Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  There’s more than an hour before the game starts, so I work my way to the infield, where the Cubs are taking batting practice. I step down to the wall and wedge myself in among the kids holding up baseballs and Sharpies and calling frantically to every player who wanders by. Rodney is playing long-toss on the opposite side of the infield, in the grass just beyond third base.

  One thing about Rodney: on the field he has always been able to transcend whatever else is happening in his life, no matter how bitter or painful. In this regard, if none other, he is like most other world-class athletes—the exceptional hand-eye coordination and 400 lb. bench press are nice, but his true gift is the ability to check his head at the clubhouse door and let himself be guided by muscle memory and instinct. To become, on the field, quite literally mindless.

  Which is why, when the initial warmth I feel at first seeing him subsides, I start to worry. His shoulders are drooped, his head down. He throws the ball listlessly and drops several easy passes in the grass. After one of these he picks the ball up, tosses it back, and turns away, staring up into the stands with his glove hanging at his side. The guy he’s playing catch with stands looking at Rodney’s back for a few seconds, perplexed, then runs deeper into left field to shag fly balls.

  As Rodney descends the stairs into the visitors’ dugout, emerging with a bat a few moments later, I wonder if I should approach him before or after the game. I’d planned to wait until after, but watching him—he takes a few reluctant practice swings, waiting for his turn in the cage—I think maybe it would be better to talk to him now. But I’m inexplicably anxious, and in the time it takes me to work up the nerve to go around behind home plate and call to him, the Cubs wrap up their b.p. session and disappear into the clubhouse, while the grounds crew hustles to put the screens and ball baskets back into storage and get things ready for the game.

  I go back out to right field and find my seat just as the starting lineups are being announced. The place is filling up now, and I jostle with the guy on my left for control of the tiny armrest. Rodney comes to the plate in the top of the first, but he’s gone before I have much of a chance to get excited, striking out on three pitches, the third one looking.

  To my knowledge Rodney has never before, at any level of baseball, struck out on three pitches. In just his second year with the Cubs he set the NL record for fewest strikeouts in a season, then tied his own record the following year. He’s regarded as one of the best two-strike hitters of the modern era, no small distinction when one considers the competition: Boggs, Gwynn, Carew. To go down looking he must be in even more trouble, mentally, than I feared. Already I can’t wait for this to be over.

  Fortunately the game ends up being a pitchers’ duel, and in just over two hours it’s the bottom of the ninth, Cubs up 3-1, one on, one out. I leave my seat and go through the tunnel and walk down to the third base field box, behind the visitors’ dugout, in position to get Rodney’s attention when he walks over from short at the end of the game. A man behind me grumbles about people who stand while the ball is in play—people, he adds, who don’t even belong in this section and probably should be out in the bleachers or the right-field grandstands or whatever other shitty section they’re ticketed for so those who paid $250 for their seats can have an unobstructed view. Half of a hot dog hits me in the back and lands on the concrete to mingle with the peanut shells and empty beer cups. I don’t even turn around, just continue to wait for the last out to be made.

  In short order the Red Sox rookie second baseman takes a slider for strike three, and the game is over. The Cubs nine gather around the pitcher’s mound, trading handshakes and high-fives, then break up and begin drifting in groups of two and three toward the dugout. Rodney comes over by himself, head down, glove slapping at his thigh. I call out to him, but he doesn’t hear me. His head stays down, face obscured by the bill of his cap. His right foot hits the top of the dugout stairs. He’s about to disappear.

  I try again, louder. This time he looks up, sees me, and smiles broadly, his joy unsullied by disbelief.

  “Junior!” He walks around to the home plate side of the dugout, where the seats come right up to the field, and I meet him there. A man in a Fenway Security jacket puts a hand out to stop me, but Rodney tells him it’s okay, and I swing a leg up over the low wall and step onto the field. We embrace.

  “Dad,” Rodney says.

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Rod. He’ll be okay. I’m taking care of it.”

  He looks at me a moment. “You will, won’t you?” he says. “Take care of him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay.” Thus satisfied, he smiles again. “It’s so good to see you!” he says, slapping me on the back with one large hand.

  A growing mass of kids is pressed against the wall, calling to Rodney and holding out the ubiquitous Sharpies and baseballs.

  “You’ve got business to tend to,” I tell him. “Listen, Rod, let’s get together for dinner tonight.”

  “Yeah, I’d like that!” he says. He takes a ball and signs it without looking away from me.

  “There’s a Bertucci’s down the street in Kenmore Square.”

  “I like Italian,” Rodney says.

  “I know you do. Will you meet me there at eight?”

  “I will.”

  “Okay,” I say. “And listen, Rod. Don’t tell anyone you’ve seen me. Especially not Dad and Ma. All right?”

  “Okay.” Trusting Rodney on this is a simple matter: it would never occur to him to tell me one thing and do another.

  But when I get to Bertucci’s at ten past eight Rodney isn’t there. I wait at the bar for nearly an hour, drinking seltzer and picking at the complimentary focaccia and olive oil while the place fills up with young besuited professional types. Rodney would never blow me off, especially under these circumstances. This makes no sense at all. After a while it occurs to me to run across the street to the Store 24 and buy a paper and check the baseball schedule, and sure enough, the Cubs are playing the Dodgers at Wrigley tomorrow. Rodney forgot it was a travel day.

  Maybe it’s just as well, because even though I’m still waiting for the cultures to grow there’s plenty of research I could be doing. I walk back to the hotel and e-mail Sawyer to ask for more money, then spend the rest of the night eating pretzels from the vending machine in the hall and reading the latest on gene-based therapies, of which there is quite a lot, most of it useless.

  Sawyer responds the next morning with the assurance that I’ll have all the money I need. He also says that, fortunately for me, and for him, and let’s face it for all of humanity, the test of the Alcubierre drive was a success. He goes on to say that I came dangerously close to crossing the line by meeting my brother, and I had better hope that Rodney keeps his pledge not to tell my parents. But even Sawyer, with his files and reports, his satellite cameras that can see from orbit whether a penny dropped on a sidewalk landed heads or tails, even he doesn’t know my brother like I do. As flighty as he can be, when it comes to keeping a secret Rodney is utterly reliable.

  Over the next couple of weeks I settle into a fruitful routine that would be almost pleasant if its ultimate aim were something other than fighting off the looming specter of my father’s death. The cultures mature more quickly than I’d anticipated—good on the one hand, since it enables me to begin testing; bad, of course, because there’s a correlation between how quickly cells grow in a Petri dish and how quickly they grow in the body. I apply various combinations of the fruits and herbs and bovine cartilage and frozen lizards to the cultures, testing, observing, alternating combinations, tweaking proportions, retesting.

  Every afternoon I take a break from the lab and walk to Boston Beer Works, stopping on my way to grab a copy of the Globe. This time of day the place is usually empty except for a few slow suicides seated a safe distance from one another at the bar. I drink a Coke or O’Doul’s while I flip through the paper, alw
ays checking the sports section first for the baseball box scores. Even though we didn’t have a chance to eat dinner together Rodney must have taken our talk to heart, because since then he’s hitting a much more Rodney-like .382, with 5 home runs and 16 RBI in 19 games. He hasn’t struck out once.

  Everything is coming together: my father is in treatment, Rodney’s happy and playing well, the Alcubierre drive works like a charm, and the cure for my father’s cancer is more or less a foregone conclusion. On particularly nice days I sit on the sidewalk patio at Beer Works and order a refill on my soda and watch people going about their lives and think perhaps I’d like one of those for myself. A life. I cast my mind ahead, to a time when my father is well and I’m free of my obligations to Sawyer, and I think maybe I’ll reestablish contact with Amy and set about building something with her in the few years we’ve got left before everyone has to abandon ship.

  Then, on a Monday afternoon when all is well and nothing can be wrong, Sawyer calls.

  “What sort of progress are you making?” Classic Sawyer, right to it without even the most perfunctory greeting.

  “Coming along,” I say. “Why haven’t I gotten the radiology reports from Brockton this week?”

  “Our two questions,” Sawyer says, “are related.”

  That chill again. The icicles, pricking, probing.

  “Okay,” I say, “so, the TomoTherapy isn’t working well, is what you’re going to tell me. I still need the details. I still need the report.”

  “The details are these: It’s a complete failure. The tumor in your father’s lung has grown considerably. Meantime, his PET scan shows new areas of high glucose uptake on the brain, in several lymph nodes and, most ominously, on the pancreas.”

  He gives me a moment to absorb this. I say nothing.

  “He’s lost twenty-five pounds in two weeks,” Sawyer continues. “Even worse, on recent nights, while he lies awake and your mother pretends to sleep next to him, his thoughts have turned, however briefly, to suicide.”

  “Okay, Sawyer. How do you know that?”

  “I wish,” he says, “that I didn’t.”

  I think about my father’s life, and as I do a sudden anger washes over me, hot like fresh blood. I think about his lost baseball career, and all the years he worked for next to nothing. I think about the money he didn’t have, spent on crap that didn’t work: the refrigerator that died just after the warranty had expired and cost who knows how much in rotten food; the color TV, less than a year old, that blinked out during game four of the ’86 World Series; the matching Desert Desperado bikes he bought for me and Rodney that started falling apart pretty much the moment we got on, and my father’s repeated attempts to repair them, to no avail, never to any avail. I think of what his afterlife might hold, and I get a vision of him as Sisyphus but instead of pushing a rock he’s pushing that bastard of a car, the green Country Squire wagon with the faulty starter, over and over again he shoves it up the hill, then watches it roll back down, and I have to admit that a tiny part of me hates him for slogging along through all eternity like this, without complaint.

  Race for the Prize

  You have roughly one week to come up with a cure. Any longer than that and it will be too late. And so you’ve got a decision to make for yourself. Given the situation there are really only two options.

  The first is to let your father die. We’re sorry to put it so harshly, but there’s no reason, at this point, to employ euphemisms.

  The second is to take the chance of killing yourself in order to save him. Because make no mistake: for you to discover the correct formulation in less than a week you’ll need to spend all your time at the lab, not wasting even an hour on sleep or food, and to achieve that sort of endurance you’ll have no choice but to turn to the pills Clark provided you with. It goes without saying that this is a dangerous prospect for anyone, let alone a barely reformed alcoholic and drug addict who only succeeded at sobriety after being locked away in a Bulgarian gulag, so for the sake of your own preservation we implore you to remember that there are two real options available to you here, as unpleasant as the one may be.

  You go to the bathroom and remove the bottle of spook meth from the medicine cabinet and roll it around in the palm of your hand, considering. After a few moments’ hesitation you pop the bottle open, dry-swallow two pills, and head out to the labs. One of the drug’s characteristic properties is the speed with which it enters the bloodstream. The effects are improbably fast and amazing, the cleanest high you’ve ever had. You buzz like a dynamo and move through the streets as if friction has been written off the books. By the time you’ve covered the distance to the Merck building you feel quite certain that you could, if the need arose, clean and jerk a Volkswagen. Though we assure you you could not.

  You set to work, and time quickly devolves into a psychedelic blur of twenty- and thirty-hour-long lab sessions, punctuated by temporary breakdowns when the meth turns on you and you curl yourself into a corner and scream and clutch at your head, or else stare out the window weeping extravagantly at the world’s beauty. No food. No sleep. You start chewing the pills, though neither we nor you are really sure why. You urinate in a bottle that used to hold Gatorade of the Fierce Melon variety, and the only time you leave the lab is to empty this bottle; since it’s a two-liter and you’re barely taking in enough fluids to stay alive, you don’t have to step out very often. The only outside communication occurs when you pull yourself together long enough to phone Sawyer and ask for more of the drug, a request with which he complies. Under other circumstances it might be worth speculating as to Sawyer’s motives here, since he’s aware of the fractured mental state the drug has already produced in you. But he’s also aware that there is no other way for this to work, so he reluctantly has a package dispatched.

  There’s a delay of several agonizing hours between when you take the last pill on hand and when the courier delivers the new supply to the door of the lab. You wrest the package from him and tear at the box and crack the cap opening the bottle and only after choking down three of the pills are you calm enough to sign the courier’s portable LCD screen to acknowledge receipt.

  Despite the intensity of your efforts, cells continue to grow and multiply with lethal, mindless obstinance. Several cultures are slowed to various degrees, but delaying your father’s death is, of course, not the aim. One sample is halted altogether for nearly two full days, during which you hold your figurative breath, but then on the third day the cells burst out in furious renewed growth, as if angered by the attempt to destroy them.

  Near the end of the week you are crippled for several hours by pain in your lower back that forces you to lie on your side on the tile floor, moaning. You reach around with one hand to massage the muscles, because this feels like the worst backache in the history of humankind, but the pain is actually being caused by your kidneys, which are in the early stages of acute failure. You pass out. When you come to again the pain has lessened to a rotting ache. You have the sudden intractable urge to urinate, and when you do it’s the exact color and consistency of maple syrup, staining the liquid already in the Gatorade bottle a sickly brown.

  Your kidneys are flooded with toxins and dying muscle tissue, a condition called rhabdomyolysis. Serious, serious trouble. Though it’s understandably difficult for you to think clearly at the moment, you need to marshal your wits, because you’re about to make the most important decision of your life to date. There is a possibility that taking any more pills will kill you, but without them there’s no way you can continue working, which means your father will surely die.

  It’s not a decision we can help you with, sadly. You alone must choose, but you are not certain you have the courage. You lean against the workbench and think that surely when your father sired you it was with the hope that you would outlive him. He wouldn’t want you to die to save his life.

  Forgive us, but we feel compelled to point out an obvious flaw in this argument: your father has alrea
dy gone through the grief of having lost you. As far as he knows you’ve been dead eight years. If you died again it would make no difference, because he would never know. Sawyer would see to it that your body was quietly disposed of, and Rodney would take the secret of your Fenway meeting to his own grave, just as you asked him to.

  You try to pull your thoughts together. The final formulation dangles somewhere in the ether just beyond your reach, all the more maddening for how close it is. You’re positive you’ve got the right combination of constituents—the proportions are what have you stumped. We’re surprised, given the fact that you’re very nearly dead, how strong a pang of intellectual vanity you feel at being baffled. It pisses you off. Not because your father is dying, but because you’re smarter than this.

  And it’s this anger, rather than love, that finally gets you to your feet. You brace yourself against the table, find the bottle, and take one more pill, feeling decidedly unheroic.

  It’s our contention, however, that this entire display is the very definition of heroic. And we make this assessment having taken into account the base, overriding appetite you have as a multidisciplinary addict—this accounts for only 10 percent or so of your motivation for taking another pill. An additional 5 percent is attributable to a subconscious longing for death, and the remaining 85 percent is, simply and heroically, a desire to help your father that is so strong it causes you to ignore biological imperative #1: self-preservation. You’re risking your own life for another, no matter the jumble of motivations, and though we question the wisdom of this risk it’s nevertheless difficult for us to observe without feeling inspiration and admiration in equal measure. Which is why we offer you this, in appreciation of your courage and (we admit it, yes) in fear for your life: