by Charles Bock
“Obviously, going through reinduction’s not ideal,” Eisenstatt continued. “The stress on your body is not something to take lightly. But if, if we have to go this route, we’re fortunate in that, as we were saying, you’re young, you’re coming into this strong and healthy, you have your beautiful baby, a positive attitude toward your recovery. You’d be on the ward as an inpatient for at least four weeks. So what we’d shoot for:”
A small voice asked if she might see the board, please.
Alice held out an open palm. In two strides, Eisenstatt propped the dry-erase board against her sheet-covered thighs. Now he set the marker in her waiting palm. Without so much as a glance in response, Alice turned her attention to the board. One motion added a short, crooked line across the bottom of the T;
She kept writing:
“That’s not going to happen,” Oliver said.
“Blinders on, remember?” he pleaded.
“Let the record show, Mrs. Culvert, I’m not presenting what you wrote as a possibility.”
“No, Doctor.” Streams flowing fully down her face. “You are only proposing to pump toxic chemicals in me until I’m fluorescent.”
“Alice—”
“I don’t think anything is solved by heading down this road right now, Mrs.—”
“What other options do I have, Doctor? I mean, really now, wouldn’t it be at least humane to tell me what else I can do?”
“Ali. We’re going to find a donor. We are.”
“You can seek a second opinion at other hospitals,” Eisenstatt said. “It’s your body. You have every right to decide what kind of treatment you do or do not want. Nobody is going to stop you. We’ll help you get into contact with whichever hospital you choose. But let’s be clear: time is a factor. And with that in mind, I’d like to focus on the situation in front of you right now. Because you have a decision to make, Mrs. Culvert.”
He let the sentence sink in, gave her the chance to prepare herself. “One way or another, you need chemotherapy. If the results are clean, we want to keep you in remission. If they show up different, we need to get you back to remission. You’re right on the cusp of the time frame where we’d start consolidation therapy anyway. You have to decide if you want to start treatment here, of course. But in a sense, we’re just waiting on whether the treatment will be reinduction or consolidation, and when we need to start. Oh, and your green light, of course. Getting beds here has been a problem of late—at the moment, the ward’s at a hundred and seven percent capacity.”
“One ten,” corrected Bhakti.
“Ten?” His eyes closed, a disbelieving beat. “With your permission, Mrs. Culvert, I’d like to put you on the admittance list, try and get you in here as soon as possible.”
A flash of panic; Alice sought out her husband, began propping herself upright. “What about Thursday? Crab Fest?”
Howard Eisenstatt, MD, let out an airless gasp. “The Black Tide?” he sputtered. “You have reservations?” An amazed laugh; he shook his head, rubbed his chin. “Mrs. Culvert, you’re obviously a resourceful woman. But this time it’s my turn to be as clear as possible. Leukemia and induction have severely compromised your immune system. By severely, I mean to say: your immune system is as close to nonexistent as is possible. I’m telling you I’d rather you not go out in public at all. If and when you go out, it must be in a controlled environment. This means wearing the mask. The gloves. Antibacterial wash in your purse. No way you’re going to a crab boil.”
Alice absorbed his disapproval, her expression insisting, What, you can’t mean me? However, it was also apparent: she knew she was in the wrong, knew she was caught.
“We’ll go next year,” Oliver said.
She spent a quiet moment looking into her lap, her jaws clenching, the tendons in their hinges flexing. When she spoke, her voice was a whisper. “I keep telling myself I need to accept this. It’s a serious condition and I should treat it.” Flicking her wrist, she gave an idle wave, as if shooing away a nuisance. “Part of me always knew I couldn’t go. You knew it, too, didn’t you, Oli? Humoring me like that, sweet.” Her eyes wandered, back to the source, the place they always returned, the baby carriage. “If it’s all right, Doctor, could my husband and I call you in the morning about the admittance?”
A careful nod, another tight grin. Eisenstatt tapped the marker on the clipboard, as if punctuating it, bringing the discussion to an official end. He started to turn, then waited. “There’s something else. I hesitate to bring it up.”
The nurse-practitioner stepped forward—she’d been quiet for so long that Alice had forgotten she was in the room. Now Dantelle (right, Dantelle) had an expression of patience and authority. “You told me the little one hasn’t had her shots. When she’s in the waiting room, there’s a chance that she carries in germs. She might potentially transmit them to a patient. There’s also a chance she picks up something from a patient. Hospitals are very dirty places. And her immune system is still unformed.”
Oliver couldn’t restrain himself. “Doe was with us in New Hampshire during induction.”
“It’s all right,” Alice said.
“We can’t take the risk,” Dantelle said. “I’m sure you can appreciate—”
“Nurses creamed themselves when they saw her.”
“Oliver.” Alice forced an imitation of cheer. “It’s fine, Dantelle. We’ll just make my appointments for later in the day, when we have the sitter.”
The practitioner looked embarrassed. “I’m not making myself clear. This would be encompassing your chemotherapy as well.”
Eisenstatt patted Dantelle on the meaty part of her upper arm, taking back control of the room. “Hospital policy is clear.”
The doctor did not sound as if he enjoyed relaying this information, nonetheless he was keeping a taut measure of just how much empathy he could dole out. “We don’t worry about how things might be run at other hospitals. Our obligation is to our patients. On the chemo floor, we don’t allow children under eleven. To make sure that everyone is safe—please, don’t bring her.”
“You’d be free to come down to the lobby of the first floor during the early parts of chemotherapy,” added Dantelle. “Before your numbers drop, it should be more than fine for you to go downstairs. She could visit you in the lobby.”
One part of Alice’s practice involved an exercise that asked her to imagine digging into the black, cold earth. Hands dirty, caked with mud, she’d dig until she found a root, taking that imaginary root in her hands, cradling that root, pulling at it, dislodging the thing. Where that root had been, into the space she’d vacated, the exercise asked her to see light. It was time for her to dig. To pull.
“You want me in here for a month. You want to put me through all this again, and you say you’re going to keep my child from me?”
She was holding her little girl, and the doctor was next to her now. “We want to cure you. We have to bring you in for chemotherapy. We have to find a donor. We have to do this transplant, and we have to start now. Time is a factor. None of this is fair. But we don’t know any other way to keep you around so you can be a mother to your daughter. This is the only way.”
What Life’s Supposed to Be About
AROUND THE TIME Alice Culvert entered her third trimester, a software program known by the acronym Mosaic stepped out of the university computer labs and became commercially available for use with personal computing systems. This was its own, minor upheaval. Until Mosaic, computer users could only enter what was popularly called the Net via designated gatekeepers—America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe—though there were also smaller, more specifically focused portals. ECHO was particularly popular in Manhattan (and had an added bonus: supposedly as many as forty percent of its members were women), as was the Well (whose membership was rumored at a whopping nine thousand), and MindVox (the go-to choice among cyberpunks, anarchists, and lesbians). With this new program, the dynamics changed. So long as your computer had a fairly con
sistent modem connection, you could bypass portals and directly access any corner or cranny of the sprawling and amorphous universe known as the worldwide information superhighway. Even better, this new software didn’t charge fees based on the amount of time a user spent online.
Related to this development, or serendipitous with it, was Oliver Culvert’s decision that he could no longer tolerate moving the phone cord from its wall jack into the side of his computer, then putting it back, a half a dozen times a day. To say nothing of the massive pain in the ass of incoming calls interrupting any decent connection. He had a second phone line installed in their new loft. He connected this line to his personal, boxy UNIX terminal. To Alice, he extolled, ad nauseam, the merits of this obscenely fast connection—42,800 kilobytes per second—how it would allow him to stay connected to the Net, make new contacts, and extend the scope of his consulting business. He believed his own deluded words, Alice knew, but from her vantage point, the shop still wasn’t much more than a front for their illegally zoned living situation, with Ruggles—Oliver’s sharpie of a best friend from undergrad—hustling up clients from the low-end brokerage houses where he had friends, while Oliver and that other unfortunate flunky, the Brow, handled tech support, all at discount prices. This quote unquote business let Oliver fart around with those few stray grad school ideas to which he couldn’t quite say goodbye (i.e., a questing-type computer game in which a college kid undergoes the travails of the Odyssey on his campus). To Alice it seemed like a safe place for her hard-driven husband to catch his breath, tread water, avoid the oncoming tsunami of real life.
Her view did not change as Oliver started spending more time with his new portal-toy-program-game-thing. Or when Ruggles, and the Brow, and Jonathan—Oliver’s first cousin, whenever he stopped by, sweaty after one of his ten-mile runs—joined in. In between calls when some day trader got walked through basic tech support, and those rare projects where an algorithm got concocted on deadline, the group, somehow, she saw, had stumbled into a new useless obsession. This one entailed working in shifts, was fueled by liters of a cheap, overly caffeinated soda (available in bulk at the bottom of the back cooler of the lone nearby twenty-four-hour Korean grocery), and fortified by bags of discount potato chips that weren’t quite tasty but were very nearly digestible (overflowing from that grocery’s dusty racks of chips). She recognized that her husband’s little group was on some sort of quest: tangibly impractical, yes; pragmatically unproductive, definitely. Epic nonetheless.
The constant raped-cat shrieking of the phone line connected with the external modem. Seas of glowing text endlessly surfed along, with backgrounds fluorescent enough to scar the retina; untold manifestly botched hyperlinks; that same goddamn graphic of a seal spinning that same rotating ball on its nose. Each new bulletin board devoted to Star Trek: The Next Generation may have been mundane, but it allowed them to push onward, to the next page bemoaning the cancellation of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the same audio outtakes of the famed radio host spitting curses during American Top Forty. And toward quality stuff, too. The best Telenet and FTP sites. Encyclopedic reference resources nobody even would have known existed. Most mind-boggling of all, in less time than it took to microwave popcorn, pixilated pictures came into focus. Naked women. All as easy as hitting F4.
Alice popped in every so often: dressed to kill in chic power garb; her belly huge and exotic; hauling in the various portfolio folders she’d needed for her meeting with that East Village shopkeeper who sold her own clothes but needed sewing help; sloppy but glowing in loose maternity sweats, having come back from some sort of mommy-preparation-Buddhisty-new-age-yoga-crystal-tantric thing. “My happy band of Orcs,” she’d say. “What useless effluvium have you uncovered today?” And would be answered with a RealPlayer audio clip of a gay man in San Francisco screaming at his roommate, I will crush you, little man. The looks she bestowed upon Oliver were at once bemused and patronizing, and, more and more, toward the end, aghast. This is how the man I love chooses to spend his life instead of preparing to be a dad.
Jaundiced faces went scraggly and oily. Scraggly hair turned oily and tangled. An odd gray stink cloud formed around the workstation. By then, Alice was occupied by her newborn; what did she care if those idiots had molded like fungus onto the furniture, if a stack of pizza boxes had formed an installation art piece in the loft’s far corner?
They’d visited somewhere like two hundred thousand pages when, out of nowhere, Ruggles brought back up a dilemma they’d had during sophomore year. That their loose circle of science-focused and business-heavy underclassmen could survive their requisite English and comp classes with a minimum of actual work, they’d wanted to read, compare, pool, and copy one another’s essays. “Should have been simple,” Ruggles remembered. When he paused to suck some stray potato chip flavoring dust from his fingers, he and Oliver recalled the writing programs they’d used way back when: Oliver loyal to WordStar, Ruggles swearing by WordPerfect, the Brow with that piece-of-shit off brand, EditOre. None of which, they’d also remembered, had allowed you to load or share files from the other programs. When you shoved your hard square little disc into someone else’s desktop, it wouldn’t open, or the text came out as gibberish. No, the only way to get an essay that your friend had written on a different platform onto your computer would have been to install both software programs onto each desktop—although installing any of these programs would have required five different hard discs, one inserted immediately after another, in a specific ordered sequence, which was all but impossible: some of those discs always got corrupted, or had been lost, or their little metal clip-edge thingies had come loose.
When Ruggles or Jonathan stopped by to veg out and commandeer a terminal shift, the discussion continued. Soon enough, their bull session had turned serious. Soon enough, Oliver and even the Brow were taking breaks from their time-wasting, attention-suck of a Web-quest-thing. They were listing what functions a new program might need. Ruggles jumped on top of cost-benefit analyses. The result was pragmatic, somewhat optimistic, and fairly well thought through, replete with marketing, viability, and programming plans. All of them centered on a semigeneric text field that would act as an amnesty zone. A writing program that would accept alphabet, number, and formatting systems from any and all other writing software.
—
They’d just moved on to coding the thing when, miracle of miracles, that prodigal impossible quest, their original slacker dream, came to fruition. Only four months, seven days, and nine hours later, but still: the evidence was undeniable. Any page they visited, they’d seen before. Just south of one million websites. They’d visited the entire Net. The celebration was underwhelming, all things considered: exhausted head nods, numb smiles, a sense of Thank God that’s finally over. Can that really be all there is? At any moment more sites were being created, they knew as much. However, in this fixed time frame, in this moment, their journey was comprehensive. We did something, but what?
Before the group had agreed upon any kind of answer, they were back inside their programming project, taking care of its attendant affairs, for instance, settling on both the company’s and the software’s name, each one the same word: Generii, coming from the Latin, sui generis. In a nice little inside joke, this translated into original or of its own. (The second i, Ruggles explained, makes it ours.) Oliver threw in what scratch he’d managed from his other part-time job; Ruggles put the squeeze on some of his junior trader brethren to chip in a few nickels; Jonathan—unwilling to see his cousin take an absolute bath on this—also ponied up. There still wasn’t quite enough to finance software development and pay licensing fees to the companies whose writing programs Generii was ripping off, so the official company line was Fuck ’em. Don’t pay one shiny dime. Once Generii showed the coding was theirs and original, as opposed to just stolen from the other writing programs, once the software was up and running and didn’t have any more problems with line breaks and format glitches and bugs and viruses,
once they’d properly carpet-bombed the taste influencers of Manhattan with CD-Rs as if their program were America Online’s sign-up discs, their product would get firmly ensconced on every important desktop in the midtown and downtown area. And when that happened, any cease and desist orders would be immaterial. The thing would be in the world.
—
Another foregone conclusion: her baby would be born naturally. No way Alice would consent to an epidural. And since she was the one carrying the little, ahem, blessing, seeing how the whole infant thing, basically, had been her deal, Oliver knew better than to do anything on this front besides tallyho: he’d followed Alice’s lead (as he should, he could hear her saying).
Another shocker: she hadn’t wanted to know the sex of the child beforehand. Once again, he’d acquiesced (as he should have, he could hear her, once again, this time getting impatient), agreeing it was better this way, more natural, they were going to love their child, what really mattered was their baby would be healthy, absolutely. For a few seconds, Alice held that little crimson bundle: no knowledge of gender, no knowledge of anything, just her baby, its physical presence, its cries of health, her baby her baby, and the waterworks had started, and she’d finally demanded, what is it, and had cried even harder, because the awful truth was, they didn’t have anything for a boy, why, the two of them still had been discussing possible boy names while hoping to induce labor, slowly walking laps around the halls of St. Vincent’s obstetrics ward, Alice’s arm around his shoulder and Oliver’s arm around her waist, Alice insisting on something Eastern or new-agey or fashionable, Oliver responding with a choice inspired by Blade Runner. For a boy’s name they had uncertainty, a theoretical love but not a settled name. For a girl, however, porcelain perfection—or, rather, one of those self-serious and self-important and pretentious names, the kind that drew attention to how smart and open and giving and knowing the parents were, although, at the same time, this one had a purity to it, a lovely grace, just what Alice wanted—a little perfect lovely graceful Doe. As for Oliver, after eighteen hours of labor, he’d been exhausted—just the witness and supportive partner, he understood now why it was called labor.
