by Tracy Barone
Cheri roams the house like a dog searching for a comfortable spot. Of course she’s going online. How could she not? Pancreatic cancer, she learns from her first hit, is Napoleonic. Nasty and short, it invades everything around it. Everywhere she goes, she’s hammered with facts and statistics she doesn’t want Michael to see. Her finger remains poised to close the browser at the first sound of his footstep. One website comes with a warning: Some patients may not want to read the following. Cheri reads it all: thirty thousand deaths per year, average one-year survival rate, only 3.2 percent of patients survive more than five years. She finds a few defeating-the-odds comment threads: a woman who says qigong healed her; a man who claims to have survived through diet and prayer; patients who were told they had three months left and had lived three years. She reads that the chances for five-year survival increase to 30 percent with a surgical procedure called the Whipple.
Cheri’s stomach is gurgling. She reads that by the time pancreatic cancer patients are showing symptoms, the disease has already invaded other organs. It could have been lurking for months in silent invasion. She ignored his constant exhaustion, writing it off as laziness and disaffection. Now that she thinks about it, he had been complaining about his stomach after meals. She should have paid more attention. The struggle to feed and be fed is a battleground, per the website. “Enjoy your food,” Milton the Penguin’s wife says as she serves him kippers. How can she be the penguin wife? Hunting she could do, but Michael does the shopping. She hates grocery stores and will wind up getting the wrong things, and he’ll say, “What the fuck is that, you know I can’t eat that. It will kill me!” Only this time he won’t be exaggerating.
Michael is in the den, sitting on the sofa, watching the news. “Do you want anything? Soup? I can order in.” When he doesn’t respond she says, “Listen, we can’t get ahead of ourselves; we’ll take it step by step. Make a plan.”
“We? This isn’t a group activity last I checked.”
“I’m obviously not going to say the right thing now. Which is fine. I can’t walk in your shoes, but I’m here. For whatever that’s worth. You are not alone.”
“I need to feel what I’m feeling without you trying to make it better. Can you respect that?”
Cheri had always believed she could do anything she set her mind to; it was a matter of will and perseverance. But she hadn’t gone through a major medical crisis with anyone close to her. Sol’s death was immediate and unexpected—he had dropped dead in the middle of the street, carrying a Thanksgiving turkey. She stands with the refrigerator door open and feels lost. Is prosciutto still edible after four weeks? Is it milk or water you put in eggs for an omelet? She pulls out what’s left of her mother’s cured pork and peels off strip after strip, hardened edges and all, chewing mindlessly until nothing is left but the wax paper.
The next days are a muddle of exam rooms, expectations, and fear. Waiting for doctors who assure them they are the best; for Michael to be inserted and extracted from machines; for insurance to preauthorize; for medical records to transfer; for the phone to ring with results. The hospitals feel like airports—transitory places with too many people, bad lighting, overpriced food, and chairs that hurt your back. A place you want to get out of quickly, but it’s never that simple. One in three. One in three people will develop cancer in their lifetime, but who will be the one? She tries not to stare at the pretty young Asian woman sitting across from her in the waiting room. She’s wearing a scarf to cover her baldness. What kind of cancer does she have? Cheri imagines asking her, So, what are you in for? As for Michael, he keeps looking like Who is everyone talking about? I’m not sick. I don’t have cancer. He looks nothing like the gray, gowned ghosts shuffling down corridors trailing IV lines like mutant jellyfish.
Cheri and Michael are two planets traveling in their separate orbits in the same solar system. They intersect briefly, then return to their own paths. Michael meditates. It seems like whenever Cheri walks into his office or their bedroom, he is on the cushion, eyes closed, palms open or sometimes positioned in mudra at his heart. One night she woke up to a loud ripping sound. Michael was tearing his T-shirt so it fell off his chest, saying over and over, “Why, why?” Seeing him literally rend his garments was so painful, so private, she burrowed back under the covers. The ripping sound reverberated in her mind even when he’d calmed down and slid back in bed. As for her, she walks around, saying sometimes out loud but mostly to herself, “He will be the exception, not the rule.”
News from the team at the cancer center isn’t good. Michael’s tumor is inoperable; the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes close to his liver. The lead oncologist, Dr. Perry—Randall, as Cheri insists on calling him—a humorless man with skin that looked parboiled, has assembled a team of experts to make their pitches. Michael is still healthy enough to be given a combination of chemo drugs, and the doctors are debating which protocol to use, weighing side effects from nausea to potential nerve and kidney damage. Cheri sees Michael’s aneurysm look and feels his rage coming like a pressure drop.
“Let’s just cut to the chase,” he barks. “Are we talking a year?”
“Given the stage of the cancer and location, the prognosis is typically six months to a year after chemotherapy. With a clinical trial, maybe more.” Dr. Perry moves into a hard sell on a combination of chemotherapy and radiation; the chemo guy holds up a port system for the administration of drugs at home. He pulls a tube out of the fanny pack, demonstrates how it will connect to a port Michael will have in his chest. Suddenly it all feels too real.
“You’re not going to point to the exit rows and tell me to put my mask on first? I’ve got the picture, and no, I won’t be trying this one on for size,” Michael says, waving away the fanny pack. “I want to think this through—including alternative treatments. I know you guys aren’t high on those, maybe because the drug companies don’t make money off them, and the drug companies fund your research. It’s to your benefit to push what they’re selling. Even if it makes people feel even worse than if they did nothing. But you doctors have to do something so people feel like they’ve tried everything possible.”
“That’s an extremely cynical viewpoint,” Dr. Perry says, “and misinformed. The statistics on chemotherapy clearly show that it does prolong life in many cases.”
“I’m aware of the statistics. But unlike a lot of people, I’m not a sheep who will just follow the flock, not unless I believe it’s right for me.”
Cheri might have been proud of Michael for being true to his stance on Big Pharma if this didn’t scare the shit out of her. “Let’s just get back to the options. At least hear them out,” she says.
When Michael asks questions about nontraditional protocols, Dr. Perry officiously recites statistics to show that enzymes, diet, supplements, and daily coffee enemas do nothing more than act as placebos, sometimes accelerating the course of the disease.
“This cancer is extremely aggressive and we’ve caught it late. If we don’t make an offensive strike with chemo and radiation right now, you won’t even get to the six-month mark.”
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the show?” Michael says. “Thank you, gentlemen, and good night.” Michael laughs ruefully in their faces. The odds are awfully rigged, but if you’re going to fight, Cheri believes, at least have the right weapons.
In the car, Michael buries his head in his hands. They sit in silent deflation, and Michael’s shoulders start to shake. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” Cheri murmurs, touching his back. He lifts his head up and she’s shocked to see he’s laughing. A big peal of laughter rises from his belly. “What?” she asks, confused. “What’s so funny?”
Michael shakes his head. “I just realized the translator got it wrong. And not just because he’s a dentist. It’s the punch line to a bad joke, is what it is.” Cheri has no idea what he’s talking about.
“Let me in on it,” she says, “I could use a laugh.”
“Oh, man, it’s too go
od. Remember Ramon talking about the grain at your birthday party? We thought it was about you not getting pregnant? The translator had it right the first time; it was me. Ramon was talking about the tumor. I’m the one who was pregnant; I have the bad seed.”
Over the next few weeks, Michael starts a macrobiotic diet and researches alternative, natural therapies. Because Michael shows no outward evidence that he’s dying any faster than anyone else, it would be easy to be lulled into denial. And perhaps denial is playing a role in his fuck-Western-medicine attitude. All the more reason for Cheri to be vigilant. Cancer requires an all-out attack, a data blitz. Cheri knows there are alternative weapons out there more potent than macrobiotic diets. She dives into the online swell and finds clinical trials in France, non-FDA-approved experimental drugs from China that could increase life expectancy by a year. Maybe.
The reality is that Michael’s bad seed—as he now refers to it—is proliferating quickly and Cheri can’t help but read further into the shaman’s prediction. Maybe Ramon was seeing not only what was barren in her womb but also what was barren in their marriage. She was planning on leaving Michael. The terrible irony is that his cancer will give her an out she never would have wanted. The world was an unsafe place. She might have fled to the Ivory Tower after what went down with Eddie Norris, lived a life of only everyday risks, but nothing was safe. It makes her want to go out and buy a gun. Having a gun always made her feel safe. Why did she ever agree to give that up? She knows the answer, of course. Michael stuck to his proverbial guns when it came to establishing a ban as a condition for living together.
Everyone has an Internet vice: porn, eBay, dating or gambling sites. Precision firearms made of German steel are her weakness. As Cheri clicks out of her windows on pancreatic cancer research and onto the Heckler and Koch homepage she thinks: No harm, no foul; I’m just looking. But now, scrolling through pages of the latest, fully automatic nine-millimeter pistols, she has a primal desire to have and to hold. Thanks to Mayor Daley the only way she can legally have a gun is if she keeps it in one of the few suburbs that hasn’t adopted his draconian ban. It’s amazing to think that gun ownership was once the biggest issue in her marriage. She shuts it all down. Erases the site from her browser history. She wants to say, I’ll do whatever you want. If you let Michael live I’ll never look at a gun site again. I’ll give to the starving children, quit smoking, be nicer to my mother, stop thinking about Eddie Norris. Take back the word separation.
A small miracle does happen. Suddenly the object of Michael’s epic procrastination, now definitively titled Everybody Must Get Stoned, is declared finished. Seemingly overnight, HMS Bay becomes drug-free; gone is his old apothecary cabinet full of pills, dope samples, and hallucinogens. Jars of foul-smelling roots, herbs, powders, and liquids leave only dust to outline their existence. The documentary left Michael’s grasp with little fanfare and an expired distribution deal, but he was decidedly upbeat and set out to gather his crew for a new project. Cheri can barely recognize this new Michael. He is buoyant, purposeful. He is living in the present. Today is a new day.
“The question is, can anyone tell you when you’re going to die?” Standing before the five members of his longtime documentary team, Michael is animated, energized, charismatic. “Can a doctor? A psychic? A voodoo priestess? Given that I have a finite but as yet undetermined number of days, I’ve decided that I want to spend them taking a last stand. A filmic campaign across the U.S. where we uncover every roadside palmist, every neon psychic sign, every fortune-teller at every country fair from Coney Island to New Orleans to Santa Cruz. We’ll talk to everyone who claims to have the gift and ask them about death—specifically, my death. It’ll be called The Palmist.” He passes out T-shirts. A hand with Day-Glo-colored palm lines is on the front and on the back is Last Stand. Michael Shoub 1945–?
The team is huddled on the couch and on the frayed armchairs of HMS Bay. They glance up at Bertrand, leaning against Michael’s desk, to guide them. He has long been the still center at the eye of Michael’s creative hurricane. There’s Jane, his production coordinator and assistant, a woman whose entire life has been spent midwifing other people’s art. She doesn’t even have a cat waiting for her at home. Giaccomo, a chameleon-like director of photography who seems to take on the aesthetic characteristics of whatever subject he’s working on. There’s Jonah, Michael’s former student turned editor, and Papa John, a wiry Cajun soundman who doubles as a composer. “The palm is like the stop sign,” Michael continues, “recognizable in any language. It shows up everywhere—in strip malls next to McDonald’s, chicken stands in the South, off the highway, next to the rattlesnake museum in Albuquerque or on a beach shack in Venice. Imagine looking past the signs, through the windows with the cheap venetian blinds, into the faces of so-called American mystics. Remember the snake oil salesman in the beginning of The Wizard of Oz? Bertrand, you know who I’m talking about, right? Dorothy’s on the bike with Toto and she stops to buy an elixir out of his horse-drawn wagon…”
“Yeah, of course, let me see what it will cost to use a clip,” Bertrand says.
“You’re talking about Professor Marvel; Frank Morgan played him,” Jane says, her tiny face peeking out from her mass of gray hair. “They wrote it for W. C. Fields, but he wanted too much money. Morgan also plays the wizard and the horse-of-a-different-color cabdriver.”
“Leave it to you, Jane.” Michael smiles. “Call it an odyssey or a fool’s quest; we’re going on the road to find these people. I’ve started the research, but it’ll be all hands on deck on this one—especially as I’m the subject. We’ll get a rabbi and a priest saying mortality is in God’s hands and we’ll show my doctors being certain about their grim timeline. God versus Western science. We start on the East Coast and work our way west. This will be down and dirty, folks. And fast. This is the first and last time we talk about my cancer. I’m still the same stubborn asshole I’ve always been. Don’t treat me any differently because I sure as hell won’t be any easier on you. Worst thing that happens is I pull through and take fucking forever to edit this one as well.” Michael’s tribe is in his thrall. Cheri is obviously the only one who thinks this is a crazy, morbid idea, the manic effort fueling it being the exact opposite of the attention on treatment that Cheri had been trying to get Michael to pay attention to. “Okay, as for tone, Bertrand, I’d like a landscape kind of like we did in Disco, but more Robert Frank.”
“Screw Robert Frank. Best thing about The Americans is the car. You need a car. Vintage. American. With muscle.”
“Get on that,” Michael says. “I need interns yesterday; promise them college credit, whatever it takes. Get me visuals: ancient depictions of the lines in hands, art, architecture, where it started, how it spread. Jane: Locations, locations, locations. This will be one hell of a trip and there’s no way I can do it without all of you. Is everybody in?”
Cheri observes the faces in the room. The concern and obvious discomfort that flickered across every face this morning is gone, replaced with a contagious excitement. The team would follow Michael almost anywhere. Everyone is in.
“I said it’s a good idea,” Cheri says cautiously as she sits at the kitchen table, surrounded by pancreatic cancer research, after Michael’s troops have gone for the day. Michael is making himself some tea.
“It’s a great idea.”
“Okay, it’s a great idea,” she says. “But can we discuss how all this travel will work with your treatment? I’m not giving up on that clinical trial in France with stem cells; it starts at the end of the month. The timing is similar on the other two at Johns Hopkins. We should go over that now so there’s still time to get you in.” She opens a file and shows him a paper. “Here are the dates.” He looks at her and shakes his head.
“I’ve decided that I’m going to give the natural treatment a chance.”
It takes Cheri a moment to absorb the resolve in Michael’s voice.
“Have you spoken to your doctors? What d
oes Randall think about this?”
“It’s not in his, quote-unquote, wheelhouse. I’ve already had my metabolic typing done to follow the Gonzalez regimen. The clinic is figuring out which enzymes and supplements I’ll need on the road, and they can be freeze-dried and shipped to our various locations, cross-country. Jane can handle the logistics.”
“The Gonzalez people don’t know what your locations are like. You’ll be going to Podunk towns hundreds of miles from a reputable hospital. What happens in an emergency?”
“I’ll manage. I am managing quite well so far. I’ll be checking in by phone, and Bertrand’s setting up a video-call system. I can overnight blood samples as needed. If I need a hospital it will be a hell of a lot better in the U.S. than that pre-morgue waiting room we went to in Chiang Mai.”
“But what about your schedule? You’re exhausted from a shoot when you’re healthy; it takes you weeks to recover. You’re not thinking realistically. I know you can fight this, Michael.” She clutches his arm. “There are people who have lived years beyond what the doctors told them. The clinical trial in France is extremely promising. Don’t you think it’s worth a shot?” He looks away, crosses his arms over his chest. When he looks back in her direction, she can see the certainty in his eyes.
“Bottom line: It comes down to how do I want to spend my time, however little of it I have left. Do I want to fly to France and spend those moments with doctors in a hospital being monitored and observed, feeling like shit from the drugs they give me to combat the disease that’s going to kill me anyway? Or doing something I love with people I love?” Cheri cringes inwardly at the implication of what he’s just said.
“You’re going to the extreme. Some people tolerate chemo better than others. If it were me, I’d do everything and anything—”
