Dead Stars

by Bruce Wagner

  The hospital was convinced that any public revelation of Telma’s case would do more than cause the sort of damage to an institution and its caregivers that takes at least a generation to heal; it would result in the catastrophic loss of the Brainard endowment. Attorneys for the plaintiff informed that because of the gift’s magnitude, the hospital board had approved putting a $35 million settlement on the table. The money could come monthly, quarterly or annually, in a formula to be determined by defendants’ design. (Compounding interest assured that the amount paid out over the girl’s lifetime would more than double the offer.) There were two caveats. St. Ambrose wanted the entire case sealed forever. Secondly, Gwen must agree to sign a document stipulating the settlement would be diminished by two-thirds should its details ever go public by virtue of memoir, interview, blog, et alia, traceable to the injured parties.

  The men finished, leaving Gwen and her lawyer alone in the conference room.

  “It’s blackmail, isn’t it?”

  “A form thereof.”

  “They don’t even want me telling her! It’s so smarmy. They’re dictating the choices I have in sharing with Telma what happened—what they did that changed her life.”

  “What you say is true. Though I’m not sure I’d have quite put it that way.”

  “And what if I say no? What if I say go fuck yourselves, we’re having a press conference. News at 11.”

  “You’d still get a settlement. You’d still be rich—Telma would be rich. I can’t visualize a scenario where you’ll walk away with less than $25 million. There are always unknowns. Insurance companies can be tough. They’ll put forth the argument that she’s got an excellent quality of life.”

  “Peter, she’s a fighter. She wouldn’t want me to take the money and run.”

  “That may very well be. But I don’t think you can effectively solicit her opinion at this time.”

  “And they get a billion dollars. To fuck up more kids.”

  “You could look at it that way. Or you could look at it as maybe saving a thousand kids—5,000 kids—for every one they get wrong.” He sucked on his electric cigarette. “If we go that route, you need to be prepared to go to trial. It’s unlikely that would happen, Gwen, but you’d have to be prepared.”

  “How much did the boy who Michael Jackson molested get? The dentist’s kid.”

  “Twenty million. In 1993 dollars.”

  “So: 20 years ago, a boy—how old was he?”

  “13.”

  “Ha! A boy Telma’s age gets $20 million for an alleged molestation. And my baby has a radical mastectomy for no medical reason. If you take inflation into account, it’s probably the same amount.”

  “That’s a pretty fair representation.”

  Long pause. The lawyer speaks up again.

  “Why don’t you go home, Gwen. Let me see how serious they are. I’ll ask for a 5% penalty if word gets out. Let’s see what they counter with.”

  “I don’t want this going on and on, Peter. I’ve lost 20 pounds, and I’m losing hunks of hair.”

  “Let me talk to them.”

  . . .

  Phoebe what did I do what did I do what did I do I made a terrible mistake! I made another mistake! He just called and said “its up to you but if it were me I/d take it,” they always say its up to you but if it was them theyd take it, they just say it so you dont think theyre coercing, the man gets millions, Peter gets millions his percentage but now I/m blaming him! O Phoebe I/m so selfish I told him I just couldn’t take it anymore I just said do it you know how I/ve been since we found out but what difference does it make how I/ve been what difference does it make I cant take it anymore? of course I can of course I can take anything they throw if I was any kind of mother can you imagine my baby suffering, how she suffered, the surgeries the pain the crying herself to sleep compared with my little problems my big problem! Ha, my little bullshit depressions or whatever Phoebe its so sick my saying to him even to you that I cant take it anymore just do it I cant take it anymore & thinking knowing what shes been through! Phoebe all I have in life is my daughter my relationship with/to my daughter, when she got diagnosed I said I swore before that horrible god because He was the only one I knew I cursed Him and said nothing will ever come between my daughter and me nothing & now they’ve bought me off thats what theyve done they bought & sold my relationship with my daughter my sacred relationship o my god my god my god they didn’t buy it off I did I bought & sold my daughters trust I cant put that on them I can’t blame them or anyone for anything anymore O Phoebe what do I do what do I do what do I say how can I look at her how do I even ever explain all the money, the mastectomoney Phoebe Phoebe what if something happens to me, what if I die of cancer wouldnt that just be so perfect? We need to make sure that youre the guardian should something happen to me you not my mother, & when Im dead and gone they say O & by the way sweetheart you have like 50 million dollars, we just dont know where it came from O Phoebe I want to die its too late I think its too late I tried to call & Peter said it was too late he said I made the right decision of course he would say that because he just got $10 million fucking or whatever dollars, he said to calm down, he used that phrase buyers remorse Phoebe why would he use such a detestable phrase? Im the golden calf so of course he said Id done a noble thing ugh he used that word, noble, he said that I provided for her I assured my daughters future her education her security o these guys are so slick you know all I did Phoebe all I did was assure HIS daughters future, thats what I assured, HIS daughters education, he said I assured her grandchildrens future too Telmas grandchildren thank god she didnt get chemo or there wouldnt BE any grandchildren Phoebe Phoebe yes yes please come over I think this is one of those things people kill themselves over no yes no I promise no I don’t feel like harming myself not yet Im just saying, I took all the mirrors down I just cant look at myself Telmas with her grandma Phoebe how do I explain to Telma why Mommy took down the mirrors because she couldnt look at herself anymore because instead of telling you the truth Mama took the money Mama ran with the money & now your whole life is going to be built on a lie a terrible dark cheap soap opera secret, I know what happens when families keep secrets Phoebe I know you know I know it isn’t good no good can come of it O Telma Telma I am so sorry I was so selfish and so weak okay OK yes Phoebe yes come but dont you think I should just tell her whatever the consequences? Theres a legal penalty, they engineered it that way fucking brilliant like they already knew me, like they had insider information like they already knew Id go for the money! Shes a whore she/ll go for the money, just watch and see . . . Phoebe I don’t care anymore we dont need that money, not all of it, its an obscene amount, I dont really care I/ll show them I dont care maybe thats the way I can fix it okay now I feel a little better but still come over no I wont make any calls I promise, & if I dont want to do it all I probably need to do is call the attorney, I dont care what Peter said, I/ll get another lawyer, you cant tell me, you cant tell me they can say no because no money has exchanged hands and even if it had I could just give it back, thats what tells me somethings wrong, thats what tells me I fucked up that Im thinking about how to no I wont make that call not until you get here Im so greedy Im just a greedy bullshitter Im a whore isnt that what I am? Im a whore who wants the money maybe I/ll just tell her maybe I/ll just talk to Telma & ask what she thinks we should do maybe she/ll say just let them just let them pay Mama or maybe she won’t, maybe she wouldnt maybe she/d just say Mama you sold my breasts why did you sell my breasts you sold them to the highest bidder! oh Phoebe hurry hurry no I wont I wont do anything I promise, I/ll just sit here no I wont just come just hurry please just come

  CLEAN

  [Telma]

  Wanderlust

  She

  brushes her mother’s hair. Not a real brushing, really just a way of caressing. Gwen’s been in bed for a number of days.

  “Mama, are you still sick?”

  “I’m sad. I’m just sad.”

  �
�Why are you sad?”

  “Sometimes it just happens. Sometimes people get sad, & then they have to take care of themselves. That’s what Mama’s doing—taking care.”

  “You’re not sad about something that happened?”

  “No, sweetheart. Not at all. Darling, would you like to do some traveling?”

  “Like where?”

  “I was watching Eat, Pray, Love, and thought it might be wonderful to go to Italy.”

  “Sure.”

  “Or maybe Bora Bora or the south of France. Or China. We could go to China. Is there anyplace you’d like to go?”

  “I want to go to St. Petersburg in Russia!”

  “Oh?”

  “We’ve been reading about the tsars and Catherine the Great. I want to go to Russia and be Telma the Great!”

  “I think that can be arranged.”

  “But I can’t go now, we have to go later.”

  “And why is that.”

  “OMG I didn’t tell you. Biggie has to have surgery.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He has a brain tumor! I didn’t tell you because I just found out.”

  She remembered what the attorneys said, but played dumb. I will play dumb, for the rest of my life. Play dumb, for the rest of her life. Play dumb, for the rest of our lives.

  “O! Is that what’s been causing his memory problems?”

  “Uh huh. But it’s really small and it isn’t cancerous.”

  “Well, that’s good news.”

  “And everyone missed it but St. Ambrose! Biggie went to a hospital in Houston and they totally missed it.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “St. Ambrose said that if Brando didn’t bring him in to see them, Biggie could have died.”

  “I guess things like that happen.”

  “They shouldn’t. Mama, I was thinking—and I wouldn’t talk to Biggie about it, but—I don’t understand what a hospital is for if it isn’t to help people, and find out what’s wrong with them? It’s not like his brother brought him to the dentist or to Whole Foods, and they couldn’t find anything. He brought him to a hospital that has specialists who are supposedly trained. Even if the doctors couldn’t find it, they have machines that are supposed to be able to. How can the doctors not have seen it when a machine sees it for them!”

  “That’s awful. But as long as the tumor isn’t—”

  “The doctors at St. Ambrose found it. Yay, team! Yay Team Telma!”

  “I hope it all turns out . . .”

  “I would be so angry. I don’t even think the mom knows yet, Biggie said he thinks his dad or his brother’s going to try to tell her, but I don’t see why. I think it’s a waste of time. And Biggie’s only going to get hurt because she’s never coming home and I just think it’s wrong to use his problems, whatever they are, to bring her back. She’s a horrible mom and she doesn’t sound like a good person either. If I were his dad or Brando, I wouldn’t tell her. But I would be so mad. I would totally sue that hospital in Houston!”

  CLEAN

  [Michael]

  What I Tell You In Darkness, Speak In the Light

  —Matthew 10:27

  He

  had five days off and was on his way to New York to spend the long weekend with Catherine and the kids. Brando was going to New York so Michael hitched a ride on the Ooh Baby jet. On the way to Van Nuys, Brando called to say he had to bail, something having to do with his kid brother, but the plane was at Michael’s disposal. “Enjoy the weekend.” Classy kid.

  It was great to have it to himself.

  He was feeling reflective.

  He looked at his email.

  Oliver Stone had forwarded a prospectus for something wild. An American architect refurbished a few dozen “peasant houses” (some were 5,000 square feet) in a village about an hour from Beijing. Each fully modernized home, with views of the Great Wall, were for rent. Oliver’s email had just one word in SUBJECT: Timeshare? He knew Ollie was kidding, but it sounded like the next cool thing. He wouldn’t be surprised if he heard that Bryan Lourd or George Clooney snapped one up.

  www.headandneck.org wanted him to tape a segment about early detection, for their new app.

  His reply:

  Done.

  The iPad chimed a new email from his daughter Carys:

  hurry!

  . . .

  If he had the energy, the actor planned to visit his son. Since the bust, Cameron had been caught using in prison, and a tough judge had doubled his sentence, giving him another 4½ years; the kid was obviously so sick, but all they knew how to do was punish. Until this, Michael had been breathing easier because of a transfer to a minimum security camp, one without fences. The jail in Manhattan was rough on the kid—the Douglas men weren’t too fond of confined spaces, especially when mandatory. But now everything was bad again. His hopes that Cam might be out in time to have a part in Jazz were dashed.

  . . .

  An art consultant he sometimes worked with sent him images of the work of an 18th-century Italian artist called Piranesi, best-known for a series of prints with the overall title Carceri d’invenzione—“Imaginary Prisons.” The drawings were simply that: darkly baroque, labyrinthine, finely detailed renderings of jails that didn’t exist, at least not outside Piranesi’s mind.

  Michael was captivated by the metaphor. These days it had become especially clear to him how zealously a man worked to customize the “cell” in which he served out his life sentence. His downfall is that he imagines he’s safe behind bars; he becomes accustomed to counting himself the king of finite space. When the actor was a student at UC Santa Barbara, he wrote a paper on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The philosopher put forth a world where men grew up shackled and facing the wall of a cave, unable even to turn their heads. Behind them was a great fire; figures walked across a footbridge, and the chained men took the shadowy forms to be reality. For the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream . . .

  What was real? (He felt like an undergrad again.) Being a movie star? Cancer? The motorized chair that became a bed for him to lie down on inside a machine with metal wings that flew 40,000 feet above the Earth? His wife and children? Sages said the only thing one could be certain of was the Self—who was Plato to say that form preceded shadow, and not reverse? In the end, everything was taken away. A drunk driver, a blow to the head from an unlucky fall, a rogue clot ended all discussion. The imaginary prisons of Piranesi underscored the folly of belonging to the Church of Realism, that cult of forms and shadows which seduces us into believing we have some control over our lives. Hey I ought to give a lecture on this shit . . . afraid I’d disappoint. They only want to hear about cuckoo’s nests and throat cancer, not imaginary prisons or flickerings in a cave . . .

  The clichéd moment was the only thing that was real. And if you could be lucky enough to be in the moment it was best to be happy, or at least at peace. It was best to love: he loved his wife and his children, and the blue planet that held all their beating hearts in its earthen hands.

  And that was that.

  . . .

  On Tuesday, he’d be at Sloan-Kettering for his check-up.

  Anyone in remission (or “cancer-free”) had been through the drill a hundred times, playing the nightmarish variations in their heads as if to inoculate themselves: OK here’s what’s going on: I saw something on the scan that I didn’t like. Or, We’re all kind of surprised at the speed of the recurrence—you were in three months ago, no? Or, I’m not going to dress this up for you; the cancer’s returned. Having said that, I’m not going to doom and gloom you, either. Cause we’re gonna sic the Navy Seals on this thing.

  The iPad chimed with another email.

  Did you get me anything?

  He’d forgotten. Which only meant his daughter was going to make him pay for his lapse, at FAO Schwarz. Big-time.

  Thinking of her, his whole being smiled. The two brave little ones—Aleisha and Telma—followed Carys into his
head. What would he do if something like that happened to one of his own? Such occasional musings were a hazard of parenthood. It was important to remember to be in the moment; not even forms that threw shadows were real . . . and nothing to get hung about. Maybe cancer was just another bar of an imaginary cell. The uncontrolled division of abnormal cells . . .

  He was prepared to believe it. What would be the harm? The New Age parable said each of us had two wolves fighting inside. One was dark and evil, the other was light and filled with love. The winner of the battle is whichever wolf you feed.

  . . .

  Lately, he didn’t like being called survivor. He was mildly superstitious that the very word fed the wrong wolf.

  It was challenging enough just to live on the planet. As far as he was concerned, being vertical and breathing conferred full survivor status. Why should the word be reserved for victims of rape, incest, the Holocaust? Every human being struggled to get through the random blessings and scourges of the day, to live through the night to see the sun. Hero was the other word that put a hair up his ass. Everyone was a hero. We were all survivors—until one day, we weren’t. It was probably the hubris of it that bothered him.

  He’d take Telma and her mom to tea again. We’re cancer-free, right Telma? So let’s forget the whole survivor deal—I never liked the “Nice try, cancer/I kicked cancer’s butt” thing anyway. Let’s forget being survivors and just be people who happen to be living their lives, people lucky enough to be surrounded by family and friends who they love. Maybe we don’t even need to be cancer-free, how about just “free”? I guess what I’m saying is that I had a whole life before this thing and now I’m having one after. You’re having one too, sweetheart, you’re having it now, and believe me, there’s going to be a lot more to come. And just because we don’t use the words anymore, just because we don’t say survivors and cancer-free, that doesn’t mean we don’t get our check-ups. “Trust in God, but lock your front door.” Ever hear that saying, Gwen? So we go and get our check-ups, and when we get a clean bill of health we kick up our heels. Kick em up anyway! Cause we can just be people now, citizens of the world, not survivors or some kind of heroes. Kid, I think that’s a jersey we can retire.”