Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  In the motel parking lot below your window a pickup truck pulls in, towing a trailer with two commercial lawnmowers. Two men get out of the truck. The driver is a man named Arthur Hopkins, Art to his friends and wife. The other man, barely out of his teens and still bat tling acne, is his son Cody. They talk as they put down the gate on the trailer and loosen the straps that hold the mowers in place. Art points to a grassy hill next to the motel pool. Cody points toward a strip of grass that runs alongside the road on the far side of the parking lot. They are discussing strategy, teamwork, how together they will approach and complete the job of mowing the motel’s lawn. And then, the discussion concluded, they fire up the mowers and get started.

  You watch the two of them work for a while. By now it’s midafternoon, the hottest part of the day. The metal siding on the motel’s pool house shimmers. By the time they’re finished mowing and getting ready to do the trim, Art is visibly heat-fatigued. Like your father, he is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War. Two years ago he suffered a devastating myocardial infarction that destroyed 60 percent of his heart muscle, yet he insists on continuing to run his landscaping business. Cody had moved to Boston after high school, but returned to keep an eye on his father and make sure he didn’t work himself into another heart attack. You watch as Art takes a bottle of water from a small lunch cooler in the bed of the truck and drinks desperately, gasping between gulps. His shirt is soaked through with sweat. He grabs a Weedwhacker and moves to resume working, but Cody stops him. He pats his father’s shoulder and says a few short words, and Art reluctantly sits down on the tailgate and finishes his bottle of water while Cody trims the edges around the parking lot and pool.

  You turn away from the window, take a deep breath, and attach the voice transformer to the cell phone with a small auxiliary cable. You’re worried your father will know right away that it’s you, but this shouldn’t be a concern. You’ll be able to hear how different and unrecognizable your voice is through the transformer. It’s set to make you sound like a woman of seventy or so; the expert NSA reasoning behind this, which is quite valid, goes that men are more inclined to listen to and heed the advice of a distinguished, intelligent older woman.

  Even though there’s no need to worry about how you’ll sound to your father, you should take a moment to prepare for how your father will sound to you. For one thing he is extremely demoralized, and his voice will reflect this. Also, the tumor in his lung has grown into the bronchus, causing frequent, violent coughing fits that are likely to alarm and sadden you.

  You put on the headset and dial your parents’ number, the same number they’ve had for as long as you’ve been alive. The line rings through five, six, seven times. Part of you hopes, understandably, that no one will pick up.

  “Hello,” your father says, and you barely recognize his voice. Despite our warning your heart sinks at hearing him sound so low and defeated.

  “John,” you say, and your voice comes to you through the headset, grandmotherly and strange.

  “Yes?”

  “I need you to listen to me.”

  He coughs and clears his throat, a prolonged and liquid sound. “Who is this?”

  “I know that you’re sick. I want to help.”

  An encouraging hint of the mercurial anger you remember: “I asked you a question,” your father says.

  “And the answer is irrelevant,” you say. The voice transformer is bringing out in you the sort of insolence you would otherwise never in all eternity consider displaying toward your father. This insolence is interesting to us, and useful to you—in order to help your father, you’ll need to be able to boss him around a bit. “What is relevant, John, is whether or not you’re interested in living. Because I can help you with that.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Wait, please. Give me a minute.”

  “Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to sell. But the doctors already told me I’m done.”

  “That’s the whole point, John. I’m going to give you more time than the doctors are offering.”

  Again he tries to clear his throat, two or three attempts of increasing effort, then finally a harsh, reflexive cough. “I’m listening.”

  It’s always surprising what people are willing to sit still for when they’re genuinely desperate. Your father’s good sense tells him this mysterious benefactor routine is unalloyed nonsense, and under any other circumstances, being even less tolerant of nonsense than the average man, he would have ended the conversation immediately and gone back to his dinner of shepherd’s pie and whole milk. But even he, the god of your childhood, can be broken down by fear. It’s a sad realization, but one you must take advantage of if you’re going to cure him.

  “Do you have pen and paper? I need you to write something down.” You wait for him to be ready, then recite the telephone number for the Brockton Hospital radiology department. “Give them your name and say you’ve misplaced the information for your appointment and ask could they give it to you again. Write down what they tell you. I’ll call again in ten minutes.”

  The moment ten minutes have passed you hit redial, and your father answers immediately.

  “What’s TomoTherapy?” he says. “I asked the woman but she said my primary care doctor arranged the appointment, and he could explain it to me.”

  “It’s a new treatment,” you say. “Very, very promising type of radiation. Some people are even cured. But at the very least it should buy you some time, so that we can come up with something else.”

  “Something else?”

  “What I’ll be working on while you’re in Brockton. I’m developing a treatment of my own.”

  There’s a pause. “Who the hell is this?” he asks again.

  “As I said,” you tell your father, “who I am isn’t important. All you need to know is I have your best interests firmly in mind. And I am going to make you well. Who else is offering you that?”

  “No one,” he says. Again, the harsh, liquid throat-sound.

  “But you need to trust me.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I’ll take that,” you say. “So you’ll go to Brockton?”

  “You think it will help?”

  “I do,” you say, feeling a little thrill at his soliciting your advice and encouragement. “And in the meantime, as I said, I’ll be working on something else. So . . . hang in there. John.”

  “Okay.”

  You hang up, still vaguely surprised that you got him to agree to anything. It hasn’t occurred to you, though it should have by now, that this is the real reason Sawyer forbade you to have direct contact with your father—because no matter the circumstances, he would not take advice or help directly from you. From a completely anonymous elderly woman he’s never laid eyes on, yes. From you, no. He is the father and you are the son, and even in this weakened and vulnerable state he is incapable of relying on you for anything, ever.

  Junior

  I spend the next week researching endlessly. Sleep becomes an afterthought, and in my anxiety and fatigue I have to resist the urge to take any of the government-issue meth pills. As the week goes on I talk to no one and ingest nothing but soda and vending machine snacks. During rare moments when I’m not at the library or the local hospital or in front of the laptop, I worry over whether or not my father actually went to Brockton, because I’ve got a promising list of potential ingredients for a cancer-killing cocktail—everything from interleukin-12 to hazelnuts, bovine cartilage to cannabis—but I need the time that TomoTherapy would provide in order to research my hunches at the Merck labs.

  I also need tissue from my father’s biopsy. I e-mail Sawyer, and on Friday a small box arrives at the motel with four samples packed in dry ice, along with paperwork from Brockton. This last is both a relief and a worry. The upside is that my father is following through with treatment, but the latest PET scan shows, just two weeks after the initial diagnosis, new cancer growth in his spine. It’s spreading even faster than I’d feared, an
d I realize my hand has been forced.

  I call Sawyer and give him the list of ingredients and tell him I need everything at the Merck labs within twelve hours. I drive in a buzzing stupor of protracted sleep deprivation, a semipsychosis exacerbated by grief and fear. In what seems like no time at all Boston looms up out of the night. Dazzled by the streetlamps and the lonely lighted windows high in the skyscrapers, I make four laps around Brookline and the Back Bay before finding Avenue Louis Pasteur and the Merck building more or less by accident.

  I get out and pump the parking meter full of quarters before realizing that, at three in the morning, it’s not necessary. The Merck labs don’t open until six, so even though the clock’s ticking I have no choice but to wait. I sit in the car with the radio on low, smoking cigarettes and tapping my fingers on the steering wheel.

  Dawn breaks slow and gray over the city. I check my watch and see it’s after five. I’m feeling a little less frenzied, but a cup of tea and some food might be in order before going to the labs. I lock the car and walk up to Brookline Avenue, then over to Longwood, where there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts. When I order tea and a bagel the girl behind the counter seems spooked by me. I take a seat by the window, and the doughnut girl keeps looking up and eyeing me. I start to wonder what it is about my appearance or bearing that she finds so unnerving, and hope that whatever it is, it won’t be a problem when I try to clear security at Merck.

  It turns out I could have probably walked into the labs naked and slath ered in peanut butter, because when I go into the lobby and show my ID badge I get the VIP treatment. One of the guards checks some paperwork and smiles and insists on taking my bags as he escorts me upstairs to a private lab. It’s not big, but it’s got everything I need—microscopes, a good centrifuge, autoclave, incubator, pipettes, test tubes and Petri dishes, dyes and razors—and based on my reception so far it seems certain that if I require anything else it’ll be provided posthaste.

  Sitting on the counters are a dozen boxes, taped heavily along the seams and bearing shipping labels with return addresses as random and far-flung as if someone had thrown a dart repeatedly at a map. I open them and find everything I requested of Sawyer, from hawthorn fruit to freeze-dried anole lizards. I empty the boxes and organize these items, setting aside those that require refrigeration. I can’t help marveling once more at Sawyer’s commitment and reliability. God help me, I’m actually starting to feel beholden to the son of a bitch.

  Despite the obvious urgency, I can’t start trying out the mung bean and lapacho tree bark until I grow cultures from my father’s biopsy samples. I could’ve had Sawyer find some mature SCLC cultures to begin testing on right away, but I’m trying to cure my father’s cancer, not the cancer of some anonymous person from the Baltimore-Washington area who has probably been outlived by the cell samples he donated. One of the fundamental problems with cancer research to date is it presupposes that a single treatment can be successful against any number of cases of, say, prostate cancer, when in fact the only reliably effective treatment is one that’s custom-fitted to every last nucleotide of a particular renegade cell.

  It’s probably just as well there’s not much to do now; I’m about twenty hours of sleep and three large meals removed from thinking with the sort of power and clarity I’ll need to make this work. I thaw the biopsy samples, sterilize two dozen cell growth plates, and set up cultures in the incubator. By the time I’ve finished it’s midafternoon, and a week’s worth of hunger and fatigue finally hit me all at once. It’s all I can do to leave the lab and walk back over to Longwood, where I rent a room at the Best Western, take the elevator to the fifth floor, order juice and a chef’s salad from room service, and pass out on the bed in a large rectangle of afternoon sunlight.

  When I wake it’s still daytime, but something about the light is wrong. It takes a minute for me to realize that the sun is now on the opposite, eastern side of the building—I’ve slept through the night. My insides feel raw and hollow. I remember ordering room service, and I go to the door and find a tray on the floor of the hallway. The juice is lukewarm, the salad wilted and topped with graying ham, but I eat and drink with the mindless greed of a starving animal. Afterward I stand in the shower for a long time with my back to the spray, head down, eyes closed. I step out and dry off and change into fresh clothes, surprised at how much better I feel.

  I have every intention of heading back to the Merck labs, but when I step outside it’s an unbelievably gorgeous day, and the vibrant, optimistic motion in everything—the sun and the people and the pedicabs and the trains—draws me out into the streets, so instead of going to watch cancer cells multiply and conquer like some microscopic Sherman’s March, I walk up to Brookline Avenue and follow it north toward the river, not really thinking about where it will take me and not really caring, and the next thing I know I’m standing on the corner of Brookline and Landsdowne, looking up at the great green façade of Fenway Park’s left-field wall. Across the street, in the window of the Cask and Flagon, a sign reads: “Bud Light Half Price Night! Come In And Watch The Sox Take On The Cubs!”

  The Cubs. I remember suddenly what Rodney told my mother over the phone: a two-week road trip. Interleague play. By now my father will surely have sent Rodney back to be with the team. Which means my brother, who I haven’t seen in eight years, is here, in Boston, at Fenway Park, probably sitting in the visitors’ clubhouse, watching TV and waiting for batting practice to begin, just a few hundred yards from where I stand.

  For obvious reasons I don’t normally put stock in the notion of fate, but I decide in an uncharacteristic moment of superstition that it is meant to be, this meeting between me and Rodney. Sawyer be damned. He didn’t say anything about not having contact with my brother, after all. Just my parents, my father specifically. No doubt poor Rodney is feeling even more broken and alone than I am, and one way or another I’m going to see him.

  This may prove difficult, though. The ballpark doesn’t open for another three hours and in any event I don’t have a ticket, so I yell out to a couple of valets standing behind a set of aluminum barricades at the players’ parking garage. The taller of the two, with the reluctance of someone accustomed to being hollered at by strangers, moves toward me down the blocked-off street.

  “My brother is with the Cubs,” I say. “I need to talk to him.”

  “Right,” the guys says. “If he’s ya brothah, shouldn’t you have his phone numbah?”

  “Seriously,” I say.

  “Okay, I’ll bite, chief. Which one’s ya brothah?”

  I tell him Rodney’s name.

  “Uh huh,” he says. “Move it, buddy, outta heah.” He turns and walks back to his place against the wall. A Hummer with a huge shining chrome grill and spinning rims rolls in, and the two attendants busy themselves moving the barricades aside and fawning over the driver, a tall Hispanic who gives over his keys and shakes their hands absently, then saunters into the park’s interior.

  So I’ll have to buy a ticket. Unfortunately Red Sox tickets are rarer than yellow-tailed woolly monkeys, and harder to find. My only hope is to walk around the park in the couple of hours leading up to game time and try to find a scalper, which means I’ve got some time to kill.

  Two hours later I emerge from a taqueria on Landsdowne, my belly full of fish tacos and iced tea. By now the streets are choked with baseball fans, and I have to pause at the bottom of the bar’s outside staircase and wait for an opportunity to merge with the happy flow of foot traffic. I haven’t made it half a block before a skinny guy in glasses and a greasy white shirt passes by, waving his hand in the air and asking no one in particular if they need tickets.

  “Ticket,” I say, and the guy stops and says, “Tickets.” “Ticket,” I say again. The guy straightens his glasses and says, “Look, I’ve got two, you want ’em both or not.” I ask how much and when he tells me it’s like being kicked in the groin, but I figure it’s Sawyer’s money anyway and hand it over.

  I’ve
been inside Fenway once, years ago, and the only difference is that the fat old men on stools tearing tickets have been replaced by uniformed guards who frisk people and rummage through bags and never, ever smile. Other than that it’s the same families and young couples and roving packs of college boys, wearing the same authentic jackets and jerseys and caps, eating the same hot dogs and drinking the same beers, which are being sold at the same 800 percent markup.

  It’s the aroma, though—spilled Budweiser, popcorn, piss, Italian sausage burning over propane flame—that really transports me back to the first and last time I was here, walking down this same trash-strewn promenade behind the right-field bleachers, struggling to stay dry and condiment-free under a load of two hot dogs, a bag of peanuts, and a large orange soda. My father, at the time still mute around me and Rodney, led the way. I remember mounting the staircase along the park’s outer wall and trying to keep pace with the old man, who always took stairs two or three at a time as a matter of course. And then that miraculous first view of the park from the infield roof seats, one of those early-life visions that’s seared into your neurons the way shadows were seared into the ground at Hiroshima. The field so vast yet enclosed by walls, by far the most sprawling interior I’d ever seen. The thousands and thousands of people. The grass impossibly neat, literally hand-trimmed along the infield dirt. The players in their startling white uniforms—big men, a couple of them bigger than even my father. The jumbotron flashing and glittering. The warm, gravelly voice over the PA. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with my father and eating hot dogs together. All of it wonderful, indelible.

  All these years later the feeling is the same when I step out of the tunnel, five-dollar orange soda in hand, and the narrow concrete walls open onto the wide, wonderful panorama of grass and sky. I remember the moment when my father leaned over and told me ballparks are America’s cathedrals, and Fenway is Notre-Dame. It was the only thing he said the entire game. I pause at the top of the landing and look around, smiling stupidly, as people squeeze along the walkway between me and the railing.