The Tumours Made Me Interesting

by Matthew Revert

  “Your collective reaction to this news is perfectly consistent with that of the general populace. We are taught to fear disease and respond combatively toward it. I will take this opportunity to stress to each of you that if Bruce had the slightest hope of surviving, we would not proceed with this course of action. This is a marriage of special circumstance and, it should be noted, one Bruce has agreed to.

  “Is this true, Bruce?” asked Vince.

  I coughed up cigarette smoke while giving quick nods, refusing to make eye contact with anyone.

  “I want to stress,” continued Fiona, “that your cooperation isn’t mandatory, but, should you choose to help, it will be handsomely rewarded. Those unprepared to help change the world must leave now. Your presence will be most destructive and detrimental to the outcome.”

  In the ensuing silence, I waited for those around me lift from their chairs and leave. Surely no one would partake in what was essentially assisted suicide. But no one budged. Although the silence continued, they remained firmly seated and altering their gaze from Fiona to me.

  “Would you like us to help you, Bruce?” asked Belinda’s mother.

  I stared at Belinda’s mother and then at Fiona, catching her right in the eyes. The intensity was staggering. Her eyes were firmly informing me that should I sabotage this, I would regret it. I thought about the care Fiona had promised to give my mother. It was the closest thing I had to assurance that she’d be okay after I was gone. I stared back at Belinda’s mother and nodded.

  Arthur was the first to climb aboard. He stood up straight, serenading us with more cracking joints in the process. “I’m in!” he yelled. “I’m happy to help you out, dear Bruce.”

  “Fantastic,” said Fiona, directing her gaze to the other, as yet undecided, members of the party.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You guys don’t have to. It’s a pretty weird request.”

  Upon saying this, Fiona fetched a lipstick tube from her handbag and pelted it at my face. It left a grisly streak of Cherry Jubilee across my forehead.

  “What Bruce means to say,” said Fiona. “is that each of you are a vital component to the overall foundation of this project. We would love for you to contribute and reap both the emotional and financial rewards befitting the effort.”

  Conversing with their eyes, Vince, Rhonda and Belinda’s mother considered what was being asked of them. I was still considering what was being asked of me and I didn’t know what to make of it. The cigarettes I was smoking made it hard to see reason. The smoke was a suggestible fog filling my body; retarding my reason. Fiona had waved sex before me like a cracker and then she snatched it away, yet I was still here; still a part of this strange circus. The truth is, sex was only important in that it validated me. I didn’t need it, nor did I necessarily want it. What I needed was someone to trust me with their body – someone to entrust with my own. But I had something else now: I had the tumours. They trusted me. Nothing had ever trusted me more and I felt I needed to reward them for that trust. In so doing, I would help my mother. Whether I followed Fiona or not, I wasn’t going to survive this. One way or another, my mother would be left alone. It was now up to me to decide how I was going to leave her.

  I was being offered the chance to finally be something. And while it was hard to know exactly what that ‘something’ was, I did know that the reaction my tumours had garnered from those enthusiasts was real. To them, I was that elusive ‘something’ we all try to be. It would be nice if we could always chose the areas in which we desired to excel, but sometimes they choose us. As I neared the home stretch of my life, I was being given the opportunity to do so in a meaningful way.

  The makeshift family that had gravitated toward my home seemed significant. The presence of these people suggested intention. Maybe they were here to help me. No matter how cold or unpleasant Fiona appeared, I couldn’t fault her passion and commitment. That anyone would give up so much of their time for someone like me struck me as profound. I was as unreliable as mobile phone reception… I needed a support network around me to keep me from veering. This really was my chance to finally be interesting.

  I stood up with conviction. “I would love for you to help me achieve the perfect disease,” I said.

  Fiona approached me and placed a hand on my shoulder. I assume to her this was meant to exude support, but to me it felt like entrapment. My mind kept telling me to smoke the cigarettes, You’ll feel better, so that’s what I did. And the harder I sucked on the cigarettes, the better I began to feel.

  Vince, Rhonda and Belinda’s mother rose from their seats to match Fiona, Arthur and myself. Belinda remained seated, wearing a goofy grin and lost in the kind of daydreams only permitted to children. Everyone else encircled me and announced their intention to lift me from the ground as a means of celebration. Maybe they didn’t approach me from the right angle, or perhaps their hearts simply weren’t committed to the task, because I’ve never witnessed a more awkward attempt at anything in my life. Arthur, refusing to put down his cup of tea, scooped an arm between my legs. Rhonda bear hugged my waist. Fiona pushed her hands hard into my chest and Vince placed his hands below my chin. Without a countdown to align their efforts, they all began lifting, pushing and hugging at different times. I felt my body being pulled in every direction at once. I yelped, while my would-be lifters muttered exacerbated swears. Then, in a ball of inept humanity, we slowly fell to the ground. Rigid, uncoordinated limbs engulfed me as our combined bodies, entwined beyond reason, sat in the middle of my lounge room. We remained in this position for some time. We all agreed never to mention the incident again.

  With everyone on board to play Fiona’s game, it was now time to learn the rules and discover our individual roles.

  Fiona’s role was as supervisor and cigarette provider. The household was allocated two cartons a day which, as long as I had as many as I needed, could be distributed amongst the others. Each day she was to visit at 8am and 6pm. The 8am visit would be a one on one session with me where she would assess my progress and ensure I was adhering to an exercise regime which she had carefully developed. The 6pm visit was for the others. She would discuss strategies and troubleshoot potential issues and, most importantly, I was forbidden to attend.

  Rhonda had been given the role of nurse. She would tend to the myriad problems that would surely develop and make sure I was kept clean and, as much as possible, comfortable. She also insisted on keeping the apartment clean, which Fiona agreed to.

  Vince was named house chef and restraint implementation coordinator. His job was to cook all meals required by the others. But, most importantly, he had to maintain a vigil over me and if at any point I tried to escape or hurt myself, he was required to restrain me until Fiona arrived. Vince’s role intimidated me the most, but he seemed to take on the responsibility happily.

  As Belinda’s mother was adamant about being dead, no official role was given to her. It was just asked that she stay out of the way and make herself available wherever possible.

  Belinda was given a role befitting her ‘child’ status and was named ‘Games Consultant’. It was her responsibility to keep me occupied and entertained. She was given a Nintendo Entertainment System with a copy of Kid Icarus to aide her efforts.

  Arthur’s role was slightly ambiguous. He was the Musical Director and was responsible for providing us all with regular music performances. He was given a penny whistle along with a book on advanced penny whistle technique and instructed to start practicing immediately.

  My role was both the simplest and most complex. I simply had to obey everyone else and forget what autonomy was. My 13 years at The Nipple Blamers ensured that autonomy was a foreign notion to me. It was unlikely I’d start craving my own agency any time soon. That aside, I wasn’t looking forward to my continued degradation. Growing the perfect disease struck me as particularly tiring. In many ways, it was more about the tumours sustaining me in order to reach maturity than anything else.

  The
most problematic aspect of my role in this episode was a contract I had to sign promising I would make no attempt to contact my mother. Failing to abide by this contractual requirement would render it null and void and all care promised would be withdrawn. My life expectancy was estimated at two months, which if reached, would be the longest amount of time I’d gone without seeing my mother. I had to trust that the provided care was adequate or risk losing it completely. It was an uncomfortable notion that I had to suck down cigarette after cigarette to forget. The rationale behind what, at first, struck me as a cruel contractual condition actually concerned safety. Fiona handed me a brochure entitled DON’T KILL YOUR LOVED ONES that outlined several case studies wherein family members of those going through a similar experience to me were rendered unwell and, in some cases, even died as a result of emotional exposure to the diseased. Being that my mother was already in, what was termed, a ‘volatile’ condition, it was possible that exposure to my degradation would be extremely dangerous to her health. So, as hard as it was, I agreed not to contact my mother in any way and, quite worryingly, placed her in the care of Fiona.

  We were all set and enthused to begin. Over many hours we developed a group handshake that we promised to start and end each day with as a means of bolstering unity. Arthur sought space back in the ceiling to practice playing his penny whistle. For the next several hours we were destined to hear a mistake-ridden rendition of Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag. Rhonda was already hard at work preparing my bedroom with a palliative aesthetic designed to keep me comfortable. Vince was cooking a vast hyena meat goulash for supper. Meanwhile, Belinda was wrestling with my television, trying to connect the Nintendo. All the while, Belinda’s mother stayed in the background like the ghost I was starting to believe she was.

  All my trepidation and anxiety aside, it was bound to be rather interesting.

  INTERMISSION

  I’m not sure if I found it difficult to spend my youth looking after my mother. In all honesty, I never really thought about it. It was simply something I did. I’d work at the University until 3pm Monday to Thursday and spend my time outside of that making her as comfortable as I possibly could. It’s interesting… I spent so much time with my mother, but I never really knew that much about her. The nature of my close proximity didn’t make learning about who she was very easy. She was her illness, and all that mattered was whatever her illness dictated. There never seemed like a good moment to probe into the other and learn anything substantial.

  Like most people, my teenage years were confusing. I was constantly fighting my encroaching puberty. The changes that began to occur terrified me, and not having anyone to talk to about it, I turned each new pubescent evolution into something deeply sinister. Whenever hair would sprout from anywhere other than my head, I’d burn it off with sunlight and a magnifying glass. I reasoned that pimples were nasty insect bites and made it my goal to capture and kill the insects responsible. I’d conduct military raids on my garden with homemade weaponry in tow, always ready to thwart the non-existent pimple bug. I counteracted my breaking voice by sucking on canisters of helium which I’d steal from the University’s school of science. Rather than seek re-assuring words from my mother, I actively kept my puberty away from her. Given how thoroughly it ravaged my body, I couldn’t bear the thought of inflicting it upon her.

  I was trapped inside a body that had started to respond sexually to various ambiguous stimuli, yet I had no real understanding about what sex was. Thanks to the local civic society, this was about to change. When I was fifteen, the civic society offered sex education to everyone in my age group. At the behest of my mother, I attended. Only rather than calling it ‘sex education’, they termed it ‘shame management’. A man whose face was completely obscured by his moustache was brought in from an external shame advocacy group in order to impart his ideology on all of us awkward teens.

  There were about forty of us teenage boys (the girls received a different lesson), sitting cross-legged on the youth centre’s gymnasium floor. A mannequin was wheeled out by a man in full chimney sweep regalia. The genital region of the mannequin was obscured by a skull and cross bones. We were then each handed what was called a ‘modesty patch’ that also bore the skull and cross bones image and asked to place it over our own genital region.

  For the next 19 hours, we were made to sit through videos of men watching women give birth and listen to doctor impersonators reel off lists of sexual diseases. When we arrived at the topic of our own bodies, the mustachioed man broke down in tears. He informed us that he once succumbed to the temptation of self-pleasure before lowering his trousers and showing us the purported result. Where one would expect to find genitalia, he possessed a rutabaga. He claimed this fate had befallen him because he didn’t understand the importance of shame. Not wanting our wangs to become rutabagas, we were quite keen on heeding his advice. For quite a while afterward, whenever I believed I was under attack by feelings of desire, I had to listen to Rembetika music, which usually killed the desire very quickly.

  I never informed my mother about the contents of this class. In my mind, I now understood what sex was and how to fight it. I didn’t have to bother her with it. My sexual knowledge, as far as I understood it, was complete.

  Very occasionally, my mother liked to wet her whistle and feel the sweet fuzz of intoxication. I’d hold a cup with a long straw toward her mouth and watch as her demeanor slowly changed in response to the alcohol.

  During one of these rare binges, shortly before my 16th birthday, my mother inadvertently let slip an anecdote that I never forgot. Feeling the effects of gravy wine, she apologised to me for contributing to my weaknesses. Apparently the sexual encounter that resulted in my conception was a deeply unsatisfying one. My mother and father had slipped into that robotically scheduled sex life that so many married couples fall victim to. Each Thursday night they would enter into a few minutes of sexual contact out of a sense of marital obligation. The drab mechanics of my father’s biology would ensure just enough blood flow to achieve the rigidity required to successfully insert himself into my mother. My mother, devoid of desire, would accept my father into her passionless body and wait until he left. Rather than swimming, I imagined my father’s sperm fast asleep as they were mechanically ejaculated from his body, floating like dead fish in the seminal fluid. I imagined my mother’s egg completely unprepared for possible insemination. The egg was busy minding its own business and BAM! a sleeping sperm collided with it. I was the result of lifeless sex. My mother told me this. The tears accompanying this admittance were enough to convince me of the reality. I was once the sleeping sperm who violated the egg. With a start like this, did I really have any hope?

  I couldn’t look at people the same way after that. In my eyes, people were a manifestation of the events surrounding their conception. I looked upon bright, dynamic individuals as the result of spontaneous, passionate lovemaking. I looked upon those we’d call ‘the damned’ as a bad fuck gone too far. This revelation imbued me with something akin to freedom, only the freedom was more of an excuse… an excuse not to try.

  I don’t think my mother ever remembered telling me this. I’m sure if she did it would horrify her. And I don’t blame her for telling me either. How can you blame someone who tells the truth?

  The events that shaped me all swim about in a pond called experience. They coexist in this stagnant pond showing great reluctance to leave. These events form a web too intricate to understand or tame. All I am and all I’ll be have its roots in this web and each new development is enslaved to past developments. That is to say, we’re trapped within ourselves. That is to say, I don’t actually respond to the world around me… my past does.

  PART TWO

  1.

  I sat at my dining table with Vince, Rhonda, Arthur, Belinda and her dead mother playing canasta. We had a deck of cards, but none of us had any idea how to play it. Canasta was just a game I remember hearing reference to in some movie I’d recently se
en starring that man who looks and sounds like stairs. We were passing cards to each other in an aimless fashion, glancing at them briefly and passing them to someone else. Occasionally one of us would announce they were the winner and the rest of us would give them a polite clap. Vince took frequent delight in accusing Arthur of cheating, which almost started a fight until Rhonda reminded them that it was impossible to cheat on a game nobody understood.

  I stared at the card in my hand – 11 of napkins – and announced myself the winner.

  “Looks like your luck is starting to turn around,” said Vince.

  “It had to happen sooner or later,” I replied.

  “I hate being dead,” said Belinda’s mother.

  “I wish I had a lizard,” said Belinda.

  Belinda loved watching us interact with each other. She felt like our collective child, which was a nice feeling. Each night she’d help Vince cook us all wedding cake soup and occasionally she’d play Kid Icarus on Nintendo with me. Her mother wouldn’t stop moping about how dead she was, but even this was becoming endearing. We decided to completely tear down the wall that used to separate me from the Stotsons, giving us one large apartment. We all moved around freely and shared our possessions without restraint. We each had something to add to the overall foundation of the household and Fiona’s project. As a unit, we were honed and calibrated.