“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.