Irene stared blankly down at the table, bracing herself for tears that were not coming. “No. That’s not going to work,” she said. “I’m a painter. Well, more sculpture lately. Doesn’t matter. Thing is, I’m really going to need both my eyes.”
“I see,” Dr. Zarrani said softly. “Well, as I said, we’ll have a specialist take a look.”
“That’s nonnegotiable,” Irene said, even as she intuited from Dr. Zarrani’s gaze that this wasn’t a negotiation. “Oh fuck,” she sighed finally, easing back and looking up at the blank ceiling. After a moment she peeked back again. “What are the odds?”
“Well, as I said earlier, around sixty-eight percent generally—”
“No, I’m sorry,” Irene said, shaking her head. “I mean what the odds are that I’d . . . I mean, why me? Is this, like, super rare? How many people get this?”
Dr. Zarrani nodded. “Extremely rare particularly for someone your age. As I’ve said, it’s most often seen in very young patients or the elderly. It—well, it isn’t the sort of thing you see often in healthy twentysomethings.”
Irene laughed. “So I’m just lucky then?”
“You could look at it that way.”
“I really couldn’t,” Irene said. “I guess my mother always said I was one in a million.”
Dr. Zarrani smiled. “Osteosarcoma affects about five people in a million, across the whole population.”
“You know that off the top of your head?”
“I’m very good at what I do. Which is why I’m confident that we can get through this together.”
Irene nodded, scanning the bare walls again. “You know, you should really put some art on the walls in here. Everywhere else in this hospital there are, like, banal Water Lilies prints and that sort of thing. You know? Stuff that can kind of fade into the background. But then if you really need some art to look at—like if you’ve just been told you have a thirty-two percent chance of dying—then there’d at least be a Monet print to distract you.”
“Perhaps you could paint—or sculpt—us something,” Dr. Zarrani said.
Irene smiled. “If you can cure me without ruining my eyes, I’ll paint this whole hospital.”
Dr. Zarrani stuck her hand out, over the open file, across the table, and Irene shook it.
“We’ll begin in a week. It may take a few hours. And do bring someone with you next time,” Dr. Zarrani suggested.
Irene shook her head. “I’m not close with my family,” she explained. “Actually, I left home when I was sixteen, and I haven’t spoken to them since. But don’t worry. I can handle this on my own.”
Dr. Zarrani shook her head slowly, and Irene couldn’t escape her sharp disapproval.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Richmond, but I’ve seen Navy SEALs who couldn’t handle this on their own. You’re going to have to have some help. You’ll need people to get you to treatments and take you back again. You’re going to feel sick all the time. Someone’s got to make you eat because you won’t want to. You’re going to need prescriptions filled and insurance claims filed and dressings changed. You see those Lifetime movies with cute little children and pretty ladies who are always stoic and brave and solemn. They might throw up once or twice, some hair falls out, they get a little thinner . . . but that’s nothing. That’s just for starters. Listen to me when I say this. You are about to go to war with your own body. That’s the best way to describe it.”
Irene felt every fiber of herself, sick and well, tight with fear. What the hell did she know about going to war? Metaphorically or otherwise.
She nodded and the doctor seemed satisfied. “If you don’t have friends you can trust with something like this, we can arrange—”
Irene stopped her quickly. “No, it’s not that. It’s—you know, my friends are great—”
Surely Sara would let them take out both her own eyes to save one of hers. Jacob and George would carry her to and from chemo appointments on their backs if she asked.
Dr. Zarrani seemed to know already. “Ms. Richmond, you can’t save them from this, I’m sorry.”
And that was when Irene, finally, began to cry.
Embarrassed, she looked down into her lap, the book of fairy tales still open to the page she’d been on when the doctor had entered. There was a beautiful silvery illustration of an enormous cloud over a still gray sea. It caught her so suddenly that for a second she forgot where she was and what she now knew. In the fairy tale, the North Wind was speaking to a Shining Fish who had no courage.
“La speranza è l’ultima a morire,” the North Wind said. Unlike Jacob she hadn’t failed the class. In fact she’d been one of the best students in the room, according to their teacher, Mrs. Marzocco, even though she’d gotten no credit for it or for any class.
The wind was telling the fish that hope is the last thing to die.
5
William, for the second time in four days, found himself at a party where he knew practically no one. First a suite at the Waldorf, now a basement apartment in Greenpoint that was jammed with actors. The ceiling was two inches above his head, and several others had to stoop. After the show, before William quite realized what was happening, Sara had whisked him onto the 7 train and then onto the G. William never felt comfortable being back in the boroughs. He’d grown up out here, after all, in Flushing. This felt like returning to dry land after months at sea. The buildings were too short; the streets too quiet. Driveways and fences! They’d followed the chummy cast members past Polish restaurants and a pencil factory and an odd, freestanding water tower like the sort you’d see in Kansas somewhere by the highway—to a little basement apartment with a hobbit-size door. One by one the actors had piled in and now were sitting around on the bare floor in a circle, drinking warm white wine from plastic cups and leaving periodically to smoke skunky weed in the back alley.
“I’ve recently begun listening to my whole hip-hop collection again,” one of them said to William. “Grandmaster Flash is a whole different experience on vinyl.”
The stranger wore a corduroy jacket and was drinking beer out of a brandy snifter, which William suspected he’d brought from home. Everyone else had plastic Solo cups and not, like, the nice ones. He reeked of pot and he kept smacking his lips together as if his beer were sawdust.
“I’m sorry,” William replied politely, “I don’t think we’ve met.”
The boy’s red eyes widened. “I thought you were someone else.” Then he backed away in a hurry and moved off across the room, before William could say that, once upon a time, he’d had a Run-DMC record himself.
George and the surly Jacob weren’t talking to anyone else either, but at least they had each other. They sat by the host’s bookshelves looking utterly exhausted and talking as if they’d been parted for weeks by dreadful battles. They exchanged stories of office politics, writer’s block, graduate research, and homeless panhandlers, all while wincing at the warm PBR cans in their hands. Every few minutes one of them would pull a hardcover down, remove the dust jacket and swap it with another from elsewhere on the shelf. Neither offered an explanation. William kept trying to excuse himself, but they were too engrossed in their talk of poems and planets to even look at him. He could have left, and they’d never have noticed, but he was still holding out that Irene would show up.
They had slept together three nights ago, after the last party with Sara and her friends. It was unusual for William. Not just to sleep with someone he’d met hours earlier, but to sleep with someone like Irene. He’d known while it was still happening that he’d never get over it. And things had gone well—at least he’d felt so at the time. But then in the morning he got the impression that perhaps it—no, that he had been a mistake. Not an error or a lapse so much, because neither of them had been very drunk. There had been no impairment. But a mistake and the sex had been merely a miscommunication, like a game of telephone played badly.
The next morning the excitement had been all about Sara’s engagement, and Irene had left after breakfast without even a kiss or a phone number. Now William guessed he was somehow supposed to act as if nothing had happened. As if he didn’t remember every microsecond of the evening, as if he hadn’t been replaying it on the 35mm film reels of his mind ever since. It felt a little shameful, really, as he’d watched it that afternoon right through a meeting with the partners and during a Sunday phone call with the London office, and on the walk home as he passed thousands of people on the sidewalks. But they couldn’t see it, he reminded himself—even if it were projected as high as the Empire State Building and as wide as the Battery. It was all in his head, and in the head of one other, who remained a ghost.
All weekend he’d been miserable and afraid to return Sara’s calls.
He drank deeply from his cup of warm wine and wished the red plastic container would, instead, swallow him up. He looked around the party and wondered if anyone would even notice if he spontaneously disappeared. It was a bit like watching the play. He was still there, in their audience, almost as if, hours ago, the curtain had gone down, the bows had been taken, the cheers had risen, and everyone in the orchestra and all the people in the mezzanine had gone home . . . but for the actors, the whole thing just went on and on.
“How was the show then?” George was asking. It took William a moment to realize that he was speaking to him.
“It was fine,” William lied, thinking that it would be rude to say otherwise in such a small room, filled with the very people who’d produced the play. They’d clearly worked hard and created something from nothing—wasn’t that praiseworthy?
Both George and Jacob stared at him, clearly expecting some elaboration. But William simply couldn’t think of a positive thing to say. He swayed a bit and tried looking at the ceiling where a bare bulb in a fixture dangled with great intent. But when he looked back, the boys were still waiting for him to speak. And William, exasperated at the party, at the days of waiting for Irene to call, at the bad wine—finally snapped.
“It was really, really awful. Really. God. Awful,” he confessed in a whisper. George and Jacob looked both delighted and not surprised. As William described the awfulness in detail, he tried to keep his voice down, but he soon realized it was utterly unnecessary—the actors were all so loud that they wouldn’t have heard him with a bullhorn in hand.
“All the dialogue was in rhyming couplets. Not sure why. Or why there was line dancing. And the guy who played Hades shouted all his lines. And, well, Eurydice couldn’t sing, so I have no idea why they put her in the lead role . . .”
George and Jacob each looked over at the girl in question, the frightfully thin hostess of the party, with breasts so enormous that her every movement seemed a complex balancing act.
Jacob commented wryly, “I can’t imagine.”
“You could count her ribs through a parka.” George concurred.
William went on to describe the highlight of the play: the moment when the actor playing Orpheus had slipped and crashed into Cerberus, whose three papier-mâché heads had gone flying into the wings.
George began telling them all about his star, collapsing two thousand light-years away, but then got distracted by the skinny actress as she rotated a tray of Bagel Bites in her tiny toaster oven. George left to go see if they were almost ready and then Jacob began telling him—William!—about the homeless man he’d seen on the subway that day and about how he felt silly now for getting so worked up about it. William was vaguely aware of a buzzing sound on the chair beside him. He looked down and saw Irene’s smiling face on the cell phone that lay there.
“Oh, get that?” Jacob said quickly. “That’s George’s. Irene probably got lost coming out of the subway again.”
William lifted the phone, almost not wanting to answer it because if he did, her smiling face would vanish from the display. And he’d have to think of something to say to this girl, who’d slept beneath him last week and awakened a total stranger.
He hit the green button to answer the call. “Yes? George Murphy’s phone. This is William Cho.”
There was a silence on the other end. Then, static. Then, “William?”
“Irene? Can you hear me?”
More static. Then a strange sound he couldn’t identify. “William?” she said again. William thought Jacob must be right. She sounded lost—scared.
“Hello? Irene?” he said, louder. The actors were all so loud. And the hot-water pipes were clanking above them—how could the skinny girl ever manage to sleep?
Jacob pointed to the street. “You’ll never get reception in the alley. Head out front.”
William hurried to the little hobbit door and ducked out onto the quiet sidewalk.
“ . . . William? . . . Are . . . there?”
William raced out, past the trash cans, lined up for the morning, and the tightly bundled stacks of newspapers that were ready for recycling. He eased between the cars, parked neatly in their rows. He was desperate to hear Irene. He fought the urge to tell her insane things: that he had been missing her all weekend; that he hadn’t washed his shirt from that night because it still smelled like her. He wanted to tell her that he was sure he loved her, even though he’d only known her for eight hours, during five of which he’d been asleep.
He ran out into the dark street without even looking—if a truck had been going by, he wouldn’t have noticed until ten seconds after it had hit him.
Finally he could hear her clearly. Finally he could make out the strange noises on the other end. Full-on, reckless sobbing, more painful than any in the songs in the musical.
“Irene, where are you? What’s wrong?” He ran down the street to the corner, so he could figure out exactly where in the enormous city he was. He wished it all away. He wished every borough, block, and street away.
“William, I—William, I’m at a coffee shop across from Mount Sinai.”
William kept running. He looked around, as if maybe the hospital were nearby. And then he remembered he was in Brooklyn and it was on the East Side of Manhattan.
“Are you okay? Were you in an accident? Hold on, I’ll find a cab—”
The crying stopped, and he heard her clear her throat.
“William, I’ve got cancer. I’ve got . . . osteosus . . . I forget the name of it already. Bone cancer. This lump under my eye. Only five people in a million have it.”
He knew he ought to turn around—go back to the party and tell her friends. That was what she wanted probably. After all, they’d known her for years. He hardly knew her at all.
“You’re going to be fine!” he yelled into the phone. Not even his phone. He knew he should go back to the party and tell George. But he was still racing down the street. As long as he could hear Irene there on the other end, he knew she’d be all right. He ran past the water tower, past the pencil factory, past the Polish restaurants. He ran all the way to the water’s edge to a dark wooden pier. Black as the Styx, the East River rushed by.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she said.
He realized she was still sobbing into the phone.
“I don’t know why I even called. Don’t say anything to Sara or George or Jacob or anyone, all right?”
“I won’t, I won’t,” he was saying. “Shush.” He didn’t make a shhhhhh sound, just said, “Shush.”
It took him a second to realize that she’d begun laughing, softly.
“What’s so funny?” he wheezed.
“Nothing,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
He didn’t understand. He tried to catch his breath, but each inhalation was like battery acid, each exhalation like cumulus clouds leaving his lips.
“Where are you?” Irene asked, her voice a bit steadier.
He gazed across at the dark skyline. Hundreds of thousands of feet of glass a
nd steel rose up into the blackness like a great Necropolis, and she was in there, somewhere.
“William? You know, this is stupid. I’m just going to go home.”
“No, I can’t really hear you,” he said, turning from the river to run back toward the party. “Hold on.”
Irene’s breath was in his ear again. He looked back over his shoulder at the water and the majestic city beyond it. Holding the phone tight to his ear, he ran three and a half more blocks before he realized that the signal had dropped.
FISH EYES AND NO EARS
At first, having cancer seemed to be largely a matter of paperwork. Irene tried to remain composed as the grandmotherly clerks at Mount Sinai looked crossly at her forms, their expressions never failing to falter as they handed her fresh ones. Irene wondered if they were having an interdepartmental Ugly Christmas Sweater contest or if the drop-stitched Rudolphs, Frostys, and Kringles had perhaps been knitted by their cats. She reminded herself to not get snippy. These people were trying to help her.
With some pharmaceutical-sponsored clipboard on her lap, Irene attempted to hold her head high without getting it in the tinsel of the plastic fir trees, or knocking the light-up snowmen from the wire branches. Christmas was consuming Mount Sinai Hospital with virulent glee. Everywhere Irene looked, she could see prickly wreaths, looping garlands, and glitzy ornaments. Stockings were hung with care in every single elevator. Toy trains looped through banks of fake snow. Handsomely wrapped gifts with oversize bows were stacked neatly in hallway corners, although these were just for show. Irene had kicked one accidentally, and the hollow tower had toppled. The décor had seemed laughable at first, and then depressing, but now, after spending an entire morning filling out forms, she was coming around to it. Who was she to judge what it took to bring a little cheer to those stuck at the hospital over the holidays? After all, she was about to number among them.
Eventually Irene was shuffled onto the sixth floor: Head and Neck Cancers. Though it seemed apropos, considering the location of her tumor, she found the little sign above the waiting area annoyingly absurd. I’ve got head cancer, she thought to herself. Cancer of the head. Just all this up here is no good at all. I’ll get myself right on the head transplant list. Pop on the head of a nice quiet schoolteacher from Ann Arbor and be done with it.
Why We Came to the City Page 7