Israel has all the cancers, and they’re all his kinder: some intelligent, others stupid, some handsome, others ugly, some tall others short, some embarrassing, others to pride. To shep nachas over and above, kvell the tears. To forget — though it doesn’t matter which in the end. Why, because they’re his.
Because he feels it, he knows it, deep down in the cells. He has cancers of the heart and the liver and kidneys and lungs all two of them then the throat and prostate and that that’s testicular, too, leftleg cancer, rightleg cancer, which he feels down to his toes that have cancers of their own to cope with. To deal, with the bladder control, the hairloss; imagining the mirrored shame, hurting as if a reflection of the pain disembodying, gotten under the skin despite the pills, despite treatments. He has eye cancers, nose cancers and ear cancers, brain cancers — and cancer. His cancers have cancer and those cancers have cancer, his tumors everywhere have tumors themselves and those tumors, tumors; tumors unto tumors unto tumors unto tumors unto the umpteenth generation, why not. In his office, Israel sits in what most would think perfect physical shape, recently evaluated, relative doctor signedoff on as maybe, nu, a dessert overweight, like most he could stand to lose say ten, twelve pounds, no more meals after snacks, though in generally satisfactory overall health, except for the — anyway thinking himself, maybe even wishing himself, dead away.
But until that wish might be fulfilled, finalizing him, naming him tensed in the past, Israel names himself, his own tumors — some he gives his kinder’s names and some names he thinks are his kinder’s, some names he would’ve like to have named them: Rubina, yes, Josephine and Batya, Evan and Jake — Jacob, to her — Josef or Joseph and Justin and Samuel, Simon and Steven or Stephen, and Benjamin, yes, Benjamin ben Israel Israelien; he’d always hoped for a boy, they all had, women crying out for a son, for Israelien cancers to come.
Why does he name them? To master them. To ignore.
Israel’s been sitting and naming his cancers, knowing them more intimately than he knows his own kinder, Hanna suspects. While he should be heading home, he reclines, swivels, tilts renal papillæ aching kidneyways to the left in his chair, hunches to count his cancers on his cancerous fingers with cancerous numbers kept orally in the black, deep into the carcinogenically latestage early evening, then thinking, maybe my cancers should have the honor themselves, their own cancers, too, and those cancers’ cancers, it’s only proper — and, soon enough, quarter after advanced, surgically halved, and with Maintenance spilling their own diagnoses in all the languages of Queens far dark down the hall, everything would seem cancer, cancerous, carcinogenic: his chair, his computer never unpacked, still in its box on the floor, and the quarky, panging computer things inside the computer still in its box on the floor, too, and his fountainpen and the dark though washable ink that it looks like cancer anyway, and the door’s a cancer door, his desk a cancer desk, he’s thinking the elemental material of the universe is cancer and that the fundamental quality of the universe is how cancerous it is: how the planets are nothing but tumors, mere carcinosarcomatic growths, verrucous hunks of whirlwinding storm, resistant to all terraformed, their surfaces ringed by heavy clouds of melanoma as malignant as hell; and how space, the orbital push and pull of everything it’s really only this cancerous tissue that’s always thickening and thinning into itself then perpetually expanding out then falling in cancerously until death and everything, it just dies. And then the cancers themselves come to death. And then death itself dies. And then what, he’s still late.
And still sitting, slumped, wasted, waistexhaled all unbuttoned notch expansion, slippers off without socks and in an even more comfortable chair at the head of the table, his, looking down the seats and settings at his kinder, his friends and guests, his new employee, the mensch’s girlfriend or wife unknown be thy name, and laughing at whatever his wife’s laughing lipstick at if only because she’s laughing at it and healthily, strong — the lipstick that says I’m still red and angry, but this is how I want to look to love you with company curious — Israel looks down at his plate and considers the chicken and he knows, don’t ask him how he just knows, that this chicken has cancer, that his chicken died of cancer and died for him from cancer, expressly, painlessly quick. He cuts his cancer with his cancerous cutlery (presents and the plates, too, and all of it from relatives who’d died how, give you one guess), then chews his cancer with his cancerous teeth, swallows his cancer, washes it all down with a glass of cancer from his cancerous glass, wipes his cancerous mouth with cancer metastasized as a napkin, its darkening starch, and then swallows again cancerously feeling the swallowed cancer, the throat cancer, mingle carcinogenically with the stomach cancer its gastric adenocarcinomatic manifesting intestinally and beyond, making for an even stronger, an even more weakening, more carcinogenic cancer cancering all and then turns more to the left, leaning, reclining as if appearing to rest but really in pain says to his Hanna: Hanna, it’s all so delicious and thank you, then across the table to his right and further down toward the kinder to the Feigenbaums there, Mister Feigenbaum now nursing with napkin and ice his head, the wound incurred through the oven, would he sue — him shifting uncomfortably in his seat with the urge to loose himself, sick — Misses Feigenbaum, whatever her name is, maybe Faye, he forgets, make sure she gives you the recipe: chicken, slaughtered and shipped, still feathered a little, frozen in the freezer, defrosted in the fridge, giblets removed for their own preparation (don’t forget to preheat), delicious offal reciped to a malignant perfection; motherchosen last day the seasons stained out of the book, made with prunes, raisins, all sorts of fruity sweetnesses — and cancerous, has to be, these secretions expressed from the bake of its carcass, whose last breast has been excised for the removal of its diseased bones from his plate to his wife’s, and how he sops the seep up with a hunk of the challah he’d bought, those two loaves as if the salted halves of the heart, the kidneys, the lungs, the gizzardy liver, how they all must be bad for you, too.
The drawer was opened and never shut and hung like her mouth.
A door hangs open on its hinges, Hanna shuts it, wipes clear its glass with a cuff.
The screenedin porch’s door’s open as well.
Everything open she needs to shut, she won’t stand for open, which makes her feel slightly ill, mistaken. It’s the pregnancy, her fat with a scapegoat. Let us grow bloated and blame.
With everything shut, everything’s perfect, as if nothing ever went soiled, gone spoiled, as it was and has been clean forever, without taint; she’s talking to herself pure from the very beginning — all that’s dull the life and the knifing made sharp upon the whetstone of her tongue, foods wrapped to keep in her skin, how she’d always served, never served herself, never been served herself, that’s if you forget Wanda and how in her high mighty she daily does. Which is terrible, makes her feel what, slighting, mistaken, and ill. But now she opens a drawer, and leaves it open to feel it, the sin.
In the drawer are the towels, and there folded responsibly, neatly, under the towels, the rags, the ripped pieces of old white dress shirts gone inked, skiddled underwear spangled with monsters. Patched together and held torn with sop. Rags once engaged as veils to hide the about to be wed, the knotted napkin she’d held with her husband for dancing at their reception, then once slit a hole with scissors it’s for knowing each other later that night, while hiding the nakedness, pleasure. And under all the rags folded below the towels at the very rooting bottom of the stack and there almost stuck to the plastic lining of the drawer is the Rag — the dirtiest rag, the unmentionable, the secret, the rag best forgotten, for mistakes made and of them.