by Charles Bock
“This one hurts more,” Alice mumbled. “Lots more.”
—
She still wasn’t coherent when the familiar voice nagged, through her fugue, coming from some outpost: They think they might not have used enough morphine. Tilda, bless her. Wearing one of those infernal masks and a pair of gloves that would be de rigueur for as long as Alice was stuck here. Only something didn’t make sense: Alice was accustomed to seeing the minty green accoutrements of New Hampshire. Tilda’s mask was the soft yellow of light filtered through a picture window on a lazy morning—aeons more pleasing. Alice did not understand how Tilda had gotten to the hospital so fast—somehow she’d made it up to the Granite State before they’d even gotten off the phone, Alice terrified, sharing the news in a blubbering, hysterical conversation.
The deep part of another evening: Oliver had been snuggled next to her in the bed, on a break from watching whatever movie he’d rented from some video place near campus. He’d wanted to know if they’d get to watch the little scrap of mask go brown on Tilda’s face.
Alice had smiled, blown a parched kiss.
More of her surroundings were recognizably mundane: intravenous glass bottles and plastic expanding fluid bags hanging above her, all of them connected to a large aluminum tree and a robotic battery pack; that orange plastic bin by the room’s entrance, specifically there for needles and radioactive trash; Alice’s patient folder open on a tan linoleum counter. Tilda sat in a cushioned seat beside her. Directly across from them, a wall of windows ran the length of the room. What was unexpected: about five yards away on Alice’s right side, a mud-green curtain acted as a separating wall. From behind the curtain came the spreading applause of a studio audience, loud enough to shatter eardrums.
Tilda flipped open a notebook. While Alice was unconscious, she’d taken notes. Not much, she said. Then she let Alice get acclimated to the land of the living, poured and handed her some water, gave her some ice chips. And only then, not wanting to leave out any last detail, did Tilda unpack her list, anything that might be moderately worthwhile: that Dr. Eisenstatt apparently had been detained by some emergency, but was still hoping to visit this afternoon; that the sheets and pillowcases were indeed hypoallergenic, the nurse had double-checked. Also, Alice was scheduled for tests today—“an EKG, an echocardiogram to make sure your heart’s okay, um, a CAT scan.” Oh, pills. Alice was supposed to take her pills: the little red one, that was an antifungal, and the white one, right, ay-psych-lo-veer, that was an antiviral, which meant no STDs, which meant Tilda probably needed “to grab a few for myself.”
They enjoyed one another’s laughter, a nice break, before Tilda continued. The pills: Alice was overdue to take the bunch on the counter in a plastic cup. Alice recognized the third one—a yellow horse-looking number of thickly packed potassium. In New Hampshire she’d been assured it would help with digestion. “Only my diarrhea hit, and every time, that huge pill passed right out of the other end.”
Tilda called it a koan worthy of the Buddha: How does one digest a pill for diarrhea if the diarrhea forces the pill through you before it can be digested? Alice was still enjoying the quandary when Tilda chugged forward again, this time to the little old woman on the other side of the curtain. Mrs. Woo. “She’s pretty much trapped in bed. They’ve got a tube in her throat,” Tilda said. Whenever any of the nurses came to talk to Mrs. Woo, they talked slowly and loudly, Tilda could not believe how bad, patronizing beyond words. Mrs. Woo had two full-grown grandchildren, and they came and went from the room at will, according to Tilda, apparently unable to speak English, but nevertheless possessing quite an endearing game show fetish, along with a preternatural aversion to turning off their television set.
“I asked about a private room. The nurse told me you could contact your insurance and see if they want to pay the extra fee. Five hundred and fifty more a night.” Tilda snorted. “I can call if you want?”
Glowing appreciation in the direction of her friend, Alice wished she was clever enough, that her mind was working well enough, for a proper counter. She wished she could keep this banter going. Then she recognized a sound—that beeping. She’d hoped she was done with it.
Congruent red light flashed from the top of the battery apparatus. Feeling around for the intercom system, Alice told the floor operator, “My IV’s beeping.”
In the window on the opposite wall, blankets of snow were coming down with speed and violence, falling so fast and hard that it was difficult to see the building just outside the window—a structure from some other century, stone and bricks worn down by time and the elements. She could barely recognize decorative flourishes on the marble window molding, a dancing cherub, its carved, curving belly. Fresh snow had accumulated into a thick pile on the ledge. It all looked close enough that if a person had a ladder, she might finagle it out the window, fight through the blizzard, and reach that other floor. She just might make her escape.
The Best of What Life’s Supposed to Be About
HIS COUSIN’S WIFE had sworn she would be at the apartment by eleven, at the absolute latest. Reliable, for the most part. Her fervor to help sure was genuine. Yet the absolute latest had come and gone, and still there was no word. Most likely she was stuck: in transit, on a subway, in a cab jammed in traffic. Jonathan also had stopped answering his phone, meaning he hadn’t heard anything, either, or was in a meeting, or had nothing new to say, just didn’t feel like answering.
Oliver lay in bed, feeding the kid a bottle, rocking her lightly, singing to her just a bit. Doe was overtired, wanting Mommy, not happy but responding anyway, moving less, getting quieter, one more stage closer to sleep. Oliver slowed his rocking. Being with the baby was fascinating. It was involving, necessary, rewarding, all the good shit that Alice—and every other woman he knew—had promised when she was pregnant and he’d been freaking out. Only there came that point; you reached a ceiling to all the Suzy Creamcheese homemaker blessing bullshit. Oliver could be making calls, like maybe to figure out how to save his goddamn wife’s life. Just where the fuck his cousin’s wife was, Oliver wanted to know.
Instead of the phone, he heard a muted clacking. Carrying from the loft’s work area: terminal keyboards, that itch that he could not reach. His programmers, for sure, were keeping it down as much as they could, they were trying to be respectful, but Oliver could still hear them. And there you had it: his family, his old life, his company, the camaraderie of friends, and the mental involvement of a challenge, all of it was yards away, on the other side of a plasterboard wall. And whenever it seemed like he could join them, when the kid seemed ready to drop, or had passed into slumber, just when Oliver started disentangling himself, Doe. What looked like a tremor. A spasm. Rousing. Again reattaching her little arms around Oliver’s neck. Clinging that much tighter.
Those first fleeting moments: his newly born daughter had been resting on his chest. Oliver told himself that, in the years ahead, he’d be looking back at these moments, trying to remember the soft warm exhalations of Doe’s little lungs on his face right now, the way her little fingernails were digging into his jugular.
—
Finally he emerged onto Whitman’s fourth floor, Alice’s backpack dragging on his shoulders and smacking against the middle of his back, shitloads heavier than he would have guessed, especially considering the way she gallivanted all over the city with that thing. Oliver also was pulling her travel suitcase behind him. He was worrying about how pissed she’d be. The hallways perennial in their brightness, that constant tart, antiseptic smell of cleaning fluid. Rolling shelves were abandoned at random junctures, their uncovered trays of half-eaten lunches stacked in sloppy piles. Oliver passed blood vials left on some sort of lab rack. He flashed back to New Hampshire: he couldn’t use the john in Alice’s room because they were measuring her urine output, and it wasn’t worth the risk to disturb the plastic pot that had been placed over the toilet’s opening. One night, like always when he had late-night soda, Oliver’s bladder ha
d acted up. In the bathroom at the end of the hall, he’d heard the night security guard; locked behind a stall door he was quietly moaning and making sounds of quick friction, noises any man recognizes from his own fist-pumping episodes.
Oliver focused about two-thirds of the way down the hall, about where Alice’s room number would be. The stylish Indian doctor stood, addressing an Asian man and woman as if directness would ensure understanding. “You really should talk to Eisenstatt about this,” Bhakti said. “And we do need a decision on the DNR order.” The Asian woman turned from the doctor and started speaking in some Asian language to the man, who was maybe ten years older. He answered, and the two began trading phrases. Oliver clearly heard the word resuscitate. He moved beyond them as quickly as possible.
Warning signs on the door served as yet another reminder of what they were dealing with, but Oliver didn’t need their printed proscriptions. He’d donned the protective masks and gloves for fourteen hours a day, was well accustomed to that layer of sweat bubbling inside the glove latex so his finger pads were always squishy, his breath ricocheting off the insides of his paper masks, rising into steam.
The small rectangular window peering into the room was covered with black construction paper, he noticed. A trademark Alice maneuver—she hated people looking in on her, wouldn’t want excess light if she was napping. Had to be a decent sign. He also knew she’d have the room like a sauna, and he removed his coat, followed by his sweater. Turning to the side vestibule, Oliver blopped pink fluid into his hands, which he washed and dried at the sink. Since it was easier to put on the mask before the gloves, he reached into the cardboard box and brought one of the little yellow guys to his face, its chemical smell immediately pungent. His last name was being called, “Mr. Culvert. Good to see you.”
Coming toward him, Bhakti showed a controlled irritation. She was a handsome woman nonetheless, striking for her dark hair and skin, her long lashes and slim figure. She asked how he was doing, though he knew it was a formality.
“Well, we got to this point,” Oliver answered. “Day fifty-one, that’s pretty good.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The first hundred days after diagnosis? They’re key, right? We’re on day fifty-one.”
Bhakti softened, eyes widening enough that she looked embarrassed for him. “I’m not sure what you were told or read.” Her mind was active, calibrating. “Those first hundred days after a diagnosis are key. Getting through these first six months is key.” Lashes batted, emerald-green irises focusing on him. “Your wife will go through a number of risk periods. That’s what happens. She gets past one marker, we look to the next. The first hundred days after the transplant. The first year.”
Down the hallway the Asian brother and sister’s discussion had turned heated. An orderly had stopped next to a nurse, and both were watching. Dr. Bhakti, meanwhile, had a shapely upper lip, one ripe with possibility. She told him that Dr. Eisenstatt was going to be in shortly. If Oliver needed to talk to him more…
Oliver stopped listening. Washing his hands for a second time, he left the faucet dripping, grabbed protective gloves from the box with the L sizes. He piled his jacket and sweater together, folded them under one arm. Pulling the travel suitcase behind him, he steeled himself, leaned his shoulder into the door.
—
Alice wore a tie-dyed motorcyclist’s bandanna wrapped around her head and the white-framed cat’s-eye granny glasses she favored whenever she was hand sewing. The purple and pink knits that she often described as magical were wrapped, twisted around her neck like a boa constrictor, or the scarf of an early aviator. Inside her fluffy, cotton-candy-colored robe, with her lower extremities covered by a multicolored quilt that had been knitted by her great-grandmother (then passed down through the generations of women in her family), Alice looked luxurious in her comfort. From beyond a fuzzy pink sleeve, she was waving three postcards.
The purpose of overhead lighting panels was to make evident to the medical staff all possible physical problems, but orange sheets of crepe paper had been taped over them, and the space had the muted vibe of a hospital room transformed into an opium den. A lovely melody, courtesy of Stevie Wonder, carried from the bedside CD player, where framed family photos faced the room. Oliver followed the arc of his wife’s waving hand, across the room, to the imaginary line’s logical end point. What had been a dull wall now boasted an oil spill: bright colors, body parts, ripped magazine pages.
At the near juncture where the long separating curtain met the wall of windows, Tilda stood on a chair. Responding to Alice’s direction, she was lifting the end of a series of taped-together pages, stretching them so they were no longer sagging but taut. Running across half the partition, a thick-markered message read: CANCER SCHMANCER SO LONG AS YOU’RE HEALTHY.
Alice paused and acknowledged her husband. Mischief and delight danced across her face. “We’re making headway, don’t you think?”
He took three steps and reached her bedside. For the second time this day he placed a hand on each of Alice’s cheeks. Once again he held his wife in place.
Every kiss had to let her know.
“Hello, my heart,” he said.
Her expression was satiated and dreamy, and he tried to memorize that moment. “You two’ve been busy.”
“I was going to call and ask if you could bring a rug.” Alice’s eyes danced again. “You know, something big and patterned. Tilda felt that might be a bit too, I don’t know…arabesque.”
“It’s already quite arabesque up in here,” Oliver answered. “Knowing you two, it’s only going to get arabesquer.”
Oliver accepted Tilda’s remonstrations about making time in his busy schedule to grace them with his presence, and dutifully apologized for how long it had taken to make it back uptown. He assured Alice the baby was doing great, really great, and asked how she was, if the doctors had said anything (or even been in yet). He told Alice about the calls from her mother, ready either to come down to the city or to have the child come up to her (naturally). Lifting the mask back up to his nose, he said, “These things smell like baby poo.”
“Oh, let me.”
Her inhalation was that of junkie needing a hit; Oliver recognized he had to change the conversation, keep Alice from sulking.
“I like these yellow ones,” he said. “They’re jaunty, more…optimistic.”
“We were talking about that.” Tilda tried to hide a glance, checked her beeper.
The requisite knock of doom. Entering now, a lithe Dominican woman moved with efficiency and pep. Her hair was frizzy and reached in eight directions. A mole about the size of a quarter was conspicuous over her right brow. “Vitals time,” she announced, then eyed the amount of water Alice had left untouched in her glass. The nurse made an unhappy sound. “You been through this already,” she said, “so you know drinking water and sucking on ice chips is a major importance. And still I got to flog that dead cat.” Her voice changed now, her words came quicker, as if she were recounting newly memorized facts before they disappeared: “We got four pillars for chemo patient recovery. Uno: hydration. Number two, protein. Then exercise. And mouth care.”
“Oh, Carmen.”
“Looking at that lunch tray, on one and two, you already off to a bad start.”
“In the name of the Green Gay Goddess—”
“When you start up with that chemo, you going to lose your appetite something serious. How abouts we load up on the food while we can?”
“Look at that sad little gray chicken patty,” Alice said.
“I want to be a team player,” Tilda interjected. “But honestly, Meryl Streep couldn’t convince the Donner party to bite into that thing.”
“Completely through the looking glass.” Converted to the mode Oliver referred to as her fashion voice, under the ostensible premise of speaking to Tilda, Alice performed for the room. “Do you know the hospital won’t give me fresh fruits or vegetables? How can it possibly be in my best interest
for them to shove canned fruits at me?”
“You want to do this again?” Carmen asked. “We can do this again.”
“Every single bit of received wisdom about good food turns upside down.”
“Your counts get low, and if there’s a stray germ on a piece of fresh fruit—”
“I have Oliver throw the microwave out of our home, yet you insist on nuking anything that comes to me?”
“In a can, we control. What’s so hard to understand ’bout that?”
“My counts are good, Carmen. They told me this morning.”
“Your counts are good considering you got cancer.”
“I do not have cancer,” Alice stated. “I am en remissyionne.”
“You in here for a reason, mama—”
He used to stare at their door in Dartmouth-Hitchcock, counting the hours, then the minutes, until Alice’s mother arrived, as if wanting hard enough would somehow will her presence. Some days he had more patience, managed the boredom, the procedural small talk with doctors, nurses explaining what the next test was, all the waiting, the begging Alice to eat, listening to her looping monologues (how could she do this, it was all so hard). Also the stretches when he had the opposite problem: getting through the quietude, Alice sleeping, red glowy numbers on the alarm clock ticking away their savings, their dreams.
But once Grandma and the baby arrived, then wham, the clock started eating into his holy and awaited break time. As if rushing out of a building’s flaming wreckage, Oliver would hightail it for the parking lot’s courtesy van, heading to one of the places downtown, grabbing a chicken sandwich from a sports bars near campus, some sad Chinese lunch from a buffet table of greased food rotting beneath heat lamps, maybe an Indian special that was as thick and spicy as cow dung. If the weather wasn’t too foul, and he really needed to clear his head, he might just walk, away from the old gentrified district, out toward the town perimeter and the strip malls. Overprocessed, grease-fire-charred garbage: his official coping mechanism. He made sure to binge away from the hospital, out of sight of Alice; she’d disapprove big-time, and about the last thing he wanted was to have her see anything that revolted her, anything that even had a chance of teasing her for her lack of appetite. He wouldn’t let her see anything that might cause her faith in him to waver.
