberal. It makes more sense to me.”

“Sense? What does this mean? What does this mean, liberal?”

The gray was being pushed out, and the sun was coming out. It was getting very hot. He was barely driving the car now. Somehow we were in and out of turns and moving forward. We were in the far right lane, maybe doing 50 miles an hour. Cars passed us and honked. Someone gave us the finger. 

“I’m a little late for some tests,” I told him. “We need to go faster.”

“Traffic.” He waved his hand in the air.

“I don’t see any traffic.” The road was clear. At times we were the only ones on the road.

“What do you mean, liberal?” He asked again.

Fuck me. In an hour I’ll be sitting in some phlebotomist’s office getting massive amounts of blood drawn. A half-hour later I’ll be drinking a bitter, salty contrast drink for a CT scan, which, if you don’t know, is a test where they put you half naked on a board and then run you through what is essentially a large mechanical donut hole that takes radioactive pictures of your insides. They’ll shoot me up with IV iodine about halfway through the test, which will make me feel like I’ve pissed my pants and make my mouth feel like I’ve got a sack full of nickels in it. After that I’ve got to get a brain MRI, which is the real hell. They’ll lay me down again on some board and give me ear plugs. Then they put on those noise reduction headphones that airport workers wear to guard against the jet engines. They lay me back and then slide a steel mask over my face like we’re in the 11th century and I’m a heretic and some kind of imaginative torture is going to punish me and cleanse me of my sin. They push me into a deep tube, only about as big as the circumference of my own body. That’s when the pounding sounds and the high-pitched noises, like feedback from a Jimi Hendrix song, begin. It’s almost so intense in the forty-five minutes I’m forced to endure that I want to scream, “Get me the fuck out of here you masochistic bastards!” It’s enough to try, in those first forty-five minutes, to wiggle out and find the tech and kick his ass up and down the hallway screaming the whole time, changing pitch and tone, some feral scream, as I beat his brains in looking for some kind of impact, some kind of containment for the craziness that’s taking hold quickly. This all happens just as you hear a very far away but nonetheless sane static, which sounds like a human voice say, “Only ten more minutes, Mr. Torch. You’re looking good. We’re headed home.” You laugh. You close your eyes to get through the rest. 

And now I had a cabbie who wanted to go theological with me. I told him finally because he wouldn’t let up, “Like, for example, I’m not a fan of the ban on gay marriage or their views on homosexuality. It’s bigger than that, but let’s count that as one reason. How’s that?”

I’ll spare you the details, but he ran me through the logic of the Old Testament, God’s Law (“man should not kill other men and lay with another man’s woman, yes?”) and Jesus as Messiah, and how the Bible forbids man sleeping with man (“It says it. The Bible is Law. If you believe God you must follow God’s Law and God’s Law is the Bible, yes?”). 

“Fuck me,” I think. “Seriously? Now?” The heavens open up outside the windows of the cab and suddenly we are cloudless.

Finally, as we near NIH, I told him, yelling, but not because of the highway, since we’re off of it, but because a whole day of tests is dawning on me, and I’m late, and I’ve got some strange cancer, and I want to kill someone most of the time these last few days, and I don’t want to know the results of the goddamned results, I told the Muslim-born now Born-Again-Catholic, the son of decades of colonial war,  as he circles around looking for the entrance because the place is Federal and so heavily fortified, post 9/11, it seems they’ve hidden the entrance or made it seem like their deal is “We don’t want outsiders here,” I tell him, “Listen, man, and this is just my opinion, but here me out: I find that there’s no fucking moral equivalence between killing someone, like, you know, ‘thou shalt not kill,’ and some guy wanting to marry another man out of Love. That makes no fucking sense, and it goes against everything I think Jesus probably taught. But I’m no fucking expert.” My guy basically wasn’t driving anymore, and we were in a stare down as the car slowed to some bright orange cones that were blocking our path to the campus. A man with a clipboard and high impact glasses approached our car writing down the cab’s license number. “You know what I mean? We’re going to have to disagree on this one. You got me, captain?”

He stared at me in the mirror. 

In a matter of minutes his whole cab was being searched. Dogs, teams of guys with guns and badges. Very serious men with poles that had mirrors attached to the bottom of them that were being used to look under the car for contraband or bombs or both. My guy had to go inside with a black bag they found in the trunk of his car, and I was like, “Motherfucker.” 

I threw my hands up.  I got out of the car and walked up to one of the search party’s members, a small black guy who was maybe 5’3” with the right pair of sneakers, wearing a bright yellow vest and a dark, foreboding black Federal outfit underneath. He was very wary of me as I walked to him. I had my hands up for some reason like I thought he’d think I was coming heavy, and I told him, “Listen, man, I usually don’t throw this card, but I’m a cancer patient here.” I raised my hat for proof — the bald head again. He looked, made a look, like despair (a family member? A passed friend?). He was deeply uneasy. I told him, hands still up in the air, “I’ve got appointments. I’m late for them now.” I pointed to the window of the room they got my guy in.

“And you want your cabbie. You need him now. You need to get to building ten stat. This is what you’re saying.”

“You got it.”

“Let me see what I can do.” He turned to go into the building.

Moments later my cabbie walked buoyantly out of the room wearing an ear-to ear grin like they had told him the secret of the world in the little, cramped place and the secret is just too chowderheaded not to grin.  

We began our descent and out ultimate ascent to Building Ten where all the machines and the needles and the intensive care units and the cancer wards are. 

“I’m sorry about all that,” I told him. “I didn’t know.”

“None of us know anything, yes? No worries, brother. This is the life.” He moved his hand across his cab but meant everything outside of it. He moved it slowly to really draw out hi point. It was both an epic and sweeping gesture. Every tree, every rock, every person, every park bench, the sun, the powder blue sky. He was blissful. I was confused. Ten minutes earlier we were in full theological debate. I looked at him in the mirror and he looked at me and then back at the road and smiled.  Yes, that’s it, he was full of bliss. I smiled back.

       Together we looked for the signs that said, “Building Ten.” We pointed this way and that. We were traveling evangelists or something. I was leaning forward, having broached the line between the front and back seat. If someone saw us they’d think I was telling him the oracle, I was so close to his ear and he intent on my vision, he blinking and smiling in the pale blue light. We found it together. Building Ten. We saw it high up at the top of the campus.

When we pulled up to the front entrance, he told me, as he ran my credit card, “You remember now. Eat well. Right Action. Prayer. God is All.” He handed me my receipt.

I nodded, tipped my hat like guys in westerns do, grabbed my bags, turned, and walked into the massive revolving door into the innards of NIH, as if sucked in by some Higher Power. It was a day of tests to see what the hell my cancer was doing 28 days to the day after a team of doctors gave me back my modified white blood cells, T-cells made crusaders.

to be continued …

I’m no preacher nor am I a teetotaler, but I know that the fourth step of Alcoholics Anonymous states that after “we’ve admitted to being powerless over alcohol”, and after we came to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, and had made a decision to turn our lives over to It, however we knew It, we should “[begin to make] a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Again, I’m no preacher/teetotaler, but I also know that the tenth step of Alcoholics Anonymous tells us to, after we’d made a list of all those we’d harmed and righted ourselves in a world we’d put off its axis, “[continue] to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”

I’m no comedian, but there’s nothing like having cancer to get one over on your sobriety, your doctors, your wife, and your family and friends.

When I was 25 I decided to get clean and sober after a car crash in Yellow Springs, OH (the very small southern Ohio town where I did my B.A.). I quietly pleaded guilty to a DUI, my second in a few years, and I walked across the Xenia, Ohio, courthouse lawn, in shame and in handcuffs, to serve out a quiet 63 day sentence. That was December 4, 2000 (my first full sober day). It was a Monday, I remember. A clear, crisp morning. You could see your breathe it was so cold, and in the midwest, in December it’s a rare thing to see a cloudless sky but, there, by God, it was. The great blue dome of the Heavens above us. I don’t remember snow on the ground, but there must have been by then. I remember someone yelling to those of us being forcibly moved forward by a big burly, corn-fed Sheriff’s Deputy to the stocks, I mean, jails, “Now that’s not a good way to start the week!” I could’ve killed that sonofabitch for such truth-telling, but I couldn’t see him for the sun that day was as bright as I’ve ever done seen it. I don’t even know if I could see the man in front of me my eyes were so blurry with doubt and confusion and fear.

In the end I only spent three, maybe four, boring days in Greene County Jail, but I’d had enough. There were no fights or rape scenes or anything like that, worst that happened was the black guys below me played Uno with such fervor and intensity that every time someone wanted to lay down a Draw Four card, I’d hear (and feel), “Draw Four, Motherfucker!” They must have started up so high, at the top of the bunk, near where my ass was, and just dropped it down with so much anger. Guys were always laughing and saying that shit was “hella fucked up, messing up the pile and shit.” I don’t know, but that was jail for me. I didn’t like not being able to do what I wanted, like for “physical time” we went to another room, walking along a yellow line, and then sat in there for awhile. We were pod 5 and the black guys owned the basketball court, and everyone else just sat and watched or just did their time in that room. The whites, older white guys mostly, some rednecks, they’d disparage the blacks, but if they got wind of it, the black guys, that’d be it. I’d heard about it. We did lose TV privileges one night because the black guys (I was in the black guys section for whatever reason — I mean with a name like “Rafael Torch,” where else was I going to be?) decided to turn on BET and they jammed for about five minutes before the whites staged a near riot and the Sheriff’s Deputy went wild and shut us down. No TV all day and all night. Justice. That feels like an awful long time ago, but it taught me my lesson. I did what others told me to do all day long and was at the mercy of others because I couldn’t control my alcohol. My father, Tom, who’s got close to 30 years sobriety was always telling me, “Listen, it’ll lead you to one of two places: jail or death.” I was, like, 16. What was jail? What was death? I was, like, “Whatever, Tom. Ok, sobriety.” And there I went, headed to jail, not then, but I did end up there. Like I mentioned earlier it wasn’t my first run-in with the law. No matter, I haven’t drank a drop of alcohol since; but, I got to say, my cancer, and I’m no ironist, has made my sobriety pretty complex.

I’ll spare you all the details of the last six months. The bottom line is that I was eating pain pills like they were Pez candy. I’m no James Frey, but man I could wolf down some pills. I was eating probably eight to nine Vicodin at a time, sometimes up to fourteen to fifteen a day. I’d get guilty and try to get it down to ten a day. Sometimes It’d work and sometimes it didn’t. I was in pain, yes, but sometimes no. Mostly no. Sometimes I just ate it because, and this is much more complex than it sounds, it made my life easier. A great lifting of the Spirit came over me because most of my sober time, whatever that is in the midst of a six month bender of pills (Vicodin, Norco, Oxycodone, Oxycotone, Dilaudid, Morphine, You Name It), I was stuck with the feeling of having a pretty serious cancer — I mean five spots, two in each lung and one along my Psoas muscle is pretty fucking serious — or the fact that they couldn’t stop my cancer from growing — it’s what we’d been trying to do since August 2009. I was feeling the pain all right, and, again, I’m no ironist. What if they were going to tell me it’s not stopping? Then I’d have to start making some decisions, I guess.

And I got a kid on the way. Fuck me.

Chomp! Five more Vicodin. Lift of Spirit. Sleep. Wake. Repeat.

I wanted to stop the little gnawing feeling in me that kept saying, “You’re going to die. This is it. They can’t stop your cancer. Can you believe it? This is, this has been, your life. Crazy, right, homie?” I wanted to shut-up that questioning, terrible part of me that was there in me, all the time, like some wild propagandist for the truth of Cancer, yaketty-yakking in the jungle of Cancer, yukking it up out in the rains of Cancer, yelping in the blizzards of Cancer, yup-yupping it under the dark midwest skies of Cancer. That’s the party line for me. There’s also the very big part of drugs, that it just makes one feel good — like I said, that first sweeping across the body of Vicodin, it’s like a great rising of Spirit, and a wonderful wealth of body and self communes, and this very rarely happens, but you can hear it sometimes in that tortured voice of Billie Holiday. The latter, it just making you feel good, is the part I don’t share with very many people, which puts me in great violation with AA, the whole “continue to take moral inventory of ourselves and” blah, blah, blah.

When I first got sober I remember watching the movie biography of Dr. Bob or Bill, I can’t remember now (James Woods is in it), anyway, I remember watching it and hearing Bill or Bob say they drank because “they never felt good enough,” and that just about did it for me. I didn’t need to see no more of that movie. I got it. I was like, “Yep, where do I sign up?” And then, there I was, setting up chairs and making coffee and greeting people at the door and I got a sponsor and never did say no, the way the old timers tell you. They say, “Never say no, kid. Don’t drink. Go to meetings. Never say no.” It was a religion. I went everyday for my first three years, and when I say everyday, I mean the Lord’s Day, too. I communed with my brethren. Some went back out and we got reports. It was scary. Then, seven years in I got some doc out in ol’ Houston telling me I got four months to live because of some cancer, and the first thing I think is, “drink.” Yet, I didn’t. I stayed the course. But I got the first taste of pain pills. And what did it matter, people probably thought, if he eats too many? He’s only got three more months, they’d whisper. Like the gossip of a small-town knitting group.

So, here it is: 1. I’m eating pills like candy because still, even after a decade of sobriety, I still don’t feel good enough, even though these have been the most fruitful years of my entire life and 2. There’s the actual pain of having cancer, like having tumors and stuff and chemo and 3. (maybe the most profound part) wanting, desiring of a little solace from the very real fact that the experimental treatment I just had may not work (although I believe and hope that it is), but being a realist, I have to give some thought to it not working. Therefore, I’m popping pills like it’s New Years 1999 and I’m Prince, because I just want some time away from thinking about having to make decisions about future treatments and “lists of thing to do before one dies” (I hate the other name people have given to this list. That makes me want to get high and waste away in a corner). Let’s face it, how many surgeries do you think I have in me? My oncologist said it right when he said, “How much lung do you think we can take out before you can’t breathe? How much Psoas muscle you think got? How much you think we can cut out before you can’t walk anymore?”

And then there’s my much more darker dealings with death. We don’t have to go there. Like I said, I’m no James Frey. I’m no cowboy. I’m just trying to right this ship because, brother, I got off-course. The pills, you know. And I’m just trying to right this ship before I get totally lost in some drug-haze ocean where, yes, I’ll experience no cancer, but I’ll experience full-on drug addiction once again, and there ain’t no more SOS in me anymore I don’t think. It’s just empty, rattled signals. This “· · · — — — · · ·” will just fall on deaf ears the world over. This feels like a true statement.

So, the other day I got caught. The last few days I’ve been going cold turkey. I came home with two prescriptions from my oncologist for “headaches,” which is a real side-effect I feel; but did it warrant two scripts for the two Oxy’s, one fast acting, one long acting? Did it warrant taking five or six, maybe eight long lasting Oxy’s and maybe four or five short acting Oxy’s at once? Was my headache that bad? No. I just was getting high at that point. I hadn’t yet made the connection. I was all but short-circuiting after Bethesda, and I know to you AA brothers and sisters out there this all sounds like “rationalizations, etc.” I hear you. But, here this, what’s worse is, yes, I was/am a cancer patient, and I was playing the card hard with my wife. Of all people, she asked, “Why did you even need to get the one script filled, the short acting one?”

“I don’t know. What if my headache was extra large?”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even think about it. It was busy, I was looking for a thermometer, you know, because of my headaches and shit, and the lady at the counter was all like, ‘Can I help you?’ and I just handed over the scripts because, you know, Tylenol’s been recalled (Did you know that?), and I was all, like, wondering what the difference between Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen was. You know what I mean?”

She just stared out the window of the apartment we were living in and started crying. She said, “You’re lying. I can’t live like this. You’re lying.” Then she did the saddest thing I ever saw her do. She just kept locking and unlocking the window like she wanted to open it and then not. It made me feel so sad inside I almost lost it.

“I’m not. Tylenol is being recalled. I was crazy overwhelmed with Walgreens. Just handed over the scripts. Overwhelmed. Maddened. Crazed there. You know how it is there, Em.”

“You’re lying. I can’t do this.” Lock. Unlock.

The skyscrapers beyond her looked sad. They wept. The cornices of their high floor windows looked like rolling tears. Oh, those sad skyscrapers!

We were in a jam, a fix, her and I. We’d been for days and weeks maybe. My vicodin addiction made me extra sick during my experimental treatment. I just quit it and the doctors didn’t know and their pain dosing wasn’t, like, you know, eight pills every five hours. That’s for horses. Yes, Emily and I, we was in what they call a fix.

When, a few days later, she hid the short acting Oxy’s and I found them, and then took twenty-five, not all at once of course — I was working undercover, you know — not really thinking that she’d, as smart as she is, have counted them! She asked, “Where’s the 25?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“You’re lying to me! Again!” She’d started to cry.

“No, I’m not. Believe what you’d like.”

“Believe what I’d like? They count these things like crazy at Walgreens. You’re telling me that they missed 25 fucking pills?”

I said nothing. I was pleading the fifth. I shrugged my shoulders. I still had my long lasting pills in my book bag. You know, for the headaches and the cancer and the self-pity and the whole not good enough bit. Real blah, blah, blah stuff, I know. Stop reading now. It doesn’t get any better.

“You’re lying to me!”

Stupid shrug of shoulders.

Three days or so ago, with maybe 7 of the 120 pills my oncologist had given me to take for pain (that was on Tuesday, June 20 — you do the math), Emily asks, because I’d been acting so weird: shakes, cold sweats, no energy, withdrawn, moody in the extreme, “goofy” (?), she asks, “Where’s the bottle for the other Oxy’s.”

The jig was up. The race was over. I’d nowhere to go.

I told her from the bed, in the midst of cold sweats, “I don’t need to give you my bottle. That’s ridiculous. I’m not going to give you the bottle. I’m not going to be answerable to you about my pain pills!”

She left the room. She was mad. There was silence all over the place. It swept across the joint, from wall to wall, from beam to beam, from bathroom to windows to kitchen to bedrooms. It was nothing but silence. The silence of a wife who’d been lied to and now was just waiting because the silence would pull me out of my nefarious den. No one would have been able to withstand that silence. It was as wicked and paranoiac as Hanoi Hanna must have been for the grunts in ‘Nam.

I slowly pulled myself up. I grabbed my bag. Pulled out my sad little bottle that had maybe 7, maybe 6 pills left, of 120, prescribed June 20, 2011. I walked to the living room because what else was there to do. Let my marriage go? I had cancer to worry about. I have a baby on the way. I gave her the bottle, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on her face. It was wonder. Not the kind of wonder one might experience driving through the redwoods south of San Francisco or traversing the twelfth-century streets of some European capitol city. No. It was not that kind of wonder. It was wonder, yes; but it was wonder that I’d lied to her for so long and it was the kind of wonder one has when one watches a crime being committed in broad daylight. Like, Does everyone see this shit? It’s the wonder of collusion. Like she’d been part of this whole scheme I’d up and had running.

“That’s like ten a day.” That’s all she said at first. “Wait, it’s more.” She took the bottle from my hand, shook it, looked into it. She’s very good at math. She’s in the business world.

“I’d take a handful, yeah, but I stuck to the every twelve hour thing like it says on the label. I followed the label. Like,” and then in a lower voice, “the second part.”

“But it doesn’t say take 5 or 6 every twelve. Does it? Does it say ‘Take 8 every twelve hours?’” She held up the bottle. It gleamed in the sunlight coming through the windows.

“I guess not.”

“You guess not.”

“…”

“You guess not. That’s all you’ve got to say, some stupid fucking ‘I guess not.’”

There’s nothing worse than that moment for a drug addict. When you get caught. She’d asked if I was taking too many before, only days before, and I’d said, “Of course not.” I was scheming her, and, more than that, more serious than that, I was scheming me. See, and I ain’t no 12-stepper preacher/purist, but I got to say drug addicts are the very best schemers. That’s a true statement. They never really lose their touch, even with cancer and a decade of clean time, which is really all up in the air now because I don’t know now. What’s sober when you’ve got cancer and you’ve got to take the drugs or suffer in pain? I know what’s not sober — when you’re just taking the pills— but there’s such a fine line between fighting the feeling of having cancer (Like, “Oh, God. Please help me, God, just not feel like I got cancer for a few hours. Oh, God. Please help me just erase a little part of that part of me. Not the whole part, God. Just that little part) and actually having the physical pain of cancer (Like, Oh, God. This hurts, this hurts, this hurts, make the pain go away, the pain. Oh, God, the pain. I hurt so much. Leave me be, God). I’m no Dr. Bob or Bill, but I guess if I was honest with myself, I’d have to say I ain’t been all that clean these days. I haven’t been all that sober. Sober means not only being temperate in the use of drugs and alcohol but it also means being marked by seriousness and gravity. Sober is being marked by self-restraint, being devoid of frivolity, excess or exaggeration.

What to do? You see my conundrum here, don’t you, dear reader?

It’s what hurts. But you are what you do. There ain’t no escaping that. That there’s a true statement. I’ve learned that sentence the hard way, some time ago, and I keep having to learn it even now because somehow my brain just can’t seem to get it in its right self. But I’m getting there. I’m trying to be honest here. I ain’t no James Frey.

I’ve kicked habits now six times since I’ve been with cancer, but these last six months, these grueling last six months of surgery and chemo and then these whack-job IL2 treatments have been grueling. And now I’m kicking. Make no mistake. I kick. That’s a true statement. I kick and kick and kick. Make no mistake. It’s true.

“I’m afraid of dying.”

She moves over to me and rubs my bald head, bald from the intensive, 21-day experimental treatment I’ve undergone to try and choke my deathless cancer.

“I don’t know when I got to be so afraid again, but here I am.”

“Things have changed, right? I mean, things have changed. Our life is going to change.” She holds me at the edge of my side of the bed, the light from the bed side table glows orange, aggressive but only for its own corner, the rest of the room is sunk in shadow. As she holds me I can feel her belly now nine months along. Sometimes if I stare long enough at it I can watch the little one’s butt move from one side to the other seeking room and comfort. “Everything is going to change.” She tells me very softly and very gently. Recently I’ve imparted this fear of dying so much that I think she’s sick of it, sick of answering for it, that it makes me so tired.

I don’t look at her as she holds me and tells me this. I have my eyes closed. We rock gently there in the open, almost vulgar, glare of the light. It’s like the world could see us. 

“I swear. I wish I didn’t always feel this way.” 

“I know. I know.” 

All of a sudden I remember when I’d try to tell my old students, when I used to teach, how hard it is to impart real “Love” because of how awesome is the failure of language to do what it’s supposed to do. “‘For example,’ I’d tell them. ‘Take Bobby here. He might want to tell his girlfriend how much he loves her.’ [class laughs — Bobby turns red]. ‘So, Bobby here, he tells her one day, ‘I love you;’ and what do you know, his girl says, ‘I love you’ back. She tells him, ‘I love you, too, Bobby.’ But here’s the hitch: Bobby might hear something in her voice, some little thing in the way she said it, and he might wonder, ‘Hey, does her Love mean my Love. Is her ‘I love you’ my ‘I love you’? [my voice trails off] [and to no one in particular, I say] Bobby’s question is a good one.” 

I feel Bobby’s plight with language now because I wonder deep down if my wife does “know” I wasn’t always so scared of something I’ve no control over; but something’s cracked in me. 

Earlier, the radioman said that there were great summer storms coming our way. He said, “Y’all in it’s path.” The storm is coming on strong now. There’s sideways rain and big chunks of hail. The lights are dimming. The thunder is loud. The lightening is bright. It’s getting violent, like the earth is readying for something we can’t understand. It’s all so incomprehensible. 

As the lights flicker, she asks, “You know I know, right?” 

My mother told me this morning that I should write something about how my affliction with cancer is really an affliction that the whole family has in some way. She says, “You should write that we’re all afflicted. Maybe I’ll try my hand at it. Maybe I’ll do it.” She laughed because I don’t think she even believed she would try to write it, and if she did she wouldn’t have shown it to me. I don’t need the story written from my mom, I know it’s true. She’s taken to itching her arms for worry over me. She’s taken to a barrage of questions daily about my health and whether or not I’m following doctors’ orders. She’s taken to saying, “This is the one. This is the treatment.” Even if I tell her, rather harshly at times, not to say this (my own superstitions); but no matter, it’s the work of a mother, she still says it. “This is the one.” She’s always been a beacon of hope (even if “hope” is a kind of dodging of the real for a life that will transcend the daft lot we’ve been given). But, being my mother, she’s afflicted. She might not have what I have medically. But she’s got the thing. We all got it.

I told her, “Do it. Write it.” It’s true, everyone closest to me is “sick” (from my best of friends to my closest colleagues to my farthest acquaintances), has been made to feel the bizarre suffering I’ve had to endure, but no one as much as my wife, Emily. She wakes to it every morning while also, at the same time, carrying our baby boy, who is due any day now. We will keep it from him as long as possible, but no doubt, he’ll be caught up in the mix. You can imagine the stupid guilt I have in all this. What stupid guilt, I know. Throw it away, people tell me; yet there’s no dumpster big enough.

I met my wife Emily about three years ago this past April. I met her online only a few months after my first round with cancer, four years ago. I met her six months after the doctors told me I had four to six months to live. They told me on October 5, 2007 in Houston at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. R. Benjamin gave me the news after we had waited for hours in a small, very cramped room populated by cotton balls, heart rate monitors, various kinds of scopes,  and medical machinery of noises mostly. We must have waited in that room for hours. The more the time passed the more likely, now that I think about it, my fate was being sealed. He must have been trying to clear the floor of other patients so that he could give me all the time in the world to ask questions, even if questions were the last thing on my mind. Unless he could answer for me what it meant this turn of phrase, “four to six months to live.” Unless he could answer for me what it meant to “get one’s life in order.” Unless he could answer for me, “Where do we go when we die?” Unless he could excuse for me the feeling that I had that I had done very little with my life and nothing really to show for it (but who does at 31?). I wanted him to be God. but he couldn’t was just an oncologist, and with the news he brought me, all the way from God knows where, we thought he was some kind of evil thing. He was bald and short and his lips were wet and red and saliva bunched up white and stringy at the corners of his mouth when he talked. He seemed to be wearing a perpetual frown. He was very white like he was wearing powder or some sort of base make-up. He also wore a white doctor’s jacket that went all the way down to his feet, he was so short. The jacket was covered with various kinds of “flair,” buttons that said things like “F@#!% Cancer” or “Live Each Day Like It’s The Last” or “Glory in Today” or “Cancer Sucks.” It was all over his jacket. It was like a joke he was playing on me given the news he just gave me. 

We sat there. (When I say “we” I mean my mom and my first wife, a relationship I’ve refused to write about until now). I remember my mom telling me how “we’re going to beat this thing.” She had cancer then too. She’d been diagnosed. Everyone close to us had been diagnosed. She was leaning against the medical bed if I remember right, as close to me as possible given the smallness of the room; and I remember just stammering, “What? What? What does this mean?” Then I remember gagging like I was going to throw up.

My mom had great concern. She didn’t cry though. She was the strongest I’ve ever seen her in my entire life. It was like she was waiting her whole life for that moment. My mom’s reaction was so steady and so sturdy that it was like she knew it in her heart, could feel the cancer in me and knew it was in her by then. She was like a CO at war with men and she just stared at me. She stared hard like she was telling me somehow that I’d have to be strong now. She just stared at me and kept telling me that this was “nothing.” “We’re going to beat this, Rafa.” She kept saying it. She knew it her whole life.  She was ready for war.  “We’re going to walk out of here and beat this thing, Rafa.” She may have even called me “Rafael,” which she never does unless she’s unusually angry with me or she wants to tell me something very important. It may have been, “Rafael, listen to me. Rafael, we’re going to get through this. You’re going to win.” Her hands were tight fists and she shook them to dramatize certain syllables. 

Dr. Benjamin turned to my mother when she said those things to me, and he told her she couldn’t speak to me in such a way anymore, that the words we used and the language we employed now for the coming fight had to change. I thought my mom was going to kill him. I think I would have tried to kill him if it was my son sitting where I was and some doctor told me I couldn’t tell my son he had to have “hope,” tenacity and acumen. My mom somehow kept her cool. She didn’t even look at him. She stared at me and jabbed her tight fists when she spoke.

At that moment I had the very distinct feeling of being in a Camus novel. I’d taught him enough and taught Sartre too, as a high school literature teacher, but it wasn’t until the doctor said “four to six months” that I’d not really understood the feeling nor the notion of the Absurd. I would wax on for hours with my high school students, but I knew nothing. Looking back it’s funny how little I knew about anything even then at 31. It’s funny how little we know about anything anywhere. How much we talk. It’s funny all the jibber jabber, the excited, racy, vapid nothing talk of the world.

And then there was my X. She sat there next to me bawling. She was what they call “emo” — she wore some sad affect, in love with photographs of vacant warehouses or run-down strip malls, American nowheres, or would get caught up in suicides in empty motels along empty highways, as if they had some key into the heart of the universe. She was the lead singer in a band that was close to “making it” and that night she wore a yellow t-shirt with either a band name on it or some ironic saying on it, like, “The A-Team.” It was always something like that. She wore tight Diesel jeans and Saucony shoes. She was very conscious of a look and was true to it. I don’t know now what I was doing with her then, but I had been doing it, playing a game that I knew, even before cancer, I couldn’t keep playing. Now it seemed cancer would call out the marriage for what it was, which was empty and nothing. She would agree with me if you asked her now, I’m sure of it. We’d been caught. We’d been found out. 

It was like a fountain had been turned on inside her and all the water of the world had been jammed up and now was coming out full-force. The room got that much smaller as we were flooded with her great “despair.” I felt like I couldn’t match it. Maybe I was too confused. I don’t remember, even now, if I even heard the doctor right, but listening to her go on I was forced to reckon the bad news. 

“Four to six.” 

“Get your life in order.” 

The way X was crying it seemed like I was already dead and buried. Later I’d come to understand the tears, the fear and despair. It had nothing to do with me, but it had everything to do with guilt, for later I’d find out she was cheating on me with, of course, the guitarist in her band (this is funny, right? It’s always the tattooed guitarist named “Jay,” right). The place shook with her cries which couldn’t be stopped. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to hold her hand and rub her shoulders, but then I thought it was me that had the death sentence. It was me that’d been told I had terminal cancer. 

My mother was now trying to see if there was anything else we needed to do so she could get us two kids out of the room before the whole place came down in rage and sadness and despair. I was only 31 and my ex-wife, much younger than I, she was maybe 25. It was after 9:00 p.m. on October 5, 2007. It was dark out. Stars here and there, but you couldn’t see them hardly because all of Houston was lit up in the distance wherever you looked. Like wildness. Like terrible hanging sadness, the yellow lights of Houston. 

Where were we? What were we doing? What roads had we taken to get here? 

In the end, after all the terror of those early months with cancer, it was like my ship had been righted. It was as if the only way to get on with my life was to get cancer. Previously I had been inert in some way I have yet to fathom. Now I keep getting cancer, a constant reminder to Life. A terrible way to go, yes, a terrible row for my whole family, but, nonetheless, a lesson — a necessary season, an endless season maybe, but unavoidable — potentially windy, too hot, too cold, a season of extremes, yes. But the Real. 

Back at the hotel my mom, like a good Italian mother, made us eat food. I remember eating bruschetta. Wolfing it down like it was the last thing I would ever eat. I remember laughing very much at dinner, cracking jokes and being snide, making vulgar asides that revealed a great anger that I think had always been in me but now had been made real, brought out center-stage by cancer’s minions, fear and sadness. It was all so off-kilter. We were a boat askance in the middle of the Atlantic. 

We were staying in the Hilton. It was under construction.

My X began her long, damaged love affair with food and sleep that night. Her standard operating procedure became “anything but this.” She would sleep for hours, for days. She would stay up all night and go to bed when I would wake, except for the strange nights when she’d barge in on my pharmaceutical-induced sleep begging me not to die. Weeping, she’d whisper, holding my head up, my eyes barely open because the drugs I took left me damaged and wasted, she’d tell me, “Rafa, please don’t die. Please don’t die. You can’t die.” I’d tell her, laughing maybe at the absurdity, “I’m not going anywhere. I ain’t dying. Let me sleep. Come to bed.” “Rafa,” she’d whisper. “Please don’t die. You can’t die.” “Ok,” I’d tell her and then she’d be gone. Like a ghost of my imagination because it was the only time I ever got her close to me in those days. I would fall back asleep wondering why she didn’t want me to die. It shouldn’t have been that way; but it’s how my nights went then before Emily came into my life.

I don’t say these things out of spite or anger because I don’t have those feelings anymore. I was very alone in that time. I remember that if it wasn’t for my mother (or my mother-in-law, a cancer survivor herself) being there with me in those months, when I first experienced chemotherapy I may have tried to kill myself. Certainly friends and neighbors came by often to offer their support and love, but I slept alone most nights and had no energy to understand nor care where X was spending her time. It was all about the band. I didn’t want to be a burden (the default position of any cancer patient), and so I told her to do whatever it took to keep her sane. She played shows, went to band practices and cavorted with whoever.  

My mother wanted me to deal with the problem of my marriage then. I told her I could not. In the back of my mind I made a pact with myself that if I could just get through this I would leave X as soon as I could, part of a starting over. X and I had many problems (and I was not innocent — I did my fair share, no doubt) before cancer, but the cancer made things more strained, rude, and acute. She was thrust into the role of caregiver, and she wasn’t able to be that and I understand that now. Again, if you asked her now, she’d agree. I’m sure of it.  

Miraculously, after two rounds of chemo, I had surgery at M.D. Anderson and it took my cancer away for almost two years. That was in December of 2007. By the end of February 2008 I found out that X had been cheating, even before the cancer. It was like she wanted to be found out. It was a text message. Something so ridiculously simple. A text message at dawn. I was about to walk our dog, and my whole life changed again. The dog had to piss and I couldn’t stop staring at the love message from “Jay.” It was something about her being a “pumpkin head sugar pie.” I stared at the lousy love message. The dog pissed on the floor I stood there so long, staring. Funny, now, when I think about it. I said it out loud even. “Pumpkin head sugar pie?” I asked. The dog looked at me and turned his head sideways like I’d said “bone” or “outside?” My whole life had been headed to “pumpkin head sugar pie.” Isn’t that funny?

So, I left her. 

I met Emily a couple of months late. When we met I was still recuperating, but I had begun the long process of putting my body back together after such sickness. I met her at a restaurant on April 24, 2008. I remember waiting by the bar for her and being very nervous because she was very beautiful from what I could gather in the photos she had put online. I didn’t know yet how tall she was, but she was blonde and breathless and, from our brief correspondence, a woman who had traveled much and wanted to see more of the world. 

When she walked in I was drinking a tonic water or something ridiculous. I saw her ask someone who worked there about me. I don’t know what she said, but by then, as I remember it, things went into slow motion. She was talking to him and, as it always goes with her, men sort of trying to put the moves on her, the man said something slick and she laughed out of politeness but she was already ignoring him and looking over the whole joint. I was standing there in the wide open. I had put some photos online, but I was embarrassed by them because they were all fairly recent, and I was still bald and skinny from the chemotherapy.  I remember thinking, “Why don’t I have any other photos?” It was like I had come out of nowhere. “Where was the old me?” I asked my iPhoto program? I had come out of nowhere, and I thought, standing there watching her look for me, she’s looking for a man from nowhere. “She’ll never see me.” I stood there nervously with my tonic water.

I let her look and look and I might have let her look on and on if I could just look at her like that forever. I would have let her look and look and stand there and look and me just look at her and I know it sounds strange but I felt my stomach turn and I watched her looking for me.  

She saw me finally and smiled, and I’ll never forget it. A sort of relief in her face and she nodded in my direction and walked towards me with her long legs and long stride and she was clutching her black bag, maybe out of nervousness, I don’t know, but it was so lovely and nice. She was walking up the short carpeted ramp to the bar to meet me. She was clutching her bag and she was wearing a knit black shirt that hung loosely over her shoulders and it would be a lie to say that I didn’t notice just how beautiful her neck was and how wonderful it was to see her earrings move breathlessly across the tops of her shoulders. She kept pushing her blonde hair back behind her ears. Her mouth, a kind of sadness there, but that smile like breathless sunsets that seem to hang right there on the horizon forever, sunsets I used to experience living in Los Angeles when I was much too young or without imagination to understand that somewhere later in my life I’d see the same thing in the smile of a woman I’d fall madly in love with, to young to know that I was looking into Emily’s smile. It all moved in such slow motion. I may have fell in love with her then. I don’t know. It sure sounds like it.

As she nodded I gave her some little ridiculous wave of the hand. It was stupid. She laughed a little, and when we met she put out her hand and told me her name was “Emily.” I told her my name and we stood there shaking hands in a slight silence while I gathered myself because it was like I was just coming out of some long dream that I’d been in for my whole life, as if I’d been anesthetized for 32 years. I didn’t know she’d be my wife then. We didn’t know any of what was to come, but we stood in the awkward silence before the maitre’d came by and sat us down. I moved nervously from foot to foot like I was shadow boxing and she kept doing the thing with her hair, pushing it behind her ears and pulling her bag up on her shoulder. That night I told her about cancer and my past as an alcoholic, which I rarely did, and she told me about her dad, who was the county sheriff of the place she’s from about sixty miles southeast of Chicago. He had killed himself a couple of years earlier. At one point in the story, she said, “I don’t even know why I’m telling you about this. I don’t tell anyone.” She told me about how her dad was a “missing person” until they found him on a dead end street at the edge of that county he had kept safe all those years under midwestern gun metal clouds. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” She told me about the funeral and then the dreams that haunted her for years after. 

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know what else to say about it. She went on.

By Thanksgiving she was my fiance. By June she was my wife. The following month we were living in Las Vegas, trying our hand out west. The month after we moved to Las Vegas, August, we found out my cancer had recurred. And here we are. Five recurrences later. Surgeries, chemotherapies, and now, experimental treatments by the United States Government. 

I’ve hit the big time.

Thank God for cancer. Some days, I thank God for this disease which takes so much from me physically but has given so much to my heart that it makes me want to just lay down and cry about how the road we think we’re on isn’t the road at all, how stupid we could be on these roads we think are the right roads even when all the signs are saying “Road Closed,” how hard-hearted we can be, how stubborn we are even when the signs are saying “Detour” we keep heading down the road, even if it’s saying “No Outlet.” But there we go. If it wasn’t for cancer I’d have already driven off the road. Falling, falling, falling. Falling away into nothing. I was that close. Put your index finger out in front of your face and put an inch between it and your thumb and that’s how close I was to nothing during that first bout with cancer.

* * *

When I was just a little kid my mom would tuck me in before bed and I remember asking from time to time, “Do you love me, mom?”  My mom would lean in close, and I remember the way she smelled in the dark, the residue of a perfume I’ve now long since forgotten, maybe something called “Poison” that she bought at Saks, but it is of no matter. I remember her leaning in and bringing the covers up tight to make me feel warm and safe, and she’d tell me that she loved me like all the stars in the sky. She used to say very quietly, framed by the yellow light coming in from the bathroom, “I love you more than anything, Rafael. Like every star big and little in the whole universe. Do you know how much that is? Do you know how many little stars there are? Do you know how many big stars there are? 

I’d smile and put my hands and arms out as far as I could stretch them and she’d laugh and say, “Yes, honey, that’s it. Don’t you forget it. That’s how much I love you.” When she’d go away, I remember trying to think about her brand of infinity. I’d stare out the window or hard into the wall of my room and let my gaze go slack trying to see the universe in such a way. A place of such infinite love. 

Little did my mom know that when she was telling me that that she was really telling me how far I was and always would be from nothing. So, yes, my mom’s right. We all have cancer. But the cancer I got, the cancer I’m talking about, let it grow, let it metastasize. Let it grow all over us as a family. Let it grow, father. Let it come, mother. Let it sing, sister. Let it feed, wife, and grow and eat, friends, and let it grow fat, little boy. So shall I. So shall I. It’ll be enough love to eat for a hundred thousand years of suffering. A million trillion. Arms wide open.

I was telling someone that my current experimental treatment was like the experience of being in a car crash. It’s the only way I know how to describe it. Sometimes I think it’s not even the crash itself but the treatment I just had was like the moment right after collision and right before the crash stops — all that time in between. It’s much easier to say, “It felt like a car crash.” Moreover, it’s not even the violent part of the car crash, but some potentially dreamy core, some highly intense and traumatic middle place.

That’s how my memory is processing it, how things are coming back to me after being forcibly sick for 13 or 14 days. I know the major events of the experience: the chemotherapy to rid my body of the old, worthless white cells I’d been born with, then the actual treatment, getting back millions of white cells that they’d taken from me only weeks earlier and then modified and made bionic in the lab according to the cancer my body has harbored, and then, to spurn on my immune system, to make the whole thing go, the IL2 (Interleukin) treatments. I remember the four doses of IL2 even though I was stung by severe rigors, violent, strange chills that left me like a Mexican jumping bean for twenty minutes — maybe more —  depending on how the Demerol worked on my system. 

I remember the hallucinations that made the whole treatment come to a screeching halt two Saturday’s ago now. The doctor was nervous about continuing because they couldn’t stop madness ultimately, couldn’t predict when it would end the way they could my flu-like symptoms or the way they could yield a ventilator to stop the experience of shortness of breath. 

I knew it once it was happening, me sitting in the bathroom, looking at smudges on a stainless steel shelf just in front of me. The whole time I’m thinking I’m hallucinating. I knew what I was looking at wasn’t real, but there it was, the movement of the smudge, what looked like, very briefly, a congo drum player, dressed like a conquistador or some sort of pre-American borderless wanderer, playing the music of nowhere. This was the weirdo narrative I had been building in my head as I took a crap looking at the smudge on the stainless steel shelf. 

I said to myself, “It’s not really happening. You know this. You know that this is the Il2. They warned you. They said there could be madness.” Nonetheless, you did your business with the toilet, cleaned up, and then yelled, “Emily! Emily! Get in here. You got to see this.” Like you and her were going to dig the little musical show on the stainless steel shelves where, in your head, some weird musician was doing his thing. You couldn’t quite place it, the music. You figured he’d had to learn it all somewhere else too because the drum was African. He’d brought it with him, here, to this place where Hell was breaking out for all parties involved, a whole place being born, an Eden destroyed and, yet, a whole new peoples coming of age. Sitting in your bathroom you felt like you were at the edge of history. 

You said, “Il2 treatments.” 

You yelled out, “Em! Come see this shit. Not, like, shit shit. But, like, the shit. On the wall.” You realized the whole thing sounded mad. You. The music. The congo guy. All of it. Things were unraveling. “I’m hallucinating,” you said. But you wanted to be sure. You yelled again for Emily. 

She opened the door and looked at me looking at the wall, and I said, “You see this, right? Or, I mean, you don’t see this, right? Well, I don’t know. Whatever. I think you know what I mean. I think you know what I’m talking about.” 

Wow. How crazy you were. 

She sighed. Looked at me sitting there, looked at my IV pole like it was a strange intruder, just standing there, like it’d been caught, a silent partner to madness and hallucinations. Like it’d been egging me on, pumping me full of drugs. My go-to-guy. Who Lou Reed had been waiting for with $26 dollars in his hand. My IV pole. Dressed in black. As she’s looking at the walls, I’m singing in my head, “Up to Lexington 125/Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive/I’m waiting for my man.”

“What you looking at, hon?” she asked me as delicately as possible. 

“It’s no biggie. I’m seeing things. I’m just making sure. You don’t see this guy here playing the drums? Like a conquistador. Playing the congo’s?” I pointed over to the thing. I circled it with my index finger, fingered the area where I saw it happen.

“No,” she said. Then looking, and after some silence, “Yeah. No. Not sure I do.” She looked hard at the stains on the shelving. She really wanted to see it for my sake, I think. I don’t know if she thought I was losing my shit. I wasn’t, I thought, because I knew I was hallucinating. Does knowledge of hallucination make one less mad? But she didn’t know. I couldn’t ask her all that. She said, “It’s just dirt. I think you’re seeing into it.”

“Oh, I know it. I’m seeing into everything.”

“Honey, why don’t you pull your pants up and come on out and get into bed? You should just come on out and rest.”

“Yeah. Ok. Good idea.” So I pulled my underwear up and grabbed my IV pole and we wheeled out into the room and I got back into bed. I wanted to be confident in my madness. I just didn’t want to be making this shit up. I started to think that maybe I wasn’t seeing anything at all, that the whole thing was a hallucination in and of itself, like thinking about it to such a degree was itself a sort of madness. I then got lost in my thinking. 

I looked around the room and things had a sheen to it. I remember thinking, “The room has a sheen to it.” That was the word. “Sheen.” “The room shined softly” is what I kept telling myself. I wondered if others saw it. It wasn’t malicious. It was blue, a light blue around all things. Things vibrated slightly. I knew it was all over for me. They were going to stop the treatments. 

When the doctor came in he asked me how I was doing. I told him. He asked me how I felt, I told him that it really had nothing to do with “feeling.” I went on. I told him about the conquistador. Yeah, it was all over for me. I think I got him on the conquistador. I think that’s what did it for him, when I told him about the stuff in great detail, even the narrative I’d built about the conquistador — you know, “being at the edge of history” and all. 

He put his hand up to stop me from talking, adjusted his glasses on his face, looked at me, said, “Wait, I’m sort of confused now.” He paused to catch his breath. I knew it. My narrative was breathless. I mean, the music, the conquering, the indians, the terror, the melding of peoples. It was a little overwhelming. He asked, “How are you being so lucid about hallucinations? You’re making me confused.” 

I told him that my undergraduate experience afforded me opportunities to explore various modes of consciousness. I smiled. 

My wife laughed, like “Oh my god. Here we go.”

He smiled uncomfortably, shifted his weight from one leg to another. He was in blue surgery scrubs, a white jacket over them, a patch on it that had a man slaying a huge crab. The doctor wiped his brow. He was sweating. “Ok, then,” he said. He proceeded to ask me a series of questions, as if this was going to prove anything at all, he asked, “What’s 100 minus seven?”

I said, “What?”

He said, “100 minus seven?”

“Uh. 93?”

“Minus seven?”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t know. Like 85. Maybe 86.” I was counting on my hands. I was laughing.

“And minus seven.”

“No. I’m not doing this.”

“You have to.”

“No, I don’t.”

I told him to look at the clock, and I told him to look around at the blue sheen of things, and he did and didn’t. He was a very by-the-book kind of man, and I think he just thought I was seeing things and that there wasn’t any more to seeing things than seeing them, like there was nothing else to it, like no story to it, no MEANING. But I think there were other things happening, but he didn’t want go there with me. He didn’t have the time. He was on call. He’d been there all night already and didn’t need to do the whole Carlos Casteneda journey with a 35-year-old cancer patient whose got four spots in his lungs and a bigger mass along his psoas muscle. He didn’t want to do the Tim Leary thing with me even though I was all (always have been) like “Fuck Tim Leary.” I just wanted him to see what I was seeing, what I’d been seeing, but I knew that was probably impossible. He had his own research to do, his own kind of seeing to do. 

He just said, “Well, I think we’re going to stop. You made it to four. That’s good. It’s clear the treatment is working. You’ve got the shine.” 

I nodded sagely, I told him, “ Yeah, man. Everything’s got the shine. That’s my point. Been my point the whole time, man.”

        Emily smiled. Shrugged her shoulders. Like, this is my man.

He smiled meekly and said, “Ok then. Well, I’ll check in later, Mr. Torch.” He threw me a little wave of the hand.

“Ok, Doc. See you later then.”

I think when he left then we were both a little confused because we were both witnessing some kind of shine. He just didn’t believe in mine as I was to believe in his. Later, my wife told me that my skin had a sort of flush to it that made it look shiny. It looked like I’d been in the sun for a few days and I had been sun-kissed. It’s what the doctor’s call the “IL2 glow.” Their “glow” was more “real,” I guess, than the “glow” I was just getting into and they pulled the plug on. This was part of what made this whole thing like being in a car crash — a beautiful car crash, a car crash that wakens you to the minute details of everything happening all at once. I feel like I’ve been in a car crash and it’s still sort of happening, the long smashing of glass, the noise of the crack-up, the way the light glitters off all that broken glass, the holy terror of it, the breathlessness of it, the speed or no speed of the whole thing. Everything sort of weightless and you’re left wondering when it will stop — things just suspended, there to see and witness. 

* * *

Maybe it was two days ago, before I left, that I looked in the mirror at myself and had the brief sensation of being someone else. It was only a moment but one that seemed to last an eternity. Like I’m still looking into the mirror. I said, “You’re you. Stop being so dramatic.” I looked and tried to capture me and my heart got heavy and I thought I’d cry a little but then I didn’t. 

I’ve lost a lot of weight these last three weeks. My cheek bones are sharp and my skin sort of falls near my chin or, better, it makes a slight dimple at either side of my lower jaw. I broke my nose when I was in my early twenties in some ridiculously wonderful and absurd bar fight and the broken bone now sort of stands prominently out at the top, where my glasses sit. My hair has been falling out and, also, a first, my eyelashes and eyebrows a little. So when I looked into the mirror I was experiencing something else. Someone I didn’t know. I wanted to put my hand out and shake his hand. My eyes have always been big, but they bulge a little now because of the severe angularity of my face without the weight I’ll gain back very quickly I’m sure. My eyes, they’re ridiculous. But there you have it. 

I was talking to myself in the mirror, and I suppose everyone has these moments, moments we think for a few seconds that the person staring back at us, that this person, this can hardly be us. We hardly believe it. The years and the tensions and the joys and the hardships and the wonder and the pessimism and the strange skepticism and the terrible optimism and all of it, the madness and hatred and silliness and humanness of being alive all gangs up on you. I guess that’s what it was, I was looking at all of it at once. I wonder if you have before. I wasn’t hallucinating. It was me. But it wasn’t me, or, better, I didn’t want to think it was me because I didn’t want to believe, maybe like you, I didn’t want to believe that at my age, 35, I was privy to such things yet. When is the right age, I guess? There’s no right age. But I wondered, looking at me in the mirror, staring at the foreigner, I wondered what he was doing there. I wanted him to go away even as I leaned in to get a better view: the eye-sockets perfect in their form, but scary because it seemed like one good punch would do some serious damage; there was the seriousness of mouth and the slight hanging at the corners of my mouth, like I was frowning, but I wasn’t. 

“This can hardly be us,” we say. We stare. We inspect. We can hardly believe it. Life all of a sudden. Yes. That’s it. Life all of a sudden. Like a heap on you. Like it fell out of the sky, out of nowhere. The passage of time. The complete wonder of it all. And it reads on your face now is all. When your hair does grow now there’s the little bits of gray hair. There’s the signs of history. You are at the edge of history. You weren’t bullshitting him. You weren’t hallucinating. It’s here.  

And you’re like, “No way.” 

But, “Yes, yes way.” 

There it is. Look. 

Nonetheless, even with this knowledge, you stand there, and you say, “Nope. Not you. Who are you? Get. Go on now. Get.” There’s a slight terror, but also a feeling like it’s always been this way. You were always right there. But what were we looking at before? What the fuck have we been looking at?

The hair product.  The shaving. The lotions. All of it. The preening. The time in front of the mirror and really, well, where were you? Excuse me. Where was I? Where’ve I been? This is what I’ve been thinking about. 

It’s like being in a car crash. Life flashes before your eyes. Moments of clarity. Illuminations. The pleasure of reality. Seeing and not seeing. Hearing and not. There you are and there you go. Gone.

And that’s the experience I just had. As best as I can put it. So when I say something like, “It was like a car crash,” I guess I mean that it wasn’t just being treated for cancer, because, you know, fuck cancer, but it’s the experience of not being me. Or not believing me when me faces me with me. Like the image of me is hard to believe. But, there it is. Now, when I look in the mirror, there I am, man. A severe, sometimes terrified man. Yet a man who has experienced wonder, a guy with the shine. And he keeps experiencing it and keeps experiencing it, has bouts with much darker things, but this wonder, well, this wonder makes him want to go figure it out now that he’s back in the streets of his Chicago again after that long car crash.