by J. B. Beatty
We are the only thing that gives it life, and yet we are all so terribly flawed.
Another time, this happens:
I’m reading. Carrie walks in (I only close the door when I want to block out the hallway light, which I only do at night).
“Hey,” I say.
She gives me a closed-lip smile, and walks to my dresser to examine my collection of books. I own 14 actual books. After 30 seconds of perusal, she grabs one and leaves without a word.
“Alright then.” I return to reading.
“This isn’t going to be a thing,” she told me after that thing that happened in the stairwell.
I try to overanalyze the statement in my typical Arvyesque way. I am the king of overanalysis. For instance, in high school before one of the big dances, I had decided that I was possibly in love with Tina Katchman, a mousy dark-haired girl in my math class who happened to smile at something I said that week. What possibly could that smile have meant? I endlessly explored every possible permutation of the emotion behind the smile, and bored my friends to the brink of death with my over-reasoned analysis. I spent so much time thinking about the smile that I never got around to asking her to the dance. She ended up going with a guy named Nik Cajoumian, a guy who apparently smiled back at her.
With me, things just never seemed simple or clear until they were over. And I never learned anything from the process.
Carrie said, “This isn’t going to be a thing,” and I couldn’t parse anything from that except that she didn’t want to have an ongoing relationship. Was there another signal there I was missing? Perhaps something in that secret language between men and women that I never could learn? Surely she wanted more—we had sex! That’s important, right?
Say she did want something more. What, then, did I want? In my previous lifetime, the answer would simply be more. Now, I had no idea. Because Maggie.
20→TO DECIDE, FOREVER, BETWIXT TWO THINGS
“L
eave me alone.”
“You don’t drink alone. That’s a rule.”
Justin gives me the finger. “It’s not a rule.”
“It should be a rule.”
We have more alcohol than we reasonably should have in the bunker. I always grabbed beer when I saw it on scavenging missions on the rationale that “Maggie likes beer.” But Maggie’s not doing any drinking these days, per Justin’s orders.
And RIP, when he was with us, he liked his bourbon. And we’ve found a few crates of the stuff that he had stashed away.
Justin’s drinking the bourbon. From the bottle. He stares at nothing.
“Let me join you,” I say. He grunts. I grab a beer from the fridge and sit down against the wall.
“What is it? What’s wrong? What did you find?”
“Why are you always asking me questions?” he says, exhaustion coloring his voice.
“Probably because you know stuff that I want to know.”
“You remind me of this girl from nursing school…”
“Thanks.”
“No, this girl, I don’t know what her deal was. It didn’t matter what we were doing: listening to a lecture, dissecting a stiff, walking to get coffee, she was always asking me questions.”
“Probably had a crush on you.”
“Nah, she knew I was gay… Am gay… Whatever. She knew. She’d just ask me about anything at all under the sun. Was her make-up right? How do you take out a spleen? What’s my mother’s name? What’s the answer to number 34? Should she try a new hairstyle? Is her boyfriend being an asshole? What should she buy her mom for Christmas? Are her stitches neat? Who am I voting for? What do I think the best neighborhood in Detroit is? Should she branch out and try sushi? Are Muslims going to heaven? It just never fucking stopped.”
“I remind you of that.” I drink from my beer. “For asking you what’s going on with Maggie.”
“Yeah, you do. Right now, you do.”
“Do you always make such brilliant, logical connections?”
“I do when I want to. My connections are none of your business.” He starts to give me the finger, raising his hand into position, and then he drops it as if I’m not worth the effort.
“Don’t you think…”
“Stop asking me questions, cracker!”
“ ‘Cracker’? You’ve never gone there before.”
“I’ve never been this drunk before.”
“Are these authentic feelings coming to the surface?”
“I told you to quit asking me fucking questions.”
“That’s not a question. Answer it.”
“What, the cracker thing?”
“Yeah, the cracker thing.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think any part of me is authentic when I drink. I just say shit.”
“Hurtful shit.”
“Are you hurt, snowflake?”
“No. Not by the cracker thing. It’s not a word that does any damage. Not to me anyway. I’ve only been called ‘cracker’ by people who are joking around.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“But you weren’t authentic.”
“No one’s authentic anymore. Who needs to be authentic? Why bother with authenticity when in the world of the Apocalypse, we can reinvent ourselves endlessly.” He tips the bottle up. “Crackers. That’s the problem. The word doesn’t hurt you. There’s no word that hurts your people like ‘nigger’ hurts mine.”
“Is this my opening for an apology?”
“That’s your white privilege there. Nothing hurts you.”
“Plenty hurts me.”
“I don’t mean you. I’m generalizing about your people. You understand?”
“Yeah, I understand. But damn.”
“You better. This gets harder before it gets easier. Going to get a lot harder.”
“Are you talking about Maggie?”
“Yeah, I’m talking about Maggie.”
“What did you find?”
“You know, I liked you better when you didn’t ask questions.”
“That wasn’t a question. What did you see?”
“Blasts.”
“Blasts? What?”
“Blasts. It’s the oncology lingo. Basically, we’re talking about little cancer cells. Little fucking cancer eggs.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means she gonna die.”
I can’t see and my head throbs. And it’s not from the beer.
“When?”
“I don’t know. I do not have a crystal ball. She may be getting better, even. Point being I am not an oncologist. I am a veteran. I am a nurse. I give little old people their meds. I change the dressing on their sores. I don’t know a goddamn thing about leukemia.”
“But she’s going to die or she’s getting better?”
“I don’t fucking know. After a week of chemo, there’s always going to be some blasts left. It’s a question of how many. There’s a good low number of blasts in some people, and a lot of them get better. There’s a lot of the damn blasts in some other people, and most of them die pretty quick. She’s got an in-between number of blasts. She’s got a gray area number of blasts. She’s got I-don’t-know-what-to-do-next number of blasts. So, it’s up to me. Either I give her another week of chemo to try to lower that number—that could cure her or that could kill her—or I put her on the next stage for the happy people with the low number of blasts—they call it ‘consolidation.’ And that could cure her. Or it could so underwhelm the remaining number of blasts that they kill her anyway.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, we are in that fun part of the game known as ‘physician’s discretion.’ And I ain’t no fucking physician. And I wish to hell I had never taken this job.”
I sip from my beer and try to absorb this. He tilts his bottle again. I stare at my shoes and say, “There weren’t a lot of other applicants.”
He laughs. Or snorts. More of a snort.
“If this were a movie,” he says, “we wouldn’t have to b
e dealing with all this fucking leukemia. We wouldn’t have to deal with these decisions. It would just be clean, black-and-white, nonstop action all the way. Just zombies. We’d be killing zombies all the time and we’d look like heroes. We’d be true-life action figures.”
“In a movie.”
“Whatever. But our plot line is a mess. We’re doing chemo in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Not even normal chemo, but do-it-yourself chemo. Chemo for beginners. This is like home schooling for medical school. Home schooling. It’s like we’re getting worksheets off the Internet and using them to decide how people are going to live and die.”
“Just wasting zombies would be a lot simpler.”
“That’s what I signed up for. That’s what I thought we were going to be doing for the rest of our lives. Pew pew pew! But zombies aren’t the biggest enemy. These GAC fucks are. And they’re not even the biggest enemy. The biggest enemy is inside our own bodies. Fucking blasts. Fucking HIV. The enemy within…”
He adds, “Except for you, suicide boy. You’ve got no enemy inside you.”
“Most mental health therapists would challenge your assessment of the suicidal frame of mind,” I respond.
“They’re not here. They’re gone. Most mental health therapists are dead.”
“Them and their patients…”
“And it’s just us,” he says. “We’ve got to clean it all up. We’re the ones who are holding the bag. Only it’s the whole world’s bag.”
Carrie pokes her head in the kitchen, looks at us. Crosses the room and grabs a beer from the fridge. Leaves.
I point at the space where she was and turn to Justin to say something. He just shakes his head at me slowly. “Nah,” he says. “Not now.”
I shrug and shift back to our conversation already in progress. “So this decision…”
“Fucking decision.”
“So this fucking decision. When do you make it?”
“Is that a question?”
“Not at all. Just answer.”
“In the morning, I’m going to throw up. Repeatedly. I’m going to take a nasty cold shower. I’m going to eat a bunch of Tylenol. And when I feel human again, I’m going to make that fucking decision. I’m going to lick my finger, stick it in the air to size up the way the wind is blowing, and I’m going to make that decision.”
21→AN AWFUL SCREAM AND I WAS UP
The screaming jolts me from my sleep. I fall out of bed, climb to my feet, and start running to Maggie’s room. But I realize before I get there that the screaming is coming from the other direction.
Justin is up and with me when we open Carrie’s door.
The lights are on.
She is on her bed, looking at the ceiling, screaming her head off.
I grab her, say, “What? What is it?! We’re here! It’s okay!”
She finally stops screaming and works to catch her breath.
“We forgot paint,” she says in a panic. “We forgot to get any freaking paint!”
I look at Justin. He is both alarmed and curious.
“Paint?” I say.
“All the rooms are the SAME DAMN COLOR!!!”
I turn to Justin and say, “You got this?”
He is looking out the corner of his eyes at the walls with his mouth half-open.
I go back to bed.
22→THE BEST AUTHORITIES USES THEIR OWN BLOOD
For much of the winter I’ve been tired. I nap a lot. Part of that is depression. I would kill to see the sun.
Part of that is the blood-letting. Maggie needs regular blood transfusions. I am the only suitable donor. I used to hate the thought of needles going into me. Now, it’s a regular feature of my life.
It’s so regular that Justin installed a spigot on my arm, so he doesn’t need to keep poking holes and making needle tracks. Whenever Maggie needs a refill, he just sits me down, ties the thingie around my arm, and screws his syringe to my arm. I watch it as the blood spurts out. It always surprises me how quickly it fills. And the color—that solid, thick dark red. It’s the very stuff of life, and as it leaves me, over the weeks I’ve grown weaker and more tired.
Justin says we can pull this off, that we’re not overdoing it, but he has warned me of these side-effects.
As I fall asleep, I imagine my strength going into Maggie, rescuing her from the poison within.
I hear her voice and I jolt awake. “What?” I say.
In a dreamy drugged-up voice she murmurs, “This is like sex, isn’t it? You’re all over inside me. I can… feel your blood inside me.”
“Um,” I say. Then I say “Um” again because sometimes I am exquisitely fluent when discussing emotional matters.
“This is creepy and cool at the same time,” she says. “I’ve never been this fuckin’ intimate with a guy before.”
I sit up and look at her. Her face is turned toward me, her lips faintly open in a trace of a smile. Her eyes are closed, but she squints a bit with each smile. It’s as if she completely trusts that I am awake and that my eyes would be on hers if only her eyelids would open.
“Yeah,” I say. “This is kind of different.” More of that fluency with emotional language there.
“Maybe you’re not feeling it like I am. I guess your blood is just draining out of you. Meanwhile it’s all flowing into me. It’s like I’m a vampire. And when a vampire and a victim hook up, the vampire always gets more out of the deal.”
“I wouldn’t describe myself as a victim.”
She yawns and then says, “You’re one of those victims who falls in love with their predator.”
“What’s that, the Stockholm Syndrome?”
“I don’t know about any syndrome. I just know that in some way, part of you is enjoying this way too much.”
This is too much for me to process. Are we talking unrequited love? Are we talking impending death? Are we just joking around in our blood-weakened state? I reach out and grasp her hand. Her fingers close on mine.
“I don’t know if ‘enjoying’ is the word I’d use.”
“You love every minute of this and you’re never going to get over it,” she says.
That’s all; she falls asleep again. I watch her and wonder.
23→HOW CLOSE THEY CAN COME WITHOUT TOUCHING
1.
The first time, before I got all tired from the blood-letting, I carefully step into Carrie’s room one night. She is in bed, lights off. I can’t tell if her eyes are open, but I feel she is probably awake. I sit on the edge of her bed and gently touch her shoulder.
She starts as if shocked and rears her head back from me.
“I told you it wasn’t a thing,” she says. “Get the fuck out of here.”
I return to my room, wondering if I feel worse for trying or worse for being rejected.
2. The second time is perhaps a week later. My lights are out. I am too tired to read for as long as I usually do. I am just slipping into slumber, that amazing feeling where you’re still awake enough to realize it’s happening and you just let go and feel yourself falling, softly falling.
I am aware that Carrie is there, that she is on the bed with me. I feel her hand touch me, and gently slide down. I feel a tingle of electricity and I try to hold on to it, but instead I feel myself slipping. So tired. I am falling, softly falling.
I dream of Maggie that night. In the dream she is healthy and she is explaining to me how to hunt ducks.
The next day I am invisible to Carrie. Which is fine because I try to avoid her anyway.
24→GOODNESS GRACIOUS ALIVE
Justin makes the decision to move Maggie to the consolidation stage. That means she’s in remission. Or at least he hopes she’s in remission. Now she’s on a wonder drug called cytarabine, and she’ll be using it, off and on, into the spring. Already, she’s feeling better. In fact, she’s been feeling better every day since the chemotherapy stopped.
She never did warm up to the bald look, so she spent several weeks wearing a knit cap until sh
e felt she had a look she could pull off. Her hair has started growing again.
We’re still doing the transfusions. “It’s our only hope,” Justin says when we are alone.
“By that you mean…”
“I mean what she needs is a stem cell transplant. At a hospital, what they would do sometimes is get the stem cells from the blood of a donor. There’s not a lot there, but there’s enough. And they got this machine that filters out the stems cells and then the return the blood back to the donor.”
“I’m guessing that you’re describing a machine that we don’t have.”
“You got it. They probably had one up in Traverse City, but I didn’t know enough then to ask you to look for it.”
“Could we…”
“Absolutely not. Trying to get up there in the winter? You probably wouldn’t make it up there alive. And if you did, you would lead the GAC back to us and we’d all die.”
“What about in the spring?”
Justin busies himself with my blood-letting, tying a rubber strap on my arm. After a few minutes, he finally says, “Possibly. I just don’t know if we have that long.”
“So, what’s the objective now with these transfusions?”
“Look, I’m not an oncologist. I’m not a hematologist. I’m just a geriatric nurse who’s making a wild guess. There are trace amounts of stem cells in your blood. I have no way to pull them out and isolate them, so we’re just taking all of your blood and giving it to her. Maybe in the process we can move enough stem cells to do the trick.”
“Best case scenario?”
“Best case scenario is she lives a full and healthy life. You, we bury when the soil thaws.”
I shiver a little. “I see. Have we discussed your bedside manner?”
“That’s a class they teach in medical school. I didn’t go to medical school.”
Later, I am reading in Maggie’s room and I feel her eyes upon me. “Hey.”