“That was upstanding.”
Flicka guffawed, and a burble of saliva drooled down her chin. “Not especially, as it turned out. We were all invited for the premiere. I wasn’t in it.”
“Why didn’t they use your video clip? Did they explain?”
“Sure. The head of the foundation said, you know all apologetic, that they weren’t sure I had the right positive attitude.” Flicka yuck-yucked. “I’d think you’d take that as a compliment.”
“Maybe. But that wasn’t the real reason. At the reception after, I overheard the head guy talking to one of the board of directors. About how tricky it was to strike the ‘right note’ for donors. How the kids had to be both ‘sick enough’ and ‘cute enough.’ You figure it out. Since I’m definitely,” she coughed, “sick enough.”
“I think you’re cute.”
“Spare me. I may have trouble with my corneas, but I’m not blind.” Without the aid of a cigarette, Flicka had an ash-flicking dryness. “Otherwise? Something’s up with my parents. They don’t touch each other anymore. They don’t fight anymore, either, which believe it or not is a bad sign. I think they may get a divorce.”
“Oh no! I can’t believe that!”
“Doesn’t matter what we believe. We’ll see. Maybe they’ll stay together for me. But this feeling—like they’re just boarders in the same house, you know, who pass each other in the hall? I think it’s one reason Heather’s got incredibly fat.”
“That’s too bad. She’s a pretty little girl.”
“Pretty, maybe, but she sure isn’t little. She’s got these friends on antipsychotics and anticonvulsants and Ritalin and stuff, and they’re all fat, too. So she’s been claiming the weight is all caused by her ‘cortomalaphrine.’”
“What’s that for?”
“It’s basically sugar pills, a ‘drug’ my parents made up to make her feel special. The scam’s been going on for years, though I only got wise to it a few weeks ago. I overheard my dad grousing to Mom about how they shouldn’t bother to get the ‘prescription’ filled at the pharmacy at ten bucks a throw, when they could just keep topping up the bottle with M&Ms. I asked him later what he meant, and he came clean. Cracked me up. But this line Heather was pushing about ‘side effects’ when the real ‘side effects’ were from Häagen-Dazs … Well, it started to piss me off. So I guess I was … a little bad.” Flicka’s smile was sly. “You told her.”
“Yeah. She didn’t believe me at first, until I pulverized the whole bottle of ‘cortomalaphrine’ with my pill grinder and mixed it with water to pour it through my g-tube. Nothing happened. Like, nobody had to cart me to the hospital for an OD. Once she got the deal—boy, was she mad.”
“That was a little wicked,” said Glynis.
“Yeah,” Flicka said lightly. “But you know, I don’t get a lot of fun.”
“So what did your parents do?”
“They had to put her on some for-real medication, an antidepressant—and with this stiff, like, really polite, you know, Jackson, dear, would you please pass the salad thing going on at home, maybe she does need Zoloft. But that has real weight-gain side effects. In the last couple of months she must have put on another five pounds.”
“You should ask to borrow a few.”
“Yeah, you, too.”
“Hey, you get any new additions to your cell phone collection lately?” The very idea that anyone would “collect” ancient specimens of a technology that was still, in her mind, a very modern innovation made Glynis feel old.
“Got a real clunker from back in 2001,” said Flicka with the pride of an antique dealer who’d snagged an original Louis XIV. “All square and geeky and ginormous. Show up at my school with that thing, and you’d be laughed out of town. And what about you, when’s your next chemo?”
Ah, for the days when guests had asked, “What are you working on?” or “When’s your next trip abroad?”
“Next week,” said Glynis. “That’s why I’m not nodding off on you. It’s been a couple of weeks. But they only go ahead with it if my blood count is higher than negative zero.”
“Chemo—you’ve never told me. What’s it like?”
Surprisingly, few people ever seemed to ask that. “Chemo” had become such a standard thumbnail for people Glynis’s age that everyone assumed they knew what it was like already. They didn’t.
“Well, some folks come by themselves, and others have minders. Me, I don’t tend to socialize—”
“Big surprise.”
“Everyone thinks I’m aloof and snooty.”
“Which you are.”
It was amazing what Glynis could take from this stunted upstart seventeen-year-old that she wouldn’t put up with from anyone else. “You could hardly blame me. Boasting at the top of their lungs about how much they’re throwing up, or what colorful new rash they broke out in after their last treatment … I’d rather fall apart in private.”
“I don’t like being around other FD kids, either,” said Flicka, ritually wiping another trail of drool from her chin with the sweatband on her wrist. “None of us do. The summer camp is okay, but in the support group it got so almost nobody came. The parents still get together. We freak shows have all cut out.”
“I’m surprised at that, actually. There are so few of you. Wouldn’t you want to compare notes?”
“If you were me, would you want to look in the mirror? When it’s just me, I can sort of forget. You know, I manage. I don’t walk too good, but I eventually get where I gotta go. Then I see these other kids and they look spastic. Then I realize I look spastic. I could skip it. I do skip it.”
“In case you think I’m totally antisocial, I did have one conversation in the waiting room before my last chemo. I guess I talked to him because I overheard that he had mesothelioma, too, and it’s like FD: there aren’t many of us. Some contractor, probably worked with asbestos on the job. Turns out he’s still working. I couldn’t believe it. I can’t sponge my own countertops on chemo, and he’s laying brick. But he can’t quit. He has to keep the job to keep the insurance.”
“Aren’t we lucky, then. Shep and my mom both working crappy jobs so you and me can be tortured in style.”
Ever since this horror show began, Flicka had induced in Glynis a curious confessional outpouring. But there were limits. It would not do to explain to this teenager that Shep’s “crappy job” was part of his punishment. For Pemba, for scheming about an After-After in which his wife would play no part, and for the fact that she had cancer.
“Anyway,” Glynis returned to the subject at hand, “Nancy usually comes with me, this next-door neighbor who used to get on my nerves and now I adore. First we cool our heels in the waiting room checking out the head gear; most of the women wear head scarves like babushkas, so it’s like a time warp, back to some shtetl. The men are more creative—pork pies, baseball caps, sometimes a classy fedora. There’s one guy who shows up every time in a big Western Stetson studded in silver stars. I’ll have taken aprepitant before we left, and I try to time the marzipan about half an hour before. Oh, and I’m sure to be popping more pills while we wait. You know, that leather case your mother got me for carrying all my prescriptions is great. Before, I lived out of a Ziploc. Other visitors show up with scented candles that make me gag. But your mom has a terrific touch with presents.”
“Yeah, when it comes to medical stuff, she’s pretty cool.”
“Oh, and there’s this hilarious competition over who gets the good chairs. There are all these comfy La-Z-Boy-type recliners with little partitions to give you pretend privacy. You want to arrive a little early, so you can snag one of the recliners pointed toward the windows, so you can see the Hudson. Though when he wrote A Room with a View, I doubt Columbia-Presbyterian was what E. M. Forster had in mind.”
“Sorry. Lost me.”
“Well, that’s what I get for confiding in children.” Flicka scowled. She didn’t think of herself as a child. “So if I’m quick, I get my primo front-row se
at. And they come around with a refreshment cart, believe it or not, just like at Yankee Stadium. They want you to keep drinking fluids, but I don’t let them bully me. I get sick of having to drag the drip stand with me to the restroom to pee.
“So then they soak my right arm in warm water, which in my day was the way you got sleeping campers to wet their beds. By the time they put the tourniquet on my upper arm, I’m already feeling woozy, even with the marzipan. It’s not that the needle hurts that much; it’s the idea of it. So Nancy always holds my other hand and keeps me looking her in the eye while they palpate for a vein, and she tells me these awful recipes … like, with Jell-O and pudding mix and canned pears! I think by now she knows I find the idea of cooking with powdered mashed potatoes repulsive, and she tries to concoct the most hideous dishes she can think of. They’re more distracting. Then after the glucose flush … Well, it’s surreal.”
“Why ‘surreal’?”
“A nurse brings out the chemo in what looks like a kid’s book bag—heavy vinyl in school-bus yellow. Except instead of a picture of Daffy Duck, it’s got massive uppercase warnings printed on both sides saying, CYTOTOXIC, like, ‘Do Not Come Within a Mile of This Shit Because It Will Kill You.’ Which it will. And we all sit placidly and let them hook the bag to the drip stand. We page magazines or watch the little TV attached to the chair while this venomous dreck drizzles into our arms for hours. Nurses scurry from chair to chair cheerfully handing out drugs like sweets—all to counter side effects of the dreck. Meanwhile, the IV makes a quiet, regular, lulling sound: cowakak, cowakak. You’re too young to get the reference, but it sounds like when the needle gets stuck at the end of an LP and won’t reject. Cowakak, cowakak … It puts me to sleep. I mean, we’re all obediently mainlining hemlock, docile as sheep, like Jews lining up for the showers. That isn’t surreal? In fact, every time I go I flash on—I’ve never told anyone this; it’s too nutty. But have you ever seen Star Trek?”
“Give me a break. I may not play records, but I’ve at least seen Star Trek. Dad and I love it, and Mom thinks it’s dumb.”
“It’s supposed to be dumb! Your mother needs to lighten up.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“Anyway, there’s one episode, something about a planet that’s done away with war by having scores of people on both sides of a cease-fire volunteer on a regular schedule to walk into a chamber and be euthanized. It’s all very orderly; you know, that program loved alluding to the Nazis. And then Captain Kirk comes in and messes up their thing, giving one of his breathy, emphatic speeches about how they either have to go back to killing each other the old-fashioned way or make peace. So every time I go to Columbia-Presbyterian I picture Captain Kirk bursting into the oncology wing and getting a load of all these delusional lemmings on Planet Bonkers mainlining strychnine. I see him getting self-righteously horrified, and yanking the needles out in a frenzy. Delivering a strident, self-righteous speech about how barbaric it is, how you don’t cure disease with poison. Because the whole routine is completely sick. I really do think that years from now people will look back on chemotherapy the way we look back now on bloodletting and leeches.”
The door tiddled, and Carol poked her head in. “I don’t know who’s being naughtier than who, but you’re each wearing the other one out.”
Glynis invited Carol in, though as a healthy person she was alien, extraneous, from another country whose customs were peculiar and whose citizens had cheating superhero powers; the dynamic quickly grew strained. Glynis considered trying to draw Carol aside and ask what was up with her marriage, until she realized that she didn’t care. She was so suddenly, precipitously tired that spots blotched before her eyes and the perimeters of the bedroom closed in; she could not care about anything or anyone, not even Flicka. So instead she telescoped briefly that she was going to be trying yet another chemo cocktail next week, and Carol acted encouraged.
“That doesn’t work,” Flicka slurred on their way out, “there’s always leeches.”
Maybe it was the mention of leeches, but as she turned from the door once they were gone, Glynis remembered how shortly after she’d moved to New York, before Shepherd, the kitchen in her tiny Brooklyn walk-up had developed a roach problem. Of course she didn’t like roaches, and rather than take them on, get into the nitty-gritty of extermination with Roach Motels and boric acid, she had turned aside from them. There was a gap between the standing cupboard and the wall where she stored paper bags from the supermarket, and before long the bags had begun to move. She knew, abstractly, that this was their nest, and couldn’t help but detect a subtle rustling sound when she made her breakfast. But she had trained herself when she entered the room to keep her eyes fixed straight ahead, and to make her way around the sink and the refrigerator while carefully tilting her head so that the place where the bags were stored remained in the unattended blur of her peripheral vision. Eventually the nest grew so large that it constituted a dark patch on the wall, but so long as she did not look directly at the patch it did not reveal itself as a teeming mass of repulsive individual insects climbing over one another in a mound, but remained a mere shadow.
The sensation was identical now, a recurrent one that had visited ever since her diagnosis. There was a dark patch, a shadow, that she wouldn’t look at directly, and in training her mental gaze resolutely elsewhere, anywhere but at this particular seething corner, most of the time she was able to dismiss it as a trick of the light. But much like the roaches, the longer she ignored it the bigger and blacker it became, and the wider a berth she was obliged to give it in her head. Some nights like this one it would make that same rustling sound, like thousands of tiny legs against brown paper.
Chapter Sixteen
Circumstances might rightly have taught that sex wasn’t everything. On the loss of sight, for example, all one’s other senses were meant to grow more acute, so that the blind developed superhuman hearing and spine-tingling tactile sensitivity in compensation. By analogy, then, subtracting sex from the equation should have made the whole phantasmagoric cornucopia of life’s many other pleasures only the more intense.
Yet sourly contriving the overwrought expression phantasmagoric cornucopia of life’s many other pleasures, Jackson couldn’t think of any. What pleasures? He hated his job. His alleged “best friend” was now the one man on earth whom he was driven most to avoid. His elder daughter’s sense of balance had so drastically deteriorated that they would soon have to demote her to a wheelchair. He could hardly get at the younger kid through the defensive barrage of fat and fast food, though penetrating the vacuous bloat of his twelve-year-old’s face would entail confronting her rage at having been implicitly ridiculed for years with “cortomalaphrine” and her staunch refusal to learn the word placebo. And his wife … So near at hand but glassed off, she might have been living in a parallel universe; he imagined that this sense he had of waving and shouting and jumping up and down while being obliviously unseen and unheard must be what it was like to be dead. He no longer lived with a wife; he merely haunted her. She seemed occasionally to discover that a sandwich had been gnawed or a pair of socks had been worn with the same unnerved quality of a confirmed rationalist forced to confront the invisible intrusions of the paranormal.
Furthermore, every subway poster for hair coloring, every television ad for chocolate, every steamy late-night movie and every snatch of bawdy banter at work bannered the fact that to the contrary sex was everything. With his vista abruptly switched to black and white, Jackson had never realized just how very important sex was until he lived without it. He wasn’t forgoing only the literal activity of round-peg-round-hole, but the whole penumbral range of glances and brushes and touches, whispers and laughters and smiles, the girlish tuckings of a stray auburn wisp behind an ear or the two tender fingers on his forearm that had once electrified his day. So he missed not so much the thing itself but the energy, which powered every other purpose; sex wasn’t the goal but the fuel. Flat out of juice, J
ackson found no joy in food, which ensured that he ate more of it. Booze no longer induced elation but made him bilious; always hopeful that one more beer would tip him over into the ebullient loudmouthery of yesteryear, he drank ever more alcohol, too. Indeed, it was only when Carol shot him a sharp, disapproving glance when he reached for another bottle in the fridge that he was persuaded that this sensible, unsuperstitious woman had come to believe in ghosts. Yet so harrowed and hollowed on his own account, Jackson considered too rarely that Carol’s own vista had gone colorless, that Carol was running on empty, that through a fatal combination of his own foolishness and her obdurate refusal to forgive it, Carol was living without sex herself.
Meanwhile, the looming debts on his credit cards instilled the curious impression that he was being followed. Walking down the street, Jackson would catch a figure in the corner of his eye, or detect a rustle in the bushes behind him, feeling trailed by an elusive presence that when stared straight down would reveal itself as a wafting tree branch or the neighbor’s dog. Yet the presence was always with him. The debts were much worse than Carol had any idea. In an ostensibly generous bid to pull his weight in paperwork, he’d taken over management of the household bills, since Carol handled all the claims for health insurance. To head off her alarm at the sheer profusion of his plastic, he had a couple of cards whose bills were sent to the office; another three were paperless, and he paid their minimums online. He wondered if the subsequent sense of corruption, of unwholesomeness and impending catastrophe, might mirror in some way Glynis’s experience of having cancer. He didn’t want to diminish what Glynis was going through, but there did seem to be a connection; Jackson had fiscal cancer. Thus even when he was thinking about other matters entirely, a wrongness-and-badness was eating away at him, in the same way that, while Glynis might occasionally be able to concentrate on one of the recipes she would never prepare on that confounded Food Channel of hers, a wrongness-and-badness was eating away at her, too. Terminal illness was insolvency of the body. Glynis and Jackson both lived in dread of that unnamed day around the corner when debt collectors would thump on the door to demand their pound of flesh.
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