Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  “Ha ha,” Sara said flatly, as George planted a kiss on her cheek. He moved past her and dropped his armfuls of books onto William’s end table.

  “You are in serious trouble, mister!” Jacob shouted.

  “For buying a bunch of nonsense books?” William asked, studying the titles.

  “Fuck that. I mean he’s in big trouble with me!”

  George gave him a puzzled look, as he turned to Sara for explanation. “What’s he—? Why’s everyone drinking?”

  Sara’s eyes were brimming, and she was smiling widely. George was sure there must be some great news from Dr. Zarrani about Irene. After all this! After his panic attack at the bookstore, and his revelation, and his thunderstorm in the subway . . . but this was it! The sign he’d been waiting for! And now Irene was going to be fine. George felt a swell of gratitude in his chest; he would never, ever doubt again.

  “Dr. mmmm and Dr. hmmmm called,” she was saying. “They tried your cell and your office. They got Allen, and when they told him the news, Allen gave them my number, and they called me, thinking it might be our home number.”

  “Why . . . wait, why would the hospital tell Allen anything?”

  Sara was confused. “Drs. McManus and Schwartz. From Harvard.”

  “WHICH IS IN FUCKING BOSTON IN CASE YOU FORGOT!” Jacob bellowed.

  “Hush,” Irene said, nuzzling her head into the itchy fabric of his tweed coat.

  George still didn’t understand. “What?”

  “The lectureship,” Sara said, beaming proudly. “They’re offering you the job.”

  George didn’t know if he ought to cry or faint or cheer. He settled on an extremely awkward mix of all four reactions, which sounded—Jacob would later tell him—like a dolphin choking on an orange. Then Sara was hugging him, and Irene was clapping as hard as she could—which wasn’t hard—and William was heading over from the couch with his hand outstretched. In an instant, George forgot all about the subway ride and Mrs. Cho and the $239.56 and the books. He forgot who he was and where he came from.

  “Cheers!” William raised his glass. “To Professor Murphy!”

  George lifted his left hand instinctively—his hand knew what it was holding before his brain did. Before he could quite stop himself, George clinked the glass against William’s and raised it to his lips. He took a deep gulp and swallowed. It burned every inch of the way down.

  NOVEMBER

  Irene liked that Dr. Zarrani delivered the bad news herself. For the first time in months, it was just the two of them sitting together again, no nurses popping in and out, and no friends hovering in the hallway. Irene was lying in a hospital bed, tubes running out of her arms and legs and torso. Only the IV machine made noise, beeping like a metronome on the stand. Dr. Zarrani had walked in looking tough, but barely a moment into the discussion, she’d had to sit down in the pink reclining chair in the corner. Irene appreciated this. What could be kinder, really, under the falling shadow of devastation, than for someone to pull up a chair?

  The experimental treatment was having some impact, but only enough to stop the progress of the cancer. Upping the dosage might lead to some gains, but Irene was too weak to survive the side effects of such an increase, even with 24/7 care. Dr. Zarrani explained that this put them in a no-win situation. Either the cancer would kill her, or the treatment would.

  Irene knew she was right. Already, she needed help getting in and out of the gigantic hospital bed. Her arms were as long and thin as kitchen tongs. Her hair was like pillow stuffing. The sores in her mouth and throat stung even through the perpetual morphine haze. Her body’s natural defense for this was to generate biblical floods of mucus, which Irene had to spit into a beige plastic tub every two or three minutes. Nurses had to wake her every thirty minutes so she wouldn’t choke in her sleep.

  Meanwhile Irene could feel tumors everywhere now—bumps on her legs and shoulders, one behind her ear. The ones on her bones were weakening her skeleton such that a simple trip to the bathroom was alleged to be a grave risk for shattering a femur or a foot. There were others in places she couldn’t feel, but the CAT scans could see them: one in her kidney, one in her small intestine, and worst of all, one the size of a baseball in her left lung, which made it hard to take a deep breath. They had her on an oxygen tank most of the time. All of this, in just under a month.

  Dr. Zarrani went on to explain a few more details, but Irene wasn’t really listening. She was watching as the woman raised her hands to support her heavy head. She was watching Dr. Zarrani begin to cry. She’d never done this before. The quickening of breath. The flush of cheeks. The shaking of jaw, and the slow filling up of the corners of each eye until, with a bursting, the drops couldn’t hang there anymore. Each tear seemed to inspire ten more. Soon the doctor was weeping, full on.

  “Shush,” Irene said. “It’s okay. Really. It’s okay.”

  “You’re smiling,” Dr. Zarrani said after a minute. Mascara shot down like dark lightning from both her eyes.

  “I’m glad you’re crying,” Irene said. “I’m glad—I don’t know why I’m glad about that.”

  “Nothing wrong with crying,” Dr. Zarrani sniffed, wiping her cheeks with tissues from Irene’s bedside. The mascara came off in long, gorgeous smudges.

  Neither of them said anything for a few minutes, and then finally Irene said, “Is it—is it weird that I’m kind of relieved? Like, just to know. You know?”

  Dr. Zarrani shook her head. “You’ve been in a lot of pain for a long time. It’s natural to feel relief.”

  Irene looked up at the cracked ceiling. “Should’ve run away when I had the chance.”

  “We’d like to get you well enough to go home for a little while before—well, before.”

  After a minute Irene said, “Do me one favor?”

  “Anything.”

  “Tell Sara while I’m asleep.”

  Dr. Zarrani said she’d be glad to and to page the nurse when she gets here. Then she hugged Irene firmly, like an aunt, and excused herself.

  When she was gone, Irene leaned over to the side table and scooped up the mascara-stained tissues. She slipped them into a Baggie and hid them deep down inside her overnight bag.

  Irene wasn’t disappointed. It reminded her of when she’d signed up to run a half marathon and was limping and staggering through the tenth mile alone when it had begun to pour torrentially, and an organizer pulled her aside to say that the race had been called off. To not have to finish, in that moment, was more than Irene could have thanked him for.

  When Sara arrived an hour later, Irene paged the nurse and then pretended to fall asleep. At some point she must have actually fallen asleep, or slipped into the haze of the morphine drip, for she awoke with a start to the sound of Sara’s voice, demanding explanations. What had gone wrong? How could it have been avoided? What could they have done differently? Already conducting the postmortem. Irene knew that for herself, there were too many what-ifs to count. If she hadn’t ignored it for so long. If she hadn’t hidden the second tumor before the trip. If she had made more of an effort to keep her strength up. If, if, if, if . . .

  Of course Sara still refused to give up the fight. “We’ll see another doctor. We should have done that months ago. She’s going to beat this. I know you think it’s all bullshit, but we’re in the middle of a very promising alternative therapy.”

  Irene nearly snorted. No way in hell was she still drinking that wheatgrass-algae juice. The week before, William had brought her another bottle of Bollinger Blanc under his coat (paid for, this time), but she hadn’t been able to taste it at all. The same with the bowl of pasta George had brought, covered in Momma Murphy’s marinara sauce (shipped on dry ice, special). That had actually scalded every sore in her esophagus. It all made her wish she’d known it was hopeless back in June. Then she might have really enjoyed those last, disappointing months inste
ad of wasting them trying to make the inevitable evitable.

  Irene waited until Sara finished a series of tearful phone calls to George, Jacob, and William before she pretended to wake up. She’d hoped that, maybe by that point, Sara would be cried out. But of course Sara started all over again when she saw Irene’s eyes open. Nice try, Irene thought to herself, as she sat there, consoling her friend over the fact of her own death.

  George came later and, like Sara, urged Irene not to give up. And so began the process of getting Irene well enough to go home for a little while before beginning the work of dying in earnest. Though she had more trouble moving or breathing with each passing day, George encouraged her to walk laps around the eleventh floor at seven a.m. It took twenty minutes to do one lap: about fifty yards up the hall and another fifty back. They could usually get two in before he had to kiss her goodbye and report to work. Only as the residual chemistry of the treatments left her system did Irene feel a bit better but also a little shorter of breath. Sara came every morning at eight and sat by Irene’s bedside until eleven-thirty p.m. They watched TV, and mostly Irene tried to sleep or read William’s copy of The Iliad, which she was still hoping to finish.

  On that last, chilly Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, William brought her a pumpkin latte. He had gotten up at five and gone all the way down to East Fourth Street to get one from Irene’s old coffee shop there—because she had mentioned once how it was always the start of fall to her, and she liked to celebrate by taking the first cold day in November to put on her winter coat and buy a pumpkin latte and wander through the West Village looking for Christmas presents for everyone, always eventually getting hopelessly lost in one of those terrible diagonal intersections, where Sixth somehow crosses Bleecker and Downing and Minetta—or in the nexus between Seventh and Barrow and Commerce. It was her favorite part of the city, messy because it was original, made before the orderly grid above it had been imagined. Blocks of triangular madness in the otherwise rectangular city.

  “I got lost for about ten minutes on Perry,” William told her, putting the paper cup on a tray near her hand. “It’s all loose ends down there.”

  He kissed her clammy forehead and held her hand. She felt a wave of sleep about to come over her, the likes of which no pumpkin latte could fend off, if she’d even been able to swallow anything in the first place.

  “Where’s my birdcage?” she asked him suddenly.

  “Your . . . we put that in storage, remember?”

  Her eyes would barely stay open. She had to think very hard about the shape her lips should take to form the words. She tried to say something else, but it was no good. A moment later she couldn’t remember what she had wanted to say anyway.

  “The nurses are saying that if you’re up for it, they’ll let you leave for a few hours so you can come over for Thanksgiving. Sara’s doing a thing at my place.”

  For days Sara had been flipping through Cook’s Illustrated and Martha Stewart and The Joy of Cooking, describing mouthwatering dishes to Irene to try to motivate her: a crown roast of lamb chops with whipped potatoes and slivered green beans. An icebox zebra cake for dessert. Irene didn’t begrudge Sara this. She had been desperate to keep busy, now that Irene’s needs were being met by the nurses at Mount Sinai, and she and George had officially given up thinking about the wedding until things “got settled.” She’d given notice at the Journal, planning to look for a new job in Boston after the spring semester started and George became a genuine Harvard professor.

  That day—the day before Thanksgiving—Sara had shown up at eight in the morning. She had to leave at noon, she told Irene. “But don’t worry, George as always is coming for the whole afternoon. I need him out of the kitchen anyway.”

  “I don’t need babysitting,” Irene said. “He should help you carry bags at least.”

  “Oh, he’d only slow me down. And I’ll be back by nine and stay until eleven. Don’t worry.”

  Irene hadn’t been worried. In fact, she wished that Sara would not come back at nine or stay until eleven. She wished they’d all go on with their own lives and not spend their own precious hours sitting there waiting for her to die.

  It was while George was watching her that afternoon that Irene made up her mind to save them all from any more trouble. He’d been reading to her from the Iliad, getting pretty animated as he sipped contraband bourbon from a hospital Dixie cup. Irene promised not to tell Sara on the condition that he let her have a sip. It burned her throat like a forest fire, but it was a refreshing pinch against the sweet, steady stream of morphine that kept easing her further out.

  As George read the final battle between Achilles and Hector, he got sweaty and loud. When it was over and Hector was defeated, Irene began to cry. She hadn’t cried since well before Dr. Zarrani had told her the treatments were a bust. Somehow she found it far easier to weep over poor Hector, and the way Achilles was pulling his corpse around the camp with his chariot before leaving it face-down in the dust until he felt like dragging it around again. A better description of her own recent weeks Irene couldn’t imagine.

  George read about Apollo coming down and wrapping Hector in his golden shield so that his skin wouldn’t rip . . . and then swearing at his fellow gods (and here George got up on his chair and shook his hand up at the drop ceiling), “‘Hard-hearted you are, you gods, you live for cruelty! Did Hector never burn in your honor thighs of oxen and flawless, full-grown goats? Now you cannot bring yourselves to save him—even his corpse—’” and then George dropped the book when Nurse Darren came in and told him to get down or go the hell home. He resumed, more quietly, a moment later.

  “‘But murderous Achilles—you gods, you choose to help Achilles. That man without a shred of decency in his heart . . . his temper can never bend and change—like some lion going his own barbaric way.’” There Irene lost the words for what felt like just a moment in the river of morphine. “At last when young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more, the people massed around illustrious Hector’s pyre . . . they collected the white bones of Hector . . . shrouding them round and round in soft purple cloths. They quickly lowered the chest in a deep, hollow grave and over it piled a cope of huge stones closely set.” And then George was closing the book, and Irene knew sleepily that he had reached the end. With a great sigh he sipped from his cup and said, “‘And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses.’”

  Irene tried to say thank you, but it came out as just a slurred sob. George seemed to get the idea, though, and he gave her a warm kiss on her forehead. Then he set the book on her nightstand and went to use the restroom.

  She dozed off and woke up, it was dark outside, and Sara was there too, flipping through a magazine article about festive votive centerpieces made out of branches of yellow and orange bittersweet.

  “Am I going to get buried?” Irene asked.

  Sara looked up at her quickly, then looked out the window.

  “Let’s not worry about that right now,” George said to her.

  “When am I supposed to worry about it?”

  Tears in her eyes, Sara said, “After Thanksgiving. Let’s talk about it then.”

  Irene left it alone. She coughed up some more mucus and drifted off. She woke up again at eleven-thirty as Sara and George were leaving.

  “We’ll be back again at eight. And the nurses said that if your numbers are good in the morning, they’ll arrange for you to come back with us for dinner.”

  Irene nodded, even though she felt sure that her numbers would not be good in the morning. She couldn’t say why exactly—nothing hurt more than it had the day before, but it was slightly harder to take a breath, even with the oxygen mask. Slightly harder to lift herself up off the pillow to receive George’s hug goodbye. She felt her heart pumping just a quarter-beat slower.

  She closed her eyes for a minute, knowing that Jacob would be there soon. He had been telli
ng everyone that he had to work double shifts at the asylum, but Irene knew he was just angry with George for moving to Boston. He arrived at Irene’s bedside just minutes after the others left.

  “Do you just hang around on the street until you see them leave?” she asked.

  Jacob rolled his eyes and said nothing.

  “Just go to Boston with them then. Nothing’s keeping you here.”

  Jacob flinched. “Don’t be absurd.”

  It occurred to Irene that she’d never get to see the end of it.

  “He finished the book today,” she said. “The Hector part.”

  “‘So now I meet my doom.’” Jacob closed his eyes, speaking softly so as not to bring the nurses over. “‘Well let me die—but not without struggle, not without glory, no, in some great clash of arms that even men to come will hear of down the years!’”

  “Do they still bury people?” Irene asked.

  Jacob thought about it. “I think you have to have bought a plot somewhere. I don’t know if you can just do it last minute. There must not be a lot of space left in the city. It’d be all the way out in Queens somewhere. Cemeteries are always in terrible neighborhoods.”

  “So I’ll be cremated?” she sighed.

  Jacob spoke softly. “That’s how I’d want to do it. Cleansed by fire and all that. Plus I hear it’s very eco-friendly.”

  “And then what?” she asked. “Sara keeps me on her mantel in an urn? In Boston?”

  Jacob lightly pounded the arm of the chair. “Not on my watch! I’ll make sure you’re scattered.”

  Irene purred. “I never did get to France.”

  So many things she never got to do or see. It seemed impossible, even now that she knew.

  Jacob patted her hand. “Then to France you shall go.”