1996
It must have been about three in the morning when the cancer god paid Jakie a visit.
He was lying awake, staring at the ceiling and listening to the nasal snores of his roommate, another old fart whose wife came in for an hour every day to sniffle into a box-load of tissues. As usual, Jakie was bored out of his skull. The nurses who now ruled his life didn’t let him turn on the TV after 11 p.m., he’d already read the latest issue of Women’s Wear Daily three times from cover to cover, and the one guy he got along with—name of Ben, a kid of about 35 or so—hadn’t been around for a week now.
Ben pretty much saved Jakie’s sanity the week after he arrived. Jakie’s wife Becky—with whom he had been happily in love ever since she clobbered him for badmouthing her father back when they were kids—had made sure he had a working TV set and plenty of books, but it wasn’t baseball season and he didn’t have the patience to read. His daughter Marilyn had suggested he record his memories and had even given him a little tape recorder, but he didn’t see the point. What was he supposed to talk about? How to sell a suit? How to drag your carcass through the mud of a destroyed town in Poland? He briefly thought about that girl he had met there from the concentration camp, what was her name again? Gretl, that was it—a lovely maidele despite the shit she had lived through. But he didn’t really want to talk about the war, even to a machine.
He was starting to think that he would go completely crazy from nothing to do, when one of the nurses mentioned that a patient down the hall was trying to auction off some old record albums on something called eBay. Well, Jakie wasn’t much in the computer line, but he could sell reading glasses to a blind man, so he got her to help him into a wheelchair and push him down to the lounge, where this thin guy with fading red hair was cursing at his laptop and coughing between epithets.
Jakie took one look at what was on the kid’s screen—he was trying to sell an album with a photo of an old guy painting a pigeon on it—and knew he was dealing with an amateur. “Slightly worn condition?” he yelled. The kid looked at him with his mouth hanging open. Okay, at least he was listening. “Who the hell would want to buy anything in ‘slightly worn condition’? You want to be fancy, you type ‘well-preserved,’ you want to be personal, you type ‘much-loved.’ Either way, you want to sell your records, you better change your pitch.”
Well, once Ben realized that Jakie wasn’t some insane old nutcase, but actually knew what he was talking about, they formed a partnership: Ben’s computer know-how and Jakie’s salesmanship. They got along great. Jakie took 25 percent of everything they made. In the evenings, Ben would come to Jakie’s room, they’d strategize, play a little poker—and Jakie would win the other 75 percent. He was a good kid, Jakie thought, but a lousy card player. Sometimes Ben’s friend Carlos, a quiet guy who was obviously trying not to show how worried he was, would visit and they’d do a threesome. Carlos, Jakie suspected, could play cards better than he let on, but since Jakie still kept winning, he didn’t see any reason to complain.
Last time he and Ben played cards, though, Ben wasn’t looking so hot. He had to take a drag from the oxygen tank next to him every few minutes, and when he did say something, his voice was so quiet Jakie could hardly hear him. He tried to keep up the kid’s spirits by telling a few tall tales about the big Broadway stars he sold suits to back in the old days, but Ben didn’t seem interested.
Finally, Ben dropped his cards, stared at Jakie for a minute, and whispered, “Any strange visitors lately?”
“No stranger than usual,” Jakie told him. “My son Morris came by—he’s looking tired, I gotta get him to take a rest—and there’s that new nurse who shaves his head so you can read in it like a mirror, but…”
Ben shook his head. He looked pretty upset and tried hard to say something more, but the coughing got so bad that Jakie yelled for the nurses, who came, took one look, and hustled Ben away.
After that, when Jakie asked about the kid, he got looks that told him that he didn’t want to know. After a couple of days, he stopped asking.
So here he was, listening to the night crew wash the hallway floors and trying to distract himself from the pain. It had already begun to return across his shoulders and down his arms; only a vague shadow right now, but he could predict to the minute when it would start to throb, and then burn, and then become so unbearable that he’d start crying for his pain meds like a baby screams for its mama’s tit.
He reached for the button that would bring the nurse. But instead of the evil-tempered old yente who usually did the night shift, this good-looking clean-cut young guy strolled in. Nice haircut, close shave, dark gray suit. Sixty-odd years in the rag trade made Jakie a pretty good judge of material, and he could tell that this was a quality piece of clothing. Definitely not off the rack. Good worsted wool, nice cut, tailor-made.
At first, Jakie figured that this guy was a high-priced specialist looking to pad his bank account with an extra consulting fee. But no doctor was going to be wearing his best suit where it could come in contact with a leaking catheter. So, maybe a rich kid looking for grandpa.
The man stood right inside the door for a moment. Then he whipped out one of those new little computer toys that all the yuppies were carrying around and started poking at the thing.
“Can I help you?” Jakie asked. He wasn’t normally this polite, but these days he’d do anything for a chance to talk to somebody.
The man peered at his toy, walked over, grabbed Jakie’s hand, and shook it like they were long-lost cousins. “You’re Jakie Feldman, right? Jakie, it’s good to meet you face to face. I’m sorry it took me so long to get around to a visit.”
Jakie might have been drugged to the gills, but he knew who all his relatives were, even the ones whose parents he hadn’t talked to for 20 years, and this wasn’t one of them. They were the ones who stared around the room because they couldn’t look straight at a hospital patient and tried to make conversation. “See you soon!” “Don’t forget you’re coming to my birthday party next month!” “I expect you on the golf course next summer!” Yeah, right. All to someone who is grateful if he can go to the fucking bathroom by himself.
So odds were that Charlie here was a con man who managed to get past the hospital’s security in order to prey on patients. For a moment, Jake was ready to call a cop. Just for a moment. What the hell, he told himself. It’s a change, anyway.
“That’s me,” Jakie told him. “What are you going to try to sell me? Insurance?”
The man grinned. “Good one,” he said. “I’ll have to remember that. No,” and he checked his gadget again, “I’m here on a courtesy call.”
And damned if the guy didn’t drop the rails on the side of Jakie’s bed and plant his backside on the mattress like he belonged there. “Jakie,” he said, “I know you haven’t the vaguest idea who I am. That’s okay—I’m not offended. But there are rules even I must follow, and one of them is that every human whom I’m overseeing gets at least one visit. So here I am.” And he smiled like he’d just handed over some kind of wonderful gift.
“That’s nice,” Jakie told him, starting to get a little nervous. Maybe this wasn’t a con man—maybe it was a well-off loon who just escaped from the psych ward. “So who are you?”
He made a little bow. “Allow me to introduce myself. Cancer, at your service.”
“Uh-huh. You’re my cancer, sitting on my bed, talking to me?” Damn, Jakie thought, he had to get his meds changed. He was in more trouble than he thought.
The man shook his head. “No, sir. I am the god of cancer.”
“The god of cancer. Right.”
The man grinned. “You don’t believe in me. That’s okay. I don’t take it personally. I’m a new guy on the block as gods go. No heroic songs, no epics—not even a lousy TV series. And then, so many people these days are sold on the whole monotheistic line. So when I introduce myself to those who have—inadvertently—joined my group of followers, I almost always meet with some initial skepticism. It’s hard on me—I don’t have a lot of time to spare, and I get tired of these long explanations—but it’s part of the job.”
Fine. Jakie knew when to play along. “Okay. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, you are the god of cancer. You’re telling me that you’re visiting to say thanks for catching your disease and living with it for five years. Is that it?”
The man looked pleased. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”
“So what took you so long to get here? I mean, if you had shown up five years ago, I would have explained that I want nothing to do with you. I could have gone back to my retirement, you would have had one less appointment to make, and we would have both been happier.”
The guy crossed his legs, careful of the crease in his trousers. “Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. I generally wait to visit until you’re ready to be handed off. That way, it’s less likely that you’ll try to tell anybody else about me. Which is best for you, really, because they’ll think you’re hallucinating and start with the brain scans—and you know how much fun those are.”
Yeah. Jakie knew exactly what he was talking about.
“So what do I get in return for all this, uh, inadvertent worship?”
“Well, tell me: How do you feel?”
Jakie suddenly realized that he was no longer reaching for the call button. In fact, he felt pretty good.
“It’s only a temporary respite,” the man told Jakie, “but everyone can use a break. And there’s also the advantage of belonging to one of the most well publicized disease groups in known history, if you don’t count the Black Plague. Of course,” he leaned forward and lowered his voice, “the AIDS god has been ahead for a while. That guy knows how to get headlines, doesn’t he? But between you and me, there’s a new cocktail about to hit that will have most of the rich white folks lasting into their 80s. Soon as that happens, I’ll be pretty well back on top.”
Jakie was only halfway listening to him. He was too busy stretching out his arms and flexing his fingers for the first time in a couple of months. He was even starting to think that he could get out of the pale green polyester shmata that they made patients wear here and get into some decent silk pajamas when something occurred to him. “That AIDS god didn’t by any chance visit my friend Ben down the hall recently?”
The carefully plucked eyebrows draw down. This guy must spend a fortune in stylists, Jakie thought. “Let me see…”
He checked the toy again and saw Jakie craning his neck. “Neat, isn’t it? One of those new PDAs—I was talking to a woman at Sloan Kettering last week, a programmer with breast cancer and an attitude, and we spent a couple of hours going over the latest tech. Told me what to buy.”
“Did it do her any good? Helping you, I mean?”
“Not really.” The man went back to his toy. “Here he is. Yup, AIDS just came to see your friend recently. Nice god, if a bit flamboyant, and still pretty busy. But I’m sure he got to your friend in time.”
Jakie pushed himself up on his pillows. “In time for what?”
The man shrugged. “I told you—in time to be handed off to the next department.” He waited for a moment. Then, realizing that Jakie still didn’t get it, “You know. Death. In fact,” he glanced at his computer, “your appointment is later this evening.”
“Wait a minute!” This wasn’t what Jakie was expecting. “What do you mean, ‘handed off to Death’? My doctor told me that there were at least three more treatments to try and that…”
The man smiled. “Let’s face it, Jakie. Those treatments wouldn’t do you any good. You’re not young anymore, and you’ve been taking a lot of strong medications lately, all of which can do nasty things to your system. Also, you’ve got a lot of tiny metastases floating around. In other words, you’re due for a stroke in an hour or two.”
Oh, hell, Jakie thought.
“Don’t worry.” The man stood, brushed some imaginary dirt off his jacket, and pulled the railings back up, “Death’s not a bad sort. No skeletons or dark robes or that kind of depressing crap—she’s more the organic cotton type. You’ll like her.”
“There must be something I can do.” Death’s wardrobe choices notwithstanding, Jakie had no desire to meet her any time soon—he’d seen enough of her work when he was a soldier in Europe, thank you very much—and he was certainly not looking forward to dealing with a stroke. “I mean, don’t I get to play chess with her or something?”
The cancer god started to look annoyed. “What is it with you old guys? You’ve had your innings—why can’t you just accept it?” He looked over at the man in the next bed. “I visited Jacobs here about a week ago, and he was worse than you. Began screaming all sorts of obscenities at me. I swear, the elderly give me more trouble than the kids.”
Okay, Jakie, he told himself, get hold of yourself. As soon this putz is out the door, you are in deep, deep trouble. “Sorry,” Jakie said slowly, stalling for time. “It must be hard. A lot of people probably try to appeal to you because they’ve got wives, or kids, or grandchildren.”
“You’ve got no idea,” said the god. “Just think of all the people out there who are losing a lot more than you are. You want to break your heart, you try to tell a ten-year-old that he’s about to be separated from his mom.”
Jakie shook his head sympathetically. “How do you do it?”
He shrugged. “Actually, I don’t do children myself. They need special treatment, so I got permission to hire somebody. Young man—was a clown before I dropped a load of leukemia on him. Has a real gift for talking to kids.”
“So why haven’t you got somebody for the old guys?”
“Excuse me?”
Jakie pointed a finger at him. “Let me ask you—as human to god—how old are you?”
“Well, when you take into consideration the last Ice Age …”
“No. I mean, how old are you supposed to be? Twenty-eight? Thirty at most, right?”
“About there.”
“So how the hell do you expect to convince people to pass along quietly when you look like some snot-nosed 20-something executive who doesn’t give a damn about anything except his own bank account?”
The man stiffened. “No need to get insulting.”
Jakie pulled himself up in bed, ignoring the drips and wires. “I’m just being honest here. I mean, tell me: How many of my generation have you really been able to convince? Or do you end up walking out of here like you were just going to with me, leaving them panicked and scared and—let’s face it—hating your guts?”
The man stared. “You’re trying to convince me to hire you, right? Sorry, but with all the downsizing that’s going on in today’s economy, we’ve got to pick up staff from other departments.”
“I’ll work on commission.”
“Good try. But I told you, I’m not hiring.”
Jakie knew that he had to keep the man there as long as possible. “Look, I’m just pointing something out that you must have noticed a long time ago. If you enjoy scaring the hell out of a bunch of retirees and dragging them screaming into that good night, you’re doing a great job. However, if the idea is to persuade them that this is good news, and that they’re going to be out of pain, and not have to deal anymore with hysterical families and doctors who only care about their wallets, then you’re going to have to get somebody who can talk to them. In their language.”
The man’s eyebrows met. He was obviously thinking about it.
“Take a chance,” Jakie urged. “Look at it this way. You can fit a man for a new suit by pushing him into uncomfortable positions, sticking him with pins, and making him feel like a total shmuck. On the other hand, you can treat him like a prince, tell him how fine he’s going to look, and measure him so fast and smooth that he’s finished before he knows it. You’re trying to fit your…worshippers…into a brand new suit. Isn’t it better for everyone if they think they want to wear it?”
The man started to nod to himself slightly, the way somebody does who has become convinced of something. Jakie knew that look. He was already congratulating himself on a new job when the goddamn PDA played a little tune, totally breaking the mood. The man glanced at it and then looked up.
“Sorry, Jakie,” he said. “Got to go. Got at least ten more to deal with tonight. Death should be around in about an hour.” He waved his free hand, turned, and was out the door before he could say another word.
Jakie yelled after him, “The hell with you, you son of a bitch! If you think I’m going to let you take me down without a fight, you got another think coming!” He tried to get out of bed, chase him down, but as soon as he shifted the first muscle the pain was there and he was flat on his back, trying to breathe past it and pressing the button like a maniac.
After what seemed like an eternity but was probably more like ten minutes, the nurse came in, glanced at the chart, and injected something into the tubing. Another minute, and the pain ebbed enough for Jakie to be able to do some thinking.
The god of cancer.
Right.
It was the meds. Or the disease. Or both. Hell, the guy in the next bed didn’t even recognize his wife. Should Jakie be surprised that he was seeing gods with designer-label suits?
Although Ben said he had a visitor last week.
So if he wasn’t imagining this. If it was true…
When the kids were small and didn’t want to wear their boots, Becky used to tell them, “It’s better to have and not need than need and not have.” It may have been a little cute, but it was good advice. And if he wasn’t crazy or hallucinating, then his best chance was to put together a really good sales pitch, something that’d reel Death in, that’d make her want his product so bad that she’d beg him to sell it to her.
You can do it, Jakie told himself. After a lifetime of dealing with bosses, unions, buyers, and Immigration, he’d learned how to handle difficult customers. All he had to do was prepare his pitch. Because if it didn’t work, he was soon going to be staring up at six feet of dirt.
An hour later, a nice-looking young woman walked in wearing a cotton poplin number that was supposed to look hand-loomed (and, Jakie knew immediately, wasn’t), and sipping from a bottle of soy milk.
Jakie was ready.
“I’m glad to meet you,” he told her, smiling like somebody’s sweet old grandpa. “Have a seat. A nice girl like you shouldn’t look so stressed. Let’s see if I can help.”
