Write out a lot of self-addressed envelopes and start licking stamps now. Get to know rejection and use it as a whetstone to sharpen your tools. Even in despair, submit to everywhere. Writing is catharsis and joy. Publication is hard work and at least a little bit of luck.
- Craig Rothstein |
The camera is the eye of a surgical leech, forgotten and decaying inside an old mason jar. The lens comes slowly into focus. The setting is the mad scientist's laboratory. The Doctor works in the corner, back turned, arms collecting and replacing various objects from crowded shelves. The brick walls are moist and the sound of dripping comes from behind them.
I am slumped in a chair in another corner. My right arm lies on a slab of wood in front of me, palm up, tubes sprouting from a needle stuck in the elbow. The camera zooms in on my face. I have the glazed expression of a tourist caught in a third world revolution.
There is a hood in the center of the room. It makes a low humming noise. Its fan works to dispel noxious gases. In it are overturned, empty bottles with warning labels that say POISON VAPOR and DESSICATION. Tables are crowded with flasks of bubbling fluids. Needles of different sizes fill glass jars. The Doctor turns around holding in his arms a basketful of needles. He approaches me. In his eyes, tiny sparks of anticipation flash across the brief landscape of the iris.
My head drops and I watch, as if from a distance, as his fingers caress the skin. They are walking over tiny hairs, searching for a vein hiding deep under the flesh. A reluctant vein. Suddenly his fingers stop. They press harder, probing the depths. They find it. He wipes the area with an alcohol swab and presses with his thumb and forefinger on the spot. He stretches the skin between his fingers just enough so there is a feeling of being stretched, and slides the curved-angle aperture of the needle under the skin. It depresses the flesh and disappears. I am perfectly still, appearing as if I haven't felt a thing.
The camera is now the curved-angle aperture of the needle. Orange Benadryl gushes fast out the end, through the layers of vascular tissue and into the thruway of blood cells and platelets. It flashes once as it hits the blood brain barrier and disseminates widely inside, binding in tiny molecular matrimony. Downstream, the effects are overwhelming and I sink into the chair. Benadryl dulls the mind, levying effects like a bad flu without the sneezing. Everything slows down to a deadened pace. Out of the neurological gloom my father materializes beside me.
“Are you OK?” His lips form the words but the sound is caught somewhere between his mouth and my ear. It hangs like a grape suspended in Christmas Jello. I look at him. He is a museum exhibit. I gape in his general direction.
The mad genius hangs a tangle of plastic ropes on the steel skeleton standing next to me. I look up at him wearily as he sets the dial on the drip bag. Then he removes a giant needle from his basket. It is magnificent and terrifying, bigger than I'd dreamed. The point looks thick and shines in the glow of the candles. A bubble of candy red liquid appears at the tip. It swells up and falls to the side, shimmying down the silver edge until it hits the collar of the syringe and disappears against the backdrop of bright candy red that fills the container. He points it at me. In my daze, I recoil, but the needle goes elsewhere. He shoves it into an invisible opening on the bag and the candy red liquid flows into the vast network of plastic tubes, extensions of my veins, hanging from the skeleton. The red medicine travels the length of the tubes, speeding around bends and curves and finally comes to the junction with my skin and disappears.
There is a metallic taste on my tongue. My eye snaps into place. The taste of sweet metal spreads over the inside of my mouth. It tastes the way it looks, kool-aid chemotherapy, chemical warfare. Now it tastes like a hospital room after the patient dies. Like ammonia and feces.
The doctor stands up and mumbles. He hangs his head from his giant frame and the words come muffled from the cavern of his lab coat collar.
“You must vait for the rest of the fluids to drip. Then you can go.”
I nod at him. His eyes have an empathetic kindness that is not quite hidden by his eccentricity. Never mind that he is mad. He's the cure. I shut my eyes and sink into a dumb nothingness of Benadryl drunk and adriamycin dreams. Somewhere out in the darkness I hear my father's voice. It sounds like distant wind. He is talking to the Doctor. I slip deeper and wait for the rest of the cocktail to make it in.
The Benadryl thins enough to allow the camera to focus. I am in a car speeding on a ribbon floating through the industrial landscape of downtown Brooklyn. Giant buildings, white and faceless with yellow lights coming from deep within, perch just to the side of the BQE. I'm in a haldol dream; my father is alert on the road. The radio speaks foreign tongues fast, or I am too tired to listen. The ribbon stretches on into the night. It's a mesmerizing scene—dull sodium glow on a deserted urban grid, massive empty structures crowded with forgotten ghosts. They watch through broken glass eyes the mechanized parade speeding by. Hash marks of rain come out of the night sky. I am six inches recessed from the surface of my eyes. I close them and feel the road vibrating underneath.
When I open my eyes again the lens is clear. We've come twenty miles and passed Nassau. The parkway is curving among naked trees and under stone arches. We are alone on the road The dashboard reads nine o'clock. I feel a gnawing hunger. Realizing I can speak again, I mention this out loud.
“Good,” my father says. “Eat when you get home.” Then, in a lowered voice, “Does it hurt much?”
“Eh.”
“What can you expect?” He shrugs, but then says, “You'll feel better. Just give it a few days.” His doctor's bravado belies his fatherly concern. He watches me shiver in the fever. I am so tired, I think. We are almost home. The parkway has already split and tapered into two lanes. Off the ramp, traffic is at a standstill. Red lights are cruel and everyone drives slow.
When the car finally stops in the funeral home parking lot, I lift my hurting body out and wave goodbye. I am hot with fever. I push the key into the lock. The world disappears into darkness. I climb the stairs and get into bed. I shut my eyes and sink into ignorant sleep.
*
Adriamycin is a viscous red liquid that stains the sides of the clear plastic syringe. It is derived from a fungus and makes me shake violently and dream vivid and terrifying sequences of death. I see my family stricken with cancer and shriveling from living full fleshed creatures into animations of skeleton and clinging red tissue. I see tumors living free of their human baggage. I see my mother and sister standing forlorn, waiting for me to come out of the tunnel. I am sweating and the bed sheets stick to my skin. My pores release poison back into the air. My piss is burning. My eyes are dry and my tears feel sticky, like they are the viscous secretions of a clandestine adriamycin gland. I say the word in my mind. Adriamycin. It floats in the lidded darkness like a Broadway marquee. It is the sickly sweet hallucination engine of chemotherapy, a mucus thread between life and living dreams. Which is real? Putomayo Indians dream life and live dreams. They drink vine nectars turned hallucinogenic by forest chemistry and dance like snakes and jungle cats and birds, flying over the Andes in glorious sun-drenched freedom. I am chained to my bed, sweating the sticky stuff that poisons me from inside. My mouth is dry and tastes of sweet metal. In my sleep I think I must be dying.
I am sealed in the prison of my eyelids but I don't know it. I see a road—salt-bleached, solitary, stretching beyond infinite fields. I am driving a car, late model, manual. The sun is stranded high in a blue-white sky. Seat belt plastic hot on my neck. Sweat collects in droplets at its edge. Just above the belt, the sun burns through the glass onto fair neck skin. A red circle starts to grow.
By dusk I reach the campsite. Mountains tower ahead of me. My neck is stiff from hours of driving. My head aches. I search the car for my leather bag. When I find it, I carefully unzip the side compartment. I remove a small orange bottle. I take out two pills. They are round tablets with a number on one side and what appear to be the spokes of a wheel on the other. I put them on my tongue. They stick to the dry surface and I can taste bitter. I take a big gulp of water from a gallon jug. The pills come free and slide down my throat. I take another drink from the plastic jug and replace the cap.
Behind me the flatlands are still lit but here it grows dark and the massive chunks of earth tearing into the sky are slowly disappearing into a gray haze of nothing. I stare into the space in front of me, trying to hold on to the sharp edges of the cliffs and peaks that are still miles away. But they blur and fade and the impending night rules all. Still I look, wondering if the mountains are really still there.
Night has swallowed the mountain range and now it swallows me. In the darkness I touch my fingers to my neck. A strange thing has happened. A little lump has formed where the sun burned me earlier. I touch it with a fingertip. It moves around underneath the skin. I take it in three fingers, like a Spanish olive, like a third testicle. I squeeze it. Sharp pain blazes down the side of my neck. I jerk my head to the side and lay the flat of my palm across the lump. My hand is hot. The pain slowly fades.
Darkness turns to light as I walk into the wilderness. The forest changes around me. Lush green foliage drops to the ground leaving forlorn branches trembling in the dusky sunlight. After a long while I stop and sit on a fallen tree trunk. I can't remember from which way I came. My throat feels thick and it is difficult to breathe. I stand up and walk in a circle. I walk quickly as if I am going somewhere important, but I am going no where. I promise myself that each step will be the last, but when it comes I must take one more. If I stop, the world will move on without me.
By the time the sun dies again in the white sky, I am exhausted. The images around me are vivid but still I do not believe them. Hillsides overrun with white birch. There is no sign of life. It smells like sadness if sadness has a smell. All the trees, downed and standing, are corpses. All dead. Not a leaf clinging to anorexic branches, not an insect crawling over rotted earth.
In the distance the naked branches fuse into a gray horizon. I shout. A wordless wail. It dies quickly in the air. I look around at the shallow valley. Leaves cover the ground in washed out reds and browns. The bare earth is broken in places where thick roots have broken through.
The ground under my feet is sickly soft. I shift on my feet and the earth shifts with me. The ground opens up and I start to sink into the peat and broken branches and dead things. The odor is rancid like expired chemicals, like window cleanser and rotting meat.
Now I am falling. The trees around me disappear and all I can see is the ground, which is now to my chin. The white-gray sky is an albino skin descending flat against the earth. It pushes me down into the filth. The stench of decay fills my nostrils. All goes dark.
I am struck by the nightmarish vulnerability. I gasp for air but don't feel the satisfaction of breath. My skin is a rubber suit. This is staged. I am a mannequin posed in death.
The scene cuts. Now I'm shoveling dirt onto a soon-to-be corpse. It twitches. Its eyes glow with the last rays of sun as they begin to fail at the grave's edge. I am throwing the dirt with my hands, simultaneously watching it come down over my vision. I feel the warm earth and the random wet flicker of a maggot. Panic rises. My heart slams against my throat. I breathe ragged and the darkness closes in. My eyes come unglued. Light, dirty and yellow, spills over the room. I take deep breaths, the oxygen rushes into my lungs. I am alone in my bed and the morning shines weakly through the curtains. I've been sleeping for two days.
*
The world is in perpetual dusk. It is always getting darker outside. Mom's voice rattles me through the wire. The drug is strong in me and I am shaking. I can't remember the conversation as we are having it. I hang up the phone in mid-mumble hoping she understands. Her voice is thick with pain. This hurts her more than me, I think. She co-opts my pain like a good Jewish mother and knits it into guilt. Then I am glad I am not speaking to her anymore. No need to in the chemo sickness.
I go to the refrigerator but my hands shake so bad I can barely get the door open. I drink orange juice from the carton. It tastes heavy and sugary and I feel the bile rise. I stumble back to my dark room with the holes in the black sheet that hangs over the window. Some light comes through in the early morning, and waits for me to wake. When I'm on the steroids, I see the light because I cannot sleep. Those are the bad nights when I am strung out and angry. But adriamycin lets me sleep a deep narcotic sleep filled with mushroom dreams and Aztec wheels.
The sickness begins when I first wake up. Now I am nauseas and stiff and feverish and aching. My hands are arthritic and my head is congested with nightmare residue. I taste sweet metal and dirt. In the bedroom, the curls of smoke float up to the ceiling. Some of the pain drifts off and the nausea becomes confused. I feel hunger and go back to the kitchen. It looks different now, smaller, cozier. The refrigerator is one of the old 1950s bullet-shaped metal boxes, the kind with the heavy clamp door handle and tin ice collectors. It's a fallout shelter. I can use it against the radiation. I close my eyes and the world spins towards the inevitable. I open them. My hands are shaking a little less. I drink more juice. This time it tastes like juice. When I look out the little window above the sink filled with day old dishes, I see puddles of oily water collecting around the pumps and the dead neon sign. The Russian is there in blue overalls. He has the self-satisfied look of a man who has just masturbated to completion in a public toilet. He is talking with a man in white jeans and a blue button shirt standing next to a sport truck. The man gets in and drives off. The Russian wipes his hands on a filthy rag. I think the Russian gives bad change. I turn back to the kitchen and think about breakfast. What will stay down?
Depression hangs on my neck like a wet towel. Tomorrow is my birthday. I will be twenty five and dying of cancer. Twenty five and at the end and what have I accomplished? Virginal. Waking in filthy morning-after hate. Too afraid to risk the truth. I never made a choice. I lived my entire life above a net. I was weak. Now I am dying. Now it is the end of it all and the sticky residue in the container is pity. I can't even cry.
The day wears on slowly. The sickness starts quietly in the morning and increases throughout the day. By noon, I am in the tilted pharmacy (or tilted in the pharmacy) getting my meds and then home to the couch. It is a terrible day as all the days are and when the dark comes and the sickness gets stronger, I am glad the end is near. Tomorrow, I dread. My dreams, once sanctuary, are nightmares. I am alone. I feel sorry for myself and I hate myself for it. My body is a trash bin, my excess flesh leans hard on the wall, near a hole I'd kicked in a drunken rage. I look at my hands, my body. This tired flesh and these hands that do nothing. My body no longer feels like my own. The chemo owns it now.
When midnight comes I fade away to bed leaving the television blaring weather reports and cereal commercials. I lie down and the world spins swiftly. The sickness is full on and the nausea and depression drag like an anchor. I am alone in the darkness. I am tiny in the world. I curl into the blanket and pull it to my eyes. It is soft and warm. I pull it close to my face. But there is no safety left in comfort. In the warmth and closeness it is still horrifying. Against the fabric my breath smells like antiseptic.
The world moves away. The only light comes through a hole in the sheet over the window. It is the pale white light of the halide streetlamps. It is empty, like me.
*
Morning trumpets its return with golden rays of sun shooting through the holes in the black sheet. In the midst of it, a figure shrouded in radiant black robes stands. It is Death. He has come to collect. The thing stands with outstretched arms, a black hooded beast without a face. Cold fingers of fear creep along my spine, pulling back nerves like the strings of a guitar. The chilling memory freezes me in place. My nightmares have followed me out. The unbelievable moment lingers in empty space, between dust and time.
The freeze frame dissolves and rage comes into me at a boil. My blood chases it up capillary avenues and reaches my burning cheeks. I am lying on my side, my hands drawn to my face, blanket over my eyes. Still I see his glare, the anti-light of his blurred black robes and his arms reaching towards me, radiating like things that aren't really there. I feel pressure in my chest, the fingers clutching and grabbing. I look down and he has my tumor in his bony hands. It pulses softly, a yellow mass with red veins. It drips fluid over his skeletal fingers. Fear wells up threatening to pollute the rage and drown me. I cry out.
“Come back!”
But he hasn't left. I try to rise from the bed but he pushes me down into soft earth. I can't breathe. The lights are going dim. Shadows are crawling around the edges, rolling like honey over fading sight. The air is sucked out of my lungs. Fingers close one by one over my throat. I cannot breathe. I cannot see. I am dissolving.
A flash of light cuts the darkness and now I am floating without sight. There is less than darkness—a vacuum of everything but the gentle tug of a current. Drifting.
A scene resolves from the nothing. Vague shapes start to take form. A background, a setting, wind, the taste of salt on the air. I am on sand. No. Soil. Dry soil sifting between my fingers. There below me, in the shaded darkness under a white night, I see the eyes and the face. I know them. I stare in disbelief. He is still moving under the fine, black dirt. Blonde hair. Thick fingers curled in arthritic spasm. My heart is pounding again on my throat, slapping the skin as from the outside. Warm drips over my chest. It hits the soil with a small “puh,” raising a tiny cloud when it does. He opens his mouth and tries to speak. Dirt falls in his hole and he is stifled. My eyes open wide. Tears form like oily puddles. They drip with the blood. They mix in the dirt that is gathering on top of him. He stops now. Stops moving. He is dead. My nemesis. My hideous mirror. My doppelganger.
Shock and air rush in a gasp. I am back in bed grappling with Death. I am feverishly angry. Gathering strength, from where I don't know, I throw myself at the robes. My hands and arms disappear into the blackness. He is like soft rubber falling apart at my penetration. My hands sink deep into the neck folds of the robe. My fingers push beyond, find a cold emptiness. It spreads through my hands and up my arms with deadly speed. I am afraid it is going to reach my heart and freeze it and shatter it but then I feel the hot flesh of something. His neck maybe. My fingers dig in.
Fear and rage fight inside me. I froth at the mouth. I shake and convulse. I am a furious seizure. I am a vicious infection. I grab wildly in the darkness at his flesh and robes, scratching and squeezing. Pain explodes in supernova from inside my chest. I am on fire.
I am crisping into a glossy black residue when a new warmth spreads like endorphin. A new calm washes over me. My hands stop grabbing at the air. My heart slows its pounding. My eyes open. The room is empty. The curtain has come off and sunlight is everywhere. I touch my fingers to my chest. There is no gaping hole, no septic wound. There is only flesh covering bone and the faint reminder that today is my birthday.
I slowly get out of bed and sit at the desk. I start a letter. (I will never mail it.) I write about the past months, about fear and questions. I write about the perpetual intensity of not-knowing. I write about the sense of dread that comes with finding out. Then something strange happens. I write about the diagnosis. I remember they said it was Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma but they were wrong. CJ, my doctor, my mad scientist, went to the lab to see for himself. Pathology had fucked it up. They'd fucked it up! My parents found me at a friend's place in the city. I'm stoned and alone and reeling. It's Hodgkin's, they say over and over. The pathologists, the damned experts who said it was Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, who gave me that death sentence, were wrong! “It is Hodgkin's Lymphoma,” my mother shouted over the phone. CJ saw it himself, the brilliant bastard. And just in time, my chemotherapy, now the right chemotherapy. It is Hodgkin's Disease, treatable, maybe curable.
It means everything. It means life. And for the first time in a long time I cry. I write about the mistake and I cry. It is the first and only time I cry about my disease. Sometimes I still try.
Later I drive for a long time. I am standing across the road from a field of wheat. The sun shimmers over the windblown wheat tops. The tall, feathery stalks make a thick blanket rolling in the crisp breeze. The air spills over my face. I wipe away the salt and get back in the car.