by Jay Smith
"Well, Mr. Clownshoe," I said with natural indifference, "I'm going to go to sleep right here. In the morning, if you're still around for breakfast, we can all talk about the future. Right now...I got nothin'. Good night."
After a moment of silently staring at me and trying to work out the proper etiquette for situations where one is caught in bed with another man's wife, Randy sidestepped back into the hall and quietly scaled the stairs. A moment later, I heard Claire’s squeal of panic from all the way up in our bedroom. This did not concern me.
Parker slipped into the shadows as I drifted off into a hard, dead sleep.
~
The sun peeked over the white fiberglass fence around my back yard and stabbed me in the face. The television was off and I could see out the big bay window. It was pretty and green, except for the hideous gazebo Claire's parents bought us for the housewarming. It blocked my view of a pretty apple tree at the back of the yard.
Claire cleared her throat.
She was sitting on the love seat toward the kitchen, wrapped in her fluffy, white cotton bathrobe with her arms wrapped around her knees. The look on her face was one of five guilty expressions she used. This one masked the fact that she was livid and wanted to launch into her classic oratorio, "This is all your fault, Winston" but knew she needed to acknowledge her own guilt first. After that, she could pick away at whatever transgressions I've made to mitigate her own actions.
"Why didn't you call me?"
The opener she chose was unexpected. She skipped the entire apology and went straight for the loaded question. She wanted me to get angry fast so she could uncork her own temper soon.
"Where's Randy? Should we go to brunch?"
She held back. "He's gone. He won't be coming back." I waited to see if she would add a qualifier or a promise to the end like "today" or "ever." She didn't.
"How long..?" I heard Paul Carrack sing the line in the back of my mind. "… has this been going on?"
Claire took a breath. The deep lines in her face showed in the morning light, light circles under her eyes deepened her sad expression. She was growing older gracefully, but it didn't stop her from painting red highlights into her dirty blonde hair or fighting back against time as hard as she could. In a few hours, whatever the outcome of our conversation, Claire would look ready for the world under carefully applied make-up, clothes, and hair intended for a woman much younger, perhaps Randy's age. In the unforgiving light of the kitchen island, however, she looked every second of her 37 years, plus a few more for bad behavior.
I knew the answer would take us back to my time in the hospital. Given a few more hours I would have worked out the exact day she met Randy; the day a rain storm brought down the gutters along the back of the house. I still have that invoice in my records. That day I was screaming from the pain of having every cell in my body burning from the chemotherapy. That day I called my nurse some horrible things and begged someone else - a child I think - to just kill me. I remember telling a chaplain to go fuck himself when he asked me if he could call in a loved one.
April 24th. Not a good day.
"We need to talk about what's next." Never mind the past, says Claire. There's no need for you to bludgeon me with my wrongs, even though I never let a good grudge die without a long beating.
"What’s next?" I considered the question a moment. I caught sight of Parker leaning back against the kitchen sink over Claire’s shoulder. His good eye stared down at the top of the island, like he was lost in thought or even disappointed. I decided. "I have to go to Las Vegas."
"What? Why? You just got home. You’ve barely been back to work."
"I have to do something for Parker."
"Parker? He’s dead."
I heard Parker muttering in the kitchen. "She’s quite sharp, that one."
Claire shook her head and folded her arms like an angry toddler refusing to march upstairs to her room. "No, that won’t work. We have to face this head on. Like my daddy says; ‘Marriage is a business partnership first.’ It doesn’t matter how we feel about each other right now, but how we handle everything we’re responsible for."
And that is how Claire defined our marriage.
I crawled out of my chair and walked to the kitchen, mindful that this could be seen as a breech in our rules for marital conversations. There was cold chicken in my future, followed by a shower and a few phone calls. Parker leaned against the little desktop built into the kitchen cabinets beside the fridge - a catch-all for receipts and mail. He was grubbing up the marble tile with his moldy rot and ash smears. I noticed my mail stacked up with a small box on top. It resembled the other APO box I received from Parker. I picked it up and found that it weighed about the same as the first, too. I looked it over a few moments before I realized Claire had been talking at me the entire time.
"You have every right to be mad at me, but you sure as hell will look at me when I speak."
I turned around with the box in my hands, looked up at her, unaware of the next steps in this dance. I said "Then shut up."
It was as if Parker said it through me. Claire’s face swelled as a scream tried to force its way out. She fought it, contorting her mouth and eyes in an unflattering series that reminded me of pirates, Muppets, and constipation.
Before she could wrap up her performance, I interrupted it. "I know that this is all a shock for you having your husband crash happy fun chicken’n sexy time with Gomer the Handyman, but imagine how you’d feel if you came home to me doing the same thing. Imagine the holiest of holy justifications for just going totally freak-show on me. It would be the mother of all righteous meltdowns. By now this house would be a treatment center for your pain. Every friend in your contact list would know that I screwed up and betrayed you in the most intimate and shameful way I could. By the time your friends and family were done with me, there would be nothing left of but my ashes inside a smoking crater. So, I’m being very cool right now, Claire. Be mindful of that as you choose your tone with me." I turned my attention back to the box. It was simple. It was neutral.
I’ve learned the best way to deal with someone who is manipulative and emotional is to not show them their anticipated responses. This was the moment I think I learned that lesson because for the first time since early on in our relationship, Claire could not figure me out. She could not read me. That realization frightened her.
A moment passed before Claire said, "I’m sorry."
"It’s been a box of fried shit kind of week."
"I understand that, Winston. But you and I need to discuss this like grown-ups and decide what we want to do."
While my mind worked out how to deal with Claire, my fingers were digging into the corners of the package, pulling open the side flaps. My fingers found something soft and lumpy, so I tilted the box up to let it slide out into my hand.
It was a purple, velour bag with a golden drawstring about the size of a 24-ounce soda bottle. Bits of dust and cotton stuck to it. The lumps crackled together as I turned the bag over in my hand. Parker whispered over my shoulder, "Yes. Grown-ups."
It was Parker’s dice bag. The legendary Purple Sack.
"Look, honey…" Claire tried again. "I know you’re exhausted from traveling. I didn’t even ask why you’re home early? Is everything okay? Bad weather? Are you sick? You seem out of it…All things considered, I mean."
I wanted nothing more than to leave the room and look through the bag and the folded paper that appeared to be stuck to it. I looked back to Claire. "I’m very tired. You can understand that I’m in shock. You can understand that I’m not in an emotional state to discuss…this…clearly. I need to…to do things. Let’s talk tonight, okay?"
Claire didn’t like putting off fights she could enjoy right away, but she relented. When I had nothing else to say, she retreated upstairs to prepare for her own day.
~
I loosened the gold cord holding the top of the velour bag closed and shook the contents out onto the kitchen table. Doz
ens of multi-sided game dice rolled out across the Formica with a tick-tack-chunking that restored a little bit of my youth. Plastic and glass on Formica. Four-sided pyramids. Traditional six-siders along with eight, ten, twelve, twenty and even a few large one-hundred-sided die resembling large golf balls. Some sparkled with flecks of gold and silver suspended in the clear plastic. Some dated back to the early days of gaming, worn relics of the 1970s with numbers so faded they were kept more for ceremony than use. Pretty and plain, new and old, they were part of my youth.
Remember that time in your life you opened a drawer or a box and found something that connected you to a good time in your life? Maybe it's your mom's old ugly apron, the one she wore every Christmas around the kitchen. Maybe it's an old birthday card or school picture, even a song on the radio you haven't heard in years...suddenly you're no longer crossing town in an uncomfortable suit to another boring meeting but hearing an old friend in the shotgun seat try to convince you that you'd be an idiot not to ask Claire to the Queensrÿche concert.
How could a fake velvet bag full of gaming dice that looked like the testicle of a cartoon dinosaur be "legendary"? Years of adventures, trips to the gaming store, and long nights around a table sharing stories and friendship. It wasn't one event. It was a separate and distinct lifetime with people I really missed.
The oldest, beaten plastic dice dated back twenty years or more to the first time my friends and I escaped reality for a few hours to kill some little monsters and plunder a dungeon. But I remember it most because I laughed out loud and a lot. I made a friend of Grant Parker, a guy who awesome that being his friend made me feel better about myself. Nate Hamm was a different story for another time, but his quirks and general weirdness always made for a fun afternoon that turned into years of stepping away from the realities of growing up.
A magician, a paladin and a thief. We were the big three heroes of Dar Halandril: Landru Iblis, Sir Drake Daemonbane, and Eon DeLor. There were others who joined and left over the years, but those were the big three as played by me, Parker and Nate. Even after we moved on to other games, we seemed to have the same general configuration to play. In other games, we would be the Hacker, Hero, and... Thief. Or the Occultist, Investigator, and... Thief. Or Techmage, Space Cowboy, and... Nate liked playing thieves.
I recognized a few shiny, black dice with gold inlaid numbers in Drakkish script. They were Parker's exclusive DrakkenCon Championship gaming dice from the year he traveled to Atlanta and played Dragonfire: War of the Wyrrms with the elite of role-playing gamers. The games of DrakkenCon were written and played so well that they were actually televised. I once saw a set of dice like those sell on eBay for close to a thousand dollars. Yet there were Parker's own mingling with the cheap plastic dice that came with the Basic Dungeons & Dragons game and generic painted rollers you could pick up four-for-a-dollar at the game shop.
~
I know a lot of people who peaked in high school or college. Their lives were never better than when stadiums or auditoriums cheered for them. They were expected to lead the rest of us into the future, but ended up spending time warming a bar stool or shilling Fords trying to remember the last time anyone gave a damn. Looking back on those old games, I felt the same way. We never had crowds. We had each other. We never emerged from the basement with anything to give away. We just told our story together. And we were heroes in a world we made for ourselves.
Like Parker in real life.
My life wasn't a bad one. I had more comforts and privilege than a lot of people and the blessing of still being alive thanks to good insurance and competent medical care. The kitchen Claire and I argued over for weeks was larger than my dorm room, larger than many first apartments. We were comfortable but never content, proud but never satisfied – but what made us feel incomplete was not having the next thing the neighbors brought home and not being closer to understanding ourselves or helping make a better world. Nadeim was right. My life was about making people feel better about farmers by putting words in an old man's mouth. Claire helped sell people houses. Her father sold Fords that allowed him to get us great deals on expensive sedans and helped finance a house way too big for our needs and more expensive than needed to be.
Now Claire was sleeping with a handyman and asking me to accept some of the responsibility for that. Our marriage was over and I knew enough friends on the other side of divorce to know this was just the start of a long, painful journey.
I took another look at the dice, remembering the adventure, the friendship, and especially the escape.
Work could wait.
DUE INTERMEDIO
People ask me what it was like to fight The Monster. They don’t want to know the gory details. They want to relate, but they don’t want to know. Not really. And I don’t blame them. Some people who’ve had leukemia have come up to me hoping to share war stories and compare scars. I tend to shy away from that kind of exchange because every time I go deep into my own experience, it doesn’t seem to end well. When I get to the part about the Death Shadows and the nightly parade of the dead through my cancer ward, the conversations end abruptly. Still, most of my experience is like anyone else with cancer, easier than some and worse than others.
If you can avoid it, I highly recommend it. Sometimes, though, you can’t avoid it. You win the big "C" lottery. At its best, you think you’re going to fly. At worst, you want The Monster to win…just deal the death blow and be done. My oncologist calls it the fire that forges the new you.
My oncologist was an asshole, but he was right.
You can’t even think without a flash of pain. Bed sores are less painful than moving and you don’t have a way of telling the nurse that he missed checking that part of your right leg for the fifth time. You listen to your heart pounding and feel the tubes deep inside your veins. When it comes time for the poison you want to cry, you want to beg for anything else. But the disease is in your blood. You can’t cut it out. The bad marrow will just make more bad blood and the bad blood will only kill you. The therapy only feels like it will kill you.
The first night I felt like a log on fire. I slept only in brief moments of passing out and cannot remember anything about the daylight hours except a kind of exhaustion I’d never experienced before. Two nurses used coarse, steel wool to scrape my entire body clean and replace my bed linens with burlap. I lay on the hospital bed, too tired to even scream. At sundown, they poisoned me again.
The second night I spent stuck inside my own cold, dead flesh as red fire ants swarmed over and through me. They had gotten inside me through the tube running into my chest and up through my catheter. I felt them rushing through me, displacing my flesh and burrowing through my muscle tissue, tearing through my joints and carving through the bone to consume the marrow. I screamed through the pain calling out to my wife Claire to help me, tell me it would be over soon. The burning and the nausea caused me to pass out twice, once from nearly choking on my own bile and the second from a contraction of pain so powerful that my body refused to inhale for a full minute.
My world went gray with flashes of white as my forearms and calves cramped and the fire ants withdrew from the corners of my body to gather in my stomach. Bloated on the marrow from my bones, they burst from their feeding, excreting more poison into my body. A pain swelled in my left hand as if someone thrust it into a pot of boiling water. I screamed and the pain subsided as my nerves went numb. My lips cracked and bled. I tasted blood first and then the sterile gauze wrapped around my tongue. Blackbirds swooped across the gray and struck at me, pecking at my lips and teeth, prying open my mouth to try and tear out my tongue. I choked again, but did not vomit. Talons scraped across my bald, sweat-drenched head. The only voice of the night I remember was that of a stranger who told me "It will be over soon, Winston. The worst is over. You did it. Outstanding work, Winston. I'm so proud of you."
I began to cry and moan through the gag blocking my mouth. Tears burned trenches across my cheeks. My eyes crackled as
the gray shapes melted together.
Soon the pain ebbed, flushed from my body and replaced with...nothing, something between numbness and a dull resonating ache. I was relieved when I lost all feeling in my fingers and then my hand. The fire ants soon disappeared from my body as the stranger's voice announced that my body was "evacuating fluids and solids". My skin hung on me like an uncomfortable suit. My pounding heart slowed so that I could only hear it in one ear and feel it soften its attempts to burst through my chest.
My world went from gray to black, my body struggling to fight against a chemical sleep, fearing that surrender would mean death. My mind and body disagreed over the danger of that undiscovered country. I was ready to surrender and let the fire cleanse all but my spirit. Leave my flesh to the ants and then kill the ants with fire. Bury them in the congealed fat of my remains. Let my spirit be judged by whatever is out there beyond this pain. Let it be over.
Some people report better experiences with chemotherapy than I can. During my time in the rehabilitation hospital, people pointed out that something very wrong must have happened to me because their experience was little more than a month-long hangover. Some of the others in my unit claimed to have eaten well and even had sex with their partners during therapy. At my best toward the end of my treatments I was too tired to smile, much less raise a hand. I was happy to take my nutrients through a tube down my throat and then with whatever they pumped into through the hole they punched into my chest. As far as sex goes, the only contact my junk had with anyone during that period was when the duty nurse adjusted it to replace the catheter.
~
Two years "cured", I can report that I still wake up screaming from the experience. That second night was the worst of a dozen nights where pain and delirium rocked my body and poisoned my mind. I was never alone, though. Someone watched. All the time.
