The Tumours Made Me Interesting

by Matthew Revert

  “Hello, may I speak with Bruce Miles please?” asked the voice.

  “This is him.” My voice sounded like it was broadcast from ham radio, fighting its way through a hangover static.

  “Hi, Bruce. My name is Fiona Sinclair and I’m a counselor calling from the Bad Bowel Institute. I understand you recently received some very difficult news.”

  “Umm… Yeah, I guess…” I might have hung up right then if her voice hadn’t been so soothing. Why did she have my number and what business was it of hers?

  “I’d like to meet up with you, Bruce, and discuss your options.”

  “Options?” I scoffed. “I was led to believe I didn’t really have any.”

  “We all have options, Bruce. We can investigate the potential for treatment or at the very least, I can help prepare you.”

  “Prepare me for death?”

  “That’s right,” she responded. Her voice maintained the calm.

  “How did you get this number?”

  “Your GP. He was concerned about you.”

  I laughed so hard that the mouthpiece became coated with saliva. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same guy? The doctor I saw was a bit of a bastard.”

  “Look, Bruce, I’d love for us to meet tomorrow morning and have a chat. You don’t have to go through this alone. There is help out there.”

  I thought back to the night before. Me on the stool, regaling a room of strangers with my tales of woe. I’d had enough of cancer talk. All I wanted to do was live my life as normal until my body gave out. When the time came, I’d hide away in my bedroom with a boxset of Jem cartoons and fade out. What else was I going to do? I wasn’t so naïve that I believed there was genuine hope for me. Cancer doesn’t just happen. It grows inside you. When it first strikes, it does so without warning and remains within you as a clandestine intruder, sucking away your life in order to make it strong. I wasn’t coming out of this illness. I had no doubt it would take me as it had taken so many others before.

  “It’s a very nice offer but I’ll have to pass,” I said with determination.

  Before she could get another suspiciously soothing word in, I slammed the phone down. The last thing I needed was to sit down and discuss the tumours in my arse with another stranger, no matter how soothing her voice was. Maybe meeting up with this Fiona woman wouldn’t result in an attack of invasive fingers, but it would still be invasive, and that’s exactly what I didn’t want.

  I was in a mild panic. It was nearing 4pm and I still wasn’t at work. I had been pacing my apartment compulsively until a short knock on the door broke my trance. I approached my door like it was a sleeping guard at the entrance of a stronghold. I flung it open in one swift motion then realised I was still naked. I instinctively fell to my knees and found a bouquet of bark leaning against the entryway. I snatched it up and commando rolled back inside, knocking awkwardly into a floor lamp and cringing as it began to fall. As it did, it struck the top of my head. I could feel the developing bump inflate. I allowed the pain to subside and cast my attention toward the bark bouquet. An envelope was attached stating that it was ‘a bouquet of bark’. There was a letter inside from my supervisor, Kerry. It read:

  Bruce,

  We all chipped in and got you bark.

  I couldn’t be sorrier about the cancer if I tried (and I have).

  Jerry wrote a song about you but it’s not very good. It’s called ‘Bruce’s Triumph’.

  Take all the time you need unless you need more than the allotted sick leave allowance specifies. If this occurs, I’ll submit an E95 leave extension request on your behalf.

  We’ve found a trio of meerkats that are happy to do your job until you return.

  Warmest everything,

  Kerry Cartwright-Mueller

  I was torn between anger toward Jerry for spilling the beans and elation at the feeling of freedom my absolution from work inspired. I’d never been given the green light to stay at home before. Once I had a five day weekend but that was only due to a front door malfunction at work. If my hangover hadn’t been so severe, I may have attempted a little jig. But then there was that part of me that couldn’t help but conjure absurd scenarios relating to office gossip about my bleeding arse. I imagined contorted, laughing faces, bowel cancer impersonations, but maybe worst of all, the feeling that half my co-workers were asking the inevitable question, who the hell’s Bruce? I wondered how much the bark bouquet had cost and what the average contribution per employee was. I wondered how fond of the meerkats my coworkers would become. I wondered if I’d ever live long enough to find out.

  I had an urge to go back to the tent-themed bar and find the tent girl who quite possibly fucked me. Shame at my drunken behaviour prevented this urge from sprouting. Instead I recalled the ambiguous nipple that my mouth had so gratefully sucked upon. I hoped like hell it was hers. The phone rang again. I picked it up straight away.

  “Tent girl?” I asked.

  “I urge you to reconsider, Bruce. We should talk.”

  It was that Fiona woman again. She was a persistent sort. “I don’t think there’s anything to talk about,” I said honestly.

  “That’s where you’re wrong. If you’d just give me ten minutes of your time. It won’t cost you a cent.”

  “If I accept, will you stop calling me?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Okay, fine. Whatever you want.”

  “Fantastic! Thank you, Bruce. I can’t stress enough how much you stand to gain from this.”

  I wrote down all the details and agreed to meet her the next morning. I wasn’t going to do it of course, but it got her off my back. I had become the centre of morbid attention and although it was exhausting, I kind of liked it. I wondered what Fiona meant when she said I stood to gain from meeting her. It was probably just some manipulative way to trick the dying into adhering to mandated process.

  It wasn’t until the third time I caught myself staring at Fiona’s details that I knew I was falling victim to the insincere promise it provided. A reality wherein these details would lead to an eventual cure wasn’t something I could believe in. Determined to retain freewill, I scrunched the paper into a ball and tried to swallow it. It lodged in my throat like smoker’s phlegm and I began choking violently. I slammed myself back-first into the wall, improvising what I understood the Heimlich maneuver to be. Three fruitless slams later and I’d crashed right through the wall into the neighbouring apartment.

  Assuming I was a particularly unsubtle burglar, the man of the house, Vince Stotson came down on my chest with a golf club. The ball of poorly swallowed paper flew from my mouth and clung to their ceiling. I was naked, covered in rubble and clutching my chest in agony.

  With his adrenaline subsiding, Vince attained enough lucidity to realise it was merely his quiet neighbour writhing on his floor.

  “Holy flip, it’s you, Bruce!” he said, coming to my aide. “What did you come through the wall for? It’s not a particularly sensible way to enter a domicile”

  “Accident,” I wheezed. “Very… sorry… to have… disturbed you…”

  “Rhonda!” yelled Vince. “We got ourselves a situation here. We’re gonna need bandages and some Vaseline.”

  My eyes fluttered open with the speed of hummingbird wings. Vince and Rhonda had their faces uncomfortably close to my own. I was wrapped in a blanket and contorted on their couch, which was far too small to accommodate a full-grown man at full stretch.

  “Two questions,” said Vince while holding up three fingers.

  I gave a slight nod.

  “Why are you naked and why did you break the wall? We’re not angry, mind. We’re just intrigued. This isn’t something one expects to experience on any given day.”

  “Umm…”

  I was a mess of verbal stasis. Sub primal sounds escaped my mouth that couldn’t be attributed to any language.

  “Oh, leave him alone, Vince,” said Rhonda. “We’re terribly sorry about the little cancer si
tuation.”

  I stared hard at the two of them. It was only now that I noticed the leather bondage gear they were wearing. In my opinion, they were both a little too overweight to pull it off. Rhonda was perhaps the shortest woman I had ever seen and Vince was quite possibly the tallest. The extremity of their physical opposition somehow made them a perfect couple in my eyes. Like most of my neighbours, I hadn’t talked to the Stotson’s much. Occasionally I’d bump into Vince during a rooftop walk and we’d discuss the weather or something equally as superficial. Truth be told, I quite liked these people. If I were a more socially apt person, I’d have no problem envisioning a friendship between us. Although, it seemed reasonable to suspect that my positive feelings toward the Stotson’s had more to do with their propensity toward leaving me alone than anything else. Right now though, I was dumbfounded that they somehow knew of my cancer.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “It was on the news,” replied Rhonda.

  “The news?”

  Vince started to chuckle. “Yes, it’s a new preventative measure apparently. They figure that they’ll publicly shame the cancer. The logic goes that if the news networks spend ten minutes each night naming cancer sufferers, the cancer will feel so ashamed and embarrassed that it will cease attacking people such as your good self. There was some massive write-up about it in yesterday’s paper. The results of a trial were published and even I, cynical as I am, had to admit that the findings were very convincing. They chose five volunteers, all of whom were definitely not suffering from cancer and for three weeks they were subjected to a barrage of reports about new cancer diagnoses. Guess what? At the end of the three weeks, only two of them had developed cancer. That’s less than half!”

  “Your cancer was mentioned right toward the start,” interjected Rhonda. “Vince and I were aghast at the horrible news. At the same time, we couldn’t help feeling a bit star struck. And to attack your backside like that! Nasty. Simply nasty.”

  I was immediately infuriated. I didn’t give those fucks permission to publicly broadcast my illness. Whatever happened to patient confidentiality? How many people now knew? The indignity of it all stole my breath. Then it hit me like an abusive father – what if my mother had been watching? Since confirmation of the cancer, I hadn’t even contemplated how I was going to tell her. She was the only person who would actually care. My mother was someone who, without any shadow of doubt, loved me and cared about my wellbeing. The news would be crushing and the thought of her finding out via the repulsive, fake smiles of plastic news presenters enraged me. The throbbing pain in my golf club-beaten chest dissipated, the hangover fog whistled out of my ears. I was lucid – perhaps for the first time in weeks. It was enough to deal with the cancer but to have to deal with this shit too? It was too much. If I was going to die, couldn’t I at least enjoy a modicum of privacy?

  I dismounted the Stotson’s couch and marched through the hole my misguided Heimlich had created.

  “Don’t worry about the wall right now, Bruce,” yelled Vince. “We can fix it up later. We have nothing to hide.”

  The two began engaging in the masochistic sex games I had clearly interrupted earlier. I picked up the phone to call my mother with the alien sound of their eroticism ringing in my ears. I hoped like hell mum hadn’t been watching the news. If anyone was going to tell her, it needed to be me.

  5.

  I had become phobic of my own bowel movements. The morning toilet trip always revealed some new, horrifying physical deterioration. Today it was pink anal foam. I had grown used to blood, mucous and stools of every sort but the foam threw me. How could something so foreign to my own experience form in my body? We live with ourselves for every miserable, waking second and yet, there’s so much about what we experience that we don’t know. Within me was an invasion that I couldn’t see. My outward appearance possessed the eerie calm that heralds the start of a storm. I was beginning to convince myself that I could feel the tumours growing. Ever since I was introduced to them, they had a physical presence. I felt more like an incubator than a person.

  I was readying myself for one of the most awkward conversations I was ever likely to have. Thankfully my mother appeared blissfully ignorant when I spoke to her on the phone, which meant that at least it was in my hands. I arranged to deliver her medication and tend to her bed sores. It was a struggle to keep from crying when I heard how excited this made her. Ever since my brother moved to Poland to mock death metal bands, I was all she had. I was about to take that away from her and it was the single most painful aspect of the whole ordeal. The more I tried to kill the thought, the more powerful it grew until it was throbbing like a headache.

  I was thinking much more clearly this morning, which was a mixed blessing. I didn’t miss the hangover but I longed for the way it stifled my depressing clarity. With clarity came reality and reality was a bitch. The apartment was abhorrently messy. It was so stereotypically ‘single male’. There was no design aesthetic at all. The only ‘art’ on the walls were faded posters of Olympic steeplechase champions, which I won in a raffle 20 years ago. The only reason I was so insistent about their display was because they were the only things I’d ever won. Clinging to these now seemed profoundly pathetic but I still couldn’t bring myself to remove them. That said, Marina Pluzhnikova was an undeniably handsome woman.

  The urge to clean intrigued me. Other than maintaining a basic level of hygiene, I wasn’t much for cleanliness. I appreciated the pleasant atmosphere a clean environment created but as far as my own squalor was concerned, it was enough to occasionally remove rotting food. The tattered yellow carpet was stained with ten years of spillage, which sat beneath modest mountains of general trash. A rich, stale scent permeated everything which, other than being admittedly disgusting, was a constant reminder of home. I guess the broken wall, which now allowed the Stotson’s clear visibility into my environment, made me more self-conscious about my living situation. At the same time, it almost felt as if I were now living with people – somehow I was less alone. I’d caught glimpses of Rhonda going about various domestic duties and it pleased me. After I’d met up with mum, I had a determination to whip my apartment into shape.

  I had to stop by the pharmacy on my way to mum’s. I had grown incredibly intimate with the pharmacy environment over the years. I was essentially mum’s designated care giver, ever since dad and Tom went away, and it was an intricate job. Mum’s medical situation was an endlessly complex ordeal, which given the nature of her unusual condition, was understandable. After dad left, she started to deteriorate rapidly and still, 20 years later, no course of treatment had been successful. All this time later, I’m still confused by it. At first it was just a vague sense that her body was changing. Nobody could have predicted the ways and extent in which her body was destined to transform. Her pain was constant during the period I now call the ‘metamorphose’. After the first five years, it grew increasingly apparent that mum’s body was slowly turning into one big arm. After ten years, the transformation into an arm was complete. Since that point, she’d remained bedridden – my mother’s warm, loving head now sat atop a grotesque, hairy, body-sized arm.

  We have dedicated a substantial amount of time talking to doctors of all varieties in the hope that we’ll find a solution to my mother’s dilemma. Even knowing how such a malady is possible would provide me with some solace. No documented evidence exists that suggest my mother’s symptoms have been seen before. Doctors love the ambiguity of it all. My mother is a cipher that, if cracked, could lead to a prestigious journal article. I don’t know what passes for fame in the world of medicine, but it’s clear that my mother is viewed as a key in which attaining it might be possible. My mother is subjected to all manner of bizarre tests and medicines. It won’t be long until every medicine currently available will have coursed through her system. One week she’ll be taking heart medication and the next she’ll undergo a treatment for lupus. And with each new change in her chemical land
scape, a new set of side effects emerge. These are usually mild, but every now and then, my mother is at the mercy of side effects no living person should have to endure. I encourage this course of action. Intellectually I know that it’s fruitless, but still, I’m always at hand, making sure she’s taking whatever pill is on the menu this week. Each new pill I place on her tongue runs the risk of damage and yet I still place the pill.

  There’s only one pharmacy I’ve ever been to. They understand my mother’s situation and know better than to ask invasive questions when I pick up medication. They live in a basement underneath a pornographic bookstore a few minutes from work. Even without a prescription, I get the sense they’d give me anything I asked for. They don’t enjoy substantial patronage, other than the occasional porn connoisseur, so the money I give them is always received gratefully.

  You have to walk through the bookstore in order to reach the stairs that lead to the pharmacy. I’ve succumb to pornographic desires on more than one occasion as a result. When you can’t shake the thought of death, sometimes a distraction is in order, so today was a day in which I indulged my carnal desires. I’m not much of a fetishist, but I couldn’t pass up a magazine devoted to ‘wool mouth’ or, ‘the sexual desire to stuff your mouth with wool’. The woman on the cover found a way to blend the ridiculous and the alluring. Lustful eyes, mouth overflowing with red wool. I paid for the magazine, tucked it under my arm and made for the pharmacy.