Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  “Looks just like Shelter Island,” Irene said quietly.

  As soon as she said it, it brought a hollow ache to Jacob’s throat, and he knew why. He hadn’t thought of the painting while they’d been out there—but now he saw that it did resemble the shoreline where she had first confessed to him that she’d been sick. Where they’d drunk the bottle of wine. Down in his gut he knew it was the last time he’d been happy—right there, after she’d told him, but before he’d really believed it.

  “I’ve got to sit down a second,” Irene said.

  Jacob looked all around, but there were no benches. He couldn’t stand the sight of her hunching down on the ground in her beautiful white dress—the sort of dress you could get married in, on a beach anyway. He looked around for a guard.

  “Hold on. Maybe—maybe someone can get you a wheelchair or something?”

  “Just let me catch my breath,” she warned, as she stared at her reflection in the floor.

  “Irene,” he tried again. “For Christ’s sake, you look like a ghost’s ghost. You can’t—”

  She wrenched herself back up off the floor without a word. For the first time he wished she still had the eye patch on. Her gaze was Gorgon-like, petrifying, unbearable.

  He stood rooted to the ground as she stalked off. In the white marble floor, he saw a miserable fuck staring up at him. What a pretentious prick he was. How could he ever have thought he could save anyone from anything? He turned and looked up at the gigantic self-portrait and knew, deep down, that he was nothing but a Warhol in his soul.

  By the time he’d hurried after her into the dark room full of Josef Albers squares, lit only by the sickening Robert Irwin fluorescent bulbs on the far wall, she was nowhere to be found. He expected to find her sitting on the stairs that led down into the Modern galleries, but she wasn’t there either. Nor was she by the Klees, nor by the Mirós, and then—fuck—not among the O’Keeffes (which she still nursed a little junior high crush on). He spat, swore, spun around, and backtracked a little—sure that he’d just missed her and that, as exhausted as she was, she couldn’t have gone far—but she was nowhere.

  He dashed into Arts of Africa and Oceania and the Americas, peering behind the Ethiopian totem poles and Filipino longboats and Eskimo death shrouds. He thought he spotted her studying a Korwar ancestor figure and then, a moment later, bending down to examine a Peruvian funerary mask—but no. Was she in a ladies’ room somewhere? Was she hiding in with the European Furniture? Jacob knew that all those decorative armoires bored her to tears, but if she wanted to get away from him, where better to go? He searched high and low amid the gilt caskets and marble funerary portraits.

  Never before had it occurred to him how much death there was in museums. Paintings of dead people. Sculptures of people who’d died forever and ever ago. Ornate vases and chairs and mirrors made by some dead guy who had sold them at some point to someone, who’d then gone and died and left them to someone else who’d died, and on and on until the great undying museum got its hands on these remains. And every wing, every bench, every window had some dead person’s name on it. The dead Robert Lehman Collection. The dead Sackler Wing. The dead Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. The dead Thomas J. Watson Library. Oh, let’s all grab a quick bite at the dead Petrie Court Café before heading down to the dead Ruth and dead Harold Uris Center for Education. It wasn’t a museum so much as a mausoleum.

  He rushed into the Branch Bank, with all that bland American furniture behind the facade, and then back out again on his way up to the Tiffany stained glass and then back down again toward Arms and Armor. Wall after wall of deathly instruments—swords and axes and crossbows and harquebuses. She wasn’t by the fifth-century red-figured vases from Greece or the twelfth-century bronze spearheads from the Trojan War. He ventured back into the Medieval Wing. There was nothing left to do but cover ground he’d been through already, in case she’d circled back. Having been everywhere else, he came back to the Warhols, past Bohemia Lies by the Sea, and there, at the bottom of the stairs he’d first come down, was Irene.

  She was just sitting there, staring out into the room. Had she been there the whole time? Had he blown right by her? She was looking at a pair of Klee paintings. On the left was a round-edged, purple and pink fantasy—little houses all in rows with fat little windows and doors. Oriental Pleasure Garden, it was called. Beside it, Stricken City. A brown and sooty monstrosity, a jagged bolt of death through its center.

  “Jesus,” he said, sitting down beside her. “I was running all over looking for you.”

  Her eyes peered up from behind the veil of her let-down hair, and he could see they were cloudy. Looking almost right through him. Her skin had turned so white and bloodless that it no longer blended with her makeup. She looked like someone wearing an Irene mask made in a knock-off factory.

  “Fuck,” he said. “Let’s get you up. Come on, walk with me, okay? Can you?”

  With his arm around Irene, Jacob was able to coax her to her feet and then slowly through the crowded aisles of the modern art exhibits and out through the atrium of marble Greeks. One step at a time he guided her toward the lobby and the exit beyond—hoping that everyone would just think they were two lovers unable to be an inch apart. He wanted, so badly, for her to exit under her own power.

  “This was nice,” she said as they came to the revolving doors. “I had a really nice time.”

  “You’re delirious. You had a terrible time. I fucked it all up. But that’s okay.”

  Jacob smiled as he eased past the security guards, trying to seem nonchalant. They stepped out into the blazing heat. Crowds milled down below them, pushed back from behind them. Traffic crawled along Fifth Avenue. He just had to get her into one of the cabs. He just had to get her down the steps.

  “It’s hot,” she said, surprised.

  “Hang on. I’m going to carry you,” he said.

  “The hell you are,” she whispered, but he wasn’t listening. He reached down with his free arm to the clammy space behind her knees and eased her up off the ground. She was lighter than a book bag. He could feel her bones through her legs and her white dress, which he was careful to make sure didn’t ride up as he came toward the line of yellow cabs at the bottom. One at a time, slow and steady, he carried her down the steps.

  “Hey!” someone yelled. “These two kids just got married!”

  Jacob didn’t have the wherewithal to answer, much less to explain.

  “Look, he’s bringing her to the car!” someone else shouted.

  Just a few people at first, but then more and more, with each step they went down, turned and raised their phones to snap a picture of the young newlyweds. The barbershop quartet looked over and transitioned, sweetly, into a new tune. An old Elvis song.

  “‘Wise men say . . .’” the four men sang in splendid harmony. “‘Only fools rush in . . .’”

  Jacob looked down at his would-be bride, blond hair flowing over her face as her eyes locked onto his: afraid, exhausted, resigned, indignant, confused. She threw her head back and began laughing.

  At the bottom of the sidewalk, the crowds parted and clapped. Irene reached up and kissed Jacob’s sweaty, stubbled cheek. A cab pulled to a stop at the curb, and the driver rushed out and came around to open the door for them.

  Jacob eased the beaming Irene onto the cool leather seats inside, the air-conditioning on sweet and loud. She clasped her hands over her sweating chest.

  “Where to, lovebirds?” the driver asked.

  “Mount Sinai Hospital,” Jacob said, “and step on it.”

  SEPTEMBER

  Sara hurried down the middle of a Duane Reade pharmacy, her empty New York Journal tote bag dangling from her right hand, the cheap gray linoleum squeaking beneath her worn ballet flats, and an Internet coupon folded in her left hand. Hosiery, Shaving Needs, Incontinence. Greeting Cards, Tacky Crap, Well-Picked-Over Bac
k-to-School Supplies. Fun-Size Bags of Candy Out Way Too Soon for Halloween. Her shoes, like twin missiles, guided her to the same aisle that she went to every other day, just after giving Irene her afternoon dose of Prednicen-M at four o’clock. It knocked Irene out for one hour, allowing Sara this small window to pick up the supplies that she didn’t trust William or George or Jacob to obtain properly.

  Adult Diapers, Orthopedics, Dietary Supplements. As she came into aisle two, she saw immediately that the store had not gotten in a new shipment of Assure high-calorie meal-supplement milkshakes since her last visit. Dr. Zarrani had said Irene needed to keep gaining weight or she’d end up back in the hospital. Getting her released had been hard enough the first time. After Jacob had literally carried her to the emergency room, the nurses had treated her for dehydration and malnourishment as if she were just one more idiot off the street who had forgotten to drink water despite the heat wave.

  “Didn’t you tell them she’s a patient here?” Sara had demanded of Jacob when she’d finally gotten there. When a nurse finally wandered over, Sara asked, “Doesn’t it say in your system that she’s got cancer?” The nurse stared down at the chart. “Who? Her?”

  It had then taken two hours to get her charts sent down from oncology. Nobody could find the paperwork that said Sara was to be treated like family and allowed to know what was going on. Not that she didn’t ask Irene to call her father twice a day. Then three more hours before Dr. Zarrani had been able to get her transferred upstairs to the twelfth floor east—not the nice, peaceful Zen garden part where they did the chemo treatments, but the other side of the building where there were beds for patients who needed to be admitted. Admitted. That was a joke.

  Irene was still insisting none of this was at all serious. “Sara, relax. Jacob overreacted. I just keep forgetting to eat.”

  An RN had come to tell them that the doctors (invisible, apparently) wanted to run a litany of new scans. A nurse manager came by, listened gravely to Sara’s concerns for less than three minutes, then disappeared. No one but the nurses came by all night, and Sara stayed, if only to make sure Irene didn’t get up and walk out. Finally around seven a.m., five doctors all buzzed in at once while Sara was half conscious. They chirped about scan results and potassium levels and speaking to researchers in Georgia.

  “When is Dr. Zarrani coming in?” Sara asked.

  “He’ll be here at ten a.m.,” one said, and then they all vanished before Sara could explain that Dr. Zarrani was a she. It took five more hours to run the paperwork to clear and release Irene, on the condition that she stop the long walks and the heavy lifting and eat three square meals a day.

  Irene had lost six pounds in the two weeks since the last chemo treatment. And it wasn’t like she had that much weight to lose in the first place. She was five foot ten and 107 pounds. Sara had hoped she would be scared enough to not want to be carried to the curb again. She’d trusted that when William brought her back to his apartment, he’d make sure she ate something once in a while, even if the chemo nauseated her and nothing seemed to taste right anymore.

  Well. Those were mistakes Sara wasn’t about to make again.

  Irene had made it exactly one week on her own recognizance. She’d promised William she’d stay in his apartment while he went out on interviews, relaxing and watching movies and eating takeout. Instead, she’d waited in her pajamas until William left, then changed into a T-shirt and jeans and gone to the gallery. She’d sculpted there until a half hour before William was due to return, then rush back, change into her PJs, and nuke the same three half-empty moo-shu pork containers that she fished back out of the trash every morning. What had she thought was going to happen?

  One day Irene collapsed at the gallery. Of course, nearly ten minutes had passed before Abeba realized she wasn’t meditating. “In a heap on the floor?” Sara had shouted, when she got to the ER again. “Please tell me someone told them this time that she’s already a patient here?”

  Different nurse, same story. “Cancer? This girl?”

  Irene had lost eight more pounds. Sara couldn’t recall the last time she herself had weighed only ninety-nine pounds—middle school? Dr. Zarrani’s examination revealed that Irene’s mouth and throat were peppered with stinging canker sores—a common side effect of the chemo and a likely reason Irene hadn’t been eating. Why Irene hadn’t mentioned that she was having trouble swallowing was entirely beyond Sara’s comprehension. Probably a hundred times a day, Sara asked her how she was feeling, and every time all she would say was “Fine!” Why did she have to make it so difficult for everyone?

  It was too much, Sara had said. They needed some backup. At least one real adult besides herself. Irene did claim to be trying to reach her father but said she wasn’t getting through to him. Where the hell was he? Mongolia? Not as if they didn’t have phones there. But no, of course, when Irene nodded off and Sara checked her phone log, it showed no outgoing calls to Mongolia or anywhere.

  So it was still only Sara in charge when Dr. Zarrani insisted on inserting a “percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube” into Irene’s stomach—the only way to make sure she got vital nutrients. Four full days at the hospital this time, getting the surgery, recovering, while Sara learned how to rig an IV bag full of Assure milkshakes so that it would drip slowly through the PEG tube and into Irene’s stomach. What else could she do? The boys were too obtuse to handle it, and Irene couldn’t be trusted to do it herself.

  The next day Sara had come to William’s door with suitcases in hand. “You can go live with George if you want,” she had told him, “but either way I’m staying here.” William had not argued, smart boy, and within minutes had set up an air mattress for her in the dining nook. Sara had three weeks of unused vacation time saved up. She promised Luther that she’d edit five stories a day from home and answer the forwarded calls when the new intern was out or in meetings. She canceled appointments with caterers and bands and florists. She and George still hadn’t picked a place, much less set a date. The apartment search was likewise forgotten. But none of that mattered now. She’d stay through Christmas if she had to, no matter how much Irene hated it, filling IV bags with the Assure she’d come to Duane Reade to buy.

  She scoured the shelves, looking for Double Boost, which was always in short supply, since one Double gave you twice as many vitamins and minerals as a Regular. Why did they even make the regular? Who’d rather drink two of these instead of one?

  The last set of scans had come back during the second hospital stay. The tumors still weren’t shrinking. They weren’t growing either, but they soon would be, now that the chemo and radiation treatments had ended. And the doctors couldn’t just keep stepping up the treatments forever. It was time to try something experimental, like drug trials. Sara tried not to think about the estimated odds of success.

  22 percent

  16 percent

  9.2 percent

  Irene was like a child. She took every opportunity to stall in taking her medications—pretending to nap or to be busy in the bathroom. Saying, “Let’s do it in a few minutes,” when a few minutes rapidly became an hour, or two, even when these things had to be done strictly according to the color-coded Excel spreadsheet schedule that Sara had taped up in every room of the apartment.

  The Prednicen-M had to be taken four times a day with an Assure. Irene had to apply a 1 percent hydrocortisone cream three times a day to the rash that was being caused by her denosumab injections. Actually, Sara had to apply the cream, because there were some spots on her middle back that Irene couldn’t quite reach. Then every morning, thirty minutes before her first meal, Irene had to have one Fosimax pill with water, after which she had to stand upright for thirty minutes to prevent heartburn. For the canker sores, Irene had to rinse with a mouthwash of milk of magnesia and Benadryl liquid five times per day, and it had to be mixed fresh each time. Four times a day she had to take amphotericin B, for t
hrush. Zofran as needed for nausea; Vicoprofen as needed for pain.

  Because it was hard for Irene to swallow, Sara had been quartering these pills every day, then grinding the pieces up with a mortar and pestle like some sort of apothecary. After a week of this, Sara had deep-red calluses all over her palm, so George went back to Sur la Table and bought a battery-powered spice mill that worked much better.

  The milkshakes had to be poured into the IV bags, which could then be hung from the standing lamp by the couch, the cabinet knobs in the kitchen, the shower rod in the bathroom, and the coat hook in the bedroom. Jacob had affixed a 3M Command utensil hook behind every chair in every room that Irene might conceivably use. The hospital had given them only two IV bags, and these had to be washed after each use or the chalky residue clogged the opening.

  William was there most of the time, but he was hopelessly disappointing at these tasks. George and Jacob came by nearly every day to help out for a few hours, and this gave Sara some time to do her editing and to sleep and to take anxious walks around Madison Square Park—but there were things the boys truly couldn’t do: Irene’s urine output had to be measured, so Dr. Zarrani could be sure that she was retaining enough fluids. This involved Irene putting a plastic measuring device on the toilet seat (which she forgot if Sara didn’t remind her), peeing into it, and then calling the results out to Sara, who was keeping a record down to the milliliter. There were programmed cell phone alerts. There were laminated lists of hospital phone numbers for each of them to keep in their wallets in case there were questions. And still it felt like they were losing this fight.

  Poor George had been on duty when Irene began having horrible cramps and had made a complete hash of everything while he tried to help without waking up Sara. Very sweet, but it meant three hours of agony for Irene while George tried to follow Internet instructions for a lower back massage that would ease her cramps. When Sara finally woke up, it had taken her ten minutes to get on the horn to three different people, who eventually concluded that, because of her all-liquid diet, Irene needed to have some senna tea twice a day to make sure she also had a regular bowel movement. That was another thing to log and another thing the boys didn’t keep track of, along with cleaning the area around the PEG tube carefully with antibiotics and dealing with the mess that resulted that time when the cap came off Irene’s tube in her sleep and the contents of her stomach dribbled out all over the couch.