Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
February 01, 2005 – February 28, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $664,183.22
The Sunday before the surgery, Glynis wasn’t supposed to eat any solids. Out of camaraderie, Shep felt he shouldn’t eat anything, either. To his embarrassment, he got hungry. The fridge was packed with leftovers from the dinner with Jackson and Carol the night before. Fasting with so much food destined to go bad seemed perverse. So he would wait until she went to the bathroom, then stick a surreptitious finger in the hummus.
Zach came home from his overnight with a fellow hikikomori, hacked off a hunk of cold roast beef, and went straight to his room. Depleted and radiating an anxiety she wouldn’t articulate, Glynis watched TV in the den. Whenever he checked on her, another pharmaceutical ad was reminding them of all the other ailments that lay in wait, and if they didn’t slay you, the cures would:
… is not for everyone. Tell your doctor if you have an allergic reaction that causes swelling of the face, mouth, or throat, or affects your breathing or causes rash or hives. Side effects may include upper respiratory infection, stuffy or runny nose, and sore throat and headache … serious stomach ailments, such as bleeding, could get worse. Some people may experience fainting. Some people may have nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, bruising, or not sleep well. Some people may have muscle cramps or loss of appetite or feel tired … If you develop fever or unexplained weakness or confusion, tell your doctor, as this could be signs of a rare but potentially life-threatening condition called TTP … may have a higher chance of pneumonia … may increase your risk of osteoporosis and some eye problems … may increase the chance of heart attack or stroke, which can lead to death. All prescription NSAIDs increase the chances of serious skin reactions or stomach and intestinal problems, such as bleeding and ulcers, which can occur without warning, and can cause death.
Accompanied by the strumming guitar and uplifting flute cadenzas that in his boyhood typified alternative folk services in his father’s church, these warnings were all delivered with a lilting, lobotomized pleasantness—the tone of voice in which one might read bedtime stories to small children about mischievous bears and over-curious kittens. Meantime, ads for high blood pressure medicine alternated with ads for salt-and-vinegar potato chips, ads for high cholesterol medicine with ads for two-for-one pizza, ads for acid reflux medicine with ads for a chain restaurant’s baby-back ribs. Averse to inferring conspiracy, he perceived only an odd sort of balance.
He kept trying to come up with comforting things to say. He repeatedly fought the impulse to assure her that she’d come through surgery with flying colors, because he obviously had no idea. Yet absent sham clairvoyance, he could do little but ferry Glynis more apple juice than she wanted. Last night’s voluble dinner now seemed improbable. Today Shep and his wife had barely spoken. Only a warm hand on her neck seemed to make a difference. This was a time of the body. To communicate was to communicate with the body.
He didn’t want to tell her what he was thinking. His thoughts were selfish, but there was too much time. Too much empty space and suffocating quiet. So he couldn’t stop himself from wondering if there was anything, any single prospect no matter how small, to which he was looking forward.
He hated his work. He hated hating it, too; to despise the company he had brought into the world seemed a parental betrayal. He feared his son’s getting older almost as much as Zach did—since lately that’s all the boy appeared to do, just get older, not wiser or clearer, no more determined or firm in himself. He dreaded suing Forge Craft for damages, when the damage was done; civil jurisprudence would entail more forms, procedures, and postponements, in which Glynis’s medical circumstances were drowning him already. And he was hardly relishing the imminent arrival of Glynis’s family from Arizona. He would put them up while Glynis recovered. Feed them, ferry them to the hospital, keep them entertained. The controlled neutrality he had maintained in relation to his in-laws for years now was bound to slide to impatience.
He tried to think conventionally, to anticipate the joyful day of his daughter’s marriage. But Amelia was at that age when she’d doubtless marry the wrong boy, whom she’d rapidly outgrow. He would know this, despoilingly, on the day. At her wedding reception, he pictured his toast to the happy couple as forced, himself already mournful over their pending divorce. He pictured all the other guests speculating wanly about how long this one was likely to last, while making cynically good use of the open bar. Posing for group snapshots, he would envision the prints shoved ashamedly into a bottom drawer. The lavish flowers would wither in his mind’s eye as in time-lapse photography. It would descend on the father of the bride like a divine vision that within a few years these two flushed and devoted young people would no longer possess each other’s current email addresses.
Nevertheless, Amelia was the type who’d expect a wedding with all the bells and whistles. A modern woman who, over the course of her life, would blithely recite “til death do us part” two or three times with no sense of self-consciousness. She was a girl-girl. Clothes. As scathing about violation of the rules of fashion as her mother felt above them. Her hopped-up, hectic determination to have “fun” was a little tiring. He worried that the intensity of her resolve to live it up in her twenties betrayed a corresponding pessimism about her life thereafter. He worried, too, that she saw her own father as the embodiment of the very party’s-over adulthood that the girl was so desperate to forestall.
He was glad, he supposed, that she had earned a degree. Yet he wondered whether the abundance of the information provided by a $200K Dartmouth BA in “media studies” might have been available through a free trial subscription to The Atlantic Monthly and a basic cable package including Turner Classics for fifty dollars a month. His daughter’s dubious degree had alone decimated the savings he’d accrued previous to the sale of Knack. Shep may not have expected his own father to send him through school, but it was customary now: a child had a right to a university education. So he should not resent the expense, and therefore he did not resent it. Yet after decades of single-ply, turkey-burger stinting, actually to be punished for the frugality had been, well—disconcerting. His cash assets had flat out disqualified Amelia from financial aid.
He kept it to himself, of course, that he found Amelia’s style of dress—the bare midriff, the skimpy tops, the glitter on her breasts—not so much risqué as obvious. Trying too hard to be a woman, and therefore childish. Consequently, in that vision of her wedding, he foresaw her coming to loggerheads with her classically tasteful mother, who—
Who would not be there.
In relation to Glynis, there was nothing to look forward to. Nothing. While friends would never have described Shep Knacker as irksomely sunny, he was an optimist all the same. Yet he did not understand what an optimist could contemplate when not a single cheerful advent plausibly awaited in his future.
Amelia called late afternoon. She surprised him. So demonstrably upset by the news at first, she would surely have planned to visit before the surgery. Her reason for demurring—having to work through the weekend on the next issue of the money-losing, negligible-circulation arts journal that she helped to edit—sounded generic. His daughter’s pep talk with her mother was short. Of course, today he’d no right to complain that anyone else in the family had nothing to say.
Shep sneaked another skewer of cold shrimp, which he shielded ascending the stairs. He stood before his son’s door. What a radical gesture it had come to seem, simply crossing this threshold. His first knock was soft, inaudibly deferential. He tried more loudly a second time. After formally opening the door, Zach stood blocking the entrance, as if his father were trying to sell him something.
“Mind if I come in?”
He did mind. But Zach was, on the surface, well behaved. He drew back to resume his seat at the computer. Feeling a little foolish still holding the bamboo skewer, Shep sat springily on the edge of the bed, ill at ease. It wasn’t the posters of bands he’d never heard of, or the mess. It was the plain fact of not being welcome. Kids never seemed aware that “their” rooms were a generous conceit on the part of the parent who paid for the entire house. It was Shep’s right, legally, morally, and financially, to walk into this room whenever he liked. Then again, some dim consciousness that in truth children had no territory may have explained why they defended their illusion of territory with such ferocity.
“I wanted to check if you had any questions,” said Shep. “About what happens next.”
“Happens?” Zach gave no indication that he had any idea what his father was talking about.
First Amelia, and now this. “To your mother,” said Shep, as if reminding the boy that he had one.
“They’re going to operate. And then she’ll come home and take drugs and she’ll lose her hair and shit.” The boy’s phrasing was crude, but uninflected.
“That’s pretty much it.”
“So why would I have any questions,” said Zach, stating this very question in the declarative. “It’s on TV all the time.”
“Not—all of it,” his father said lamely. Cancer in the world of entertainment was a neat one-word expedient for the disposal of characters who had served their purpose, and would vanish politely off-camera. It added gravitas to a series in danger of seeming trivial. It provided a plot twist from which primary players reliably recovered in an episode or two—never more than a season.
“So what part do they leave out?”
Agony, he wanted to say. Time, he wanted to say. Money, he did not even want to say, but that, too. “I guess we’ll find out the hard way.”
The boy was incurious. He should have had questions. Yet it was not as if Zach had no sense of mystery, as if he regarded the world as known. To the contrary, the appurtenances of his life were nothing but mystery. Take that computer. When Shep was fifteen, he did his homework on a typewriter. It was electric. He may not have completely understood the circuitry through which a tap on a key raised the arm of a letter. Still, he could watch the arm rise, inspect the three-dimensional backward a affixed to the metal. He could grasp the elementary process by which it struck an inky ribbon and stained a black a-shaped mark on a physical piece of paper. But when Zach typed an a, it was magic. His iPod was magic. His digital TV was magic. The Internet was magic. Even his father’s car, the machine through which boys once achieved their first dominion over the physical world, was now controlled by a computer. Diagnosis of malfunction didn’t involve tinkering with an engine and getting covered in oil. The car plugged into another impenetrable computer at the dealership. Were anything to go wrong with the technical furniture of Zach’s life—and these days, machines didn’t sputter on you, develop a funny hissing sound, or start to squeak; they either worked, or they stopped dead—the notion of fixing it himself would never enter his head. There were sorcerers for such things, although the concept of repair had itself grown arcane; one was far more likely to go out and buy another machine that magically worked, then magically didn’t. Collectively, the human race was growing ever more authoritative about the mechanics of the universe. Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo—charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do as it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry.
At that moment, Shep had his first glimpse of why Zach might seem to be getting older in an exclusively temporal sense. Nothing the boy had been taught in school had supplied him the slightest jurisdiction over the forces that controlled his life. Second-year algebra failed even fractionally to inform him about what to do when their broadband service cut off besides call Verizon—the sorcerers; it failed to illuminate what “broadband service” really was, beyond merciful access to magic. This passive, unmastering relation to the material world permanently suspended his son in the powerless dependency of childhood. So it made perfect sense that Zach would be uninquisitive about his mother’s treatment. Modern medicine’s hocus-pocus was surely as supernatural as everything else.
Supernatural? Shep wanted to recall to his son the slick, membranous skin between the leaves of an onion. That, he would say, is like the onion’s mesothelium. It will be tedious, but it won’t be fancy: they will slice her like a vegetable. And then pick, bit by bit, the tiny shreds of that onion skin that look peculiar—too stiff or too slimy or the wrong color. Sewing her back up is not so different from the way we truss a turkey at Thanksgiving, to keep the stuffing in. This is the old world, he wanted to say. This is the world of typewriters and vegetables part spoiled, and what makes it so frightening to me and your mother isn’t that it’s inconceivable, but that we understand it.
“I think it would be nice if you helped keep your mother company today,” said Shep. It was exactly the sort of near-order that his own father would have delivered.
“I don’t know how,” said Zach.
Shep almost rejoined, I don’t know how, either, and could not fathom how they had all been reduced to such rudimentary social ineptitude. Presumably people had been falling catastrophically ill since before the species walked upright. There ought to have been a protocol, perhaps a strict one.
“She’s only watching TV,” Zach added.
“Then go watch it with her.”
“We don’t like the same stuff.”
“Go watch whatever she wants to watch, and at least seem to enjoy it.”
His son sullenly closed out his computer. “She’ll know you told me to.”
She would know. And he could force his pliable son to sit vigil at his mother’s side, but he could not make him want to. In general, Zach had inherited the worst from both his parents: his father’s obedience, and his mother’s resentment. The combination was deadly. At least rebellious resentment led somewhere—to defiance, to a sometimes flamboyant overthrow of the existing order. The obedient kind fostered only disgruntled inertia.
Shep put a hand on his son’s arm. “The next few months are going to be difficult for all of us. Your mother won’t be able to give you a ride to school; you’ll have to take your bike. I may need you to chip in and do some cleaning, or make up beds for guests. You just have to remember that however hard it is for us, it’s going to be a whole lot harder for your mother.”
The speech was gratuitous. He was playing at being a good father rather than being one. Zach had sometimes been petulant about possessions, nagging for things that “everyone else” got—to Shep, costly gimmickry that would only fill the gap between the last and the next must-have. Zach found his father’s constant budgeting for an “Afterlife” baffling if not deranged, and his campaign for that iPod had been so persistent that Shep had relented out of boredom. But in all other respects the boy asked for too little. So the one aspect of his mother’s illness that he would have registered from the very start was that the importance of whatever he wanted or needed or was had just been demoted from slight to zero.
That night in bed, Glynis curled on her side away from him, assuming the same position that she had when she was pregnant. Shep drew up closely behind her, aware that he had become leery of touching her abdomen, yet sensing that this instinctive avoidance should be resisted. He felt distant from her. It wasn’t Pemba; it wasn’t Forge Craft. It was that what was about to happen to her was not about to happen to him. He pressed harder, since she would sense their distance. But when he laid a hand gently on her stomach, she moved it with equal gentleness away.
His experience of the night was of insomnia, though to remember the dream the next morning he must have slept. He was reroofing a closed-in porch, and the owners had wanted the original roofs removed before the shingles were replaced. It was an attractive house that seemed to have what they call “good bones.” There were many layers of previous roofing jobs, and as he pulled them off each revealed patterns that he recognized as the sequence of wallpapers that he used to peel back from a tear beside the bed of his boyhood. When he pulled up the roof’s last thin covering, expecting the blond timbers of this sturdy house, the cavity underneath the final tar paper was black and corrupt. The timbers were infected with mold. Beetles and grubs scuttled from the light. The wood of the frame was moist, and crumbled at his touch. Though seemingly sound from the outside, the roof had been leaking for years. As he stood to call down for his workmen, the beams would no longer support his weight, and the structure gave way.
Since Glynis couldn’t have any, he skipped his own morning coffee, so mobilizing for their departure took too little time. He wondered if all along he had made coffee every morning not for the beverage itself, but for something to do.
It was still so early that the traffic toward northern Manhattan was light. The sun had not yet risen. Shep associated driving in morning darkness with excitement, a flight to India with a three-hour advance check-in. He was excited now as well, but it was the excitement of fire alarms, of blizzards, of 9/11.
“This is going to sound crazy,” Glynis volunteered; he was grateful that she was talking. “But what frightens me most is the needles.”
Glynis had a life-long aversion to shots. Like so many aversions, in the absence of her overcoming it this one had grown only worse. When they watched movies in which heroin addicts injected themselves, she turned her head away, and he had to tell her when it was safe to look back at the screen. During news reports about new drug discoveries or vaccination programs, she left the room. She was ashamed of it, but she could never bring herself to donate during blood drives, and traveling to countries that required inoculations for cholera or boosters for typhus had always been an issue. It had taken him years to appreciate the enormity of the gesture, the scale of her earlier determination to cooperate with her husband’s aspiration, in her submission to hypodermics for his sake.
“I thought of that,” he said. “The contrast medium for the scans … How did you do it?”
“With great difficulty. Before the MRI, I almost fainted.”
“But you’ve also needed blood tests—”
“I know.” She shuddered. “And there will be more. The chemo … You sit there with an IV in your arm for hours. When I think about it, I get woozy.”
“But in relation to other stuff, you’re such a stoic! Remember when you sliced your middle finger in the studio?”
“It’s not the sort of thing you forget. I was using that flex-shaft burr shaped like a miniature buzz saw. It grabbed the silver and kicked. I was lucky I didn’t lop off half the finger. I still don’t have any feeling in the tip.”
“Yeah, but you came downstairs all matter-of-fact, and announced quietly, like, It is my clinical opinion that I may need a few stitches, Shepherd, and I’m a little concerned that I shouldn’t drive with only one hand. In the same tone of voice that you’d have asked me to run to the A-and-P because unfortunately we were out of chives. Which is why it took me too long to notice that the rag around your left hand had turned crimson and was starting to drip. What a hard-ass!”
She chuckled. “I bet if you looked closely I was a tad pale. And I’ve never used that buzz-saw burr again. It’s still in my kit, with the grooves stained brown.”
“But this needle phobia. Won’t it probably ease up? With having to keep getting past it?”
“It hasn’t let up so far. But it’s so irrational, Shepherd. I’m about to be gutted like a fish, and all I can think about is a pinprick.”
“Maybe,” he proposed tentatively, “you focus on the irrational fear to distract you from the rational ones.”
She slipped a hand on his thigh, the touch so welcome it gave him chills. “You may not have a college education, my dear. But sometimes you’re very smart.”
Merging onto the Saw Mill River Parkway, Shep wondered at how yesterday there seemed nothing to say, and now there seemed too much and too little time to say it. With foreboding, he could see how this vacant, wasted leisure followed by a desperate, too-late cramming-in could easily prove a paradigm for their future.
“I don’t think I ever told you this,” he said. “I can’t remember what I was watching—maybe one of those forensic shows, like CSI. A medical team was doing an autopsy. The coroner said he could tell from her corpse that the victim had done a lot of sit-ups. I’ve no idea if the scene was realistic, but it’s stuck in my mind ever since. This idea that even after you’re dead they can tell if you went to the gym. Sometimes when I’m working out, I have a vision of having been in an accident, and the doctors are admiring my abdominal muscles in the morgue. I want credit for doing my crunches, even as a stiff.”
Glynis laughed. “That’s hilarious. Most people worry about clean underwear.”
“I guess that’s all by way of saying—well, these surgeons must have to operate on all kinds of people who look like shit. Old saggy people, fat people, patients who are totally out of shape. I’ve no idea if it bothers them, or repulses them, or if it’s all the same to them. But your body is so slender. Perfectly proportioned and well toned.”
“Lately I’ve missed a few step aerobics classes at the Y,” she said dryly.
“No, a lifetime of self-respect—it doesn’t go away. The point is, I’m a little jealous, someone touching you like that. Looking at you, even looking at parts of you that I’ll never see. But I’m proud, too. If it does matter to them, those surgeons are operating on a beautiful woman, and they’ll feel privileged.”
While keeping his eyes on the road, he could feel her smiling beside him, and she took his hand. “I don’t think they look at bodies the way we do. And I don’t know if internal organs are ever ‘beautiful.’ But that’s really sweet of you to say.”
He parked, and saw her to Reception, touched and relieved that Glynis seemed to want him with her for as long as possible. She wasn’t a woman who easily admitted to need. He filled out the forms, pleased to have finally memorized her Social Security number. She signed the release. They waited together. Their silence was no longer empty, impotent. It was thick silence, deep and velvety silence, the air between them like warm water.
He rose with her in the elevator, introduced himself to the nurses, folded her clothes as she changed, and helped to tie the gown. He wasn’t very useful in tugging up the beige elastic stockings, but he tried. Then they waited, again. He was glad for the waiting; he could have waited forever. At last Dr. Hartness arrived. He was a wiry, efficient man who could easily have been mistaken for an accountant; even his hair was dry. Shep sat at her bedside while the surgeon explained the procedure again, employing the droning, unemotional tone of voice in which one might read aloud the complicated instructions for assembling flat-pack furniture. Now accustomed to the surgeon’s slide-part-A-into-slot-B approach, Shep didn’t take offense, since none was meant. In fact, despite all the disparaging things that people said about doctors, this one seemed personable and decent.
“Please?” Glynis pleaded once Dr. Hartness had left. “See me through the sedative?”
“Of course,” he said, and turned her head. “Don’t look over there. Don’t think about it. Just look at me. Just look into my eyes really, really hard.”
Shep kept a hand on her cheek, holding her gaze, careful to keep his own eyes from darting even briefly to the anesthetist as she filled the syringe. And then he told his wife that he loved her. The effect of the injection was almost immediate, and these would be the last words she heard.
He had infused the ritual with as much feeling as three words could bear. Yet he wished that by convention their invocation was rare. Between spouses, the declaration was too often tossed off in hasty, distracted partings, or parlayed lightly to round up banter on the phone. He might have preferred a custom that restricted such a radical avowal to perhaps thrice in a lifetime. Rationing would protect the claim from cheapening and keep it holy. For were he to have been doled out three I-love-yous like wishes, he would have spent one of them this morning.
After leaving his cell phone number at the nurses’ station, Shep emerged from the lobby onto Broadway, blinking in the sharp, white winter sunlight. He’d given no thought to how he might occupy the rest of the day, aside from a vague ambition to get some coffee. Glynis wouldn’t be wheeled in right away; after the sedative, she still had to be put under general anesthesia, and then for at least four hours she’d be in surgery. Thereafter, she’d be conked out on morphine for more than a day. Again he yearned for protocol. He couldn’t see the utility of a civilization that had an etiquette for sending greeting cards in December or placing the fork to the left of a plate, but as for what to do while your wife was sliced open you were on your own.
Yet it took only one café con leche in Washington Heights to realize that there was a protocol. It was blessedly specific, and so iron-clad that it might have been chiseled into the Constitution: In America, if you had a job that provided even the most miserable health insurance and your wife was very ill. If you had been frequently absent from that employment, and were likely to miss more days still. If your employer was a dickhead. Then when your wife went under the knife, and at every other opportunity as well?
You went to work.
Jackson seemed surprised to see him, but only for a moment; Jackson was well versed in the unwritten Constitution, too. Within minutes of Shep’s arrival, Mark, the Web designer who’d been especially caustic about Pemba, came up to his desk and squeezed his shoulder. “Be thinking of you today, bro,” he said. Other co-workers smiled encouragingly, particularly those who’d worked under the old Knack regime—what few were left. Even Pogatchnik showed, for him, unusual sensitivity by at least making himself scarce. So: Jackson had told the staff. Shep might have been affronted—the guy had overstepped the mark, and for all Jackson knew his friend was experiencing a violent sense of privacy—but found himself grateful instead. For he felt anything but guarded: raw, unprotected, his very insides exposed to the air, as if he had no skin. Jackson would have meant the announcement as a kindness. Shep would receive it as a kindness.
Phoning disgruntled customers, Shep might have expected to be irascible, to chafe at the inconsequence of every grievance. To the contrary, each feebly glued tile of linoleum seemed to matter, because everything mattered. He’d been so thankful for the smallest act of consideration from total strangers this morning: a nurse’s application of an ice chip to his wife’s cracked lips. Consideration for other strangers seemed fitting repayment. He let the complainants go on at length, expressing his dismay that their workmen had failed to give satisfaction, and promising to redress the problem without delay. When a woman in Jackson Heights objected to Handy Randy’s employment of Mexicans, insinuating that they were all illegals—which, let’s face it, they probably were—he didn’t impugn her illiberality, but explained patiently that while their Hispanic handymen were hardworking and competent, their English was often poor. They didn’t always grasp what was required. He would ensure that a fluent native speaker was sent to fix her doorframe, until the screen door swung to with a graceful click.
Lonely, he was glad of the clients’ companionship, glad for the contact, for the sound of the human voice. Customer relations as video game: focus, on anything but Columbia-Presbyterian. He was unusually aware of his control over the quality of a few moments in these customers’ lives—lives, after all, comprised of moments, and only of moments. Single-handedly, he might redeem five minutes of their day. It was no small matter. The redemption carried forward into the future, too, by providing a remembered encounter with a helpful, receptive man who had sympathized with their troubles, and endeavored to resolve them. He could make jokes that were glorious for the very fact that he need not have made them. How odd that at every point of contact with other people, meaning dozens if not hundreds of times a day, he had always wielded this power—to elevate the quotidian to the playful, the humorous, the compassionate—and so rarely made use of it.
He worked through lunch and called at two. She was still in surgery. He called at three. She was still in surgery. At four as well. He told himself it was good that the doctors were being thorough. Yet that was too long to lie with parts of you gaping open, the parts that you didn’t think about, that you didn’t want to think about, that you took blissfully for granted. By now customer complaints were failing to divert his attention, and more than once he had to ask a householder to repeat the problem, the address, the date of the job.
The fact that Glynis was in surgery for nearly twice as long as scheduled enabled Shep to put in a full workday—which, with his thin lifeline to insurance, was important even if it shouldn’t have been. By the time he got Dr. Hartness on the phone it was close to six. Jackson had hung about, and was obviously listening in.
“Well, there’s at least that … I see. And what’s that exactly? … What does that mean? … No, with me I’d rather you were frank.… Tonight, would there be any point in my—? … No, I’ll do it. Better it come from me.… Dr. Hartness? You’ve worked very hard, and very long. You must be exhausted. Thank you for trying so hard to save my wife.”
When Shep hung up, he could tell from Jackson’s stricken expression that his last sentence lent itself to misinterpretation. “Her vital signs are good, and she’s resting well,” Shep assured his friend. “But, ah.” He remembered Glynis coming down the stairs with that hand wrapped in red, the starkness of her message. This was another time to be factual. “It was worse than they expected. They found what’s called a ‘biphasic’ patch. Epithelioid cells, but with sarcomatoid mixed in. Like fudge marble ice cream, he said. The biopsy didn’t detect it. These sarcomatoid cells are evil fuckers, and—I guess the direct application of chemo doesn’t work with them. They didn’t install the ports. They got everything they could, which isn’t the same as everything, I’m afraid, and sewed her back up.”
“This is—bad,” Jackson surmised.
“This is bad.”
Shep would get plenty of practice repeating the same summation that evening. He went home and told his son. Zach had only one question. His father dodged it: “That depends on how she responds to the chemo.” Zach was having none of that. He demanded a number. So if the boy wanted to know, he should know. He took in the information like a pool swallowing a stone: after a little bloop, Shep watched it sink from view, and felt it settle on the bottom with a muffled clunk. It seemed to make sense. The boy did not seem shocked. His father anguished about what kind of a dreadful world Zach must have routinely inhabited where this sort of thing could seem normal, or even expected.
At least from now on the two of them would be occupying the same universe. It was a universe that was falling apart. This was a purpose children serve that Shep hadn’t appreciated before: when something terrible is happening to your wife, then something terrible is happening to them also. You share the same terribleness, which for outsiders is mere misfortune. This mere-ness that he sometimes sensed in others had grown intolerable, which was why until today he’d avoided any discussion of Glynis’s condition at work.
They ate together, which was unheard of. Zach offered to watch TV with his father, which was really unheard of. Shep apologized that he had to make phone calls. As they rinsed the dishes, he was pleased that, despite his good-natured permission, his son declined to disconnect the fountain over the sink.
He retired to his study. He compiled a list on the computer. He would need the list again, for other turning points, other news, and he did not want to admit but he did admit what news the list would finally be useful for delivering. He noted cell numbers as well as landlines, copying from his wife’s address book. He separated the contacts into “Family,” “Close Friends,” and “Not So Close,” thinking as he dropped this and that listing into the latter category how mortified some of these people would be by the designation. He was more inclined to put into the “Close Friends” list the few of her companions who had remembered to call on Sunday and wish her good luck.
He dialed methodically. The hardest, Amelia, he forced himself to call first. He was halting, unclear, and she kept interrupting: “But she’s okay, right? She came through okay, right?” He remained on the line longer than he could quite afford to, making sure that she understood, and realizing at last that she had understood all too well to begin with and was waiting to be told something else. Getting his daughter off the phone was as painful as bedtimes of yore, when she’d wrap herself around his calf, and he’d have to prize his little girl’s fingers from his trouser leg.
Yet soon his delivery of the details grew fluid: “‘biphasic,’ which means less aggressive epithelioid cells are mixed with the more …” His voice was calm. If the measured tone was misinterpreted as lack of proper feeling, he didn’t care. When pressed for prognosis, he settled on the expression “a less optimistic outcome,” which still had the word optimistic in it. They all had access to the Internet, if they really wanted to know.
This was part of his job now: disseminating information, orchestrating visits, protecting her from visits. He would be moonlighting from now on as a cross between an events planner and an executive secretary. He found himself instinctively distrusting the people he contacted who were the most lavish in their outpourings of sorrow, making nonspecific offerings to help “in any way they could.” In his experience, the folks who were the most articulate about their feelings were the least apt to express them in any form other than more words. Beryl, for example, waxed especially eloquent, launching into reminiscence about marvelous times with the two of them that were either exaggerated or apocryphal, and extolling the character of a woman whom she did not like. In embarrassment, he’d cut her off, explaining that he had other calls to make. By contrast, his father said simply that he “would be praying for the whole family.” While Shep might sometimes feel impatient with hackneyed Christian catchphrases, this time he was admiring of a religion that provided an idiom of well-wishing both sincere-sounding and succinct.
For more and more he was appreciating the limits of the verbal. The worse Glynis felt, the more what mattered wasn’t solicitous conversation, but a hand on her shoulder, a plumped pillow, the television remote from the table, or a cup of chamomile. So he was far more moved on the phone by silence, by sighs, by palpable awkwardness. By people like their next-door neighbor Nancy, an Amway zealot with whom Glynis had almost nothing in common, or so you’d have thought. As for the dismal discovery in surgery, Nancy had honestly nothing to say and so didn’t try to say it. Moreover, Nancy did not make a hazy offer of “help” that he could never call in. She asked when Glynis would be receiving visitors, when she would start taking solid food, and whether Glynis liked homemade buttermilk biscuits. She had brought over a cheese-and-broccoli casserole on the weekend, which is what he and Zach had polished off between them for supper. Shep was already getting the feeling that, in a crunch, the people you thought of as your “close friends” were not necessarily concomitant with the ones you could count on.
To his surprise, Shep slept deeply. To his shame, being in bed on his own was a relief. The simplicity of it, the undemanding expanse of empty sheet. He hadn’t realized the strain of another body beside him, rotting a little more every minute from the inside out. The energy it sapped from him, not being able to protect her. You wouldn’t think that something you couldn’t do and were not doing would take any energy at all, but it did.
Two mornings later, Shep’s trepidation about seeing his wife mirrored in some respects his dread of her return home the Night of Pemba, that distinctive horror of telling someone something that they did not want to hear. Nuttier was his nervousness that they might have changed her or exchanged her for someone else, removed something or inserted something in their knifing about that would make her unrecognizable to him.
But then, the anxiety was not entirely out of order. He did not know what character was, or under what degree of duress it broke down and adapted to a new form that bore no resemblance to the person “Family,” “Close Friends,” and even those “Not So Close” imagined they had known. It was even possible that “character” and its more superficial cousin “personality” were niceties, decorative indulgences of good health, elective amusements like bowling that the sick could not afford. Given his own robust constitution, he was forced to reference farcically minor ailments like colds or flu. He conjured the dullness of color, the irritating tinniness of birds and music, the unsettling pointlessness of all endeavor whenever he felt ill, as if he himself had remained the same and it was the world around him that had sickened. His spirits sagged, his appetites flagged, his jokes evaporated. Thus, by introducing a minimally toxic virus like adding a squeeze of lemon juice to a cup of milk, a lusty, upbeat, good-humored man was soured into a glum, indifferent pill. So much for the durability of “character.” Multiply that effect by a thousand times, and it was little wonder that he feared for who, or what, lay in intensive care at Columbia-Presbyterian.
Shep was probably not alone in hating hospitals, in visiting someone he loved and still fighting an urge to flee. It wasn’t just the smells, or a biologically instinctive impulse to avoid disease. If illness was the great leveler, the problem was to which level. Dressed in identical flapping gowns that gaped humiliatingly at the back, patients along the hallway were deprived of all that made them distinctive on the outside—accomplished, interesting, or useful. Sucking up fluids, drugs, and nutrients, producing nothing but effluvia in return, they were uniformly burdensome. Glimpses into wards at the sleeping lumps, the blank gazes at televisions, induced the impression not that all of these people were equally important, but that they were equally unimportant.
Nevertheless, he was moved by the fact that they were all admitted for treatment, the Laundromat attendant and the Philharmonic conductor alike. He had faith that the Laundromat attendant, no matter how dim or surly or shiftless or readily replaced by another high-school dropout, did not receive appreciably less diligent care than the maestro. It must have been fifteen years ago when Shep was trimming a tree in Sheepshead Bay, and the chain saw had kicked to the base of his neck—much as that buzz-saw shaped burr had kicked to Glynis’s finger, but on a larger scale, and close to his jugular. The blood had been copious. He still had the scar. What he remembered most of all was amazement. Rapidly sinking into the early stages of shock, he could no longer trim this customer’s tree. He could not entertain the paramedics with interesting snippets from NPR. A man who had always measured his utility in the most tangible terms, he had rendered himself incapable of fastening the bracket for aluminum blinds or installing a double-glazed skylight. Yet total strangers had still hastened to press their clean towels against his wound, and other strangers had tenderly loaded his leaking body onto their stretcher. Some pragmatic side of him would have seen it as perfectly reasonable that at the average hospital admissions desk they would ask not only what drugs you were taking and were you allergic to penicillin, but what was your IQ and could you build a ten-story condominium; how many languages do you speak and when was the last time you did something nice: what good are you. Instead, astonishingly, they pulled out all the stops to stanch your bleeding, even if you were of no earthly use to anyone.
With multiple tubes extruding from under the sheet, Glynis took up a childlike amount of space under her bedclothes. She looked like a sack, like something discarded. According to Dr. Hartness, the night before they had gradually reduced the morphine drip, and removed the tube from her nose. The surgeon had warned that once she woke she would still be groggy and disoriented. Ashen, she seemed to be dozing. For once he gazed at his wife and failed to marvel that she was all of fifty years old.
Shep pulled up a chair, careful to keep the legs from shrieking. He sat on its edge. A mere elevator ride from the bustle of Broadway and its oversized crullers on carts, this was an alien world of stasis, where minimal pleasures were nearly always more appealing in anticipation than in receipt—a sip of pineapple juice, the Tuesday blancmange with strawberry sauce, a visitor with flowers whose sweet, penetrating reek would end up unsettling a delicate stomach. A world where oblivion was nirvana, where one was never allowed the hope of no pain but only of less. He did not want to be here so badly that it was as if he were not here. He yearned to sever those tubes with a mighty sword as he would have hacked her chains in a dungeon, to scoop his beloved into his arms with her gown trailing, to sweep her back to the bright, clanging, frenetic world of taxis, of hotdogs, of crack addicts and Dominican pawnbrokers, where he would rest his damsel’s pink bare feet to the cold concrete and she would once again become a person.
As he took the hand without the IV and warmed it with his own, her head lolled from the opposite side of the pillow to face him. Her eyelids fluttered. She licked her lips sluggishly, and swallowed. “Shepheeerd.”
Through the croak in a throat raw from intubation, she instilled his name with the deep erotic purr that had always stirred him, even when her intention was chiding. The eyes opened fully now and he recognized his wife.
It was she, though Glynis was not quite here. She had been on a long journey and had not, entirely, returned.
“How are you feeling?”
“Heavy … and light at the same time.” She sounded a little drunk, and seemed to be having trouble moving her mouth. He wanted badly to give her a drink of water, but she was forbidden. Nothing by mouth until her bowels were functioning again. “Wondering,” he thought she said, letting her eyes sweep the ceiling. “Everything amazing.”
Well, she certainly didn’t see the room as he did. “Don’t try to talk too much.”
“Dreams … So real. So long and complicated. Something about a silver tiara. It was stolen, and you helped me avenge—”
“Shh. You can tell me later.” She wouldn’t remember later. “Do you know where you are? Do you remember what just happened, and why you’re here?”
Glynis took a deep breath, and in her exhalation was a collapsing. A sag into the mattress. “I didn’t for the longest time.” Now her voice was all croak and no purr. “It was lovely, like running time backward. But it came to me. You wouldn’t think you could forget that you have cancer. You can, and that part is soft. But then there’s the remembering, and that part is awful. Like having to go through it all over again.”
“And by yourself, a second time,” he said. “You should never have had to hear the diagnosis alone, Gnu. I should have been with you.”
“No difference. Alone anyway.”
“No, you’re not.” She was.
“Surgery. Don’t worry, I understand, I’m not that out of it. That was the one consolation, when I remembered.” Another hard swallow. “Since I also remembered that they scraped it out.”
Not all of it, not by a long shot would not have made a therapeutic riposte. Still, she was more compos mentis than he had expected, just a little slurred, and he had promised the doctor that he would tell her. The surgeon was meant to stop by and speak to her later this morning. If Shep was going to break the news—gently, that was the conventional adverb, but there was nothing gentle about this news—he would have to do so during this visit.
“Gnu, the surgery was very successful. You’re stabilized and recovering well. There were no complications. Or, rather, there’s only one complication. That is, they—found something.” He went through his patter, so practiced from the phone. Less optimistic outcome. The same phrase.
“No ports” was all she said when he finished. “Thank God. I didn’t like the idea of them. I’d never say so to Flicka, but that plastic spout on her stomach has always given me the creeps. Like being half human and half … coffee creamer.”
He blinked. It was as if she hadn’t heard him. “Did you understand everything I just told you?”
“I heard you.” She sounded annoyed. “Different cells, no ports, chemo. We were going to do chemo anyway.”
Something had completely failed to register. Maybe the problem was the morphine.
Shep had taken the morning off, and stuck around to wait for the surgeon. Hartness was late, and Shep tried not to be angry at the man who had toiled so valiantly on his wife’s behalf. Still, the extra two hours would cost him part of his afternoon’s work. He could not afford many full days of absence. It was hard to keep up conversation, and as Glynis lapsed into a doze he got terrible coffee he did not want. Finally the surgeon strolled in, and Shep was able to watch the same drama from the outside, the same recitation about biphasic presentation, the same perfect absence of uptake from Glynis—no disappointment, no questions, no tears.
Dr. Hartness moved swiftly on to the bugle call. “But don’t imagine we’re throwing in the towel. We’ll put you right on Alimta. It’s a powerful drug. We’ll give it everything we’ve got. We’re planning to be very aggressive with this thing.” Aggressive was a word that the medical profession often imputed to the cancer itself, and the cooptation of the same adjective for its adversary once again invoked battle—with weather. With a snowstorm, a gale wind.