[sic]

by Joshua Cody

  Rather than leave me, however, she plunged into the project of rescuing me. I had little idea why, at the time. The stress and the high-dose chemotherapy and radiation had shut down my libido, and my mood swings were unpredictable and scary to both of us. And we didn’t even really know each other. Later it occurred to me the project was necessary to her own recovery, not mine. This is not to say that she was selfish: on the contrary, it was Sophie who set up the group e-mails for updates to family and friends on my progress when I became seriously incapacitated; she dealt with transportation issues when I finally was admitted for the long stay, bringing books, clothes, until the moment she finally quit; and even when she did quit, she made sure that my mother was able to take over her duties. But she had to assume this identity, as she had to assume, consciously, and with enormous effort, her other roles: girlfriend, New Yorker, freelance designer, person walking down the street, person having breakfast, person sitting down, person engaged in conversation, person giving someone a hug. None of her actions was in the least inauthentic, but her degree of alienation from goals, actions, simple states of being—the acute, inescapable self-surveillance of the addict—resembles that rarefied ontological space of the depressive, the anxious, the ill, the poet. The two of us weren’t amateurs in suffering, we were very much, by now, professionals.

  •

  Chemotherapy and radiation are as different as night and day, pagans and Christians, Laurel and Hardy. With chemo, you feel the slow drip of poison overtaking your body; everything is slowness, gradations. You gradually feel awful, and then gradually better. Radiation, on the other hand, doesn’t work in degrees. You feel nothing. It takes about three seconds. You feel absolutely fine, until the moment when your hair falls out, your skin burns off, you’re too tired to move, you’re throwing up, and this is where the pain medication comes into play. At first they give you pills, but then they have to switch you to morphine. I was afraid to start the drip, for some reason; I guess I wanted to wait until the last possible minute, so that when the pain got really bad, it would have more effect. But that’s not how it works. “We’re gonna start the drip now,” one of the staff members ordered, “because in a month the pain will be unendurable and the drip won’t do anything anyway.” My mom recorded the conversation:

  “If you think you hurt now, you will be in agony then.” I think this to be an utterly unjust and cruel statement but I say nothing. The doctor ignores my presence. When he tells Joshua about the upcoming “agony,” Joshua is extremely calm and replies, “Oh, really?” Inside, I am trying to control my fury.

  My mom had flown in a couple of weeks into my stay. On the plane, she sat next to none other than Luke Duke himself, the venerable Wisconsinite actor Tom Wopat, star of the beloved 1979 television series The Dukes of Hazzard. Why was Luke Duke flying to New York? No, he wasn’t fleeing that double-dealing commissioner Boss Hogg and that forever-bungling sheriff of his, Rosco. Tom had been in Milwaukee doing a tour with a musical, and the next stop was somewhere in Africa, so he was heading home to New York for a week’s respite. My mom says they had a great conversation, and I believe it. He told her he was glad to get out of Milwaukee. The audiences at the show had sucked. One night, he said, there were like a dozen people out there. Why was my mom flying to New York? he asked, and she told him.

  Your son is a courageous guy, Luke Duke said. I know things will be okay. But I will keep him in my prayers.

  They went back to their reading, but when the plane landed he gave my mom a sweet “good-bye” and a handshake. At baggage they were on opposite ends of the carousel. His luggage tipped onto the belt first, so he grabbed his bags, and then, to my mother’s surprise, walked all the way around the carousel to her and said, “I will not forget you nor your son, Mrs. Cody.”

  The other day I asked my mom if she remembered walking into my hospital room for the first time, and she e-mailed me (and this must be a transcription from a journal or diary she was keeping at the time, not just a response to my query):

  He is thin, which I expected. His complexion is grey. Of course, he has no hair, no eyebrows. But, most of all, his eyes are sunken into his skull and he looks like a skeleton.

  I greet him by saying, simply, “Hi, Josh, darling.” I am determined not to cry. I sit down and we nervously talk. Although I am so proud of Joshua, I feel as though my chest is going to explode. His manner is calm, sweet, and loving. He seems to appreciate that I am here.

  I certainly did appreciate it. One aspect of multiday hospitalization that tends to be forgotten in the horror of it all is the sheer complexity of performing ordinary, daily management—mail, bills, clothes, rent, notebooks, pens, et cetera. Being sick is very much a full-time job. Take a look at the calendar my mom and I were keeping.

  And here’s a very touching page from one of my mom’s notebooks that gives some sense of the constant errand-running, the housekeeping the caretaker of the ill must sustain: running to the local pharmacy for a certain type of soap, a certain type of lotion; taking the subway all the way downtown to the apartment to grab shirts, pants, Wite-Out, and Hugh Kenner’s book on Ezra Pound, The Pound Era, wherein Mr. Kenner states that Mr. Pound is the most emblematic artist of the twentieth century.

  What’s more touching, to me, is a discussion I unfortunately do not recall sharing with my mother regarding the question of mariachi’s assimilation of the trumpet, because that’s when they started the morphine drip.

  It was also great that my mom was there when they started the morphine drip because Sophie, who had essentially been the unofficial chief of staff, was unfortunately forced to step down from her position for personal reasons.

  One afternoon, Sophie came into the hospital room, and I could immediately tell she had traded the role of Rescuer to that of I Can No Longer Help This Man For He Will Bring Me Down. She was shaken up, trembling. Of course, she was always shaken up and on the verge of trembling. But she was awfully pale. She had just come from my apartment.

  “I have something to tell you that’s very difficult for me to say.”

  She glared at me through the corner of an eye, gauging whether I was prepared for a momentous and disturbing revelation, a horrific item that concerned not only her but me.

  Note to reader: if you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself in a close relationship with someone who has a life-threatening disease, and for whom conventional treatment has failed, and who is facing a “salvage” treatment that itself is life-threatening, DO NOT DO THIS. Because your friend will know what I knew, not imagined, feared, nor thought: Sophie had just talked to a nurse; this nurse was surprised that Sophie hadn’t been informed I was going to die that afternoon.

  “I was cleaning your apartment, and I found it,” she said.

  Found what? I wondered. I couldn’t think of anything. A mildewed washcloth? Doubt it. Dirty laundry? Couldn’t be, everything was at the cleaner’s. Pornographic literature? Probably not—how would she know? It’s all in French.

  The glare was now bitterly accusative—I’d forced her to say it. “The cocaine.”

  Cocaine? I hadn’t had a line of cocaine since that one night way back in October or November or whenever it was, when I hit the Golden Ratio. And I’d only ever actually had any in my apartment once. I’d never bought any. I might have had some pot laying around—a drug-dealing friend of mine had given me some for the chemo, but I never took to it. I suppose it was possible that there was a dollar bill folded into triangular eighths with some cocaine in it somewhere, an accidental residue from one of the rare points in the past when I had in my possession a dollar bill folded into triangular eighths with some cocaine in it.

  No, she said, it was a whole bag. She’d found it on the bookshelf. She stared at it longingly for hours. She almost did a line. It would have sent her back straight to hell. All of her effort, all of her work against addiction, for naught, because of me. I almost killed her.

  Luckily—she had no idea where she found the strength
—she flushed it down the toilet. Again, I thought of Goodfellas: Lorraine Bracco in her bathrobe, with a firearm in her panties, flushing sixty thousand dollars’ worth of powder into the sewers of Long Island.

  “How much was it?” I asked Sophie. And I wanted to ask her—Did you have a firearm in your panties?

  She was crying. “I just wish you the best. But I cannot be around a cocaine addict. It’s too dangerous for me. I’m so sorry for you. I wish you the best, and I hope you have the strength to seek help. But I can’t be that person.”

  Still, I felt as if I had to offer her something; I felt so guilty, having come so close to horribly murdering her. “It could have been some of that stuff Mike gave me back in October, but I really don’t—”

  Sophie put up a thin pale elegant wrinkled dry hand. “Stop. Please. Don’t make this harder than it is.” She came over to the bed, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and walked out of the hospital room and out of my life.

  •

  A couple of years later I saw her again. She might have e-mailed me, or contacted me through Facebook, which I reluctantly joined at the insistence of an unfortunate (for me) dalliance. Or maybe we ran into each other on the street, or in a restaurant. That might have been it. It was nice to see her. She looked great. She had been struggling a little with her design career, but things were looking better. I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but we agreed to get together for coffee in a couple of weeks. Lo and behold, in a couple of weeks, she called me as I was walking downtown to Battery Park to see a film. This time it sounded as if her teeth were clenched.

  “Do you want to get a coffee?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Where are you?”

  Odd question. “Right now? I’m walking down to Battery Park. Why?”

  “Because I’m around the corner from your apartment. Do you want to come back to your apartment and make coffee?”

  No, I thought. I don’t. “I’m on my way to see a film. I’m halfway down to Battery Park.”

  “What street are you on, exactly? I’m driving. I’ll come meet you.”

  “Okay, I’m on West Broadway and Warren—”

  Our conversation was briefly interrupted by the sound of scraping metal. “Fuck! Sorry, hang on, I just hit some asshole. Listen, wait there, I’ll be right down.” She hung up. Her parents had something like thirteen Mercedes.

  Given the automobile accident, she made good time. We went into a Viennese-style café; I ordered an espresso. She ordered a doppio venti nonfat mocha soy vanilla hazelnut white cinnamon thing with extra white mocha and caramel, a scissors, a roll of Scotch tape, and a Scotch tape dispenser.

  “What?” said the barista.

  “One doppio venti nonfat mocha soy vanilla hazelnut white cinnamon with extra white mocha and caramel, a scissors, a roll of Scotch tape, and a Scotch tape dispenser.”

  “You want a scissors, and Scotch tape?”

  So this meeting was sort of a nice bookend to our hospital check-in, when she berated the woman on the cell phone. But just like the woman on the cell phone, the guy was compliant; maybe people treated Sophie with such sympathy because her vulnerability was so apparent, as were her brave attempts at masking it. He gave her the scissors and the tape, and she sat right down at the biggest table in the place, pulled out her massive leather portfolio, and got right to work, matting huge printouts of design prototypes. I tried making conversation, but I felt bad, interrupting her concentration. I did learn that she was going through a dry spell sales-wise, and had moved temporarily back into her parents’ McMansion, the thought of which, she said, turned out to be more depressing than the actual experience, which was actually kind of fun, hanging out with them, not living alone, not constantly worrying about rent.

  That’s about all I learned. I sat there in silence for a time, watching her slowly cut ecru cardboard along scored lines, unwinding a strip of tape from the reel, applying it with a single bony finger.

  I watched her single finger, tracing a line.

  And all of a sudden, it occurred to me.

  After I learned that the chemotherapy didn’t work and that therefore things looked a little dimmer, but before I started up the next treatment, I had made a little, very modest feature film with some friends, because one of the things I’d always wanted to do in life—ever after having seen Raiders of the Lost Ark after having read an early draft of the screenplay a family friend somehow had been able to secure or steal from Lawrence Kasdan or somebody close to him (I know I said before I wasn’t interested in the arts as a child but that actually wasn’t true), I had memorized the screenplay and had essentially directed the film in my head, so every directorial decision, every cut or added scene, was a revelation—was to make a movie (and I would recommend it to everyone, by the way). My movie contained a scene in which a character, at a party, does lines of cocaine. We went through various mixtures of vitamin B12, powdered milk, corn starch, powdered goat milk, soy baby formula, and baking soda before coming up with a simulacrum authentic even at macro-lens close-ups. Packed into little plastic bags, it was very convincing—even for an ex-addict. Afterward, I threw the props into a bag and brought it home and forgot about it.

  Never had the heart to tell her.

  * * *

  * Similarly, I had long heard the line “Don’t you know the crime rate’s going up up up up up?” in “Shattered,” Some Girls’ final song, as “Don’t you know the prime rate’s going up up up up up?” I wish it had been “prime rate.” It could have been, considering the year was 1978, the very peak of the federal funds rate, and considering that Mr. Jagger attended the London School of Economics. But Mr. Jagger is referring not to inflation, but to the paranoia and vigilantism that was so emblematic of New York of the seventies; thus he’s referring back to one of the album’s central thematic concerns. Incidentally, I’ve always found it curious that the two best songs written by white people about New York—“Shattered” and Talking Heads’ “The Big Country,” wherein the singer, flying cross-country, peers down at “the shapes I remember from maps; the shoreline; the white-caps; a baseball diamond” and muses “I couldn’t live there if you paid me to”—not only together form the essential love/hate dialectic the city generates in each and every one of its residents, but were the final songs on albums released within five weeks of each other. (Again, I’m considering songs written by white people about New York; one could argue that songs like the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” Tom Waits’s “Downtown Train,” Springsteen’s “Incident on 57th Street,” Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” or Blondie’s “In the Flesh” are songs about love, loss, and desire that are set in New York; that the Clash’s “Broadway,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” Elton John’s “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” even “Walk on the Wild Side” and the great ones by Dylan [“Hard Times in New York Town,” among so many others] are songs more about the effect New York has on a particular character or set of characters than about the city itself—the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” even speaks of the attempt to understand the “effect on man” of the New York Times—and I would not say that about “Shattered,” since the narrator is so abstracted. Then again, one could not say that New York’s presence in any of these examples is un-incidental. And when you start thinking about the sheer number of songs written about / set in the city—even just those written by white people, including Irving Berlin, the Magnetic Fields, Rufus Wainwright, obviously the Ramones, not to mention Sinatra, the Sex Pistols, Stephen Sondheim, Suzanne Vega—your head starts spinning. Didn’t somebody say that no city appears in more songs?)