by Po Bronson
ENDPOINT
Po Bronson
I’ve known her for three days. The plane to Montreal leaves in six hours. What do I do?
In three days it is already so close to love. By tomorrow it would be love. If I don’t say the words, I will burst. But tomorrow I will be in Montreal, beginning the rest of my life.
“Jennifer Jennifer Jenny,” I say, each word with a slightly different intonation, the string a cryptic sentence of philosophy.
“What?” She smiles. I’ve teased her.
“Six hours.”
“I know,” she whispers empathically, feeling as hopeless as I.
If it was love, really love, we would know what to do.
Coming this close in just three days is damn good. Makes a man wonder.
Six hours.
“Make time stand still again,” she begs, and I can tell that when I do, she will start to cry.
You wake up in the middle of the night and it feels like your mouth is sewn closed. You panic. You cannot open your mouth to scream for help. It feels like if you force your jaws open, you will tear the roof of your mouth off. The involuntary reaction of the muscles in the neck and cheeks is to squeeze the salivary glands and swallow, but the glands are dead and it feels like you just swallowed a two-by-four. The application of topical artificial saliva takes thirty minutes just to get the mouth open in the morning. Talking is brutally painful. Telling those who’ve come to see you die that you love them is impossible.
I’ve been there in the room. A hundred times.
“He wants to tell you he loves you,” I want to say.
It’s like watching the worst stutter imaginable. Come on, you can say it.
His eyes plead, I want to say it one more time.
I know, I know.
“Don’t talk, Daddy,” they say. “It’s okay.”
He needs to say it, has to say it.
“He wants to tell you he loves you,” I want to say.
“His mouth is just too dry right now,” I say. “Come back in an hour.”
His eyes look to me. He’s begging me. Those eyes are screaming. Fix it so I can say it one last time.
None of this is in the data.
You wake up in the middle of the night with your mouth sewn closed.
The condition is called Xerostomia.
I cannot save them, but I can grant them a dying wish.
This is what I must get across.
Four out of five will die anyway.
That’s the catch.
I have looked into too many eyes.
I come to Washington, D.C., to present my data. Four times a year, the Food and Drug Administration convenes a panel of twelve eminent oncologists to advise the FDA on which new cancer drugs to approve for sale. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the FDA accepts the panel’s recommendation. If Ethyol is approved, first year sales are anticipated to be over $200 million, and I will move to Montreal to continue research into other uses of Ethyol. There are significant tax advantages to doing research in Canada. I already have the plane ticket. I already have the lab space leased. I already have an old girlfriend there waiting for me. She’s expecting me to move in. It won’t be a conscious choice; I’ll simply stay with her “until I get my own place,” which I never will. We’re going to try again and, this time, get it right.
The panel convenes for three days in the grand ballroom of the Town Center Hotel in Silver Springs, Maryland. Swank it is not. Think traveling salesmen anonymity. Think threadbare carpets, hollow walls, maids vacuuming at odd hours, art bolted to the walls so it can’t be stolen. I show up two days before my time slot, book a conference room down the hall from the panel hearings, and begin rehearsing with my staff and various $2,500-a-day consultants. The double doors are open to the hall.
“It’s no use,” I say, dropping flat, holding my weary head in my hands.
Why not? everyone demands to know.
“Only the data matters.” Nothing I can say will make a difference.
“Of course it will.”
“Four out of five die anyway.”
“But you help them.”
“There’s nothing about helping them in the data.” Quality of life cannot be measured.
One notion, seven years of development, one hour in front of the panel.
Sixty million dollars and four clinical trials.
This has been a huge waste.
I’m going to fail.
Then Jennifer walks by. I fall backward into a huge down pillow.
“Who was that?” Linda says.
I don’t have any idea.
“She looked at you like she knew you.”
I would have remembered meeting a woman like her. That’s not a connection a man can forget.
I am going with my instinct here.
“Excuse me, guys. Can we break for fifteen?”
I pace down the hall, dart into the ballroom where the committee was hearing an Upjohn presentation. She is sitting in the back row. Alone. We whisper.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
I am rolling in that big down pillow in the morning light.
“Wow.”
“What?”
“We haven’t met before?”
“No.”
Little things add up fast: skin, smile, size, warmth, softness, confidence, keenness in the eyes. Body language, mostly. She doesn’t feel like a stranger. Already I want to have babies with her.
“Will you touch my hand?” I put my palm out, resting on my thigh.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just feel compelled that we should touch.”
“Okay.”
I am going on instinct here.
She puts her hand down flat on mine.
“Take it away if you feel at all uncomfortable,” I offer.
“No, it’s okay.”
The current runs between us.
That’s not a connection a man can forget.
A man waits his whole life for that kind of clarity.
I’ve known her for three days. The plane to Montreal leaves in five hours.
Okay, I get on the plane. When I get off the plane, Jo is waiting for me with flowers. Waiting for me I can take, but the flowers are too much. She can tell by my reaction that I’m uncomfortable with the flowers. I’ve been in Canada two minutes and already off to a bad start. Flowers mean nothing to me but dressing up death. I take the flowers and get on the long people mover and feel like I’m being carted to my death, all dressed up.
At her apartment, there’s hot water for tea on simmer. The corners of the bedding are turned back. The oval mirror where we can watch ourselves make love is aimed at the bed. A deep bowl of bow-tie pasta salad chills in the refrigerator. There’s beer, too. And in the bathroom, a second toothbrush. Jo was so ready for me. So ready for me that now she’s embarrassed, and in the car on the way to her apartment she’s afraid her apartment will be like the flowers, too much too soon.
“You want to just drive around for a while?” she says.
She drives up to Regent’s Park. The students have just been let out of school and are running wild. They barely wear anything. We walk around. Jo is so nice to me. I feel so guilty. I feel ruined. I’ll spend years trying to forget a woman I knew only for three days.
I’ve known her for three days. The plane to Montreal leaves in five hours.
I go to the airport. I get my boarding pass. But I never get on the plane. I tell my investors I’m sorry. Seven years has been enough. Time for something new. I tell them I’m going to North Carolina.
“What will you do there?”
I don’t know. Find something. An old door closes, a new door opens. Start fresh.
“But why?”
I refuse to explain it to them.
“You’re too impulsive,” they tell me. “You always were.”
I call Jo. I tell her I’m not coming to Montreal. I’m afraid she’ll cry, but instead she’s furious. If I
was doing this in person, this is about the time she’d start throwing things. She hangs up on me.
It takes me only a week to unwind seven years of momentum. I find that sad. It shouldn’t be that easy. Maybe this is God making it easy for me. I abandon all my fears.
I’m on the plane to Raleigh now.
The idea of starting fresh takes root. This’ll be great. I am a healed man. I am free of baggage. I can truly love a woman now. I have let go of my pain. I want a little house and a little dog, and when I wake up on weekend mornings I will not be restless. I will be so at peace that I can stay in bed for hours. I’ll get a job at the Duke hospital and see patients. This will be my true place in life.
On the plane, three times I go into the bathroom to fool with my hair or change my shirt.
I walk off the plane into the boarding area, and . . .
Well, maybe she’s waiting for me in the baggage claim area.
I go down to baggage claim, and . . .
Maybe she’s stuck in traffic. I wait twenty minutes, until the last bag on the carousel is retrieved.
It starts to sink in. I’m in a strange town, I don’t know a single person. I’m in a state in which the number one industry is pig farming and Jesse Helms is senator.
What the hell am I doing?
I have an address. Just get a cab, I’m sure everything’s fine, there’s just been a mix-up.
I get the cab. It all comes to me on the way. I’m freaking her out. I’m a strange man suddenly invading her turf, taking over her life. I’ll be asking her to love me. I’ll be asking her for directions to the supermarket. I’ll be asking her to borrow her car. Who can love a man who needs them too much?
The cab lets me off in front of the address. It’s a little single-story brick house. Jennifer answers the door. She’s silent, torn, kisses me softly and wonderfully but not quite passionately.
Yup, I’m freaking her out.
“I thought you would pick me up at the airport,” I let slip.
I shouldn’t have said that.
She tours me through the house.
It is a little house. There are two bedrooms, and when she gets to the second bedroom she says, “This is your bedroom.”
I just let that disappointment hang there.
“So you’ll have your own space,” she adds.
This isn’t what it was supposed to be like.
You get Xerostomia from dead salivary glands. You get dead salivary glands from radiation therapy. You get radiotherapy for head and neck cancer. Thirty-nine thousand people each year get head and neck cancer. All get radiation. Fifty-eight percent get Xerostomia. Four out of five will die anyway. They all have a dying wish.
Seven years ago, a professor suggested I study the chemical Ethyol, simply because little was known about it. I put Ethyol in petri dishes with every kind of cell or body tissue imaginable. Then I mixed Ethyol with other drugs and recorded what happened. It was merely trial and error. Six years ago, I noticed that Ethyol didn’t degrade under radiation. I theorized that this chemical could, perhaps, block radiation if injected into the salivary glands. Five years ago, I formed a company and raised money. The body is a mystery; what works in a test tube won’t necessarily work in humans. I’d never seen Xerostomia, only read about it, yet I became convinced I could prevent it. According to my peers, I made the leap of faith too soon. Doing so is my weakness. Ignoring warning signs, going on faith.
Four years ago, we settled on a safe dose. Three years ago, we began tests in humans. Two years ago, we began receiving reports of adverse events—Ethyol was a neurotoxin, directly causing nausea, vomiting, and dizziness. We considered abandoning the study or restarting it with a smaller dose. A year ago, we unblinded the data and found that Ethyol worked. Xerostomia was prevented. We saved no lives, but dying wishes were being granted.
The panel would not be impressed.
The FDA emphasizes the saving of lives, not the quality of life.
Quality of life only counts if you’re going to live. According to the FDA, there is no such thing as quality of death. Hippocratic oath, et cetera.
Four out of five die anyway.
There was nothing in the data about dying wishes.
We had run one study in France and Germany. Something was lost in the translation. Doctors there had recorded many cases of “moderate” Xerostomia as “mild” Xerostomia. What was mild and what was moderate, anyway?
The FDA doesn’t let you toss a study out simply because you don’t like its data.
We tested Ethyol on eight hundred patients over four years on two continents. Six hundred nineteen of them died within six months, same as the control group.
I get one hour in front of the panel.
“I’ve got to find a way to get this across,” I say in anguish as the hour approached.
“We’re fine,” Linda assures me.
“We’re not fine.”
“Why not?”
“Because it sounds like we’re asking them to approve a poison for sale so that some people who are going to die anyway won’t get cotton mouth.”
“You’re being cynical.”
“It’s a band-aid. It fixes nothing.”
“The proper term is palliative care.”
“We have to convince the panel we’re not talking about a little cotton mouth.”
“We have an overhead slide on milliliters of saliva production.”
“No! No slides! I need someone to bear witness.”
“Bear witness?”
“Yes. Bear witness.”
“Cry their eyes out?”
“Exactly.”
“This isn’t some Disney movie. The panel won’t appreciate being manipulated.”
“It’s my only chance.”
What was the value of a dying wish?
What was the value of being able to say “I love you” one more time?
I’ve known Jennifer for two hours. We’re having dinner. Dinner is hamburgers, and thick french fries that we dip into steak sauce, and beer in frosted mugs. It’s nothing like a date. We’re helplessly drawn to each other. I hang on every word she says. She’s wearing brown stretch capri pants and sandals and a short-sleeved cashmere sweater under my corduroy coat. Her toenails are painted white. Her lipstick’s umber. She has freckles. She’s real and stunning at the same time. Her eyes hint at an incredible innate curiosity. We tell each other stories, get the nuance of each other’s jokes, listen attentively without interrupting. We feel safe, so safe that we begin to confess everything we have to confess, trying to scare each other off, but what doesn’t scare us off only makes us stronger. I tell her about Jo in Montreal and the three years of on-again, off-again attempts to find the sweet spot in that relationship. I tell her about my tendency to want to take care of women who don’t need any taking care of. I tell her I will lie under pressure, the most ruinous habit of all. I tell her I drive women away by neglecting them because I’m afraid to confront the moment of truth.
“I can’t hurt people.” People? Why’d I say “people”? There’s a little lie right there. Women. I can’t hurt women. To the point that I destroy them with mazes of yeses and maybes.
None of it scares her. She tells me she’s always had long-distance relationships. Her friends tell her she’s the most independent woman they’ve ever met. She loses sexual attraction to men after sleeping with them for a month. Her dead father was a giant in her psyche. Her mother was jealous of her, still is. Et cetera. None of it scares me off. It’s too soon to judge. I just listen, rapt.
We just keep doing this, trying to find reasons not to like each other.
It doesn’t work.
Then she says, “Okay, I have a confession.”
Here it comes.
“We’ve never met, but . . . we almost met.”
Not once, but twice.
The first time, three years ago, Jennifer came to my lab as a journalist. I refused to meet with her, shunning the publicity. She sat outside
my lab door for three hours. She figured me for a typical doctor-type megalomaniac. She hated me.
The second time, a year ago, the FDA convened a panel to discuss standardizing the measurement of quality of life. She came to report on it. I was going to speak. Two hours before the panel, she got a phone call from her stepmother that her father was in the hospital. Jennifer jumped on a plane to North Carolina.
The invisible hand of history kept pushing us together. Sooner or later we would meet. A blind date set up by God.
“What do you think this means?” I ask.
“I don’t believe in these kinds of things.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Soul mates. For every woman there is one right man, yada yada yada.”
“Me neither,” I lied.
“I don’t try to find meaning in coincidence,” she said, but it occurred to me she might be lying too.
The attraction between us is not an everyday attraction.
“You and I are just two people who met,” she tries, but the characterization doesn’t fit.
What if she is the one? I have only three days to find out.
Now I need to know everything about her. “Tell me more,” I beg. “More.”
Thirty-six, never married but engaged twice, a middle child between two brothers, her mother a little schizophrenic, her father a polite boozer who sold commercial insurance. Grew up in the French Quarter of New Orleans, moved to Minnesota halfway through high school, teased for her accent but learned to speak softly and showcase her blond hair to fit in. A year into college, her father couldn’t handle her mother’s schizophrenia anymore, freaked out, met another woman, and cut his family off. Unable to afford tuition, Jenny dropped out. She refused to let resentment destroy her. She loved music, couldn’t play a lick, so sent dispatches about concerts to the local weekly, which published them. Bands let her in. Music in the Twin Cities was exploding. She covered the scene for the Chicago Tribune. At thirty, she gave it up while she was still young enough to find something new. She did the bravest thing she could think of: She tracked down her father in North Carolina.
She survived a life of hurt, and the only scratch to show for it is she’s still alone.