Fear of Missing Out

by Kate McGovern

  “Sure, thanks, Maxine!” Mohit calls toward the door.

  I listen to hear if Mom’s retreating down the hall or hovering. After a moment, footsteps pad lightly back toward the living room.

  Mohit rolls over, throwing a leg across mine. “How’s your head?”

  “Um, well, it doesn’t feel like an eighteen-wheeler is driving back and forth over my brain stem at the moment, so that’s an improvement. My vision’s…” I look toward the ceiling, watching those circles of light dance around the room. I’m trying to think of the words to describe the blurring around the edges, the bright flashes, the dreamlike quality of what I see in front of me right now. “Kind of psychedelic. Some people would pay good money for this.”

  Mohit sighs. “Why do you do that, Astrid?” He flops on his back, one hand draped across my chest.

  “Do what?”

  “That thing. The minimizing thing. You can just tell me when you’re in pain. I can deal.”

  I resist the urge to roll my eyes, because Mo hates it when I do that and I’m not looking to pick a fight right now. But this is not the first time we’ve had this conversation.

  “I’m not minimizing. I’m just…” I pause. It doesn’t have anything to do with protecting Mohit; I know he can handle it. It’s about me. I’m trying to retain half an ounce of my former self. The person I was BT. That’s hard to explain, even to this person who knows me better than basically anyone.

  “Remember what we were doing a minute ago?” I ask finally.

  “What were we doing a minute ago?”

  I flip over on top of Mo, straddling his waist with my legs, and press my whole body against his. I can feel his heart beating through his totally unscented, fair-trade, GMO-free sweatshirt, and my body rises and falls with the movement of his chest.

  “Oh, is this what we were doing?” he asks. He slides a hand under the waistband of my jeans and rests it at the base of my spine. His hand on my bare skin makes me melt a little bit.

  “Something like that,” I say, running my hands up under his sweatshirt.

  “Dude, your hands are like icicles right now!” he squeals, recoiling.

  “I know they are, and your chest is very warm. Be nice to your cancer-ridden girlfriend.”

  He laughs. “So we’re going there already, huh? You’re a little bit cruel when you have a brain tumor, you know.”

  “Sorry. Can’t help it.”

  We lie there for a few minutes, our breathing never quite in unison.

  Eventually, Mo stretches an arm out from under me and takes the book from my bedside table. “Where are we going today?” he asks, flipping it around to look at the cover.

  It’s a Lonely Planet travel guide to Kenya.

  “Kenya, huh? Anything good?”

  “Safari in the Maasai Mara, but that’s kind of cliché. Lamu seems like a must-see.”

  My used-travel-guide habit started the first time I got cancer. Someone had left one—The Rough Guide to Japan—in the chemo lounge and I started thumbing through it absentmindedly, the way you do anything when you’re in the middle of a chemo infusion. I’d never particularly wanted to go to Japan, but browsing through the descriptions of people-packed Tokyo and the Shinto shrines in Kyoto made the infusion go by more quickly. So I bought another one online—for Greece—and then another, and another, for far-flung islands and European hot spots and random parts of the United States, too. Places I’ll probably never see in real life, and never knew I wanted to until I read about them. Traveling via guidebook isn’t as good as the real thing, but it’s better than nothing.

  I take the book from his hands and put it aside. “Mo?”

  “Astrid?” His dark eyes alight on my face expectantly.

  I pause to think of how I want to say what I want to say. “I’m a little bit scared this time.”

  “Yeah,” he says, so quiet I can barely hear him. “I’m a little bit scared, too.”

  Then I kiss him until my vision might be blurred from pleasure instead of pain and my lips swell and the weight is almost, almost, almost gone.

  * * *

  It’s two in the morning when I wake up to pee. My head feels surprisingly clear, almost normal, and I roll over and run my hand over the Mohit-shaped wrinkles in the sheets next to me. He didn’t really leave those wrinkles, of course; he left after dinner and a round of Wii bowling with Liam. But I can still feel him in the empty space next to me.

  I tiptoe to the bathroom, careful of the creaky parts of the hallway. Outside Mom’s door, I pause. There’s muffled noise, like the TV is on. She must have passed out watching something, trying to dull herself into sleep with a late-night talk show or a PBS mystery on repeat.

  The door is cracked slightly—ever since Dad left, Liam sometimes still likes to climb in bed with Mom in the middle of the night if he has a bad dream or something, even though he’s eight now—so I nudge it open farther with my toe, careful not to make any noise, and peer in. I expect to see her asleep, tangled roughly in the blankets, with the blue glow of the television pulsing in the room. Instead, it’s completely dark; the TV is off. And her body isn’t limp like it would be in sleep. Even in the shadows of the room, I see her curled toward the opposite wall, in a fetal position under the covers, rocking back and forth. With every rock, she makes a low moan, almost a growl.

  A floorboard groans under me and I freeze, watching Mom’s shadow to see if it seems to register the noise. A moment later, she sniffles, rolls over, pulls the covers closer around her. She never turns toward the door, and I let my breath out slowly and step back into the hallway, toward the bathroom.

  It feels like an impossible intrusion, like reading someone else’s journal or checking their email, listening to my mother’s private grief. The parts she doesn’t want me to see. I have to shut it out before it sucks me in and I can’t think about anything else.

  3.

  “Tell me again why you think anyone at this symposium knows more about my tumor than Dr. Klein?”

  Mom pushes through the revolving door at the Expo Center. “Maybe they won’t, Astrid,” she says when we both come out the other side. “But Dr. Klein said even she was looking forward to checking out the most cutting-edge research in the field. So you never know, do you? Plus, the doctors leading the clinical trial will be here, and I don’t think it would be a bad thing to make a personal connection with them.”

  I sigh. My mother has no idea that patients don’t get into clinical trials by being friends with the research team. It’s not like an AP class with the best teacher: you can’t just talk your way in by bringing cookies to the guidance counselor.

  Then again, it’s true that Dr. Klein’s comment about the cutting-edge research is the real reason I let my mother drag me along to this brain research symposium. I’m curious what they’ve got. But if Mom thinks I’m going to follow her around while she goes up to random researchers and pulls my scans out of their envelope, she’s dreaming.

  The symposium is supposed to be the biggest international conference of neuro-types anywhere. The lobby is teeming with science nerds weighed down with branded tote bags probably full of research papers, brochures, other people’s business cards. In every direction, there are signs directing traffic toward the main exhibition hall, the bathrooms, the café, and others featuring the highlights of today’s schedule. I grab a program, which is as thick as a phonebook for a small city, and flip through it. There’s a long directory of all the exhibitors, plus a day-by-day schedule for the weekend. Today at one o’clock Dr. Klein is giving a talk on radical therapies for high-grade pediatric astrocytomas. I think I can skip that one.

  “I’m going to do a lap,” I tell Mom when we’ve registered and draped visitor badges around our necks.

  Mom gives me one of her I-can’t-with-you looks. “Fine, just don’t leave without me, will you?”

  “You have the car keys.”

  “You’re really a pain in the ass, you know.”

  “You have
only yourself to blame.”

  She smacks my arm with her program. “Meet me back here in an hour.”

  “You know, we have these crazy contraptions these days, they’re called cellular telephones—”

  “One hour, Astrid. Don’t make me come looking for you.”

  “Roger that, Maxine.”

  Mom cocks one eyebrow at me. “Maxine?”

  “It’s just something I’m trying.”

  “Well, don’t. One hour, Daughter.”

  “Yes, yes, Mother,” I call over my shoulder as I wander toward the exhibition hall.

  * * *

  Inside the hall, I’m immediately overwhelmed by the chaos. Row after row of booths, all of them decorated in brightly branded tablecloths and trifold banners, stacked high with papers, books, baskets of souvenirs in the form of key chains and bottle openers and brain-shaped stress balls. My head throbs under the fluorescents. I take a stress ball from a table as I pass by, avoiding eye contact with the obviously twenty-something research assistant behind the table, and squeeze my fist around it as I wander down what appears to be aisle J.

  I try to meditate on the squeezing as I walk, imagining that my brain is the stress ball and I’m massaging the pain out of it. Mom always tells me to try to visualize away my pain. Not in like a condescending way—she knows I need actual medication, obviously, like a lot of it sometimes—but she’s a CNM (certified nurse midwife) when she’s not in full-time Brain Tumor Management mode, and she’s used to telling her own patients to breathe and focus and visualize things to manage their pain. Of course, I guess when your pain is temporary and in service of birthing a human, it may be more inclined to respond to mental pressure.

  Anyway, my headache doesn’t go away from squeezing the stress ball, but some of the anxiety brought on by the chaos around me seems to. Not that I have any kind of serious problems with crowds or anything, but with a few minutes of focused squeezing and deep breathing, I can already feel my heart rate slowing and the queasiness I recognize as nerves calming. Bonus of having a brain tumor and going through a crap ton of treatment for a year: I’m reasonably attuned to the signals my body gives me.

  I pause to catch my breath at a table featuring research into a new blood test for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, one of those nasty human prion diseases that kills you slowly after taking away your motor skills, speech, and normal personality. Once again avoiding eye contact with a research assistant, I pull my phone out to text Mo while I perch against the edge of the table.

  Then I pause and think better of it. I know he’s going to ask if I’ve talked to the directors of the clinical trial; he can’t help himself. Mohit is just like my mother, wanting to figure out the best course of action, the best next steps. He wants to feel like he’s doing something other than watching me die. Which, let’s be real—it’s not like I’m terribly keen on croaking before I graduate high school either. And I guess I wouldn’t want everyone around me to throw up their hands and be like, “Well, you’re toast. Let’s call Make-A-Wish and go to Harry Potter World.” (Although I really, really want to go to Harry Potter World.) So I don’t know what I want, exactly. But it feels like the positivity is forced, like we all have to rush toward optimism or the Angel of Death will somehow notice and take our despair as permanent defeat. Maybe I just want them all to give me a minute. With the despair part. A minute to feel really mad about this whole situation.

  I text Chloe instead. She always lets me have a minute.

  This place is a madhouse. Almost literally, considering the number of people with compromised neurological function probably roaming around. Present company included.

  Clo writes back right away: Questionable use of “literally,” but I’ll allow it on account of your brain tumor.

  My phone buzzes again. Can we hang out later? It’s book club night over here and I need to avoid All the Cambridge Ladies.

  I laugh. “Cambridge Ladies” is code for the abundance of uber-liberal white women in our neighborhood who wear tunics and leggings and make their own granola and drive used Subarus, among other common characteristics. Which basically describes our own mothers (minus, in my case, the Subaru).

  Clearly, I type back. I think Mo and I are doing a movie night. You in?

  She doesn’t respond immediately, and I know she’s probably momentarily pouting about spending another Saturday night with me and Mohit. It’s not like Chloe hates Mo or anything. But she didn’t take to sharing me all that well, especially at first. These days, she and Mohit have a kind of unspoken agreement that they put up with each other’s constant presence in my life because what else are they going to do about it?

  Finally, I see two dots appear on my screen while she types a reply. I suppose I could third-wheel it yet again. For you. And don’t tell me, the movie must be something that gets more than three stars. I know your weirdo boyfriend’s weirdo Rule of Movies.

  She’s not wrong. Mo’s Rule of Movies is that he never—never—watches anything that gets less than four point five stars on All the Rating Systems of the Internet. It’s manageable, except when Chloe and I want to watch a really bad thriller with Liam Neeson and call it a day. Sometimes I just don’t care if everyone else hated it because I am going to hate-watch bad Liam Neeson thrillers for as long as I’ve got left, and I am going to love them.

  A voice comes over the loudspeaker announcing the start of the one o’clock presentations. I think of Dr. Klein, getting her PowerPoint deck ready so that she can show people my brain and tell them how the radical therapies fixed it for a year and then failed miserably. I’m sorry I let her down. I wish we’d waited another week to get the latest scans back. Then at least she could’ve made this presentation while I was still supposedly in remission.

  I hang a left down aisle K, and a table catches my eye primarily because there’s no one there. I mean, most of the tables have a few people at least hovering around them, perusing the literature or asking questions. This one is empty, except for a youngish guy behind the table, fiddling with the display.

  I wander over. It’s an exhibit for the American Institute for Cryonics Research, which I’ve never heard of. The guy seems far too young to have any kind of real job—he looks not that much older than me—but I don’t see anyone else with him and he’s wearing an exhibitor badge around his neck. He’s trying to straighten one of the pop-up banners, and the top disengages from its frame and bounces back against his face.

  “Dammit!” he says, under his breath.

  “Want some help?” I ask, stepping in and grabbing one end of the banner.

  “Thanks. Sorry. These banners are just … My boss doesn’t understand the concept of ‘get what you pay for,’ know what I mean?”

  I help him clip it back in the holder and straighten it out. Then I step away from the table.

  “Thanks,” he says again. “I’m Carl. Uh, sorry, Dr. Carl Vanderwalk. I’m still getting used to the ‘doctor’ part. I just graduated from med school. Anyway, Dr. Carl Vanderwalk, MD, PhD. Doctor, two ways.” He laughs awkwardly.

  I take his outstretched hand. “Astrid Ayeroff. Just a regular human.”

  “Lucky you—you won’t end up drowning in debt like I am.”

  “Something like that,” I say. I must look slightly distressed, because he furrows his brow and looks around.

  “Water?” He passes me a bottle across the table.

  “Thanks.”

  “So what brings you to the symposium?” he asks while I take a long swig of the water and try to visualize it moisturizing my brain and melting the headache away. It doesn’t work.

  I put the bottle down, half empty. “I love the brain.”

  He smiles. “It’s a thing of beauty, isn’t it?”

  He’s right about that. “Mmm-hmm. Thanks for the water, Dr.…” I’ve already forgotten his name, so I look at his badge more closely. “Dr. Vanderwalk.”

  “Please, just Carl. The doctor thing makes me feel old. They keep telling me
I have to use it when I introduce myself because, I don’t know, otherwise people think I’m like twelve or something and totally unqualified to talk about our work.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I ask.

  “Oh, my boss. Here.” He rummages around behind the table and pulls out a business card. “Dr. A. R. Fitzspelt. His first name is Argos, but don’t tell him I told you that.”

  I take the card and drop it into my tote bag. “So what is cryonics, anyway?”

  His face brightens, like he’s suddenly been asked to rattle off a list of all the As he got in med school or something. “I’m glad you asked! Cryonics is the most advanced and exciting extension of cryopreservation. It’s the science of body preservation. It’s the future.”

  Images of industrial-strength freezers in a warehouse clouded with cold mist pop into my head. A team of mad scientists pore over glass caskets of freezer-burned bodies. I can almost smell the formaldehyde from here. For a moment, it feels like the room is spinning.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Carl says. “It sounds like science fiction.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I get that a lot. It’s not, though, believe me. It’s a legitimate choice more and more families are making for their loved ones at death, to preserve either their entire bodies or, in some cases, just their brains. Our facility is in Sedona, Arizona. It’s the oldest cryonics lab in the nation. Our youngest client is just two years old. Our oldest is eighty-four.”

  I swallow, thinking of a two-year-old body engulfed in a deep freeze. “Preserve them to what end, though?”

  “We’re just beginning to explore the possibilities, of course,” he says. “But the ultimate goal is to one day revive our patients.”

  I never say this, but I think the hair on the back of my neck is literally standing up. And for Chloe’s sake, I mean “literal” in the dictionary-definition way this time.