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My mind is out of breath. Like a hormonal teenager, my heart erupts in pimples. “Hello, Americans!” the roofers who speak rapid-fire Spanish to each other shout down. The sun has the yellowish-brown tinge of tarnish on old silver. Politicians of all sizes must have made a pact to use words without regard to their proper meaning. Everyone is an individual and reacts differently. I learned the truth the strangest way, lying in bed listening to the night wind howl, like a street mob waving clubs and fists and a rope knotted in a noose.
Healthy people avoid you, afraid of catching your cancer. My own doctor looks away when he talks to me as if too shy to meet my eyes. Simone Weil, the Christian mystic, starved herself to death in a conscientious effort to merge with God. The bare, whitewashed room in Kent where she died had a window overlooking fields and woods. It’s like nothing I have ever experienced, mind-grabbing, soul-saving, all-consuming, a weighty epiphany that falls out of the sky and flattens you, a baby abandoned in a dumpster.
Down in the basement, behind a series of unlabeled steel doors, is a special X-ray machine, called a linear accelerator, that resembles a giant praying mantis poised to devour her sex partner. It has been kept secret for so long that few remember now what or where it is — like baseball immortal Ted Williams’ head, cut off and frozen after death and last seen in Arizona some 20 years ago. A prosperously plump man, his elaborate swirly comb-over held in place by a prodigious amount of hairspray, puts an arm around you, pulls you closer, whispers dark rumors in your ear. Meanwhile, God lives in fear of losing his crap job and never finding another one near as good.
The cardiologist who examined Barbara compared the heart to a house with four rooms. In Barbara’s case, the door to one of the rooms is stuck, and there are dead plants on the windowsill. I hadn’t the background to question him or object. I listened in glum silence, downwind of Hell and nearly overcome by the stink. There are times ahead when we will ask ourselves, which is worse, being broken or getting repaired? A colleague at the university has had his intestines rerouted because of colon cancer. The brother of my sister-in-law is receiving chemo for liver cancer. All I can think is, I can’t die now. I’m just getting good at writing.
