by Chris Vola
“When I’m gone,” he says, “who’s going to show your kids? I won’t be here forever.”
At night in your childhood bedroom in your parents’ house, you look at yearbook pictures of someone you don’t recognize.
Now you’re choking yourself again, saying the mantras.
It doesn’t take much.
When you return to the city where you live, you make an appointment with a shrink with an ethnically androgynous name whose mostly positive online reviews you’ve been tracking for months, even though you couldn’t find any pictures of him/her, but you’re cool with it because the office is one of only a few that take your out-of-pocket plan. You sign in with the doorman in the lobby of a 1970s-ish concrete abortion that looks like every downtown building, read headlines on the elevator flatscreen about a man falling sixty-five feet at a baseball game and the Dalai Lama’s website inflicting viruses on its visitors. You get off on the correct floor where you assume there will be an office with a comfortable couch in a warmly dimmed setting, a Morgan Freeman type with the gravitas and wisdom of two centuries of psychoanalytic progress. After a few tense minutes sitting in a waiting room where everything – the furniture, the carpeting, the receptionist’s hair – is composed of diverse shades of beige, you hear your name. You walk into a small room lit by hospital-like halogen lamps. Sitting in one of two chairs that straddle a large, tissue-box-accented coffee table isa mousey South Asian woman who can’t be more than five or six years older than you.
“I’m Dr. K—,” she says, standing up and extending a hand. “Have a seat and tell me what’s going on.”
The clinical florescence of the overhead light accentuates the shrink’s mottled, child-scar complexion. Your chair is comfortable enough but you wouldn’t want to watch TV in it. “I’ve been thinking a lot about dying,” you say, getting right into it because you’re on the clock, eyeing the tissues. “Actually it’s pretty much all I’ve ever fixated on. Not really my own death. I think about my parents getting old, the elderly people I see limping alone down the street, fat kids snarfing Tropical Skittles and Doctor Pepper. I guess it’s not that weird but for me it’s like, palpable. I think I’m losing weight, circles under my eyes. My mother says they’re hereditary but I never really noticed until recently.”
“Are you religious?”
“No. Spiritual maybe. I don’t know.”
“This is something that people have been wrestling with since before the language existed to express it. The primordial question. There aren’t any real answers, at least none I’m qualified to provide.”
Morgan Freeman’s voice wouldn’t have made it sting any less.
“Morgan Freeman is a false god,” you whisper to no one.
She asks you about your education, your hobbies, your sexual preferences. You imagine that each of your thoughts about death has contributed one mile-per-hour to the speed of a car you’re driving on a road with a singular destination, a cliff of an unknown depth. “You’ve got to try to stay in the moment,” she says at the end of the session, “in the present, stay busy. If the negative thoughts start to creep in, think of something positive in your life. It’s much more beneficial to be your own architect than to focus on things no one can control.”
The pep talk is beyond hackneyed, but you’ve always been susceptible to encouragement. It’s why you got good grades. When you leave the office and watch the video streaming in the elevator about a circus bear in Azerbaijan who has learned to ride a motorcycle, your hands stop shaking.
In terms of demographics, pigment, and the geography of your birth, you are lucky.
You stop smoking weed every day, lift free weights a few times a week, have coffee with friends you haven’t seen in a while who you consider “optimistic” and not “coke-jaded.” You initiate conversations with women at the restaurant where you’re a manager and at the bars where you drink and these encounters are occasionally successful, i.e. frictional. You re-read the Eastern philosophy textbooks that you were drawn to as an undergrad and that now make the tattoos that say “BE HERE NOW” in Sanskrit on your hip and the Chinese character the guy in the shop said means “Tao” on your back a little less like Phish-related mistakes and more like the fulfillment of a promise you made without knowing it. If everything exists in one moment, “before” might be irrelevant. Maybe there won’t be an “after.”
One night you burrow deep in a Wikipedia hole that ends with dozens of open tabs related either generally or explicitly to transhumanism, which, you read, is “a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition, including radical life extension to the point of biological immortality, fostering a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life.” The idea that you might, in the tangible future, be able to overcome physical limitations through radical technologies that are already being funded, to diffuse the death switch.
You love this shit.
“You crazy fuck,” you say to yourself, giggling, but for the better part of a week you surge through websites that extol the possibilities of nanomedicine, mind uploading, postgenderism, cyborgization, artificial wombs, chemical brain preservation. You skim through the less interesting rebuttals from neo-Luddite haters bitching about the trivialization of human identity, hubris, coercive eugenicism, and dozens of other killjoy buzzwords.
Your parents are probably screwed, but you will still be middle aged in 2045, the estimated year of the Singularity, when things are supposed to really start going down, transcendentally speaking, when negligible senescence won’t be limited to lobsters and jellyfish. You join Beta Race, an organization that publishes a monthly e-mag aimed “to deeply influence a new generation of thinkers who dare to envision humanity's next steps” and begin following the group’s transhumanist lifestyle recommendations. You practice caloric restriction and supplement your mostly raw and vegan diet with up to fifty daily supplements that increase mental clarity, reduce cortisol release, and promote optimal health and energy in convenient, antioxidant-rich doses. Your coworkers start calling you PT, short for Purple Teeth, for the red wine you consume daily (one per meal and another after an acceptable cardio session) in order to maximize your resveratrol intake, and you ask them what you should wear at their funerals, when your Body Mass Index will still be at an optimal 18.5 to 20. They can’t tell you to go fuck yourself because you’re their manager but you know they want to. You couldn’t care less about hurting the feelings of weaklings who have already given in to self-immolation. You learn to use group collaboration tools on your phone and visit personal networking sites to meet and communicate with other proto-posthumans. You download an app that turns your phone into a device to supplement your memories, constantly recording conversations and other audible events. You purchase better insurance that’s more than you can realistically afford but ensures that the co-pay will be low enough for the regular examinations and blood tests you will have to undergo ad nauseum.
Your stomach might convulse sometimes at work or when you pass a pub, anticipating the succulence of animal fat, the release of hard liquor, but these are necessary casualties of the focus on everlasting survival, and denial is an essential quality for success in the cyborg nirvana you are destined to inhabit.
One afternoon you’re jogging in a park on a trail that’s almost the exact distance, if run every day, that will lower your blood pressure to an optimal level in only a few weeks. You avoid eye contact with the idle dying you pass – a liver-spot scarecrow reading a newspaper, a neck-lolling woman in a wheelchair, a trio of shagged-out kids smoking cloves, an otherwise hale-looking guy wearing a Ballpark Franks tee shirt thereby declaring his affinity for nitrate-induced gastrointestinal carnage. Close to a personal best time, you build up speed for the last few hundred yards, glancing at the occasional female runner heading in the opposite direction. One girl slows down as she passes, eyes wide, points at your midsection, sort of trying to hold b
ack a laugh but also sort of concerned, and resumes her original pace. It’s humid, you’ve sweated through your shirt and there are probably some serious swamp ass issues going on, but you are exercising outdoors during an abnormally warm autumn.
Water transfer isn’t just normal, it’s necessary.
“Uninformed bitch,” you whisper.
You pull off your ear buds, turn to flag her down or at least pretend she’s the reason you stopped and not because you’re totally winded. You feel an unnatural squishing between your sock and cross trainer. You look down at the athletic shorts that were Carolina blue but are now crotch-covered in brownish stains, at the thin red stream that’s coursing down your right leg, congealing, pooling under the tongue of your shoe.
An alert beeps and blinks on the activity tracker attached to your wrist. Your heart beats per minute have tripled.
*
Your grandmother had been afflicted by hemorrhoids for most of her later years, referring to them as her “piles.” You’d always been careful to avoid the slime-capped Preparation H tubes and stool softener bottles that resided openly in her bathroom.
What’s currently sticking out of your ass isn’t like the gargantuan protrusions you’d seen in waking nightmares while listening to her graphic complaints, tiny enough to avoid the urge to seek immediate medical attention. Though that small relief does little to ease the throbbing that’s making it impossible to sit down.
Curled on your side in bed, tablet-addled, you learn that fifty percent of Americans will suffer swollen veins in the anal canal at some point in their lives, usually after age thirty and usually due to the strain of soft bowel movements, constipation, obesity, or pregnancy. Though initially painful, the prognosis is rarely serious, and can usually be corrected by a combination of increased fiber, drinking more water, drinking less alcohol and caffeine, exercising frequently, and applying an over-the-counter ointment when necessary. Except you can’t be certain that what you have is actually a hemorrhoid. You’re too young, you don’t drink coffee, you’ve been laying off the booze for the most part, and your diet has been endorsed after years of studies by Beta Race’s team of board-certified nutritionists.
The bleeding might also be caused by a similarly shaped polyp, tumor, or abscess. You analyze the risk factors for each. Until recently and for as far back as you can remember, you’ve been a happy guzzler of red meats, processed cheeses, over-proof spirits. Roughly seventy percent of your penetrative experiences have been sans condom, meaning that HPV is more a certainty than a possibility. The human papillomavirus accounts for approximately ninety percent of anal cancer diagnoses, and the three dozen or so partners you can remember make this risk exponential.
Your activity tracker starts blinking. You remove it.
You look up Google reviews of the primary care physicians in your neighborhood. You’re about to schedule an appointment when you remember hemorrhoidal Nana telling you in a brief moment of opiate-free clarity before she succumbed to the tumors that had spread to her marrow, to “never go to a doctor. I didn’t for twenty-three years and it wasn’t for lack of aches, there were plenty of those. It was because I knew, deep down, that the second they started prodding around they’d find something. You can’t find anything if you don’t look for it. Here I am, a few months past eighty, feeling okay, and I had the nerve to listen to your goddamn mother. A simple check-up. It’ll take a load off everyone’s minds, she says. Now look at me. Fucked. Take Advil, get enough sleep, don’t get married and you’ll be fine.”
She died two hours later.
You don’t want to be fucked. You can’t risk a hospital visit, allow yourself to share your grandmother’s fate.
So you’ll wait. Say the mantras, wait.
After a week or so your ass begins to feel better but one day you notice two identical lumps behind your ribs on both sides. Cancer already spreading from your lymph nodes? Maybe they aren’t lumps, but areas of organ-related swelling. Early onset kidney failure is a possibility. You begin documenting the frequency of bathroom visitations, checking each urine deposit for color, opaqueness, bubbles, activating the stopwatch app on your phone to get an accurate measurement of its duration. You check your semen for blood and other potential abnormalities with the thoroughness of a tea-leaf reader, cupping it in your hands, sniffing. While pressing your fingers to your jugular to confirm suspicions of an abnormal heart rhythm, you press on something like a growth that clicks when you move it – a clear indication of a thyroid disorder that might lead to hyperactivity, irritability, memory problems, psychosis, and paranoia. A minor shoulder ache is an aneurysm in-waiting. You keep clicking the WebMD links. Sleep is occasionally possible, but only after the forced repetition of the glass-half-full self-talk that you haven’t really believed in a long time. And an appropriately heavy dose of benzodiazepines.
After a steady, hazy string of Xanax-infused evenings, a new idea begins to take shape in your head, something different, something of which your grandmother might approve: you can’t find anything if you don’t look for it.
So you stop looking.
WebMD can fist itself.
You bury most of your electronic devices in your closet. You stop responding to what few texts you still get from long-estranged friends. Afternoons: bong rips, HBO, Thai lunch specials. Nights, you drink with a fervor. More often than not, your super, who also occasionally sells you Percocet and mushrooms, knocks on your door to tell you about the previous night, how he stopped you from flinging a slice of take-out pizza at a passing bicyclist after another sidewalk puke session outside your building. You give him money, change the channel. Mornings don’t exist. Your cross trainers are ashtrays. You get all your shifts covered at the restaurant.
At least you’re sleeping.
You’re out alone one night and you meet a girl whose face you won’t remember and who’s almost as toasted as you are, but who sobers up fast a few hours later at your apartment when you ask her if she won’t mind biting a mole off your back that you assume is malignant. You wake up alone in piss-heavy boxers, roll off the bed onto the floor, a howling emanating from your balloon-swollen abdomen.
Your time has come.
*
The clinic’s waiting area is well-lit, featuring plush couches, a silent BBC news broadcast, an impressive selection of gender-neutral magazines. The only noise as you fill out your insurance information comes from the ambient nature sounds pumping from invisible speakers and a little kid making fun of his brother for coloring an eagle green and orange in a book in the children’s play area. A nurse enters from a side door and pronounces your name wrong. You take a last breath of willful ignorance and follow her into the examination room.
You don’t remember the questions she asks you, and you don’t remember your shorter answers.
She tells you to sit down, wraps a blood pressure machine around your arm and slips a thermometer under your tongue. “Ninety-eight-point-three,” she says. “Very good.” She frowns a little as the blood pressure machine relaxes from your arm. “BP’s high.”
“I’m always nervous,” you say.
She nods, jots something on a clipboard, tells you to roll up your sleeve. You watch the plastic pouch expand with truth juice. The nurse divides the blood into vials with different color caps, slapping stickers on each. As she flicks her gloves into the hazardous waste bin, you imagine being sucked down with them, crushed against the loose needles and emptied piss cups, pierced and filth-bathed into a strangely melodic silence, a soft gray place where you have no concept of gravity and the squirm of your days.
The nurse tells you to strip, walks out of the room, not making eye contact.
The man who enters a few minutes later is tall, thick with the traces of what must have once been an impressive musculature, with an unassuming salt-and-pepper beard and a dignified hairline. He introduces himself with a deliberate, Julep-swilled drawl and a mitt-shake that’s rigid but oddly pacifying. He motions for you to have a
seat on the examination table and flips through the papers on the clipboard that the nurse gave him.
He looks up. “You decide to request all these tests yourself?” he asks. “Seems a little unnecessary for someone your age without a history of,” he looks down at the clipboard, “anything.”
But you know that’s not how it works.
You know there has to be a first time.
“I’ve done a lot of research and, given my distinct set of possibilities, yes I need them.”
The doctor shakes his head, reaches for a box of latex gloves in a nearby cabinet. “Well, all right then,” he says. “Hopefully your insurance isn’t going to murder you for this.”
“I have better medical coverage than the majority of nightlife industry workers. I have –”
“Uh, ok. So which one of these possibilities will we be starting with?”
You guide the doctor’s hands toward every abnormality and inflammation, watching for a glitch in his serene face, the flowering of concern, but nothing changes. He asks you to flip over and assume a position normally reserved for canine submissives so he can get a look at the scabbed-over flap whose throbbing existence can’t be denied by even the most untrained eye.
“Yup, that’s a real big one,” the doctor says, almost chuckling. “This looks pretty straightforward, but I’m going to digitally examine your rectum for any irregularities, polyps, et cetera. This might be uncomfortable.”
You realize he doesn’t mean “digitally” in the technological sense.
You clench at the release of pressure and the snap of glove removal.
“Everything appears to be fine internally,” the doctor says, marking something on the clipboard. “You’re probably going to want to get the hemorrhoid removed for hygiene purposes. Shouldn’t be too painful since it’s mostly external. In the meantime, make sure you’re eating vegetables and drinking lots of water. Easy on the alcohol.”
