“Yes,” said Mrs. Khemlani, who thought I was applauding her theory. “Hooray! Hooray for history!”
Better to be a garbageman than a doctor, when your father gets sick. If I were a tree surgeon or a schoolteacher or a truffle-snuffler, or even a plain old junkie, then sickness would just be sickness, just something to be borne and not something I was supposed to be able to defeat. For months my sisters had wheedled me into meddling consults with my father’s doctors, and I had pretended to understand what they were saying to me, and offered ungrounded opinions to them and to my sisters and my father. Even if I hadn’t cheated my way through medical school, the task of recalling the lost knowledge of pathology from second year would have been beyond me. I make my living praising the beauty of well children. I love babies and I love ketamine, and that’s really why I became a pediatrician, not because I hate illness, or really ever wanted to make anybody better, or ever convinced myself that I could.
But nobody deducts the credit I deserve for being impaired and a fake. The doctors hear you are a doctor and enlist you in their hopeless task, and fork over the greater portion of the guilt packaged up in the hopeless task. The nurses hear you are a doctor and hate you immediately for judging their work and for interfering. And the angel, who has catalogued my every failing and should know better, berated me for failing to save my father’s life as it became more and more obvious day by day that he was going to die. It was the least I could do, she told me, because even this miracle is nothing compared to what I was supposed to grow up to achieve. And if I could do this, then everything else would turn around. It was the first hope, besides death, she’d offered in a long time.
“He is not an enemy you can outwit,” said Mrs. Scott, one of my father’s Tuesday chemotherapy buddies. He got out of the hospital a week after I arrived home, and for another month I took him every week for his infusions. Lately he was too tired to talk, or else just sick of her. He fell asleep during every infusion, and left me alone to talk to her. He confided that he hated the way she whored after hope — every week something else was going to save her life — and I’d think he was faking it just to escape her if I didn’t know firsthand the beautiful thick sleep that IV Benadryl can bring. Every session they began a conversation about whatever late discovery she had made in the pages of Prevention or Ayurdevic Weekly or High Colonic Fancy, and five minutes into it he would tell her he felt oblivion pressing on his face, and five minutes after that his chin was on his chest and he was snoring softer than he does in natural slumber. And because I could not put a shoe heel deep into her mouth to shut her up, I always suggested a game of checkers or cards or backgammon. Dr. Klar’s infusion salon was packed with those sorts of diversions.
We played chess, a game that usually generated a lot of thoughtful silence — she’d put a finger to her temple and stare so hard at the board that I expected it to start vibrating in sympathy with the intensity of her gaze — but today she was distracted and a little agitated, maybe because she was getting steroids, or maybe because my angel was sitting so close to her, and despite her optimism she was getting sicker from week to week, and I swear that as they get closer to death people can start to feel the angel’s ugly emanations.
“It’s not a game of chess, you know,” she continued when I said nothing. “I think I just fully understood that right now.” I put my finger down.
“What’s that?”
“You know,” she said, putting her hand on her chest. Like my father, she had lung cancer. “Oncoloquatsi,” she whispered. That was the name she had assigned to her disease, and she always whispered it, as if to speak his name too loud would be to summon strength to him.
“Oh, him,” I said.
“I know it suggests a game, how you move and then he moves — you pick a chemo and he counters with a mutation, or you find the perfect herb to overcome him and he produces another measure of resistance, and the doctors play the game from organ to organ until your whole body is a board. They even doodle you up like one.” She pulled down on the neck of her blouse to show a piece of skin below her collarbone — it was just a cross to mark a target for radiation. “But this is only a surface-seeming. Look deeper like I have and you will see the truth.”
“I think I’ve got you,” I said, moving my bishop illegally. She didn’t even look down.
“How often have I heard that from him? But he never has gotten me, and it’s not because of my disciplined mind. It’s because I have learned to resist him in the very marrow of my being. The very marrow, Doctor. It’s not a lesson you would have learned in school, but I want you to learn it. I want your father to learn it. I have disciplined my soul against this enemy, and he must do it, too.”
The angel sidled closer while Mrs. Scott was talking. She leaned over and took a sniff at the lady’s turbaned head. “Three weeks,” she said. And then she put her nose close to the thin, shining skin of my father’s forehead — every day his skin seemed to get a little thinner, or stretch a little tighter, so I was sure that just the faintest rubbing pressure or the lightest scratch would reveal the dull-white bone underneath — and said the same thing.
“Shut up!” I told her.
“It’s hard to hear,” Mrs. Scott said. “I know it’s not your common wisdom, but you don’t have to be rude.” Dr. Klar came in before I could answer or apologize.
“Hallo, everybody!” she called out. Thirty years in southeast Florida had not dulled her accent much. This appealed to my father, who liked that she was German, order and discipline having always added up in his life to success. Her immaculate white coat seemed the least perfect thing about her, but just being in sight of it I felt accused of slovenliness and failure. “Here is the grandma of your better nature,” the angel said the first time she saw her.
My father woke at the sound of her voice, and smiled at her. “Charlotte?” he said. A week after I took him from the hospital, he started mistaking people and places, thinking a nurse or some solicitous church lady was one of my sisters, or thinking he was in his childhood home in Chicago, calling out for a dog who died sixty years ago. Me he never mistook for anyone else, though he often seemed surprised to see me. “Still here?” he said some mornings.
“It’s Dr. Klar!” she said brightly. She said everything brightly, even things like What’s the use or If he’s alive in a month it will be a miracle. She was one of those oncologists who speak life out of one side of their mouth and death out of the other. For my father she had only good news; for me only bad. I hated her.
“Darling,” my father said, closing his eyes again and still smiling. “When is the baby coming?”
“Soon,” she said. “The baby is fine. Everything is fine!” She reached out to pat his shoulder but I caught her hand.
“The bad shoulder,” I said. He had metastases all over, but his shoulder and his back bothered him the most. He nodded his head and fell back to sleep.
“How is the pain, then?”
“Worse. And we’re out of Percocet. He’s out of Percocet.”
“Easy enough to fix,” she said.
“An ounce of meditation is worth a pound of Percocet,” said Mrs. Scott.