When I got home, Julia’s things were gone. Our apartment was almost completely empty. I just walked around for a while as the enormity of it sank in. I felt a wild desperation to reverse the course of this disaster. How could I have done nothing to stop this? Even worse, I hadn’t helped her move out. Her brothers moved her while I was in New York partying with Taina and Adrian.
A desperate, pleading declaration of my deepest wish to reconcile and build a future with Julia would have made all the difference at this point. Flowers, notes on her windshield, voice mails, e-mails, and a heartfelt drop to the knees was what I should have done, but didn’t. I always thought that I might propose to her in front of her third grade class. How great would it be to embarrass her like that? But instead of doing, I kept thinking, just like I had been thinking and not doing for years. I felt completely powerless, like in a dream where you can’t move. Something was stopping me. I remembered the discussion about Taina’s starfish, and yes, frozen was a good descriptor. I figured that I just had to make peace with it. Asinine passivity is what it was. Showing a little faith during the good times would have allowed me to hold on to the woman I love in the worst of times. And the worst of times were certainly on their way.
A couple of weeks passed. “This is good,” Taina assured me on the phone. “Catching your breath and seeing if you can live without Julia is a kind of test. If you can, then let her go. If you can’t, then you have to do something.” By the weekend I was so anxious and mentally fried that I had to take the most direct route to happiness. I had to go to the woods.
I studied forestry so that I could be close to nature and ended up stuck in an office all day. I work for the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection’s State Parks & Forests division. I started out as a park project manager and ended up being “promoted” to manage the tech department. It’s more money, but I’m cut off from what I love. The only flora I see all day is a sad little Japanese maple outside our office building, the one that they planted last summer next to the employee parking lot. So I went hiking almost every weekend, even if it was just at a local park.
Even though it was late January, the temperature was warm, predicted to peak at fifty degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon, and there was no snow or moisture on the ground. After a breakfast of three hard-boiled eggs and coffee, I threw together a light backpack and headed out in my Wrangler. I pulled into the range of forested hills and rocky outcrops of Sleeping Giant Park in Hamden and headed toward the picnic areas and the parking lot. My Jeep was dwarfed by a dense pine forest at the foot of the mountain. At 8 a.m. there were already a half-dozen cars in the lot. I dropped my forehead onto the steering wheel. Since the memory of my high school locker combination, I had had two more similar episodes, complete with nausea, headaches, and a sudden flash of a useless, vivid memory. These were also long forgotten and useless brain data, like a conversation I had with a stranger at a bus station, old computer code, and an unspecified moment when I had looked at the face of a clock. I made some notes about it in anticipation of the check-up that I had coming up in a few weeks. I sensed that it could be something serious, but I dared not acknowledge the possibility. In fact, the real purpose of my day in the woods was to remind myself exactly how young, healthy, and athletic I was. I would take the most challenging way up the mountain, the white trail.
I stepped out of my Jeep and took a long, deep breath. I looked up. The sky was ice blue and clear. A few dry pine needles floated down. I put my hand out and they landed in my palm. They were in bundles of five. “White Eastern Pine,” I mumbled to myself, remembering the park plans and maintenance I had overseen for several years before my unfortunate promotion. I looked around and surveyed the various types of trees along the path leading up to the mountain. When called a tree-hugger I’d say, “Guilty as charged.” I love forests, and I also love trees individually. I consider these guys to be my buddies, the black birch, the clusters of hemlocks, the sugar maples and hickory. If any of them is sick, I know how to heal them. Many a tree has been rehabilitated, debugged, defungused, or otherwise protected because of me, which in turn benefits the human and animal community too. I stopped to inspect the blue-gray bark of a beech that had been freshly carved with a pair of initials. I ran my fingers over the inscription and thought, isn’t there a better way to say “I love you” than by scarring a tree? Damn kids.
I knew these woods better than I knew my own neighborhood. I had hiked more than half of the seven hundred miles of Connecticut’s Blue Blazed trail system. I’d stumbled upon mill ruins, ghost towns, abandoned cellar holes, Indian caves, and crumbling cemeteries. Still, like many life-long hikers, I dreamed of trails yet unseen, of survivalist adventures in the big-league wilds of Alaska. I was thinking about plans I’d made with a group of hiking friends to spend a week camping in Arcadia National Park over the summer, when I heard someone call my name.
I turned, but saw no one. I located a guiding marker, which meant that the path would soon intersect with another trail. I figured I must have heard approaching hikers. Again I heard my name, more distinctly this time. I turned around several times, but there was absolutely no one on the path.
I kept walking, focusing only on my own breathing and the scenery before me. The mountain was already a steep climb at this point, and it rose sharply up seventy feet or so before it leveled off for a stretch. I lifted myself up over the first large boulder in a colossal pile of ice-age trap rock. I noticed the smooth surface of the rock I was climbing. I looked at my hiker’s watch: eight twenty-eight and forty-seven seconds. When I was three-quarters of the way up, I heard my name called a third time. I felt that same dizzy feeling I had at the club in New York. This time, I didn’t turn around because I realized that the call wasn’t coming from the woods. I was breathing heavy, and sweat dripped off my forehead and into my ear. It tickled, and I shook my head to get it out. Suddenly I smelled urine and boiling milk. I heard the creaking of a hammock as it rocked in its hook. The forest fell away. I landed on my back, inside a crib.
A woman leaned over the edge of the rails and smiled. It was dark, so I couldn’t see much more than her dark eyes glistening and her fingers stroking the tops of my hands. She was looking at me but talking to someone else. Later, I would recall, but not immediately understand, her words: “Javier es el mas fuerte y saludable.” She picked me up and kissed me hard on the forehead. I gripped her finger. She spoke directly to me this time: “Acuerdate de lo que te digo, mi niño. No tengas miedo. Todo lo que te ha pasado te ayudará. Vas a salir adelante.” She nodded with the sureness of what she had said. Then she lifted me and I smelled her neck, moist with perspiration. Her scent was familiar and safe. She patted me on the back and rocked me from side to side, “Shhhh.” I dug my face deeper into her shoulder and I felt the hard edge of her collarbone against my cheekbone. Her “shhh” blended into the hiss of the wind all around me, and the bald branches trembled and the dead leaves stirred on the ground. I opened my eyes and I was on the lip of the seventy-foot pile of rocks. The soles of my boots were three or four inches from the rock’s edge. Inside my nylon sports pants, hot urine ran down my legs. I had no memory of climbing up the last quarter of the cliff’s face. I had no memory of anything after I looked at my watch. But more than five minutes had passed. I looked back down toward the ground. My stomach lurched.
I scanned the landscape for other hikers but there were none. I began to shiver in horror and relief: my body had gone on autopilot and finished the climb, like a sleepwalker. I spotted an enormous slab of sandstone hidden among the low branches of a tree and leaned against it, breathing deep. I climbed into the lap of a flat rock, leaning my head in the palms of my hands. I was shaking.
When I calmed down a bit, I turned around and headed back. I got off the white path and onto the safe, flat dirt road of the tower path. At one point, despite being cold and urine-soaked, I had to stop and rest again. The power and clarity of the memory had zapped me. The sun warmed me a bit. I
closed my eyes and pressed my fingers into my temples. Javier. The woman had called me Javier. The name sounded terribly familiar now, and again I felt a rush of unspecific but powerful emotion, along with that vague sense of dread that had plagued me over the previous week.
I got behind the wheel of my Wrangler. A flag went up—maybe I shouldn’t operate a vehicle. But I did. I contemplated going to the emergency room, but I didn’t go. At this point I abandoned my convenient blue seeds theory, and realized that Taina was right. This was no small ailment. But within fifteen minutes, I felt completely normal. When I got home, I checked my pupils in the mirror, tested my own motor coordination with a few tasks I had been asked to perform in a drunk driving test, and everything appeared to be just fine. Once I felt better, I immediately found reason to question the seriousness of what had actually happened. I downgraded my level of alarm, and comfortably settled back to my earlier suspicions about the mysterious blue seeds.
My first priority was to shower and get into warm, dry clothes. Once dressed, I sat down at the computer. I typed in the Spanish phrases that I remembered from my memory in the woods. But the website couldn’t come up with anything because I didn’t know how to spell the words. I got out a pad of paper and wrote down the words phonetically, using an online Spanish dictionary until each option matched a real word and then linked them into a string that made sense. When I was sure about each individual word, I checked them off. Then I rewrote them into a single English sentence. I sat back and read the sentence in its entirety. Like the combination from my high school locker, the last word released its meaning all at once.
I didn’t read the phrase aloud; there was no need, for in English it was void of context, void of her lovely voice. I had always known these words, I realized. I was only confirming what I instinctively knew. I was the one who had hidden my knowledge of these words, and of the Spanish language itself, somewhere far and deep inside my own head.
“Acuerdate de lo que te digo, mi niño. No tengas miedo. Todo lo que te ha pasado te ayudará. Vas a salir adelante.” I stared at the translation on the screen:
“Remember this, my boy. Don’t be afraid. Everything that has happened to you will help you. You will succeed.”
I rested my chin in the cup of my hand and my elbow on the desk. I stared at the words for a long time. I understood then that there was something really wrong with me. I climbed into bed. Next thing I knew, the alarm went off and it was Monday, time to go to work, which I did, refusing to even think about what had happened the night before.
I worked a half-day. Shortly after lunch, I had a seizure. I was in a meeting with four other people in a conference room when it happened. I woke up in an ambulance, with a mouthful of blood, terrified and thrashing so much that they tied down my wrists. I was admitted into Yale–New Haven Hospital, where I underwent a series of tests. A friend from work stayed with me until my parents arrived. I kept my eyes closed to block out the light. There was a mass inside my head, they told me. Only a biopsy, which they scheduled within twenty-four hours, could determine the exact nature of the mass. They gave me steroids, which reduced the swelling that had provoked the seizure. I immediately felt better. “Steroids. Really?” I said.
“Not those kind of steroids, unfortunately,” the doctor said, as a nurse took my blood pressure for the millionth time that day. My poor mother looked like she’d aged ten years in the last ten hours. At sixty-five, her hair had already gone completely white, but she also had a playful expression that made people think that she was much younger. But now her big green eyes looked haunted and her voice trembled each time she spoke. I took her hand and said, “Ma, this is a technical problem with a technical solution. We’ll find the best brain mechanic to pop open my hood and fix it. I’m gonna be fine.”
I told the doctor and my parents about the memory flashes, the sudden and temporary inability to think of common words or names of people I knew well. The doctor explained how it was the tumor pressing against healthy brain tissue. “That contact causes nausea, aphasia, dizziness, and seizures. Hallucinations and personality changes are pretty standard, David,” he said, scratching his head. “But eidetic memory? I don’t know . . . you could have been hallucinating. We’ll know more after the biopsy and some more thorough testing. Was it accompanied by a sense of dread?”
I said yes, and he nodded. “Probably a hallucination.” But I didn’t believe it. Not for a minute. I knew that what I remembered was real.
That night, when my mom asked me what I needed, I said, “Julia.” She looked down and patted my hand. “She’s on a cruise to Mexico, Davie. She and her mom can’t be reached.”
When I woke up after the biopsy the next day, my doctor assured me that I was doing great, and that now we had to wait for the lab results. When I woke up, I answered his five questions perfectly, except the one about my name. I told them my name was “Javier” but I don’t remember that. Over the next twenty-four hours, there were a bunch of other kooky moments, especially before the swelling in my brain completely subsided. My night nurse, a cheerful matron who hailed from Cuba, told my mother in the morning that I had warned her, in flawless Spanish, that she should bring the birds’ cages inside because there was a hurricane coming.
The doctor came into my room and pulled up a chair. “David,” he said, and looked down at his hands. “It is what we were afraid it would be, a high-grade malignant glioblastoma multiforme.” He had explained a range of possibilities before. This diagnosis was the worst-case scenario.
I said, “But some people do survive this, right?” He shook his head and leaned forward. “If we treat it with the most aggressive means available—surgery followed by chemotherapy and radiation—you have about a year and a half to live. In your age category, less than fourteen percent of patients with this type of tumor survive the five-year mark. Technically, the ten-year survivorship is 1.7%, but that’s just an average. Of course a few do, but it’s so rare that it doesn’t even bump the statistic up to two percent. That’s what we’re dealing with here.”
I’ve been asked many times since then what my reaction was after hearing those words. The best way to describe it is to say that I heard the “swoosh” of an axe falling, the splitting of the membrane between normalcy and insanity. Everything that is ordinary, safe, and comforting rips away. I was left in a place of silent, stunned floating. My intestines felt like they had just liquefied, hot acid burning everything in their path. I remember the doctor suggested that one option was not to fight the cancer at all; that the battle would be long and hard and that in the end, this disease always wins. It always wins.
My father’s stricken blue eyes stared at the doctor from behind gold rim spectacles. “How did he get this?” he asked in a choked voice.
“Cell phones,” my mother gasped. “Microwaving with plastic wrap?”
The doctor let out a great sigh and threw his hands up in the air. “My father spent his entire life trying to figure out how brain cancer chooses its victims, but to this day, it remains one of the most intractable forms of cancer. A very small number of people have genetic markers that predispose them, but the vast majority of primary brain tumors are believed to have environmental causes. Exposure to pesticides, plastics, chemicals, radiation, but honestly, it’s a big question mark. We just don’t know. And nothing in David’s history explains the onset at such a young age.”
In the meantime, the words “it always wins” echoed across the chambers of my heart. I searched for something to hold on to. A comfort. A beacon. Something to suggest that this was all a big misunderstanding, a nightmare, or a lie. Back in my hospital bed, I closed my eyes and tried to remember the woman who had had so much faith in me. “Remember this, my boy. Don’t be afraid. Everything that has happened to you will help you. You will succeed.”
Had I invented that memory just because I needed some reassurance? Had I known, deep down, that something terrible was on its way? The statistics the doctor had just dropped on me wer
e a kind of tsunami barreling toward me. Before he left, the doctor asked if I needed anything.
“My wife,” I said in the impatient tone of someone who’s been married twenty years. “I’m waiting for my wife.”
“I didn’t realize you were married, David,” he said. “Where is she?”
“On a cruise ship in Mexico. It’s taking her a while to get back.”
“That’s great that you’re married,” he said. “I’ll tell you, married patients tend to have a better outcome than unmarried ones. To men, a wife is a kind of life raft.” He patted me on the shoulder. “You’re a lucky guy.”
At the foot of my bed, my mother began to sob.
After the biopsy and all the tests and meetings, they let me go home. I was pumped full of steroids and they worked like a dream. I felt perfectly normal, although a bit tired from the biopsy, as would be expected. As the days went on, I waited for the dreaded symptoms to return, but there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary going on in my head. No memory flashbacks, no headaches, nothing. By the next week I woke up and wondered if the whole thing had been just a bad dream.
Before I checked out of Yale, a series of tests and meetings had been set up with a renowned neuro-oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York in preparation for the next phase: the surgery to remove the tumor, or what they called the “resection.” We were aiming for two weeks.
Taina was the only one of my siblings who lived within driving distance, and she had taken two days off from work and had been with me in the days immediately after the seizure. She was in charge of managing the communication with Ray, Holly, and Adrian. My parents handled the extended family, my friends, and the neighbors. Like Julia, Adrian was also missing in action. After the concert in New York, he had gone to perform in a music festival in Spain and wasn’t answering his cell phone or replying to text or e-mail messages. No one knew how else to reach him. Taina promised me that Holly was on task, getting word out through whatever channels possible. I really needed to hear his voice. If Julia was my beacon, Adrian was my rock.
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