Life and Other Near-Death Experiences

by Camille Pagán

  “If that changes, you’ll tell me. Right?”

  “Of course,” I chirped, ignoring the mild but persistent throbbing in my lower abdomen.

  Old San Juan was a postcard of a city, with tropically colored colonial buildings stacked side by side on narrow streets paved with deep blue cobblestones. After walking along a path overlooking the water, we ducked onto a side street, where Shiloh led me to a tiny bar. The walls were plastered with photos of famous people and what was presumably the family who owned the bar.

  “Legend has it this is the birthplace of the piña colada,” Shiloh said.

  “Is that true?”

  “I don’t know, but José here makes a mean drink,” he said, reaching across the bar to clasp hands with the bartender.

  “You know everyone in Puerto Rico,” I said.

  He squeezed my thigh lightly. “No, I’m just taking you to my favorite places.”

  This was comforting. If he had other girlfriends on the side, he wouldn’t be parading me around town. Plus, he’d shown me where he lived. Not that it mattered, I reminded myself; we had a few more weeks to play couple, and then it was on to the end.

  José slid two tall frosty glasses toward us, each filled with an icy mixture so pale yellow it was nearly white. Sweet without being heavy, the drink set off every pleasure receptor in my body. “I think I’m in love,” I told him, face still in my glass.

  Shiloh smirked. “I’m fond of you, too.”

  I kicked him under the table. “Not so fast, tough guy. I’m still trying to reconcile your fine body with your homicidal tendencies.”

  He leaned in to whisper in my ear. “How many more times do I need to replicate this afternoon to make you forget about the plane mishap?”

  I smiled broadly, then kissed him, surprising myself. I wasn’t usually the type for affection of the spontaneous or public variety. Then again, I was not the type to sleep with random men while I was still legally married. And yet.

  After we finished the piña coladas, Shiloh and I walked a few more blocks to a brightly colored restaurant where a band was playing. We were seated and ordered wine and paella. After the waitress left, Shiloh motioned toward the dance floor. “Come on.”

  “No puedo,” I said, mimicking Milagros during our last lesson.

  “Si, tu puedes,” he said, pulling me out of my chair. He stopped and glanced at my stomach. “Wait, are you feeling okay? Because if you’re not—”

  “Very clever use of reverse psychology there, Dr. Velasquez.”

  “I’m serious, Libby. We’ve already done a lot today. If you’re not up to it, it’s not a problem.”

  For once, my cancerous abdomen wasn’t the issue. The issue was that I was about as graceful as a buffalo mid–accidental cliff dive. “I can’t dance,” I confessed. “I have, like, four left feet.”

  “You’re in luck, because Puerto Ricans happen to be born with a right foot, a left foot, and dancing hips. I could salsa before I could walk. I’ll teach you.”

  He gyrated exaggeratedly in front of me and I laughed. “Okay, but you’ll have to lead.”

  “Not a problem.” He put one hand on the small of my back and took my right hand with the other. “Watch my feet for a minute. Then look up and let me guide you with my body.”

  I blushed as he moved me back and forth, again and again, until I managed to operate my limbs in a manner that might charitably be described as dancing.

  “You’re not half-bad,” Shiloh shouted over the music.

  “For a gringa!” I said, mostly delighted that I had not yet broken one of his toes.

  “Exactly.” He laughed and spun me around.

  The tempo slowed, and he pulled me close. “What’s next, Libby?” he asked quietly, his cheek almost touching mine.

  Best to play dumb, I thought. “After dinner? Maybe we can call it an early night.”

  He chuckled. “Sure. But I mean after Puerto Rico.”

  He’d seen me stark naked, with all my divots and dimples highlighted in the bright light of day. He’d witnessed my postsurvival meltdown on the beach and my sobbing like a sad sack on the porch. But sharing how I planned to spend my final months felt insanely revealing, and I fought the urge to duck under the nearest table.

  “I’m going to see my brother in New York,” I said noncommittally. “Hey, would you mind if we went back to the table? I’m kind of thirsty.”

  “Of course,” he said, guiding me across the room. We sat down, and I downed an entire glass of water before looking up. When I did, he smiled and said, “So, New York, huh? I hear they have some pretty good hospitals there.”

  “That’s what I hear,” I said, dabbing at my mouth with a corner of a cloth napkin.

  “That’s what I hear, too,” he said, and reached for his wineglass.

  The waiter delivered our paella, and Shiloh and I feigned an unusual amount of interest in consuming it, pausing between bites to discuss meaningful topics such as whether I liked mussels, and if the rice had been cooked long enough.

  But.

  After we returned to his apartment, stripped down, and took to each other like coyotes on carrion, we were lying there panting. And he looked over at me and said, “Has it occurred to you that maybe it isn’t your time?”

  I squinted at him, still kind of light-headed from the sex we’d just had. “Given what you’ve told me about your feelings on fate and fatality, I’m going to assume you don’t really believe that.”

  “No,” he confessed. “I believe we have absolutely no way of knowing. But I think it doesn’t hurt to assume we’re going to live until we’re absolutely ready to die. You’re not ready. You can’t convince me you are, Libby.”

  I pulled the sheet up around my bare flesh and said nothing.

  In the low light of the bedroom, his eyes looked nearly black. “Damn it, Libby, fight for your life,” he said in a low tone. “At the very least, get a second opinion.”

  Fists wedged into my armpits, I gripped the thin cotton sheet tightly. “That’s not what this is about. This is about dignity. I’m fighting for my right to let nature run its course instead of letting chemo destroy what little time I have left.”

  “You’re talking to the wrong guy about that one. Trust me, I know how much treatment sucks. Chemo and radiation almost cost me both balls—and that was after my marriage ended. Any time I have a cramp, I think, It’s back. I have to work every single day not to let this thing that happened sixteen years ago define the rest of my life. But you know what? It was worth it. I’m alive, and I’d do it again tomorrow if I had to.”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said, sniffing as I attempted to maintain my composure. “But this is different. You’re not going to change my mind, and if that’s what you’re trying to do, maybe we shouldn’t see each other anymore.”

  His sighed deeply, then put his arms around me and pulled me down so his stomach was pressed against my back. “Don’t say that, Libby,” he whispered as I let myself ease into him. “Aren’t we having fun?”

  Fun? I couldn’t argue with him there. After we made love again, and Shiloh had fallen asleep beside me, I stared up at the mosquito netting, listening to him snoring lightly. In spite of our argument, I felt weirdly content. While I wasn’t fond of the inciting incident that had put me there, I liked this parallel universe I found myself in. It was a place in which I was able to ignore trivial matters such as work, bills, and my gay husband, and instead sun myself with abandon, eat and sleep at will, and catch up on the carnal pleasures I’d missed during the first thirty-four years of my life.

  If only my resolve about the end of my life was not eroding like the shoreline at high tide. What would I do? Was my decision to forgo treatment not brave at all—but rather impulsive and perhaps even selfish, as Shiloh had implied?

  As I began to drift off, I hear
d my mother’s voice, or at least her voice as I imagined it. My father had neither the foresight nor the spare cash to invest in a video camera before her death, and so Paul and I had only a two-minute clip taken by a distant relative at another relative’s party to help us re-create the light, steady timbre of our mother’s speech.

  “I’m not worried about you, Libby,” she said, placing her hand in mine. She was at the hospice, tethered to the bed by thin plastic tubes that ran between her legs and into her limbs. It was a week, maybe, before the end, and she had asked to be alone with me. “You’ll be just fine; I know it in my soul. But take care of Paul, please, love? I need you to do that for me.”

  “Of course, Mama,” I told her as I sat paralyzed, unable to shed a tear or squeeze her fingers for fear I would make her pain even more severe.

  “You’re the joy of my life, Libby Lou.” Her words were slow and strained, as though it took everything in her to push them through her throat and off her tongue. “I love you.”

  “I love you more, Mama,” I assured her, holding her gaze until she finally let her eyes close.

  This was not the memory I would have preferred to recall, but nonetheless it surfaced regularly. Because it was the moment when I finally acknowledged—if only for a few brief minutes—that she was going to die. My pastor, my father, Paul: they all tried to warn me. I was always a pleasant child, or so I’ve been told. But the day my mother and father sat us down and explained that she had cancer, a switch in me flipped. Forget looking on the bright side. My subconscious decided that if I didn’t acknowledge that there was a dark side, I somehow thought life’s negatives would cease to exist. So when people tried to explain that my mother didn’t have long to live, I nodded and mentally filed this probability somewhere between alien probings and a prehistoric mammal breaststroking through Loch Ness.

  In all my recollecting, what I had not much considered was my mother’s actual request. Unflappable and übercapable, Paul had been the one to take care of everything and everyone, including me, so I had failed my mother in this regard. But it would not be a final failure, I assured myself as I curled up against Shiloh. I would spare Paul the sight of skin spread like rice paper over bones and blood, a body battered beyond recognition by the same chemicals intended to salvage what a lab test had already confirmed was unsalvageable.

  By avoiding a grueling repeat of our mother’s death, I would take care of Paul in the most meaningful and lasting way I was able.

  Or so I told myself as I drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “I need to go into the office this afternoon,” Shiloh said the next morning. We’d had coffee and croissants at his apartment, and had just returned from a quick walk on the beach, during which neither of us brought up our life-and-death chat. “You okay to take the ferry?”

  “Of course,” I said, though in truth, I wished he’d mentioned it earlier. Still, if I could dine alone, certainly I could take the S.S. Regurgitator back to Vieques by myself. Besides, I was acutely anxious about becoming too attached to a man I would be leaving behind in a few weeks. Milagros could squawk about love until she was blue. The main thing was that I didn’t want to fall in love. Except I was getting confused, with thinking about the future and enjoying sex as more than a stand-alone act. It was the cancer; I was sure of it. Not only had it warped my brain, it had created an instabond between me and Shiloh that would not, and could not, last.

  So when Shiloh dropped me off at the boat that would take me from Puerto Rico proper back to Vieques, I kissed him with abandon, then ran for the dock before I could ask when I would see him again. One day soon I would no longer be a part of his life, nor he mine. It was best if we both began adjusting immediately.

  As the ferry approached the shore, I felt the sense of relief one feels when coming home. At the beach house I took a nap, and when I woke it was dark out. It was a waste of a day, but I was wiped out and a bit feverish, and needed to rest. I made myself a bowl of cereal, read for a while, and returned to bed.

  Shiloh didn’t call the following morning, and in spite of my feelings about healthy separation, it was impossible not to wonder if this had something to do with my refusal to give into his attempts to save me from myself.

  No matter—it was impossible to dwell on anything other than the rusty knife slowly sawing through my gut. I’d soaked through my shirt, and when I put my hand to my forehead, I realized I was burning up. I took three Advil and cursed myself for not having rum on hand to chase them down.

  Until that point, I hadn’t really felt like I was dying, per se, but now death was all too real. As I bent at the waist and resisted the urge to dry heave, I imagined my life force seeping out of me, like heat from the windows of an old home. And to think that I was still months out from the worst of it! My mother had refused morphine until the month before her death. She kept smiling as tumors bombed their way through her ovaries, into her intestines and bladder. And how? How did she have the energy to parent two children and be a wife and see her friends, while I was struggling to get off the sofa?

  If she could keep going, then I would have to as well. Gritting my teeth, I tugged on my bathing suit, slipped on a cover-up and a sun hat, and took off down the beach. I wasn’t really in the mood to sunbathe, but Milagros told me that half a mile from our stretch of sand, there was a new hotel that made killer cocktails, which sounded apropos, even at eleven in the morning.

  The hotel was a mirage of sparkling limestone at the edge of the sand. “Will you be dining with us?” a waiter asked as I approached the bar.

  “Just drinks,” I said. I pointed to the canvas lounge chairs lined up on the beach. “Can I sit in one of those and still be served?”

  “Are you a guest of the hotel?”

  “No, but I’m dying of cancer.”

  The waiter regarded me as though he didn’t believe a word I was saying, but I was gripping my side in a manner that suggested I was in the middle of birthing a live cactus, and he decided it was better for me to be far from the dozen or so patrons brunching on the patio. “I’ll be right over with a menu,” he said, indicating that I was to choose a chair.

  The piña colada I ordered seemed to dull the pain, so I ordered another before finishing the first. It was fast approaching noon, and some of the people around me had begun sipping fruity cocktails, so I didn’t feel too bad when the waiter asked if he could bring a bill and I said yes—as soon as he was done fetching me a third drink. “Medical marijuana doesn’t work for me,” I explained when he lifted an eyebrow at my request. “This is the next-best thing.”

  In fact, I had not yet tried nor considered weed, and it struck me, through my hooch haze, that it might not be the worst idea. Perhaps Paul would be able to help on that front, too.

  Seagulls were circling overhead, and it was hard to tell if they were after the cocktail peanuts the waiter had served, or my flesh tartare. The persistent boom of the surf mostly drowned out the gulls’ high-pitched clamoring, but between the two, I nearly missed my phone ringing.

  It was Tom. I answered, which I will attribute to the piña coladas.

  “Libby?” As per usual, he sounded upset. “Why are you in Puerto Rico?”

  I almost asked how he knew I was there, but then I remembered that I had booked tickets on one of the credit cards I shared with him and that in my haste, I had removed him from the account but failed to change the password. That would need to be fixed soon. In the meantime, I told him to leave me alone.

  “Your doctor’s office called me,” he insisted.

  My stomach lurched. “You know sharing a person’s medical information without their permission is illegal, right?”

  “They didn’t share anything. They just asked if I knew how to get ahold of you.”

  “Good,” I said, watching a spindly brown bug approach my chair. As it crept closer, I lifted my foot, then ch
anged my mind as I was about to crush it. I nudged it away with the edge of my sandal and watched it scamper in the opposite direction.

  “Are you going to call them back, Libby?” he asked, sounding too kind and concerned for someone who was no longer supposed to be a part of my life. “Is everything all right?”

  “Of course, it is,” I said, and it was almost believable. After all, what did sick mean? And what was well, anyway? I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, then opened them, fixing my eyes on a vein in my forearm that was pulsing like a river. To the left of the vein was a blackened freckle, and to the right, a small white pigment-free blotch—both remnants of the summers I spent slathered in baby oil beneath a baking sun. My eyes trailed down, past the festering flesh hidden beneath my cover-up, to the subtle curve of my calf muscles and my slender ankles. My imperfect body, deemed terminally unwell, was the best it would ever be. Soon it simply would not be at all. It was almost impossible to wrap my mind around.

  “If the doctor calls you again, tell them we’re no longer married and give them my number,” I told Tom.

  He hesitated. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “I know you’re upset with me, but I want you to know that I’m here for you if you need anything.”

  Upset. Upset! Like the only reason I’d chosen to put two thousand miles between us was because he’d eaten the toaster waffle that I’d been saving for breakfast.

  “I am fine, Tom,” I said sharply. “Now please, stop calling me.”

  “Li—”

  I ended the call before he could continue, not only because I didn’t want to speak with him. I was having the same feeling I’d had after the plane crash.

  “Ma’am? Ma’am, are you okay?” the waiter asked, regarding me as I gasped and clutched at my throat.

  I turned my head in his direction and croaked, “I am not.” And then, I am sorry to say, I passed out.

  When I came to, an older man wearing a very small banana hammock was crouched over me. I yelped as I realized my face was mere centimeters from his rug of chest hair.