Not long thereafter, Sherri got fed up with Fat working night and day on his exegesis; also she got mad because he asked her to contribute some of her SSI money to pay the rent, since because of a court judgment he had to pay out a lot of spousal and child support to Beth and Christopher. Having found another apartment for which the Santa Ana housing authority would pick up the tab, Sherri wound up living by herself rent-free, without the obligation to fix Fat's dinner; also she could go out with other men, something Fat had objected to while he and Sherri were living together. To this possessiveness, Sherri had said hotly one night, when she came home from walking hand-in-hand with a male friend to find Fat furious,
"I don't have to put up with this crap."
Fat promised not to object to Sherri going out with other men any more, nor would he continue to ask her to contribute toward the rent and food costs, even though at the moment he had only nine dollars in his bank account. This did no good; Sherri was pissed.
"I'm moving out," she informed him.
After she moved out, Fat had to raise funds to purchase all manner of furniture, dishes, TV set, flatware, towels -- everything, because he had brought little or nothing with him from his marriage; he had expected to depend on Sherri's chattel. Needless to say, he found life very lonely without her; living by himself in the two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment which they had shared depressed the hell out of him. His friends worried about him and tried to cheer him up. In February Beth had left him and now in early September Sherri had left him. He was again dying by inches. All he did was sit at his typewriter or with notepad and pen, working on his exegesis; nothing else remained in his life. Beth had moved up to Sacramento, seven hundred miles away, so he did not get to see Christopher. He thought about suicide, but not very much, he knew that Maurice would not approve of such thoughts. Maurice would require of him another list.
What really bothered Fat was the intuition that Sherri would soon lose her remission. From going to class at Santa Ana College and working at the church she became rundown and tired; every time he saw her, which was as often as possible, he noticed how tired and thin she looked. In November she complained of the flu; she had pains in her chest and coughed continuously.
"This fucking flu," Sherri said.
Finally he got her to go to her doctor for an X-ray and blood tests. He knew she had lost her remission by then; she could barely drag herself around.
The day she found out that she had cancer again, Fat was with her; since her appointment with the doctor was at eight in the morning, Fat stayed up the night before, just sitting. He drove her to the doctor, along with Edna, a lifelong friend of Sherri's; he and Edna sat together in the waiting room while Sherri conferred with Dr. Applebaum.
"It's just the flu," Edna said.
Fat said nothing. He knew what it was. Three days before, he and Sherri had walked to the grocery store; she could hardly put one foot before the other. No doubt existed in Fat's mind; as he sat with Edna in the crowded waiting room terror filled him and he wanted to cry. Incredibly, today was his birthday.
When Sherri emerged from Dr. Applebaum's office, she had a Kleenex pressed to her eyes; Fat and Edna ran over to her; he caught Sherri as she fell saying, "It's back, the cancer's back." She had it in the lymph nodes in her neck and she had a malignant tumor in her right lung which was suffocating her. Chemotherapy and radiation would be started in twenty-four hours.
Edna said, stricken, "I was sure it was just flu. I wanted her to go up to Melodyland and testify that Jesus had cured her."
To that remark, Fat said nothing.
The argument can be made that at this point Fat no longer had any moral obligation to Sherri. For the most meager reason she had moved out on him, leaving him alone, grieving and desperate, with nothing to do but scribble away at his exegesis. Fat's friends had all pointed this out. Even Edna pointed this out, when Sherri wasn't present in the same room. But Fat still loved her. He now asked her to move back in with him so that he could take care of her, inasmuch as she had become too weak to fix herself meals, and once she began the chemotherapy she would become a lot sicker.
"No thanks," Sherri said, tonelessly.
Fat walked down to her church one day and talked with Father Larry; he begged Larry to put pressure on the State of California Medicare people to provide someone to come in and fix meals for Sherri and to help clean up her apartment, since she would not let him, Fat, do it. Father Larry said he would, but nothing came of it. Again Fat went over to talk to the priest about what could be done to help Sherri, and while he was talking, Fat suddenly began to cry.
To this, Father Larry said enigmatically, "I've cried all the tears I am going to cry for that girl."
Fat could not tell ifthat meant that Larry had burned out his circuits from grief or that he had calculatedly, as a self-protective device, curtailed his grief. Fat does not know to this day. His own grief had reached critical mass. Now Sherri had been hospitalized; Fat visited her and saw lying in the bed a small sad shape, half the size he was accustomed to, a shape coughing in pain, with wretched hopelessness in its eyes. Fat could not drive home after that, so Kevin drove him home. Kevin, who usually maintained his stance of cynicism, could not speak from grief; the two of them drove along and then Kevin slapped him on the shoulder, which is the only avenue open to men to show love for each other.
"What am I going to do?" Fat said, meaning, What am I going to do when she dies?
He really loved Sherri, despite her treatment of him -- if indeed, as his friends maintained, she had treated him shabbily. He himself -- he neither knew nor cared about that. All he knew was that she lay in the hospital bed with metastasized tumors throughout her. Every day he visited her in the hospital, along with everyone else who knew her.
At night he did the only act left open to him: work on his exegesis. He had reached an important entry.
Entry 48. ON OUR NATURE. It is proper to say: we appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system which, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction -- a failure -- of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. "Salvation" through gnosis -- more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia) -- although it has individual significance for each of us -- a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world -- and self-experience, including immortality -- it has greater and further importance for the system as a whole, inasmuch as these memories are data needed by it and valuable to it, to its overall functioning.
Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit via linear and orthogonal time changes, as well as continual signaling to us to stimulate blocked memory banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there.