William wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. What sort of a name was “Alis-ahh”? Had she said Alissa or Alicia? Had he misheard?
So he sat, awake and unwilling to move, until the sun rose up over Queens.
• • •
Irene woke up at seven, vaguely aware she had only an hour to get to the hospital to begin her first day of treatment. She’d had one of the strangest dreams of her life — Dr. Zarrani had said it wasn’t uncommon for cancer patients to get them. Dreams like full-on acid trips. Surreal visions that didn’t always end right away when she woke up. The doctor had called them “healing dreams” but hadn’t explained what exactly was healing about them. Irene barely had time to think about it, however. She was hectically running around the apartment. When William asked why, she told him she had to get ready for her first infusion.
“Just wear what you had on yesterday,” he said.
“That’s — don’t be ridiculous.” She thought about taking back what she’d said about him being girlish, but she thought that might please him too much, and besides, when she opened up his wardrobe (made of real wood that was faux-weathered), she discovered that his closet was filled with clothes that she could easily wear. A pair of jeans that must not have fit William since college were a bit torn in the knees but looked quite good on her with the cuffs rolled and a yellow necktie as a belt. She spotted a pink dress shirt and rolled the sleeves around her elbows, cinched it in the back with a rubber band, and tucked that into the waistline of the jeans.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you had a girl living here with you,” she said, detaching a silvery pull cord from his window shade and retying it as a necklace.
“We’re going to a hospital, No Ears. What does it matter what you look like?” William groaned. She saw his eyes were sunken and bleary.
“It’s my first day, I have to make a good impression! Do you have any makeup?”
“Why would I? Let’s go! You look beautiful!”
“What did I say about that word?” she chided. “Come on, you don’t have anything? Who doesn’t have some concealer lying around for bad skin days? Or some lipstick a girlfriend left somewhere?” She eyed him curiously as she lifted a white panama hat down from his hat rack. “I know you’ve had girlfriends. Don’t tell me you bought this for yourself.”
William placed it on her head. “It was a gift from my mother.”
Irene took the hat off and studied it. “It’s excellent. I’d like to meet this woman.”
“If you will hurry up and get to your appointment, you can meet her tonight.”
Her eyes widened. She hadn’t expected him to take her up on it, but suddenly she wanted to meet Mrs. Cho very badly — if anyone could help uncover the real William beneath all this showroom furniture, it would be her.
He went on. “We’re having a big family dinner for Christmas Eve. You’ll love it. It’s like my own personal circle of hell.”
Irene clapped eagerly.
William began to say firmly, “If you keep delaying and we miss your appointment, then we’ll never get there in time…” but Irene was already halfway out the door.
• • •
They made it into the hospital just in time, and Irene enjoyed the holiday decorations much more now that William was there to look aghast alongside her. After filling out some more paperwork, they met with Dr. Zarrani, who guided them around the chemotherapy suite as if it were an apartment they might be interested in buying.
“No elves or reindeer in here!” Irene said.
“The design was done around the concept of a Japanese Zen garden,” she said. “You come in over here past the waterfall sculpture to check in each morning.”
All the light came from great brass lanterns, and to one side of the waiting area was an actual sandbox filled with rocks and little rakes, which two children were busy attempting to demolish. The tables, covered in magazines and catalogs, were all made of polished stone, and trimmed bonsai trees divided the waiting area to make it more peaceful.
Dr. Zarrani stood stiffly. “I know it seems silly, but studies have shown an improvement in patient recoveries.”
William balked. “What, like through some ancient Shinto magic or something?”
The doctor led them back into the infusion area. “It has to do with the patient being more relaxed and inspired to face the hard work ahead.”
“Aesthetics are important, William,” Irene snapped. “Hence, why I wanted to look nice.”
“You look very nice,” Dr. Zarrani said to her as William raised his hands in apology. “Now take a seat here by this blue… pagoda thing. The nurses will be out soon to begin you on doxorubicin and cisplatin. It takes a few hours, so I hope you brought a good book.”
Irene eyed the nearby Vogues and Cosmopolitans suspiciously. She’d read the same ones yesterday in the waiting room.
“I can run out to a bookstore and find you something,” William offered.
“Well…,” Irene said, looking mischievous as she pulled a heavy volume out of her purse. “I took this off your shelf this morning. I hope that’s all right.”
He did look a bit startled at the sight of his copy of the Iliad, the Jacob-disapproved-of Lattimore translation, surely filled with old college notes and underlinings, but he shrugged, not knowing, Irene was sure, that the notes and underlinings were precisely why she wanted to read it.
“Can I wait here with her?” William asked the doctor.
“For eight hours? Don’t be absurd. Go buy your mother something for Christmas. And get some sleep. I know you were wide awake all night.”
William wanted to stay until they started, but Irene wouldn’t hear of it.
“You go or I go,” she said. So William went.
Dr. Zarrani came in to start the drip. “The doxorubicin distorts the shape of the helix, which prevents it from replicating, and then the cisplatin binds the DNA to itself, which triggers a kind of self-destruct order inside your cells.”
Irene felt her nervousness quieting in the comforting hands of the doctor, as she scrubbed the crook of Irene’s elbow with a cotton ball soaked in yellow antiseptic. Irene had thought that they’d inject something into her face, not her arm.
“How do the drugs know to go from there all the way up to my eye?”
“Unfortunately, they don’t,” Dr. Zarrani explained. “Normally we’d do surgery first, but in the interest of not damaging your eye, we’ll start with this and hope it shrinks the tumor a little. The chemo drugs go into your bloodstream and go everywhere. They’ll get the tumor but also everything else.”
Irene sat up straighter in her chair. Not a surgical strike then, she thought, just a full-on scorched-earth policy. And then she remembered her dream from the night before. She’d been crawling, for what seemed like hours and hours, through a barren desert. Finally she’d come across a great black leaf, and she’d hidden in its shade. But once there, safe, something very strange happened. She’d begun to spit, uncontrollably. Great threads of saliva flowed uncontrollably from her mouth, and she’d felt drier than ever as she’d writhed about, trying to stop. Only when she’d thought she’d desiccate completely like a mummy in a tomb did she realize the great threads she’d released weren’t saliva but silk. And while she’d been writhing, she’d inadvertently, or perhaps instinctually, woven this silk into a great shimmering womb, its walls glistening with cool dew. She’d been just about to climb inside and sleep for a thousand years, when she’d woken up on top of William.
“Now this will sting a little bit,” the doctor said.
There was a terrific pinch, and then Irene could feel something alien inside her arm. It would be there for hours, and she would keep on feeling it there, long after.