by Lydia Netzer
“It’s me,” said Irene. “George, listen.”
“Hi! How are you?”
“George, listen,” she repeated.
“Listening,” he said. He couldn’t help but feel his face stretch into a grin. He wanted to squeeze Sam Beth around the shoulders until she popped. He wanted to cheer the goddess of the race to victory, pumping his fist in the air. He was so happy that Irene had called him on the phone.
“I know this is going to sound odd, but you need to take this seriously, George. What I’m about to say.”
“I absolutely will,” he said.
“I can tell that you’re not, though,” said Irene.
George laughed. “Of course I am,” he said. “If it’s something you want to say to me, then it’s serious to me.”
George was ready for her to talk. He was ready to hear that she was sorry, that she never should have left him, that she’d been impulsive. He knew that these answers were coming. He just wanted her to say them and get it over with. He needed to hear her say she was coming back, and he could say that all was forgiven. “We never have to see my mother and father again,” he had prepared himself to say. “We can pretend we fell out of trees or arrived in a spaceship or grew from the swamp. Nobody has any mothers where we come from. We don’t even believe in mothers.”
“You need to go to the doctor,” said Irene.
“OK,” said George. “Is that the thing you wanted to tell me?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s it. I think—this is going to sound really weird, but bear with me—I think there is something wrong with your head.”
George said nothing. He pulled the hospital gown lower over his knee.
“Can you hear me?” Irene said.
“Yes,” said George. “I just thought, I thought that you were going to say something else.”
“What else?”
“I thought that you were going to say—”
He felt embarrassed, in front of Sam Beth, in front of the goddess. They both knew so much about it already. It was shameful, what was happening to him. It was embarrassing.
“Did you think I was going to say that we were getting back together?” Irene wanted to know. Her shrill voice cut into him. He had been thinking it was a beautiful voice, so clear and direct. But now it just sounded awful.
“No,” said George. “Well, yes.”
“We can’t, George. You know that. We can’t even think about that.”
George said nothing again. He had no response. His head was throbbing. The goddess of the race put her hand on his back and rubbed back and forth over his spine, her blunt fingers with their short pale nails scratching gently over his skin.
“So, what then?” he finally said.
“Go to the doctor,” she said. “Get your head looked at. It’s important. I can’t explain why. But it’s important. I think there might be something badly wrong with you.”
George gave a little wry laugh. “OK. OK, I’ll go to the doctor.”
“Don’t blow this off,” said Irene. “Don’t snort painkiller up your nose and wait another day. Please. For your mother, if not for me. For Sam Beth.”
“OK, Irene. I said OK,” said George. He cut her off before she asked if Sam Beth was with him. She was with him. She had asked to come with him. She was tapping away on the screen of her phone, sending messages, maybe finding strength in quotations found online.
“OK,” said Irene. “Promise me, though.”
“I promise,” said George. “I promise.”
“Good-bye George,” said Irene. “I won’t call you again, and I’m sorry for this. But I had to tell you. You don’t have to check back with me. I know you are mad. But just go.”
The phone chimed and George knew she had disconnected. He knew she did not think he was aware that something was wrong with his head. She did not know he was present in the dream she’d had, that he was there, dreaming with her, sucked out of some addled version of a can’t-get-ready-for-work dream and into her bleak nightmare. And all he had thought, while he was listening to her talk about the missing parts of his head, was how beautiful she was, even in the blurring back-and-forth of dreaming, she was so beautiful, and even with a bloody mess falling out of his skull, he was just happy to be in her arms.
*
When the doctor came back in she had a frown on her face. Sam Beth whipped her phone into the back pocket of her jeans and said, “What.”
George felt a cold fear sink into his chest as if a snowball had landed on his sternum, dissolved, and flowed inside.
“George, we’re going to do some tests. I’m going to be honest with you now. Because of the severity of the headaches you are experiencing and some of your other symptoms, we are a bit concerned. Please don’t worry yet, but let me do what I can to get a clear picture of what’s going on so we can get you on the road to feeling better, Ok? I want you to be patient with us today as we are going to try some different things, and know that it is worthwhile, finding out as much information as we can.”
“What tests?” said Sam Beth.
“Well, we’ll start with an MRI. The nurse will be in shortly to give you an injection, some contrast dye that will go right here, into a vein in your arm.”
“He just wants medicine for his headaches,” said Sam Beth.
The doctor smiled at her, crinkling up the skin around her eyes until they almost disappeared.
“Of course, that will come later,” said the doctor. Then she reached out and put her hand on George’s knee and patted it firmly. “I’ll be back,” she added.
Sam Beth took her phone back out but just held it idly in her hand. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she said. “Contrast dye.”
“Maybe I’ll be radioactive,” said George. “You can put me in the detector and say, there he is.”
*
The nurse helped him to lie down on the curved table that would feed him into the MRI. The room was bright white, dominated by a huge beige machine with a round opening in it and a table sticking out of the opening, which he could lie down on. When he was in place on the table, he could see the machine above his head, its tube waiting for him.
“We’re just going to stabilize you,” the nurse said. George’s head was pounding with pain, and he acutely felt her fingers touching him around his skull, brushing his hair aside, and aligning him on the table, then applying a brace to his head that made it impossible for him to move his neck or rotate his head. His hand went up to scratch his eyebrow and knocked into a piece of this head cage, making the nurse chuckle.
“Itch?” she said.
“No, I’m fine,” said George.
Inside the tube, he tried not to think about Irene. He concentrated instead on the clicks and whirs the machine was making around him, on keeping his eyes closed, on inflating his lungs and deflating them rhythmically, on the feeling of the cage on his head, and then the clicks and whirs again. But it was hard not to remember being with her, inside the space where the proton collider would go. The burning urgency of her hands on him, every touch of her mouth like a little singe, of her voice telling him things, never shutting up, just egging him on and on until he was maddened by it, and lost track of himself, and lost the headache, and the visitations of the gods, and just surrounded himself in her, and found her there for him, very simple, very close.
In the imaging machine with its grumbles and whines and its lights moving strangely across his face, he wondered where Irene could be and how if you folded the United States on a central line of symmetry between San Francisco and him, then you would fold it in Kansas, and Louisiana, Nebraska, and when the angle of the line was just perfect, then he would be reflected onto her, and she onto him, perfectly asymmetrical, a transformative equation where the left does not equal the right but is the right. Where the night doesn’t mirror the day but is the night, and the day is the day, and they’re both the same thing.
“Irene,” he would say. “I didn’t get the idea of the
Gateway of God from my own brain.”
“Oh, OK,” she would say. “Where did you get it?”
“I was visited by a god, and the god told me about it.”
She would wait.
“Then other gods visited me, and they further confirmed and explicated the idea. It all came from them.”
Then she would say, “But that’s crazy.”
And it was crazy. George was very, very afraid that it was very, very crazy.
“I know,” he would say. “I know it’s crazy. And I’m afraid that because it’s crazy that I’m crazy.”
“You are. You’re totally nuts if you think gods visited you and explained physics concepts to you.”
“That’s just it.”
“But don’t worry. We can fix it.” Irene would want to fix it. She was a doer. She was a fixer.
“That’s just it. I don’t want it fixed. I’m actually more afraid that if I’m crazy, I might someday have to stop being crazy.”
George halted his imagination in the middle of this hypothetical conversation, before Irene would say something insulting like “Don’t be stupid. Of course if you had the choice to be crazy or not, you’d choose not.” Or she might say, “Don’t worry, being crazy is great.” But probably not.
He wanted to say that losing his faith was terrifying to him. That if he did not have the gods, and he did not have Irene, then he would have nothing. If he thought very hard, in the middle of the MRI machine, with his brain elevated beyond itself by the whirs and clicks and whines and lights of the imaging mechanism that was mapping his brain, he could almost believe that she would say, “Babe, if you lose your faith, you can use mine. Mine is better. I believe in machines, remember? They’ll never call you crazy for believing in that.”
Would she ever say that? Would he ever be brave enough to tell her all about it?
*
“You have a tumor,” said the doctor. “I’m sorry to say. In your brain.”
George had his street clothes on again and was sitting in one of the regular chairs in the examination room. The doctor had sent Sam Beth out of the room, after determining that she was not his sister or his wife.
“A brain tumor?” said George. He could not hear the doctor properly because the goddess of the race was standing behind the doctor, putting her silver hands over the doctor’s wide mouth, and occluding her speech as much as she possibly could. She gritted her teeth with the effort. She squinched her eyes together. The doctor was mumbling.
“A brain tumor,” she said again. “George, are you having difficulty hearing me?”
“No,” George lied. “I’m just tired.”
“I need to ask you some questions,” said the doctor. “I’m afraid your situation is quite serious and we must act quickly. There is a severe amount of pressure from this tumor encroaching on several very important areas of your brain. I’d like to show you a picture.”
The doctor wheeled her chair over to a flat-screen computer monitor and, with a few clicks of the mouse, opened a file so that George could see it.
“Your tumor,” said the doctor, “is here.” She pointed to an area in George’s brain that George believed to be near the front.
“It is shaped like a barbell,” the doctor pointed with her finger to show the two sides of the tumor. “Part is here in the frontal lobe, and then part is over here in the temporal lobe, both on the left side of your brain. Do you see?”
“I do,” said George. George thought, People with brain tumors have hallucinations. That’s what they have. They have hallucinations. They don’t have visitations from gods who explain physics concepts. They have hallucinations of visitations from gods who explain physics concepts. A much different thing.
“So, to our questions. I know you have had headaches for quite some time now. And they were diagnosed as migraines, and you’ve been taking narcotics to control the pain. But do you ever see things that aren’t there? Smell anything odd that doesn’t make sense to you? Hear things?”
George looked up at the goddess of the race, who was standing behind the doctor still but was now gesturing eagerly, waving her arms in front of her as if to say no, stop, don’t. George looked at her and felt as if he was being torn apart by inches on the inside. He didn’t want to lose her, didn’t want to lose the goddess of love, and the coy sex goddess, and even the god of wealth, and the god of war, the mermaid, the goat, the mistier ones like Quetzalcoatl and Osiris, the firm ones like Philanthropy and Revenge. These familiar figures, present in his life for such a long time.
“If you take out the tumor, all that will stop?” he asked the doctor.
“All what?” said the doctor. “All what?”
25
Irene stood on the Golden Gate Bridge. The red metal of the railing was cool under her hand and very solid, but there was a fog over the bay hovering just below the bridge itself, so that the bridge seemed truly suspended. It was a dream bridge floating over nothing, as if one could just fall off the edge of it and be buoyed up by the air.
So many people had jumped off this bridge that there was a plaque next to Irene on one of the girders, advertising a crisis hotline, with an emergency phone under it that you could call if you were feeling sad. The plaque told her the consequences of leaping from the bridge were fatal and tragic. The first she could not dispute. The second, she pondered as she leaned out over the fog, was not so clear. Maybe death was not so terrible. How could it be, when she had practiced it so many times? What was waiting for her on the other side: A leafy island? A new, more cheerful Hinterland? George?
Irene listened to the dampened sounds of the seabirds, the hiss of the cars passing behind her over the bridge. There was no city, and there were no mountains. Only fog and the strangely transmitted few sounds: water lapping, a ringing bell, the thump of her heart under her armpit. She thought about what George said about inhabiting the transitional point between life and death. Did she do it because she was a suicidal coward, as she believed, or because she was victorious over the weak impulse for death, as George suggested? Empirical evidence suggested she was not a jumper. She had never jumped. The data supported George’s hypothesis.
Irene’s phone barked. She took it out of her pocket and looked at it as if it were an artifact from another world. At the conference, physicists were walking around, going out and in the doors of the different meeting rooms at the hotel, along with the businesspeople who gave physicists their money. Maybe she was late. How long had she been standing here? The area code was from Toledo. It could be someone at her lab, someone with a problem. Maybe one of the pieces had come back from the fabricator already. Maybe it was ready to be installed.
“Sparks,” she said. Her voice echoed a little bit.
“Irene,” said Sally. “It’s Sally. George’s mother. You know.”
Irene imagined Sally standing in her office in Toledo, perfectly groomed. She pictured her standing on a pedestal, clothed in a drapey robe, blindfolded, holding up a set of scales. She pictured her presiding over Sam Beth’s marriage with George. She would wear the clothing of a high priestess of Babylon, and it would be pretty strange on such a Norwegian-looking lady, but then Sam Beth was Korean and seemed to pull it off alright.
“Hello,” said Irene. “Is everything alright?”
“Well actually, it’s about George.”
“Did he go to the doctor? Is there something wrong with his brain?”
“How did you know that?” Sally asked, her voice suddenly sharp and accusing.
“Never mind,” said Irene. “Is he sick? What did the doctor say?”
There was a long pause, and Irene chewed on her lip. She reached into her pocket and found a pen there, began stabbing it into the railing of the bridge, making a very small blue mark there.
“Irene, it’s actually … George has a brain tumor, the doctor said.”
She paused, and Irene scraped the railing with her pen. “It’s threatening—” began Sally. Irene could hear panic lea
king into the older woman’s voice, and felt horrified that she might start to cry. But Sally didn’t. She went on to explain the tumor, its shape, its slow rate of growth.
“They can do a needle biopsy,” she said. “They can drill down into his—head”—her voice caught but she continued—“and pull out a piece of it and see what it is. Or they can do an open biopsy, where they go in to take out the tumor and biopsy it during the operation. Right there at the same time.”
“That sounds better. The open biopsy. When are they going to operate?”
“That’s the thing,” said Sally. “He doesn’t want them to operate.”
“Why not?” Irene asked. “Why would he not want that?”
“He says the symptoms have been steady for so long, it cannot be growing at a dangerous pace.”
The consequences of jumping from this bridge are fatal and tragic. A person falling from this bridge would surely die. In her mind, she had always felt she would die in Toledo, in the Maumee River, like an Ohio person. But the feeling she got from inhaling deeply on this bridge, so tall the biggest ships could pass beneath it, made her feel that something else was possible. She could do a world tour of suicide bridges. She had never seen the Brooklyn Bridge, the Gorge Bridge above the Rio Grande. She could explore the possibilities of not jumping from every vantage point in the world. The towers of Europe, now that she could fly. The minarets. Everywhere she could find to not die.
After falling asleep so many times, she could only die once. After slipping under every night of her life, she could only crash into one water.
“He has a brain tumor!” Irene screeched into the phone. She turned and leaned her back against the railing, kicking at the barrier with the heel of one shoe. A young couple passed in front of her on the walkway, and the woman looked at her with a concerned frown, as if to say, Are you alright?
“Calm down,” said Sally. And the crying sound was gone from her voice. She was all business. “You don’t know everything about this. OK? So listen.”
“Fine,” said Irene. She was pacing up and down beside the railing now.
“The tumor is in two parts,” she began. “And the operation is dangerous. He could forget who he is, a little bit or a lot. Forget who he knows, or what he knows. Or not, it just depends on what happens in the surgery. So he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to lose anything.”