by Chris Eaton
Before companies like Cargill and Morton and Sifto made the process of ingesting salt much more convenient, our prehistoric ancestors used to get it from the animals we ate. Apparently, the animals we eat today aren’t nearly as kind to us. Every cookbook Chris Eaton could get his hands on – and, in the beginning, they were only too accommodating towards a hero like him – seemed to back him up. He was getting overly excited. If you check out any toxicity site, it lists sodium chloride (i.e., salt) on par with PCBs. The body recognizes sodium chloride as a poison and goes to work quickly to eliminate it. This cleansing process causes an overburden on our organs. When we consume table salt, our bodies must dilute it by twenty-three times the amount of cell water to neutralize it. Our bodies then retain water, causing edema and, later, cellulite from the excess fluid in the body tissue. Iodine was originally discovered by one of Napoleon’s chemists trying to make gunpowder out of seaweed, and they started adding it to salt in the early-1900s, theoretically to prevent goiters. Significant amounts of iodine can contribute to hypothyroidism.
Some table salts even include aluminum hydroxide, for easier pouring, which is a known cause of Alzheimer’s.
“Did you know that our ancestors of six to eight thousand years ago didn’t suffer from any of the debilitating diseases we have today?” Chris Eaton was surrounded by doctors at this point, and not the ones who fix your body, just your head. “Who knows? It might even be the cause of cancer. This salt is changing us. Into something we were never meant to be. The body does need sodium to live, but studies have shown all you need is about five hundred milligrams per day. Most people are consuming over six thousand! They’re trying to kill us… I think… or at least dumb us down…”
“And what proof do you have of this, Mr. Eaton? What makes you think there’s someone out to get you?”
“Who needs proof when you have facts?”
And they suggested he take some time off.
***
The doctors figured his delusions had been brought about by the incident. It was a fairly natural reaction, they said, for the brain to try to make sense of something so nonsensical. Likely there was already something inside of him before the accident, they said, something about who he was, perhaps genetic or perhaps the result of some random coincidence, that was already making him feel confused and unsure about himself, that he felt directly connected to things the rest of us might ignore, or might associate with fate, or religion, or chance, and he had no way to make the logical leap to those connections until the proverbial pin dropped on this whole salt thing. Somehow, the stress and trauma of the situation had brought a jarring realization to his brain, and no matter how ridiculous it seemed to anyone on the outside, this was how his brain had fixed itself, so no amount of logic was likely to convince him otherwise.
The iloperidone helped, but mostly it left him dizzy and sleepy. And his dreams were always of other people. The real remedy came from Julia falling ill. She collapsed while waiting for the bus to school, and the next driver on the scene called for an ambulance. She felt fine, she said to him, embarrassed. Really, she told the paramedic, there’s no need for all this. I’m not even sure why I’m here, she said to the doctor on duty. And by the time Chris Eaton reached the hospital, the doctor was saying it was nothing a good birth wouldn’t fix. They’d been so crushed by the late miscarriage in their first pregnancy that they’d found it difficult to resume a healthy sex life, and this news came as a surprise. But it also gave Chris Eaton a new focus. He had learned a thing or two about carpentry while working at the Pentagon, and while Nots’s injury lawsuit was ramping up, he put that to use redecorating his office into a baby’s room, building a crib from scratch, as well as a high chair and several simple toys, from a duck to a boat to a small bike and tennis racket. In the face of this new life they were creating, the strange connections he’d been making before seemed to disappear, or become less important to him. Besides, there was an all-important piece missing, like a jigsaw puzzle without a box to compare, and the section in the middle was impossible to complete. Who stood to really benefit from the 9/11 attacks? Who was pushing the buttons in America? Who was his fabled Illuminati ringleader? None of it made sense any more.
One night, with Julie hugging him from behind, the baby kicked so hard he could feel it against his back. When he put his face against her belly and spoke gently, there was always a reciprocal tap. He forgot about the Pentagon and the salt and all the numbers. There were bad days, naturally, but mostly he thought how nice it would be to finally return to work like he used to. Would he still have a job at the Pentagon after all this? He wasn’t sure.
Then, when the doctors felt it was safe, Julie showed him some research of her own. There was no Tonia Hersc, never had been. She’d found some of the cookbook titles he had told her, but none of them were by Tatienne Villars. Le Journal had no record of her. There had never been a poet and miner named Jeorg Hersc, only a soldier in the Seven Years War. No Humphry Davy. Hemingway was real, of course, and Petrousa. But Petrousa had never left his native Greece to live in France. And the winner of the first Paris-Brest race was not named Charles Terront but Charles Thery. Chris Eaton stared at her for a moment. Then his face softened, and he thanked her. It was all starting to make so much more sense.
“I love you,” he said, and pretended to fall sleep.
***
The settlement wasn’t enough to support them forever, but was enough to allow them to spend a few years with their child before either would have to return to work. Julie wanted to put it all behind her, anyway. This would let them start over and forget this whole thing ever happened. But he couldn’t forget. Before the government lawyers came back with their last offer, they delivered a big speech to him about how they understood what he was going through, and that, as the only survivor of that section of the Pentagon crash, they knew he was important to the American people at this moment, and that they wanted to make sure that he was treated fairly. They wanted to make sure it was not unjust. And Chris Eaton paused, then leaned over to Archie and Julie and whispered something they could not hear. They asked him to speak up.
“What do you mean,” he repeated. “I was the only survivor?”
And the next day the lawyers came back with a deal.
***
After the next elections, Senator Chi left her position in California to take over as Secretary of Health and Human Services. The product of a Jewish mother and Chinese father, raised partly in Asia, with a PhD in biology, and one of the most popular public officials the West Coast had ever produced, not even the opposition could argue against her appointment. She could converse easily with the Chinese scientists about the burgeoning avian and swine flu problems they were having. She gave a speech about it to Congress. It was only a matter of time, she said, until one of these flu viruses became capable of human-to-human transmission and the next pandemic would sweep the world. Then, an entire island of aboriginal people fell ill in Central America with “a respiratory illness of unknown provenance.” Cuba ceased letting people in or out of the country but would not say why. In Mexico, a battery manufacturer had to shut down production when no one showed up for work. The first US case happened in California with a nine-year-old girl who could not be named in news reports. A young hockey player in Canada had died on a weekend trip only hours after contracting a fever. Agents from the American Centers for Disease Control were dispatched to all locations. Less than three weeks later, there were confirmed cases in Spain and Scotland. In Wales, Israel, and New Zealand. What did it mean, Chris Eaton wondered. What were the links? Austria and Germany. Ireland, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Several more in Canada. Three hundred and fourteen people placed under quarantine in China. Multiple cases in California and Texas. In fact, an entire school district in Texas was shut down for a week, from what later ended up being a false alarm, but there was increased pressure on the CDC and Senator Chi to introduce a nationwide vaccination program. But not until the illness
es of celebrities like Ani Torches, Rich Gannon and Ian Dowd put a very public face on it did they start rolling things out.
Near the end of Julie’s second trimester, in her twenty-fourth week, the government decided the disease was reaching epidemic proportions and that it would be best to vaccinate the entire population, with the highest risk groups including the obese, those with heart disease, people with diabetes, asthma or kidney disease, people with AIDS and pregnant women going first. It was also initially suggested that pregnant women get a special non-adjuvant shot, but the supply of that one was quickly exhausted, and their midwife recommended she get the full adjuvant shot, anyway. Chris Eaton was fairly adamant against it. Something was wrong, he said. He didn’t want to go into too many details, however, because he and Julie were doing so well. She agreed without too much argument.
Julie’s midwife, however, was also worried, but for different reasons. They were already running out of the vaccine in California. There was talk of a major blunder by the government, and she wanted to make sure Julie was protected before the shit really hit the fan. On her recommendation, Julie got the shot on the Friday. All weekend she had to resist jokes about not being able to lift her arms. On the Tuesday, she came down with mild, flu-like symptoms, which was to be expected, coughing, exhausted and achy but with a body temperature barely peaking over a hundred. Nothing serious. Their doctor diagnosed her with a mild sinus infection and prescribed an antibiotic. A week later, her lungs were full of fluid and they had to rush her to the hospital. Her blood oxygen levels had fallen below seventy and she was delirious, resisting all attempts to intubate, so they had to strap her down until they could purposefully sedate her into a paralytic coma. Her kidneys went first and her lungs, under constant pressure from the ventilator, were close behind, collapsing twice during the third week and blowing her up like a balloon. She looked like she weighed four hundred pounds, and stretch marks covered her body from her face and neck to her ankles.
Chris Eaton was told he might have to decide between saving her and saving the baby, and he told them to save her at all costs. They could always make another baby. But there was only one her.
After five weeks, while still in the coma, Julie’s lungs collapsed for the third time, and the baby’s fetal heart rate plummeted. With all choices now removed, Chris Eaton’s son was delivered by Caesarean after only twenty-nine weeks in the womb. His hands were so tiny and perfect, but his own airways were too blocked to admit a breathing tube, a side-effect of the drugs they’d been using to keep Julie alive. He lived only nine minutes and made only one sustained monosyllabic sound. Julie died the next morning.
Her grandfather died shortly after turning eighty, asleep in his bed, with his toupée on the nightstand and the bedroom door locked tightly against “the children.” This was despite the fact that they’d all grown up and moved out and had children of their own, from whom they likely kept their own secrets. It was only from the mortician that they would discover his baldness, when he rushed from the embalming room to meet them, and their father’s scalp was dangling from his wrist, the ample bangs caught in the pin of his heirloom watch, when he reached to shake their hands.
It’s surely from her grandfather that Chris Eaton has adopted the need for routine. On that last night, he did the same things he did on every night of his life since he’d married her grandmother, performing the same ritual for the past fifty-four years, nearly nineteen and a half thousand times, minus his six months of service in World War II, the occasional business trip, the nights he camped with the boys in the back yard and taught them to tie knots, the evenings before her grandmother’s birthdays when he feigned insomnia so he could set up his surprise for her in the morning, the few nights after he had had his first heart attack and was recuperating in hospital from his “routine” bypass surgery (he’d performed the first one in North Carolina himself, in 1953, when the chances of survival had been estimated much lower), the nights she had spent with her daughter-in-law when all of her kids fell ill at the same time, and his thrice-yearly fishing trips with their eldest son (her father). They watched the news together, drank a cup of lemon tea, brushed their teeth, complained about immigration, changed into their pajamas and he gave one final rant on the health detriments of drinking milk past childhood before turning out the light.
When her grandmother woke up the next morning, she discovered he’d stopped breathing.
“I can’t think of anything sadder than waking up one morning and realizing the person you love most in the world no longer exists. That he’s passed away when you weren’t even paying attention.”
But, of course, the more she thought about it, the more it seemed like the best way to go, so peacefully that he didn’t even wake her up. And the last thing they did was follow the rule they set up on the first night of their honeymoon: to never go to sleep without a kiss on the lips. “Honestly, I don’t know how long it would take me to go pick up that phone and call the hospital. You know? Knowing that was the last time I’d ever get to lie there with you again…”
She and Laurent had still not succeeded in getting pregnant. Plus recently she had started throwing up for no apparent reason. She would be fine, sitting at the computer in her underwear, when her entire mid-section seized up, and a violent thrust of nausea swept everything up into her chest. She ran to the washroom, threw up (four dry heaves and one shot of syrupy bile), and then curled up on the couch to wait for him to come home. Her doctor assured her it was still probably nothing, maybe just stress, which she’d been under a lot lately with the death of her father, but she also recommended another ultrasound and a stomach x-ray just to make sure.
This time the ultrasound technician said, “I use a condom.”
“What?”
“On the instrument. For your protection.”
But what was she being protected from? Wasn’t the problem already inside her? Why hadn’t they used it last time? The technician covered the condom and transducer with more Vaseline and pushed it inside her. Chris Eaton took deep breaths and held them, rolled on to her side, returned to her back, then walked down the hallway to wait outside the x-ray room. “Drink this fast,” the x-ray technician said with the lights out. She sucked the chalky paste through a straw, which tasted vaguely like medicine she used to take as a child, and five minutes later she was done.
They told her to drink lots of water. What they didn’t tell her was that her bowel movements for the next few days would come out completely white; mushy albino turds that only reinforced her fear that she was suffering from some kind of stomach or bowel cancer.
Nevertheless, the tests came back fine. She had a slightly herniated esophagus, which might explain the nausea, but her previous cysts had not returned. And nothing seemed to have spread to her uterus or colon, which had eventually taken the life of both her mother and grandmother. They were so relieved. They celebrated at their favorite restaurant. They bought a new crib and screwed on the floor next to it. But then that relief faded and again, they stopped having sex. It was the summer and they’d decided to save energy by dumping the air conditioner. And in the early days of July, they slid across each other like melting icebergs, falling with large splashes when they got out of bed in the morning for work. Once, she tried rubbing his leg under the restaurant table, sliding higher, and he pulled away. For a while, she even suspected he was having an affair. Then, she walked in on him while he was fondling himself in the washroom, and he let her feel the lump for herself.
The doctors said that testicular cancer was actually more common than breast cancer. Highly treatable. Low risk. Near a hundred per cent success rate. (These were terms they actually used. They said them almost without thinking. At any treatment facility, the most commonly used tool is vocabulary.) On closer inspection, however, his lump had already metastasized into his retroperitoneal lymph nodes, so they admitted him to the hospital immediately, removed the left testis and lymph node through an incision in the groin, then set him u
p for four rounds of BEP chemotherapy, which made all the hair on his body fall out until his skin seemed somehow unfamiliar to her, like some kind of beached whale on the couch watching illegally downloaded episodes of British sitcoms. Occasionally he would even leaf through a novel or two, and before all expectations, he was back at work. He was a real fighter, the doctor said. A real fighter. And no worries, they should still be able to have those kids they wanted, one testicle should handle the job nicely on its own. They weren’t entirely out of the woods, of course, but the first monthly tests came back clean. It looked like they had managed to get the whole thing.
Then, in the second month following the surgery, they discovered increased levels of neuron-specific enolase and human chorionic gonadotropin in his blood, and the CT scans confirmed that the cancer had spread to his left lung and a portion of his pectoral muscle.
Another operation.
Another strong recovery.
Three months after that, he started getting his own stomach pain.
She kissed him before he went to sleep.
They fell in love. They got married. And after a four-year residency in the colorectal unit of the Cleveland Clinic, she left the practical field to teach in the new Associate Degree Nursing Program at Hartnell College back in Salinas, California, introducing the first courses for enterostomal therapy in the state. Her husband, who was a distant cousin of the Kroger family, sold his father’s store to the grocery magnate in the funeral home parking lot, and spent most of the mid-sixties in Ohio with a hefty salary and not much to do but golf and put on weight. But those years were also some of Kroger’s finest, increasing their annual sales by another billion, so he was able to land another cushy job as Director of West Coast Marketing for Dole Food Company, Inc., where his greatest challenge was convincing a fast food nation that it was important to eat something besides processed meat and the occasional cheese slice. He helped initiate the national “5 A Day” program, aimed theoretically at curbing the rise of American obesity but really designed to launch more Dole products off the shelves. Before long, Chris Eaton had been appointed Director of the program, and was becoming heavily sought-after as a guest lecturer, across California and the rest of the country, on the importance of nursing in the nation’s failing healthcare plan.
