From the hallway, there is the clatter of dinner trays on carts and the chatter of the people who push the carts, collecting the old trays. Hospitals are noisy and, like, raucous. That’s a word I’ve never used before that just came to me. I don’t know why. Maybe the Death Star in my brain is causing strange loop-de-loops. Maybe I’ll start speaking Japanese or understanding how to read braille.
I feel like laughing but I don’t know why. It’s like the laugh is coming before the punch line. What is funny out there in the hall? I can hear laughing! I think about cow jokes. If someone comes in here, maybe I will tell one.
Q: Why can’t cows keep secrets? A: They just go in one ear and out the udder.
Udder is a funny word. Udderneath. Udderwear. Udderwise. You get the idea. I’m pretty sure Dad’s right about the cows.
Someone drops something in the hallway with a huge bang that makes me jump. The paging system comes to life: “Paging Dr. Klein, please report to Three South. Dr. Klein.”
Come on, Dr. Klein! Hurry! I wonder what is on Three South. The hospital is full of people who are having just as crappy a day as I am, I guess. Maybe not, though. Maybe Three South is the good ward. Maybe it’s the place where people go who are happy. I don’t know why. What would they do there? What good things happen in hospitals anyway? Maybe babies are being born. I don’t know where I was born. Maybe I was born in a hospital. Maybe this one. Maybe Dr. Klein’s face was the first face I ever saw. It’s weird how babies don’t see their moms first. I guess they see the doctor or the nurse. They see a whole crowd before their mom swims into view. That’s kind of sad, if you think about it. I was almost a year old when I got adopted. Whose face did I see first? Who did I used to know? I bet Elliott remembers. She was three. Three is pretty old. I think I remember things from being three. I remember a big black dog jumping on me in a park. I was carrying a red umbrella. I was with Grandpa Hoppy. He came hopping over to us and hit that dog with his cane. The dog was just being friendly though. I remember that like it’s a photo in my brain, the dog wagging and Grandpa Hoppy shouting like a madman. He was quite a “character.” Everyone says so.
I’ve seen real, actual photos of my first day with Mom and Dad, so even though I don’t remember it, I sort of do, because of the pictures. I’m wearing these super-awful bright green overalls. Who puts a redheaded kid in green overalls? I look like a Christmas elf.
Mom says there was chocolate cake. She says that Elliott pushed my face into it (by mistake) and I came up crying and they knew they were in for a bumpy ride. Yeah. No kidding. After Iris, we must have been a pretty big shock.
Someone shouts. I hear running footsteps.
Things beep and kids cry and nurses open the door and swing it shut and light floods the room and then dims again and someone is always ringing something and talking too loudly and there are footsteps clicking down the hall. It’s weird (again! weird!) how quickly it almost seems sort of normal to me. What should be normal to me right now is to be at home in bed, dreading school tomorrow and hoping the boy who called me Fish has suddenly been chosen to go to school in the Antarctic, where he’ll likely be eaten by polar bears. Unless those are in the Arctic. I get Earth facts mixed up. I read somewhere that we won’t ever really go to Mars because there are places on Earth that are pretty inhospitable (like Mars) and we seem in no rush to live there. I’m pretty sure the article referred to the Antarctic as being especially hostile. Well, I hope that’s where he goes. I hope that’s where he is right now, shivering and wondering, What happened?
Through the parted curtains, I can see the moon, which is full and bright, and above it, I can see Cassiopeia. I find the Big Dipper, which points at the North Star, which hangs there halfway in between. I wonder if any of those stars are still there or if they are just ghosts. I wonder if I’m going to die and I’ll be a ghost. I wonder which ones of those dumb stars made me, and which ones of them made my tumor, because if you think about it, cancer is also made of dead stars. Everything is. Good and Bad. Fish-boy and me. Elliott and Iris. Mom and Dad. The people picking up the dinner trays. Everyone. Everything. Dr. Klein. Plastic waste! It’s not just us that are dead stars. That would be too poetic and too pretty! It’s all the bad stuff, too. It’s all the worst stuff. You just don’t see that on posters. You never will. No one will drink their coffee out of a cup that says CANCER IS MADE FROM DEAD STARS superimposed in pretty calligraphy over a crookedly painted constellation. It just won’t happen.
I’m not tired at all, which is dumb because I’m always tired, but when I should sleep, I can’t. I’m wide-awake. My brain is basically a salad spinner, whirling unrelated ideas. “Slow down,” I tell it. “Give me a break here.” It ignores me. Well, it is me. Is it possible to ignore yourself?
The doctor who was here earlier said the tumor is about the size of a Brussels sprout. “Not a kohlrabi?” I said, and I laughed.
He said, “What’s kohlrabi?” But he looked so serious about it that I couldn’t answer. It had seemed funny when I first said it and then it wasn’t.
“Never mind,” I said.
He showed me on the MRI. My brain looked like a shadow. It looked like the censors had come along and rubbed it out so we couldn’t see how ugly it really was. I imagine it covered with graffiti and misspelled four-letter words. Bleep it, the network would say. That tumor is PG-13. The tumor itself just looked like an empty space where brain should be but wasn’t anymore, a blankness opening up inside of me.
Before he left, he rested his hand on my hand for a good long second or two or maybe even three. I didn’t know him, so I pulled my hand out from under his. I don’t much like being touched, especially not by strangers.
There were Brussels sprouts on my dinner tray and I wonder if they planned that, or if this is all a joke, after all. I hate Brussels sprouts but I ate them anyway. They were mushy and tasted like sweat and wet cardboard. Take that, sprouts, I thought, chewing hard.
Now I’m awake. I don’t know what time it is. Mom and Dad are gone for the night. I know that without remembering them leaving. Was I asleep? Half-asleep? Not paying attention? Is the tumor just erasing things willy-nilly from my brain?
The overhead light in the room has been turned off and now there’s a different light that shines behind my headboard so it’s never quite dark in here. I think about the hammock and how I slept in it and it left diamonds on my skin, and that was only a few days ago but it was also a different life. I think maybe if I hadn’t gone to school that day, this wouldn’t have happened, even though obviously it would. It’s my Fate. It was my Fate all along. Capital-F Fate. I want to tell Tig about it really bad. He’d know what to say. He’d know what to do. Maybe we could run away, the two of us. We could go to the Mars Now headquarters, which is in Iceland. We could explain: Mars is full of radiation. For most people, that would be bad. For me, it might save my life. That’s what the doctor said. “Radiation is our first hope,” he said. Mars could save me. Tig would get me there, if he knew.
I do a bit more crying. I’m not a machine. I’m not going to Mars. I’m a kid with a Brussels sprout named Nirgal in my brain, my own Death Star. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to have radiation treatments and they will shrink the sprout down to a cherry tomato and then down to a lima bean and then a green pea and then they will go in and cut out what is left if they can. My head is a salad bowl. Everything is salad.
Mom and Dad brought my laptop, so I pull it out of the drawer beside my bed and I log into the hospital wifi and check my email, more out of habit than anything.
Then I blink.
And blink again.
Tick, tick, tick.
I can’t stop blinking.
The email from Tig says this:
Ish,
I bet you thought I forgot you but I didn’t. I’m not good at writing emails that much. I met some kids and we’ve been hanging out. School is OK. I’m doing a thing about recycling that’s pretty cool. It isn’t the same as home but it also sort of is, if you know what I mean. I miss you and S.S. Rafty and Lunch Island. I’m sorry about that day on the island. Awkwardness is the worst. I don’t know what I thought. I guess I love you. I didn’t want to cry so I tried to put you away somewhere where I wouldn’t think about you. It’s dumb. I know it is. I made up a story that you went to Mars and left me here alone and I was so mad at you, it made it easier not to talk to you. Portland is OK. People here are kind of weird. It’s raining pretty hard right now. It’s always noisier here than at home. There’s a lot of traffic. It’s nice not to be so hot all the time. I miss the lake. Is there any water left in it? Did you read that Lake Meade is full of perchlorate? We might have been right about the lake. OK, bye for now.
Tig
I delete it and then I undelete it and then I read it again, and then I wish Mom hadn’t brought in my laptop because maybe it’s the radiation from the laptop that put this tumor in my brain.
Or maybe it’s Tig’s fault for leaving a big hole in there that cancer could fill up.
I guess I love you.
We are only twelve. Nobody loves anybody yet. Right?
I guess I love you.
I have a brain tumor.
Or maybe it was just bad luck or the way the wind was blowing one day that blew a speck of something into me that turned out to be a seed that grew.
I hit reply.
I write:
Tig,
I miss all that stuff too. Except I don’t miss me. You can’t miss yourself. (Ha-ha.) I miss you. I was mad you left me on Mars alone. You said you wouldn’t. Your house has cracked.
Love, Ish
PS—I have a brain tumor. I’ve named it Nirgal.
I stare at it on the screen for a few minutes, then I delete the PS. I can’t tell him. I want to. I don’t know why I can’t. I guess because if I do, then it becomes true.
I leave everything out that matters. I leave everything out that I meant to say. I sneak the love in there, though, just so he knows that I know. Just so he sees that I get it and that I feel it, too, even though I don’t really know if it matters now at all.