Irene stared blankly down at the table, bracing herself for tears that were not coming. “No. That’s not going to work,” she said. “I’m a painter. Well, more sculpture lately. Doesn’t matter. Thing is, I’m really going to need both my eyes.”
“I see,” Dr. Zarrani said softly. “Well, as I said, we’ll have a specialist take a look.”
“That’s nonnegotiable,” Irene said, even as she intuited from Dr. Zarrani’s gaze that this wasn’t a negotiation. “Oh fuck,” she sighed finally, easing back and looking up at the blank ceiling. After a moment she peeked back again. “What are the odds?”
“Well, as I said earlier, around sixty-eight percent generally—”
“No, I’m sorry,” Irene said, shaking her head. “I mean what the odds are that I’d… I mean, why me? Is this, like, super rare? How many people get this?”
Dr. Zarrani nodded. “Extremely rare particularly for someone your age. As I’ve said, it’s most often seen in very young patients or the elderly. It — well, it isn’t the sort of thing you see often in healthy twentysomethings.”
Irene laughed. “So I’m just lucky then?”
“You could look at it that way.”
“I really couldn’t,” Irene said. “I guess my mother always said I was one in a million.”
Dr. Zarrani smiled. “Osteosarcoma affects about five people in a million, across the whole population.”
“You know that off the top of your head?”
“I’m very good at what I do. Which is why I’m confident that we can get through this together.”
Irene nodded, scanning the bare walls again. “You know, you should really put some art on the walls in here. Everywhere else in this hospital there are, like, banal Water Lilies prints and that sort of thing. You know? Stuff that can kind of fade into the background. But then if you really need some art to look at — like if you’ve just been told you have a thirty-two percent chance of dying — then there’d at least be a Monet print to distract you.”
“Perhaps you could paint — or sculpt — us something,” Dr. Zarrani said.
Irene smiled. “If you can cure me without ruining my eyes, I’ll paint this whole hospital.”
Dr. Zarrani stuck her hand out, over the open file, across the table, and Irene shook it.
“We’ll begin in a week. It may take a few hours. And do bring someone with you next time,” Dr. Zarrani suggested.
Irene shook her head. “I’m not close with my family,” she explained. “Actually, I left home when I was sixteen, and I haven’t spoken to them since. But don’t worry. I can handle this on my own.”
Dr. Zarrani shook her head slowly, and Irene couldn’t escape her sharp disapproval.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Richmond, but I’ve seen Navy SEALs who couldn’t handle this on their own. You’re going to have to have some help. You’ll need people to get you to treatments and take you back again. You’re going to feel sick all the time. Someone’s got to make you eat because you won’t want to. You’re going to need prescriptions filled and insurance claims filed and dressings changed. You see those Lifetime movies with cute little children and pretty ladies who are always stoic and brave and solemn. They might throw up once or twice, some hair falls out, they get a little thinner… but that’s nothing. That’s just for starters. Listen to me when I say this. You are about to go to war with your own body. That’s the best way to describe it.”
Irene felt every fiber of herself, sick and well, tight with fear. What the hell did she know about going to war? Metaphorically or otherwise.
She nodded and the doctor seemed satisfied. “If you don’t have friends you can trust with something like this, we can arrange—”
Irene stopped her quickly. “No, it’s not that. It’s — you know, my friends are great—”
Surely Sara would let them take out both her own eyes to save one of hers. Jacob and George would carry her to and from chemo appointments on their backs if she asked.
Dr. Zarrani seemed to know already. “Ms. Richmond, you can’t save them from this, I’m sorry.”
And that was when Irene, finally, began to cry.
Embarrassed, she looked down into her lap, the book of fairy tales still open to the page she’d been on when the doctor had entered. There was a beautiful silvery illustration of an enormous cloud over a still gray sea. It caught her so suddenly that for a second she forgot where she was and what she now knew. In the fairy tale, the North Wind was speaking to a Shining Fish who had no courage.
“La speranza è l’ultima a morire,” the North Wind said. Unlike Jacob she hadn’t failed the class. In fact she’d been one of the best students in the room, according to their teacher, Mrs. Marzocco, even though she’d gotten no credit for it or for any class.
The wind was telling the fish that hope is the last thing to die.
5
William, for the second time in four days, found himself at a party where he knew practically no one. First a suite at the Waldorf, now a basement apartment in Greenpoint that was jammed with actors. The ceiling was two inches above his head, and several others had to stoop. After the show, before William quite realized what was happening, Sara had whisked him onto the 7 train and then onto the G. William never felt comfortable being back in the boroughs. He’d grown up out here, after all, in Flushing. This felt like returning to dry land after months at sea. The buildings were too short; the streets too quiet. Driveways and fences! They’d followed the chummy cast members past Polish restaurants and a pencil factory and an odd, freestanding water tower like the sort you’d see in Kansas somewhere by the highway — to a little basement apartment with a hobbit-size door. One by one the actors had piled in and now were sitting around on the bare floor in a circle, drinking warm white wine from plastic cups and leaving periodically to smoke skunky weed in the back alley.
“I’ve recently begun listening to my whole hip-hop collection again,” one of them said to William. “Grandmaster Flash is a whole different experience on vinyl.”
The stranger wore a corduroy jacket and was drinking beer out of a brandy snifter, which William suspected he’d brought from home. Everyone else had plastic Solo cups and not, like, the nice ones. He reeked of pot and he kept smacking his lips together as if his beer were sawdust.
“I’m sorry,” William replied politely, “I don’t think we’ve met.”
The boy’s red eyes widened. “I thought you were someone else.” Then he backed away in a hurry and moved off across the room, before William could say that, once upon a time, he’d had a Run-DMC record himself.
George and the surly Jacob weren’t talking to anyone else either, but at least they had each other. They sat by the host’s bookshelves looking utterly exhausted and talking as if they’d been parted for weeks by dreadful battles. They exchanged stories of office politics, writer’s block, graduate research, and homeless panhandlers, all while wincing at the warm PBR cans in their hands. Every few minutes one of them would pull a hardcover down, remove the dust jacket and swap it with another from elsewhere on the shelf. Neither offered an explanation. William kept trying to excuse himself, but they were too engrossed in their talk of poems and planets to even look at him. He could have left, and they’d never have noticed, but he was still holding out that Irene would show up.
They had slept together three nights ago, after the last party with Sara and her friends. It was unusual for William. Not just to sleep with someone he’d met hours earlier, but to sleep with someone like Irene. He’d known while it was still happening that he’d never get over it. And things had gone well — at least he’d felt so at the time. But then in the morning he got the impression that perhaps it — no, that he had been a mistake. Not an error or a lapse so much, because neither of them had been very drunk. There had been no impairment. But a mistake and the sex had been merely a miscommunication, like a game of telephone played badly.