“I won’t, I won’t,” he was saying. “Shush.” He didn’t make a shhhhhh sound, just said, “Shush.”
It took him a second to realize that she’d begun laughing, softly.
“What’s so funny?” he wheezed.
“Nothing,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
He didn’t understand. He tried to catch his breath, but each inhalation was like battery acid, each exhalation like cumulus clouds leaving his lips.
“Where are you?” Irene asked, her voice a bit steadier.
He gazed across at the dark skyline. Hundreds of thousands of feet of glass and steel rose up into the blackness like a great Necropolis, and she was in there, somewhere.
“William? You know, this is stupid. I’m just going to go home.”
“No, I can’t really hear you,” he said, turning from the river to run back toward the party. “Hold on.”
Irene’s breath was in his ear again. He looked back over his shoulder at the water and the majestic city beyond it. Holding the phone tight to his ear, he ran three and a half more blocks before he realized that the signal had dropped.
FISH EYES AND NO EARS
At first, having cancer seemed to be largely a matter of paperwork. Irene tried to remain composed as the grandmotherly clerks at Mount Sinai looked crossly at her forms, their expressions never failing to falter as they handed her fresh ones. Irene wondered if they were having an interdepartmental Ugly Christmas Sweater contest or if the drop-stitched Rudolphs, Frostys, and Kringles had perhaps been knitted by their cats. She reminded herself to not get snippy. These people were trying to help her.
With some pharmaceutical-sponsored clipboard on her lap, Irene attempted to hold her head high without getting it in the tinsel of the plastic fir trees, or knocking the light-up snowmen from the wire branches. Christmas was consuming Mount Sinai Hospital with virulent glee. Everywhere Irene looked, she could see prickly wreaths, looping garlands, and glitzy ornaments. Stockings were hung with care in every single elevator. Toy trains looped through banks of fake snow. Handsomely wrapped gifts with oversize bows were stacked neatly in hallway corners, although these were just for show. Irene had kicked one accidentally, and the hollow tower had toppled. The décor had seemed laughable at first, and then depressing, but now, after spending an entire morning filling out forms, she was coming around to it. Who was she to judge what it took to bring a little cheer to those stuck at the hospital over the holidays? After all, she was about to number among them.
Eventually Irene was shuffled onto the sixth floor: Head and Neck Cancers. Though it seemed apropos, considering the location of her tumor, she found the little sign above the waiting area annoyingly absurd. I’ve got head cancer, she thought to herself. Cancer of the head. Just all this up here is no good at all. I’ll get myself right on the head transplant list. Pop on the head of a nice quiet schoolteacher from Ann Arbor and be done with it.
Grace, Irene had always believed, was a double-edged blade to be kept laced at her hip at all times. To appear unperturbed by all that was perturbing you eased both your own mind and the minds of those around you. So she wished to appear the cool lieutenant, marshaling the harried hospital staff as they hammered keyboard keys and strategized the times and locations for her first two chemotherapy appointments. This worked, until she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glasses of one of the old ladies behind the counter and was thrown by how stretched and blurry she appeared: precisely the way she felt.
The woman’s great gray head swayed from side to side and her tongue clucked behind fuchsia-painted lips.
“Oh dear,” they all seemed fond of saying, as they reached for their telephones, “let me just call someone and see about this.”
The problem was the question marks. Irene was full of them. Allergic reactions to medications: ? Name of previous primary care physician: ? List previous hospital visits, in order, and by purpose: 1. Tonsils removed, 1992 or 1991? 2. Fell down and hit head on a brass Dalmatian statue. I was 5 or 6? No concussion. 3. Horrible stomachaches, turned out to be lactose intolerance, which went away suddenly. Not sure when. Immunizations and vaccinations: Probably all the standard ones for kids? Nothing after 1998. Father’s medical history: Male-pattern baldness, rosacea, near-sighted,??? Mother’s medical history: ???
“I have primary bone cancer.” She tried to get used to the way these words felt on her tongue, and she’d point to the small lump below her left eye socket. “I have a malignant osteosarcoma.” It wasn’t at all noticeable until you noticed it.
The day passed in excruciating baby steps. By the time darkness fell, Irene had visited practically every floor in the hospital, never once escaping the sight of glittering snowflakes.
Finally cleared to begin her first two-day chemo dose the following morning, Irene walked across the dark street and broke down crying in the back corner of a MetroStop Bakery over a bowl of scalded corn chowder. None of the servers seemed to find this odd. She looked down at the mascara smudges she’d left on the edge of the paper tablecloth. She’d expected to get a bit farther than this. She hadn’t even seen a single needle, scalpel, or IV! To quiver in the face of medieval instruments seemed reasonable; to be undone by grainy Xeroxes did not. At eight a.m., she was to report to the twelfth floor for chemotherapy, which would take a few hours to be infused through a vein in her arm.
Irene waited for the mascara stains to dry a little. Then she carefully tore a perimeter of paper around them and slipped the scrap into her purse, not yet sure how or if she’d use it in some new piece she’d been constructing late at night in her apartment.
While her fingers were in her purse, they pulled out her phone, even as she forbade them to do it. Everyone’s gone for the holidays, she reminded them. Still, they thumbed through her contacts. Sara was at George’s parents’ place in Ohio for Christmas. Jacob was in Tampa, or as he called it, “the land of decrepitude,” with his mother and father for the final few days of Hanukah. She hadn’t wanted to ruin anyone’s holidays, so she hadn’t told any of them about her diagnosis yet.
The only person who knew was William Cho. Irene studied his picture. Her phone had downloaded it on its own, from where she didn’t know. Dressed in a black suit and black tie, William looked somewhat startled against a blue Sears background. She wished she knew how to change it; this puzzled man was nothing like the delicate and curious boy she’d spent the night with a few days ago. The more she looked at this un-William, the more she wanted to see the real one again. She had bought him that Dylan scarf, but it was still back in her apartment. They hadn’t spoken since the last time she’d sat in this same café right after the diagnosis.
He would probably still be in the city; his parents lived in Queens. She tapped the star key every so often to keep the screen from going dark and taking him away.
• • •
867 Video was dead, and from the owner’s stares, William got the distinct impression that he was the sole reason the store hadn’t closed up yet. Perhaps William was keeping it open in a larger sense as well, for the trend among his coworkers was to have DVDs — no, Blu-rays now — conveniently delivered to their doors, or better yet, streamed to their TVs. “How do you have time to go to a store?” they asked him at work, when they saw his rentals sitting on his desk waiting to be brought back. “Didn’t they all close?”