James stays with me for a month during chemo. He is the closest I have ever had to a real brother. We come from the same pod. He makes flower arrangements and paints beautiful pictures, organizes my closets, helps me get rid of old books. He builds me a Cat in the Hat bookcase and helps find the perfect glass door for my shower. Because he is an actor and an artist, he is very porous, and I feel somehow that we are doing the chemo together. Each night James and I move to Dillon, Texas. This is a surprise. I have never really been drawn to Texas or football or small towns. The nausea comes. The body aches. We smoke a joint, eat a picnic, and travel. I am not sure why or why now. I know Tami Taylor has a lot to do with it. She is tall with long red hair, supersmart, sexy, Southern, and kind without being stupid. I alternate between wanting her as a mother, a lover, and a friend. I live for Tami Taylor. James lives for the totally unavailable bad boy, Tim Riggins. It’s a TV show called Friday Night Lights that revolves around a high school football team. I have never really watched television before. It always depressed me.
What I love is that we now really live in Dillon, Texas. Our days are just marking time before we can be with our friends: Coach Taylor, Tami, Tim, Matt, Julie, Vince, Jess, and Lyla Garrity. I want to say it’s not that their lives are more interesting, but in fact they are. I hardly leave the house, so this is the closest I get to traveling. I have become a person obsessed with a TV show. There are so many things I never thought would happen. Each day, some way in which I thought myself special or different comes undone. For example, I was convinced that I was not a “cancer person,” whatever that meant. I thought cancer didn’t happen to emotional people or manic people. I was sure I would die of a heart attack or stroke. What I failed to figure in was (a) emotional does not mean “enlightened,” (b) the toxic world, (c) it was in my family, and (d) trauma. We make up stories to protect ourselves. I am not a cancer person. I am not someone who would die in a car crash. I had a rough childhood, so the rest of my life will be easy. I paid my dues. These little myths and fairy tales keep us from the existential brink. Now I had crossed over and had discovered that there are no rules or reliable stories. There is suffering. It is ordinary. It happens every day. More of it seems to happen the older you get, or maybe your vision for it just expands. It is as unavoidable as is your ordinariness, your baldness, and your bag.
TV always makes me think about death. There is something about the emptiness. I have thought about death since I was ten. Maybe even before.
I was ten and watching The Invisible Man, which seems like an extremely sophisticated movie for a child, and Claude Rains—who was my stand-in father, always so witty and clipped and handsome in that impenetrable kind of way—had thick, white, scary bandages around his face and head. In one key scene he unwraps them and I waited for the revelation of something hideous and grotesque. He unwraps the bandages and there, in place of some deformity, was something far worse. There was nothing, absolutely nothing where his face and head once were. Even now my blood chills and the nausea returns. Claude Rains was invisible, gone. I vomited for three days and right after became wickedly afraid of the dark.
Death. I have spent days trying to make friends with it. For many years I was plagued with something I called the death thing—the sudden and acute realization of my own mortality, a complete flash of understanding that I will not be here anymore, gone. This flash is so immediate and so absolute, it takes my breath away. I have had the death thing in bookstores, in the shower, while working out, in bed. I have had it in my dreams and literally sit up with a gasp. It happened so often I could bring it on, which I began to do in an attempt to control or master it. Now I am in death. It is no longer a thing. It is not a flash of something that could happen. It is something that will happen. It is something that has already begun. I have a catastrophic illness. Many people die from it. I could be dead soon. People say not to think like this. But I wonder why or how I wouldn’t think about the biggest thing that is going to happen to me.
Death is the thing that will end my existence and turn my body to dust or bones, and make it impossible for me to ever see the stars, or walk through the early days of spring, or laugh, or move my hips while someone is inside me. I think crying will help me. I will cry my way into death.
James sleeps next to me every night in my bed. We have never been this intimate. I am nervous. I am dying. I had cancer. My cells are trying to fight it off. It could go either way. I get up my courage. I say, “Jimmy” (I am the only one who calls him that), I say “Jimmy”—in a Southern accent just like Tami Taylor—“Jimmy, can I put my head on your chest.” He says, in a deep man’s voice, “Of course,” and cuddles me in just like Coach.