He moved his right foot in front of him, to the left, as he lowered his chest towards the ground, stretching out his left leg behind him to lie flat, while his right leg was bent and trapped beneath him. Looking down at his virtual reflection, he could see the piriformis muscle that crossed his right buttock at the back of his hip, helpfully highlighted in blue.
The operation to remove the tumour on his spine had impinged on a nerve in his spinal cord, giving rise to a month of excruciating pain. The pain felt as if it was in the muscle, though that had not actually been damaged at alclass="underline" the pain there was a phantom, a false message. But his body didn’t know the difference, and the muscle had clenched up tightly to protect itself against the perceived injury. Now that the nerve had settled down, that tightness had turned the original phantom pain into a self-fulfilling prophecy: the piriformis muscle really was the problem now. Not only had it been damaged by its own defensive response, by refusing to move normally it was pulling everything else around it out of shape. It needed to be coaxed back into its old routine, but after a month spent cowed and quivering, that was easier said than done.
Martin leant forward as far as he could; the pressure on his right leg as he folded it against his body was transferred to the piriformis, stretching it a little. He kept the position for a count of twenty, then eased off.
Resting, he gazed down at the reflection of the back of his leg, at the inelegant network of fleshy ropes that had managed to tug itself so far out of balance that he was still taking painkillers just to sleep. There was something almost comical about the fact that the cancer itself had, so far, given him no pain, and the sophisticated drugs targeted against it had left him with none of the side-effects he’d been prepared to face, based on a lifetime of media images of people on chemotherapy. Instead, he just felt as if he’d been kicked in the arse by a donkey.
He leant forward again, holding the stretch to thirty this time, trying to persuade the stupid muscle that its cringing was only making things worse. When he relaxed he scrutinised the result; he could have sworn that the bundle of blue fibres was already a few millimetres longer than when he’d started. But the imagery he was seeing wasn’t likely to be that accurate; he didn’t have magic MRIVISION, showing him his true anatomy in real time. It was all just an educated guess, a simulation cobbled together from a month-old scan and some postural cues extracted from ceiling cameras in the gym and the goggles’ superficial teraHertz view of his body. It could help him perform the exercise correctly, by looking for the same information as a human physiotherapist would, but that was it. He couldn’t look down and search himself for new secondary tumours.
He did the piriformis stretch five times, then swapped legs and repeated the set; his left side was giving him no trouble, but the aim was to keep everything symmetrical. Then he went through half-a-dozen other lower-back exercises diligently enough, but with rather less zeal. They were all beneficial, and he didn’t doubt his physio’s advice for a moment, but it was hard to feel a sense of urgency over slightly stiff hamstrings; none of this routine was going to make a difference to the cancer, at least not directly, but if he could win back pain-free days and drug-free sleep, that would be both a victory in itself and a plausible boon to his overall health.
Martin showered and headed out of the hospital. He’d barely taken three steps along the road when a shabby white car pulled up beside him and a man in his twenties called out, ‘Taxi?’ The car bore no company insignia; everyone in Iran was a taxi driver when they felt like it.
Martin nodded and got in the front seat; they agreed on a price to his home. After Martin replied tersely to his attempts to start a conversation, the driver cranked up the volume on his stereo, unleashing a track with a female vocalist who sounded like an Iranian Céline Dion interspersed with an insipid male rapper.
Martin tried to be stoical, but the song was too loud to blank out and too excruciating to ignore. ‘Please, would you mind turning that down?’ he begged.
The driver didn’t seem offended, but he held out his hand. ‘Extra service.’
Martin said, ‘Forget it. Please stop the car.’
The young man pondered this new request. ‘You should pay me for my trouble.’
Martin was unmoved; they’d gone barely a hundred metres. ‘If you want flag-fall, get yourself a taxi licence. Just stop the car.’
‘You have to pay me!’ the man insisted, outraged. ‘You want me to call the police?’
‘Go ahead.’ Martin opened the door; the driver panicked and screeched to a halt, allowing him to disembark.
Martin slammed the door and walked away down Enqelab Avenue, trying to remember where the bus stop was. He paused and steadied himself against the side wall of a news kiosk, listening to the whine of motorbikes weaving through the pedestrians. He needed the treadmill to warm up before stretching, but it took away his energy for half the day.
He had to be patient. In six months, the perfect new liver being cultured from his own modified skin cells would be fully grown, ready to replace the tattered organ from which the primary tumour had been sliced. Ten years ago, stage four cholangiocarcinoma would have been a death sentence – and any form of treatment a gruelling ordeal – but Martin’s weekly injections had no side-effects at all. Twenty-four hours a day, the artificial antibodies with toxins attached were bumping into the cancer cells strewn throughout his body and polishing them off, with no collateral damage. Nothing was certain – the metastasising cells could always acquire resistance – but his oncologist said he had a thirty per cent chance of surviving five more years. Thirty per cent, up from zero with the old treatments.
Martin found the bus stop. At home, he set his alarm clock, then undressed and climbed into bed. The donkey-kick burned, but he wasn’t supposed to take any more codeine before evening. He closed his eyes and pictured Mahnoosh beside him.
‘I miss you,’ he whispered. He felt a twinge of guilt; sometimes it felt dishonest, or, perversely, like a kind of infidelity to summon up her presence.
‘What’s the problem?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be forgotten.’
Maybe not. Or am I just putting words into your mouth?
‘As if I’d let you,’ she replied scornfully.
Martin suddenly recalled the night, not long after she’d moved in with him, when she’d been undressing for bed and he’d started chanting raucously, ‘Loose the Noosh! Loose the Noosh!’ She’d thrown a bedside lamp at him and broken his nose.
She said, ‘Give me your hand.’
She held it tightly as he drifted into shallow sleep, and when the alarm screeched three hours later, she still hadn’t deserted him.
Martin was at the school five minutes before the bell. The other parents nodded to him, but didn’t come too close; a few had tried to talk to him in the past, but there had always been a fundamental disjunction between the way they’d felt obliged to engage sympathetically with his family’s tragedy, and the way Martin had preferred that they mind their own fucking business.
Javeed emerged from his classroom staring at the ground. When he finally looked up and saw that Martin was there, his expression of relief was haunted, provisionaclass="underline" this time his father had come, but there was always tomorrow. Martin fought against the instinct to smother him in reassuring promises: I won’t leave you, pesaram; you’ll never be alone. Even if he’d believed the words himself, why would Javeed take them seriously? His radiant mother had died without warning, in perfect health. What could his grey-haired, limping, jaundiced father possibly say to regain an aura of invulnerability?