by Joshua Cody
We get off the elevator and are led to the radiology department. On the walk there, I ask Joe—who has now also seen Dr. [Nothereal] crying—to stay with her and comfort her, as Joshua will not let go of my hand. While Joshua is in radiology, I wait in the hallway. Finally, I see Joe come around the corner. Dr. [Nothereal] is not with him. I ask him if she’s okay. He says that he tried to settle her down as well as he could, that it is a certainty that she has feelings for Joshua that are not just medical concerns, and that she says she doesn’t know how I can stay so strong when she, as a person in the medical profession who has become attracted to a patient (which is a forbidden “code” in the medical profession), cannot. She tells Joe that she cannot any longer stand to see Joshua in pain. Joe says he comforted her, tells her that we all appreciate her medical expertise as well as her compassion. He said she composed herself and said she was going back to her apartment, about a block away from the hospital. Joe had offered to walk her there, but she said it is not necessary. Then Joe and I wait until Joshua is wheeled out of the x-ray room. The attendant, Joe, and I then get Joshua back to his room, all the while Joshua is holding my hand. Joe and I get him back into bed.
Joe is due to leave Monday morning and stops by early that morning before he leaves for the airport. I am so sorry to see him leave. He has been so helpful to both Joshua and me. I wish he could stay.
Early Sunday morning, Dr. [Nothereal] visits Joshua again. He has had another violent night. She checks his medical chart and says to me, “I ordered no Ativan; I ordered Halydol. The nurses did not follow my orders.” She shows me the medical chart and her orders. No Halydol was administered throughout the night and she shows me that she ordered haldol IV .5mg every 8 hours, by the nurse, not on a PRN (as needed) basis. She also notices that she had ordered no more swish-and-spit procedures of the mixture of water and lydocain. She had ordered that the nurse should take a sponge stick, dip it directly into the pure lydocain and gently swab Joshua’s mouth and tongue that way. This was not indicated as being done in the record either. She is furious. She exits the room in a fury.
Then one morning I got up at my normal hour, eight, precisely an hour after rising at my previous normal hour, seven (the nurses have to wake you every hour, which becomes a source of vague irritation after a few weeks). I was looking forward to my morning helping of—well, nothing, actually, because one of the prime vexations of the transplant is a weird thing called mucositis, which is when the lining of the mouth and throat and esophagus is annihilated, so you can’t eat or drink or even swallow; the entire mouth and throat becomes a plastic white shell that cracks and bleeds even when you’re not vomiting chartreuse bile like Linda Blair or, unlike Linda Blair, regurgitating horrendous mucus crystals, bizarre coralsharp glistening black structures that scrape along the unprotected digestive tract, splitting it, before coming out of your mouth and falling to the floor and shattering there. But what I’m describing here is pain, and it is not pain that I felt when I started, that morning, to die.
Of all the things I’ve set out to describe, this one presents the largest challenge, because the incentive for action—for escape—was not pain. It would be easier to say that it was; in many cases I’m sure it is; but it was not in my case. Not pain even in Nothereal’s very broad definition of the word. I’ve gone through dozens, maybe hundreds of words à la recherche du bon mot, and the best I’ve been able to do, surprisingly, is the oddly neutral “discomfort.” But it’s the most accurate, I think. What does it mean, normally, to be in discomfort? Let’s hypothesize a scenario: you’re at a bar, say, when the mediocre techno’s a little too loud. Techno’s bad enough, and this isn’t even good by those standards. The stools are too high, so there’s nowhere to anchor your legs, and you feel, faintly, the onset of a muscle cramp. The place is overcrowded; just behind you and to your right, a bunch of people from the DA’s office downtown are busy transferring aggression after the week’s frustration; their voices purposefully intrude. One woman in particular directs an earsplitting, rueful laugh at your eardrum, all the while taking care to pretend that, as far as she’s concerned, you don’t exist. The guy with her keeps ordering nauseating cocktails like diet vodka Cokes or Dewar’s in 7UP, and the bartender sets ’em up on the sticky bar right in front of you, and a blue-sleeved arm continually reaches out an inch from your face to grab them, and each time you wonder if they’ll spill on your slacks. You know that in a few minutes you’ll have to urinate, but God knows where the bathroom is in this place, and how long the line is. It’s slightly too warm inside, too humid; the windows are foggy; there’s the slight odor of—well, you know, cheap perfume and sweat and beer and maybe something rotting somewhere. Maybe you’re with a couple of friends you don’t know too well, and one of them’s already been drinking too much, and the other, for some reason, may not like you. But for some reason you’re socially obligated to talk with them, although the one guy’s talking too quietly for you to possibly make out what he’s saying, and the drunk guy’s shouting too loud and he’s not looking for a response anyway, and you’ve got another chemo session tomorrow—you know, any bar in New York at six in the evening. And you just want to get out of there. That was the feeling, magnified. You just want to get out of there. But you can walk out of a crowded bar; I couldn’t walk out of the hospital. That’s the best way I can put it. There are two kinds of people: those who fear death, and those who fear not death but—as Orson Welles noted, not to Merv Griffin two hours before his own death but as a younger man—age: a fear they mistake for thanatophobia. It’s not nonbeing itself that terrifies them, but wrinkles, the loss of beauty, varicose veins, difficulty walking, general wear-and-tear, forgetfulness, broken hips, the loss of control of one’s body, the impossibility of walking, the assisted-living scenario, dementia. But not non-being itself. I wonder how the actual approach of the moment of death strikes such people: it might be a surprise. Of course the moment of death isn’t a moment at all, but the end of moments, and according to Zeno’s paradox of locomotion, in order to get there you must get halfway there, but in order to get halfway there you must get halfway to halfway there, in other words quarterway there, but even in order to get quarterway there you’ve got to get halfway to quarterway there, which is eighth-way there, and so on. As the morning sun streamed in, my halfway there was a sudden deep ache in my lower back, and my quarterway there was a sudden spike in fever (the worst I’ve ever experienced and the worst feeling I’ve ever felt, and it occurred to me why the Christian imagines Hell as hot), and my eighthway there was the ache in my back swirling around to radiate through the torso and then to the arms and the legs and then to the wrists and ankles, then to the fingers and toes and, discovering a barrier to expansion, curling back to the wrists and ankles and hammering spikes into them. Halfway to eighthway I stopped counting because I saw hospital staff rush into the room, and a plethora of tubes shoved into the plethora of UBS-like connectors attached to the catheters in my chest and arms, saw two of Picasso’s weeping women, the mother and the lover, Beata Maria Virgo Perdolens and Dora Maar. I was aware that there was much to say to my mother and to Nothereal. But there was so much other work to be done, and I had such a short amount of time. There was above all else the body, and the need to escape from it; and that need eclipsed all else. Biologists call this escape “death.” I realized I had to get out of there, and I told everybody. That if they didn’t do something pretty soon, no very soon, no, now, I was leaving. For a person like me who fears death rather than aging, oddly, the experience wasn’t, at least in this case, frightening.
(Although death was frightening for my father, who was my kind of guy, freaked out by the non-notion of nonbeing. The first time I saw him cry I was around ten; I was sitting on the burnt-orange carpeting of the second living room in the addition we’d built to our house—I can remember when it was still lawn—reading, believe it or not, an art book [this is becoming a recurring motif]. The picture windows looked out onto the back lawn
, which was desaturated; it was autumn, afternoon, chilly. He was standing in the middle of the backyard, looking up at the leafless trees; there were crows huddling in the branches, but they weren’t calling, they were just sitting there. That was the moment, he said, he knew his mother was dying. He turned around and was crying. His mother was afraid of death, even to the point of asking him if he’d be willing to accompany her. He wasn’t willing. She felt betrayed. He felt guilty, betraying her, and also angry at her request. She died. He watched her die. He described the grimace on her face that turned into a smile, and he said from that moment on he had no fear of death. A couple of years later he collapsed in the kitchen; I was in an adjoining room. He’d snapped an incisor in half against a bone in a pork chop, and later he learned that this shock, mercifully perhaps, had triggered a minor aneurysm. Suddenly he wasn’t in the kitchen, but was on the banks of the river Styx, facing Charon, whom he described as having a face without features, and who did not speak, although his words were audible, physically; he could have sworn the air molecules were tickling his tympanic membrane. He said he was overwhelmed by an abiding calm, enveloped in warmth. Charon asked him if he wanted to get in the boat. He was a bit afraid to say no for fear of offending the poor boatkeeper, just as he had offended his mother; but he declined nonetheless. That’s fine, Charon said. Any time you want. Just know that we’re here for you, to take care of you. Now this is what he told me. Did he make all of this up, to reassure me? Or to reassure himself? Because when he really was about to die, he called me up from his place in Oceania, LA, and—opened-mouthed but wordless, unlike Charon, who spoke words with closed mouth—howled like a wild dog.)
But if my experience wasn’t frightening, it was—a banal word—sad. There were three things that were sad. There was the external world of, shall we say, appearances, like the appearances of the nurses at the door, the faces of de Kooning’s women. But the apparition of these faces seemed to rise slowly to the top of the field of vision: the crown of the heads were cropped, then the foreheads were gone.
Then there was my body, rapidly moving from uninhabitable to unimaginably uninhabitable; therefore taking leave of it was not only not marked by sadness but not entirely without, if not happiness, at least relief. It wasn’t exactly the rational wager of taking the chance that what was in store couldn’t be worse than this; but it was the recognition that, while not knowing what cards were in that hand that had yet to be turned over, it was now an impossible bet to refuse. In other words, more the feeling of an inevitable flow, a tremendous swell and rise.
Along with the sense of leaving the body was the sense of leaving the mind, feeling it recede. And then there was something new: I first saw it in a flash, but I kept going back to it: a smooth black form, floating in a dark red field, slowly rotating.
What was this thing? Where was it? Each time I saw it, it was easier to discern, as if it were lit by a gradually brightening light source on a dimmer. My mother’s face, then this thing, then Nothereal’s face, then this thing now slightly better lit than before: still the deepest black I’ve ever seen, but I could make out a texture on its surface I’d previously held to be as smooth as the surface of undisturbed water, as sheer as a shard of glass cleanly broke. I knew what it was. I recognized it, floating there innocently, suspended. It was the most familiar thing in the world. Funny it was black. When I was around twelve, I’d say, I was surprised to discover, among the thousands of books in my father’s library, a book of testimonials of near-death experiences: I was surprised because the book seemed so vulgar. A remarkable number of interviews reported the same thing on the threshold of death: a diffuse white light, an infusion of warmth, an inundating sense of comfort. (A small chapter was given to botched suicides: a remarkable number of subjects reported the overwhelming feeling of having committed a profound breach of metaphysical protocol. Again, how vulgar.) But mine was black, not white. It was there, then my mother was there, then it again, then Nothereal. Like how a movie is edited. Music is the least representational of the arts, and movies are the most. Or are they? Kubrick said once that if one were to compare witnessing a car crash (or some other violent catastrophe visited upon a person, assumedly) to witnessing its representation in any medium, the film version would be the closest to the original; but he also said film adds nothing to the arts that’s not already there—except editing, that’s unique to the movies and you can’t find an analogue to editing in any of the other media. And how we edit our lives. My near-death experience was edited, cutting between the thing slowly rotating and the hospital room; and when I was in grade school, in the classroom, I would easily become bored and restless, particularly in the afternoons, and I would pass the time by “editing” a scene together by employing the six extraocular muscles to switch between the cardinal positions of the gaze, at varying rhythms: between the teacher and the students, say, at different speeds. The teacher’s droning monologue wouldn’t change, but the difference between staring at her for a whole minute and switching like wildfire between the faces of my comatose classmates—I remember marveling at how this simple choice could change the meaning of what was going on, marveling at how good the actors were, thinking that if a film featured performances this strong and subtle it would be by far the greatest film ever made. The hospital was like this, but not through choice. The views of the black shape were longer in duration now, the views of my mother’s face, or Nothereal’s, shorter. At first I thought this trend—in music you’d call it a gradual process applied to rhythm—was illusory, a trick of the mind. But no, it was definitely happening. Each time I saw the black shape, it lingered longer than the last, it was closer, and the light source clearly divulged the texture of its surface, not smooth, inscribed, scarred, with traces of being impacted by love, hope, sex, dreams, laughter, joy, loneliness, sex and sex and sex. It wasn’t my body and it wasn’t my mind, but it bore abrasions from contact with my body and my mind; it was beautiful; it was capable of producing beauty. I beheld it with awe and grief and gratitude. “You’re going to be fine,” someone said, distantly, in the hospital room. I was seeing less and less of the hospital room. I was losing my body and my mind, and I was approaching this thing—not the body nor the mind—and I wasn’t quite ready but there wasn’t time to get ready, so I realized I was ready.
I briefly studied ancient Greek, and there’s a word in Greek, , transliterated into English as “psyche,” which has been variously translated, often as “spirit,” but what’s important is that the word is derived from a verb meaning “to cool, to blow” like a breeze.
I might parenthetically add at this point that there was an unfortunate period in my life and in the life of a woman I loved and who loved me, and we were living together in Paris and were happy and unhappy at the same time, because we loved each other but could not trust each other for reasons too complex to describe here and perhaps elsewhere. We had enjoyed many conversations—in different cities, sometimes in planes, once, while driving across a black bridge, as the sun was sinking—but we had somewhere along the line acquired the unfortunate habit of accidentally, yes, accidentally catching glimpses of each other’s notebooks, the ancient Greek equivalent of accidentally, yes, accidentally running across an e-mail or a text message addressed to someone other than oneself. In essence we had designed a perverse epistolary correspondence that ran its course on a stratum parallel to that of verbal communication, and the tension between these strata was seismic in its sudden short shifts and rumblings. One morning when she was in the shower I glimpsed a phrase in her lovely, smooth as sandalwood penmanship:
—The wind of the senses
O what gorgeous minds we had. I was sleeping with someone she knew and she was sleeping with a friend of mine, and I realized with a start that she was quoting me, quoting a phrase she had accidentally glimpsed in one of my notebooks I had accidentally left open like a mouth that opens in order to cry out. She had quoted me out of rue and spite and above all envy. But in her haste and,
I’m certain, fear of being discovered, she’d gotten the quote wrong. What I had written (emphasis mine [I mean it’s mine now, it wasn’t there then]) was,
—The wind beneath the senses
Which isn’t better, just different—but for our purposes, more apt. For this is what I saw: the black form of the cooling , the breath of the wind beneath the senses.
Meanwhile, the hospital staff was trying to save my life. My mother’s record:
I am horrified when Dr. Q. says to Joshua, in a rather demanding/threatening/curt tone, “What day is it today?” (I didn’t even know what day it was!) Joshua replies, Wednesday. In fact, it’s early Thursday. Then Dr. Q. continues, in this matter-of-fact tone: “Who is the President of the United States?” Joshua just looks at him in a confused state. As do I. He says to the doctor, “I don’t think I can answer any more questions right now. Could we do this on another day?” He begins to cry.
I’m holding my tongue, but furious that Joshua is being subjected to some kind of interrogation. And all of these “white coats” surrounding him. It is very intimidating. And I look at Joshua and he looks just like my husband. It is a moment of some kind of special “out-of-body” experience, this father-son relationship, and I am shaken by it. I begin to cry. I am “seeing” my husband and know he suffered when he died. I am overwhelmed by emotion, confusion, by—I don’t know what. I started to cry. A young nurse sees me and tries to comfort me and I am angry and cannot be comforted. I tell her to leave me alone, which she does, reluctantly. My heart is breaking over so many things: Joshua’s pain, his being hit by this obscene disease, his incredible courage in being a good and cooperative patient, in his tolerating a situation which never should have happened to this beautiful and good young man, the medications which do not seem to be helping . . . so many things. All I know is that I am furious with God.