Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  I open the door, then turn to face him again. “Sawyer.”

  He continues flipping pages. “Hmm?”

  “It occurs to me to wonder: why do you care at all about how this turns out?”

  Now he looks at me. “A minute ago,” he says, “when I called your father unremarkable?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t mean it.” He holds my gaze a moment, then looks back at his paperwork. “Now go tend to your family.”

  As I leave and close the door behind me there is the briefest moment of gratitude and affection for Sawyer. It flares in my chest, then fades and is gone. I stand in the hallway outside his office, short of breath suddenly, thinking: how very, very strange, this life.

  I go up in one of the high-speed elevators that service the subterranean portions of NSA headquarters. I clear security and step outside to find a black sedan parked at the curb and a security officer whom I do not recognize waving me over. He hands me the keys and wishes me a good trip, and just like that I am on my way home for the first time in nearly a decade.

  It does not occur to me, until I pull away from the curb with a tremendous lurch and creaking of shocks, that it’s been eight years since I was last behind the wheel. I’ve got a heavy foot and keep forgetting to use turn signals, and even blow through a red light. Though I’ve been in Washington for four years, for what I know of the place I might as well have been on the moon all this time. By pure luck I come across a sign for 295. I merge with painful slowness and drive another half hour before 295 connects to I-95 North, which will carry me all the way home.

  I remember what Sawyer said about cash, and on a hunch I check the glove box. Instead of the usual cascading jumble of napkins and receipts and registration paperwork, there’s a cell phone, a banded stack of fifty-dollar bills, and a credit card. I remove the money. The next exit bears the universal sign for food—a plate with a fork and knife on either side. Thankfully I don’t have to drive all over creation and risk getting lost, because there’s a McDonald’s right at the bottom of the ramp.

  With a full stomach and two apple pies cooling in their cardboard sleeves on the passenger seat, I hit the road again. Hour after hour of I-95’s soul-numbing sameness spurs the cyclical and obsessive thinking that has become my favorite pastime over the years, and it takes a considerable effort to wrangle my thoughts away from the hopelessness of my father’s sudden illness and pin them down on the more productive contemplation of how, exactly, I’m going to help him. There’s very little time, and I’m disappointed with myself for not having the foresight to research this before now. Given that he smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, on top of prolonged exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, it didn’t take a genius to figure that sooner or later he was bound to get the cancer ticket in his Wonka Bar. Yet here I am, flat-footed, fully defensive, and lost without a map.

  Then, as so often happens, something is revealed to me. It is not elegant. It requires more time than we have. It is likely to fail. But it’s the only chance my father’s got.

  When I pull into town off the interstate the apple pies are gone and the sky is just starting to pink up over the hills in the east. Nothing looks the same. The farm pastures on the outskirts have been plowed under and paved over, replaced by chain restaurant mini-malls and the neon oases of every major oil shill. There’s a Wal-Mart where families used to sunbathe and splash in the fountain at Castonguay Park. The city’s last elm tree, a huge, stately hardwood removed to make way for a credit card call center, has been sawed into manageable sections that wait on a sidewalk to be hauled off and forgotten. I’m so preoccupied passing by the tree’s corpse that I nearly run down a stray dog with a curlicue tail and a bad case of mange. It stands in the middle of the street, mesmerized by my headlights, and I cut the wheel and end up in the parking lot of a sex shop. The dog, hackles raised in fear, skitters off into the shadows.

  My heart is racing from the near-collision, and I take a few deep breaths to calm myself. A glowing red sign in the window of the sex shop makes an odd promise: PRIVATE. I switch on the radio and smoke a cigarette and take a few minutes to gather myself. I scan through the dial twice and find nothing but country and conservative talk.

  When my hands stop shaking I turn the car out toward Fairfield and drive until I reach Miller’s Bakery. I park on the opposite side of the street. If I can’t visit my father, visiting Miller’s isn’t a bad substitute, since the squat gray building, plopped artlessly between two restored Victorians, is practically synonymous with him in my mind. I’m so startled when he passes by the big storefront window in his jeans and white T-shirt and apron, carrying a sheet of sticky buns, that I reflexively duck down in the seat. I watch, trembling anew, as he makes tourtière pies and fills cream horns and troubles over meringues. He works hard and dusts flour off his hands and looks just like he always has, and of course I shouldn’t have been surprised that, a day removed from a terminal diagnosis, he nevertheless showed up for work. Even if everything else around here has changed, my father, certainly, remains the same.

  I leave before the sun comes up, drive to the Econo Lodge on Kennedy Drive, and rent a room from a scowling girl with dirty blond hair. I’m convinced she’s mute until she mutters a comment about weirdos renting rooms first thing in the morning instead of at night like normal people.

  “Won’t clean the room,” she says, handing me the key, “if you sleep all day. Housekeepers are gone at three in the afternoon.”

  “That’s fine.” I feel wired, a little crazed, even, and so have no intention of sleeping anyway.

  When I reach the room I open the blinds, crack the window to dilute the stench of aerosol disinfectant, and use the cell phone from the glove box to call Sawyer. He answers after six rings, sounding groggy and ill tempered. I tell him my plan, and what I will need from him. He surprises me by being amenable and cooperative despite the fact that I woke him from a deep sleep. He immediately agrees to provide everything I’ll need, though he warns that the nearest place with the necessary equipment is the Merck lab in Boston.

  “But what about the other things?” I ask. “How long?”

  “I’ll have a man there this afternoon.”

  “What time? I’m going to the library to start researching.”

  “I’m fairly sure,” Sawyer says, “that he’ll be able to let himself in.”

  I thank him—it feels strange to mean it—and hang up. I hold the phone for a while, turning it over in my hands, considering, then toss it on the bed before I give in to temptation. I can’t call my father until Sawyer’s man gets here with the voice disguiser and the other equipment. Besides, I don’t yet have anything useful to tell my parents. Business, is how I need to think of this. Just another problem that needs solving.

  The library won’t open for another few hours, so I take a shower. I don’t register the fact that I have no clean clothes until I get out and dry off. I stand naked on the bath mat for a moment, considering, then put on the dirty stuff and make a mental note to hit Penney’s after I leave the library.

  Though I’m not tired I lie down on the bed for a while and watch the early news. There’s something comforting in how hokey and half-assed local programming has remained: the female newscaster with last decade’s haircut stumbling over her lines in a studio the color of anemia; the grainy commercials with poor dubbing and folks of dubious personal hygiene hawking lumber and used cars. I grew up among these people. I understand and trust them, because they are guileless and cheerfully self-sufficient and do not put on airs. They make me realize, with some surprise, just how much I’ve missed home. After a while the local broadcast gives way to the national morning show, which is so intolerably dull that against all odds I sink down into the shingled stack of pillows and doze for a while.

  I wake with a start at nine thirty. The library opened half an hour ago, and though it may be a bit of a stretch to say that every minute counts, it’s not too far off, especially since I don’t yet know th
e particulars of my father’s diagnosis. He could have a year left, or a month. Better to assume the worst. I throw on my shoes and go, stopping at the gas station next to the motel to buy a pair of mirrored sunglasses, which with my ball cap will have to do for a disguise until Sawyer’s man shows up.

  At the library I sign for use of a computer terminal. I sit down and search first for clinical trials, as this is where the most advanced work is being done, work that may point me in the right direction. I scan the National Cancer Institute website to no avail, then move on to the major medical centers: Dana-Farber in Boston, Sloan-Kettering in New York, M.D. Anderson in Houston. I speed-read thousands of headers in two hours and come up with nothing. The problem is these trials are engaged with objectives far too modest for my purposes: “improved life expectancy of 1-3 months”; “slowed brain damage from spread of primary tumor”; “some survival benefit from multidrug treatment,” etc. It’s shameful, I think, to pursue such worthless goals so doggedly. I am not interested in discovering a better way for my father to die—I want a cure. Anything less is pattycake, a waste of everyone’s time.

  In any event I didn’t expect much from the clinical trials, because I have a hunch that the key to curing my father lies outside the laboratory, in a farmer’s field in Ohio, maybe, or growing on fallen Japanese oak trees, or circulating through the lymphatic system of an Ecuadorian frog. Or, perhaps, all of the above. I’m about to wade into the vast rollicking ocean of alternative therapies when the phone, which I’ve neglected to set to vibrate, rings in my pocket. There are a few grumbles from the people around me, regulars who probably have some tacit system worked out to decide who gets the newspaper first every morning, and who don’t appreciate some interloper breaking the sacred studious silence.

  “Hello,” I say quietly.

  “Clark here.”

  “Who?”

  “Sawyer sent me. I’m at the Econo Lodge. Room 316. Waiting.” He hangs up, and I’m left thinking, for not the first time, that occasionally Sawyer and his colleagues take themselves a touch too seriously.

  My first impression of Clark, on entering my room and seeing him seated at the small table near the window, is he’s a real Master Race-look ing son of a bitch: blond brushcut, cheekbones like steel blades, and behind the sunglasses, I am certain, eyes the color of glacier ice. For all that is severe and official-looking about his physical appearance, though, he’s oddly dressed: jeans and sports jacket, and beneath the jacket a T-shirt that reads: Camping is In-Tents!

  Clark removes the sunglasses. Sure enough, cold blue. “Junior?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  He stands and motions to the half-dozen black cases of various sizes on the bed. “There are several changes of clothes in the closet,” he says. “Let’s get started. I hear you’re pretty bright, so this shouldn’t take long. I want to be back in Boston by dark.”

  He wastes no time showing me the contents of the cases, explaining the function of each object quickly and moving on to the next without asking if I understand or have questions. Voice transformer, laptop with satellite broadband, fake ID cards (including a badge that will grant me access to Merck Research Laboratories in Boston), disguise utility with simple stuff like glue-on facial hair, and the item I’m most interested in: a folder containing my father’s updated medical records.

  The last thing Clark hands me is a bottle of scary government-issue uppers that I’ve seen a few of the guys in the Program use. The drug is a lightly classified formula for G-men and spooks who need to stay awake and alert far beyond reasonable human limits. It resembles methamphet amine in its effects, but without the agitation, paranoia, or dental rot. Until now, I’ve avoided it like herpes.

  Having fulfilled his duties, Clark shows himself the door, and when it closes behind him I feel a strange and massive sense of relief. The moment he’s gone I slap the folder with my father’s records on the table and spread the pages out. There are two things that will tell me all I need to know: the radiologist’s report from the PET scan, and the pathology report from the biopsy. I find both.

  The news is not good.

  The PET scan shows a primary tumor in the left lung (bad enough) and lymph node involvement both above and below the right clavicle (even worse), as well as “highly suspicious” lesions on the liver (worse still). The pathology report fingerprints the cancer as small-cell, which if you’re going to have lung cancer is pretty much the type you want to avoid.

  Though I’m reluctant to know, I get on the laptop to get an idea of how long, given this information, my father can expect to live. After five minutes of research I come up with the very grim estimate of one to two months.

  I knew that it would be bad, but I did not know it would be this bad. The plan I hatched on the road is far too speculative and time-consuming to have even the slightest chance of success. Unlike yesterday in Sawyer’s office, when the shock of the diagnosis insulated me, I’m having no trouble feeling things now. I switch on the television and turn the volume up and cry for what seems like a long time. When I’m done I stand and pace the room, trying to ignore the sudden siren call of the bottle of pills on the nightstand.

  Morning turns to afternoon. The sun begins a slow descent and glares through the west-facing windows with rude brilliance. I spend some time in bed, staring blankly at the television. I resolve a hundred times not to take any of the spook meth. Eventually I bring the bottle into the bathroom and stand poised over the toilet. I try to take the cap off and pour the tablets out and hit the flush lever, but for some reason I can’t. I go back into the bedroom and sit at the table and watch the parking lot fill with cars as evening comes on, and then, because there’s nothing else left to me, and because I’m afraid of the pills, and because I’m in mourning for a father who hasn’t yet died, I do something I haven’t done for a very long time: I pray.

  The Son Becomes Father

  You understand that we are sorry for and sympathetic to your problem. You understand, also, that our sympathy cannot extend to direct intervention on your behalf, no matter how desperate the situation. Naturally we’re happy to offer what assistance we can within the limits of our long-standing policy of supportive neutrality, but even if we had the ability to make your father well, which we may or may not, it’s not our place to wave our magic wand, so to speak, and make it so.

  Having said that, we will say this: call Sawyer and have him arrange for your father to be treated at the nearest TomoTherapy center, at Brockton Hospital, south of Boston. TomoTherapy involves highly concentrated doses of radiation, and has a fair chance of buying your father enough time for your original plan, which incidentally is quite solid, to be put into action. Being a newish treatment, TomoTherapy is offered at only a dozen or so places on Earth, so you should be aware that in order to secure a spot for your father, Sawyer will have to use his influence to bump another patient whose situation is just as desperate.

  We’re glad this gives you pause. You wouldn’t be human if it didn’t. However, consider this: Do you think, when you were a boy, that your father would have been philosophical about any threat to you? Would he have weighed his options, thought on it awhile, then reluctantly come to a decision, full of ambivalence? No. Your father would kill puppies and step on old ladies’ throats to protect you. For your sake he would sack and burn cities, salt the fields of all the world. Then or now. And though over the years he’s set an example that any son would find hard to live up to, there will never be another time, in either of your lives, when it’s so important for you to try and emulate him.

  You call Sawyer. He answers, sounding more alert than earlier. His brusque, official tone lets you know he’s at the office in his high-backed leather throne. When you tell him the situation and make your request, however, his manner shifts again to one of sympathy and humble cooperation. While you’re understandably baffled and skeptical, we can tell you it’s true that your father is the reason Sawyer has suddenly become so earnest and humane. It’s
pretty simple, really: Sawyer considers himself a patriot, in the most basic, flag-lapel-pin way, and your father’s joining the Marines during a time when just about every other young man was hiding out in the National Guard or running to Canada with his ass on fire scored big points with Sawyer. It scored bigger points still when Sawyer learned your father had turned down a professional baseball contract. But beyond all that, what really hooked Sawyer is that he wishes his own father were more like yours. Or, more accurately: he wishes that his own father—a liberal, vaguely effete, draft-dodging college professor who’s perpetually drunk in that acceptable middle-class vodka rocks kind of way—had been pretty much the exact opposite of what he was, what he continues to be in a potbellied, graying form.

  Sawyer readily agrees to arrange for TomoTherapy treatment. He asks if there’s anything else you need.

  “Not at the moment. Soon. But if you could let me know the moment it’s arranged, that would be good.”

  “Done. I’ll call you back in half an hour or so.”

  You sit at the table and watch the digital readout on the clock radio. Exactly twenty minutes have passed when the cell phone rings.

  “Monday at two p.m. for an assessment.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.” There’s a rustling on Sawyer’s end like he’s moving paperwork around his desk. “They’ll put together a treatment plan and get started right away.”

  “Great, that’s great.”

  “What, no concern for the fellow who got bumped?”

  “Listen, just make sure I get copies of all the paperwork from his treatments, okay? Daily.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  You fold the phone and put it down on the table. All the preliminaries are out of the way. The organizing and mental networking that come so naturally to you have been exhausted for the moment, and now it’s time for you to contact your father. Instead you just sit there, understandably anxious about making the call.