There was nothing wrong with me. That’s what I thought. Besides the usual. Bad knees, bad back, bit of a belly. Maybe my temper gets the best of me now and then. Maybe I could drink less and eat better and work harder. I live in my brother’s garage. That’s pretty much what forty-two looks like. Not wonderful. Still, the news came as a surprise.
I forgot to mention I have this problem with my ears. If I lean back in a bath, if I plunge into a pool or a pond, the water pours in and sloshes around and deadens my hearing. I’ve got to knock my head with my palm and sleep on my side and scrape around with a Q-tip forever just to make my head not feel like an aquarium. You know how some people watch the Olympics and think, With enough training and the right swimsuit, I bet I could do that? I do not bet I could do that when I watch the divers spinning in the air and arrowing into the water and making it shoosh over white.
Because if I go deep? A knife-stab of pressure is what I feel. A few days ago, I went golfing. I do this thing where I sneak on at the munie’s third hole and nobody knows any better. I was feeling a little drunk on account of the two liters of vodka and 7 Up, and I was also feeling a little like a cheapskate on account of having seventy dollars in my bank account, so when I knocked my lucky ball into a water hazard, I aimed to get it back.
Some history: I’ve had this ball, a Titleist, since high school. It’s grass-stained and driver-scuffed and I don’t play with it often, but when I do, I’m jotting down with the tiny pencil eagles and birdies.
It was weird—wrong—to see the ball slicing left, plopping into the water, feathering up a spritz of foam. Surely a sign of bad things to come. I stripped down to my boxers and waded into the duckweed and felt the mud sucking at my feet. The day was hot and the water was good and cool, and I let out a whoop when I plunged beneath the surface. It was like diving for pearls—the pond’s bottom pebbled with dozens of balls, maybe hundreds.
When I kicked my way down, when I descended past the glimmering green fingers of sunlight, when my hand reached for what I believed to be my ball, I heard a whine and felt a thudding pressure, and then all at once something gave in my ear that felt like a hot chopstick shoved deep.
It’s like everybody else in the world has this protective seal or bubble or something. But me? No bubble.
That’s why I went to the doctor. My left ear. God! I tried a hot compress. I Q-tipped until the cotton swab came away bloody. I jumped up and down and tried to knock the water out of me until everything spun and I had to lie down, and even then the spinning didn’t stop. None of it worked. The pain pulsed along with my heartbeat. And the whine grew louder, like a thousand hungry beetles nesting just off my brain.
The doctor said I was lucky. He said the tumor would have killed me within a few months. He said it was a good thing I was such a bad golfer. That slice—that ball—saved my life.
Because if I hadn’t jumped into that pond, I never would have come in to see him and he never would have ordered the MRI and we never would have had this conversation about carving the thing out of me. He had gray hair but a young face. He could have been thirty or he could have been sixty for all I knew.
“Brain cancer sounds like the worst possible news. But there’s a silver lining to the flipside of the coin,” he said, or something like that. I couldn’t hear properly, for reasons already explained, and his voice came at me as if through a damp mattress. “You have the best of tumors, the Cadillac of tumors!”
He showed me a series of images tacked up on the lightboard. They made me into a ghost and showed my insides. The tumor—snuggled right behind my ear—was a white orb the size of a golf ball. As if I had found the Titleist in the pond after all. And swallowed it.
I touched the space behind my ear. The tenderness seemed to extend into the very bone. “How do you feel?” the doctor said. “Would you like to sit down? This is kind of a lot to take.” When he spoke, his face bent. Sometimes faces do that. They bend or warp. Their foreheads get too big or their eyes get too small or their tongue uncoils into something serpentine. This was one of those times.
Every time he opened his mouth, it got bigger, a big black cavern edged by teeth the size of tombstones. Usually, I look away and blink hard and try to reset my vision, but this time I kept staring and his mouth kept getting bigger and bigger until I worried I would fall into it.
You could say I’m employed. I hang drywall. I’ve worked for every contractor in town and sometimes they still call me. But I’ve made a few mistakes. There was the time I sledgehammered to pieces the wrong plaster wall. Or the time I left a load of panels on a driveway and a hard rain came and sopped them to mush. Or the time I found the teenage girl napping on a couch and decided to kiss her. Nothing terrible.
I’m living with my brother until things turn around. Nathan’s big like me. We’re like two big bears, people say. I could probably break your hand when I shake it. My thigh is as big around as your torso. Nathan is built the same way, but we couldn’t be more different. Like two houses with the same plan, but one ends up infested with bats in the attic, mold in the walls. He’s in slacks and I’m in Carhartts. He’s in a luxury sedan and I’m in a beater Pontiac with no muffler and one door a different color. He sits at a desk all day, moves numbers around, while I hang boards, tape seams, scrape mud off a trowel.
He lives in one of those developments where everybody has 2.5 kids and drives an SUV and mows their lawn at ten o’clock a.m. every Saturday. I live in the garage because—Nathan tells me in a confidential whisper—Kimmy doesn’t want me to get too comfortable. That’s his wife. The mother of his children, my nephews. She wears jeans with rhinestones on the butt and gets her hair done every Thursday and drinks Pinot Gris from a box.
The deal is he gives me a roof, feeds me meals, and I drywall his unfinished basement. But the tumor has made this difficult.
The doctor said he got most of it. When he said this, he made a motion as though he had scraped it out with an ice-cream scooper. I had the worst headache in world history and couldn’t hear out of my left ear and my thoughts were slugged up with painkillers.
He showed me the tumor. It was in a metal pan. It wasn’t white—as it appeared in the MRI—but yellow. The color of spoiled milk. The color of jaundice. The color of sickness. I asked if I could keep it and he laughed, and then the laughter died when he realized I wasn’t kidding.
I’ve got a big bald spot and a scar like those on Frankenstein’s monster from where they flapped open the side of my head and then stapled it shut. I used to be able to chase my nephews around the yard and push them on the swing set, but now I just lie quietly in the cool, dim garage and every once in a while they’ll come see me and ask to see the tumor and say, “Gross.”
The tumor is not as clean and round as a golf ball. The scalpel or the saw or the crowbar or whatever they used—it roughed the tumor up along one side, so that the orblike bulge gives way to what look like petals or squat, rough tentacles. I keep it in a Mason jar full of vodka.
My nephews are named Gus and Quinn. I can’t tell the difference between them. One apparently has more moles. The other apparently has a beanier head. But I might as well be looking at the same person, double-visioned after a long night of drinking. They are rarely apart, but when they are, I call them “buddy.” As in, “Do your uncle a favor and stop making so much noise, buddy,” or “Hey, buddy, you want to see my tumor?”
Neither Gus nor Quinn realizes this, but I do: When they pick up the Mason jar, when they hold it up to the light and bring their faces close, the tumor floats toward them, pressing up against the glass, as if it can smell them, as if it were hungry.
Did I mention that my brother paid for the procedure, for the drugs, for the follow-up appointments?
“I’ll get you back,” I say, and he says, “I know you will,” but we’re both lying. I’ve never made more than fifteen an hour, and the math doesn’t add up unless I live to be three thousand years old. Maybe one of these lotto scratch tickets will pay off. Or maybe I’ll end up on one of those reality shows. Or maybe I’ll seduce an old rich woman and shove her off a cliff. You never know.
It’s spring. Thunderstorms roll through every other day and the tulips are pushing out of the black dirt and the nights are warm. Night is the only time I leave the garage. I like to listen to the frogs drumming and feel the soft scratch of grass against my feet. That’s where I am when I hear Kimmy’s voice wafting through an open window. “He’s got to go.”
“I know,” my brother says.
“Then tell him. Tell him to leave. Or he never will.”
“But where would he go?”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“Don’t say that.”
“He’s like a cancer. He’s like a tumor that’s stuck to this house, this family.”
“Please don’t say that.”
When I run my finger along the Mason jar, the tumor follows, like a shark pacing a child at an aquarium. I screw off the lid and set it aside. A bitter smell stings my nose and waters my eyes.
The tumor rises to the surface. There is a hole in its center, so that it looks like a blind eye or an inverted nipple or a newt’s mouth. I reach a finger in and nudge it. It dips down and bobbles back to the surface. I touch it again, more gently this time, tickling it, stroking it, swimming it about the jar with my fingers.
And then it lodges onto the tip of my thumb. There is a small suckling pressure that is not unpleasant. My eyes close and my mouth opens and I feel myself growing hard. When I finally pull my thumb away, maybe an hour later, it is bloodied around the nail and the tumor appears fatter, ruddier.
I make an effort to impress Kimmy. I spend all morning in the basement, taping panels, scooping and swirling and smoothing spackle with a trowel. And I spend most of the afternoon in the backyard, digging tiny graves and placing white skully bulbs into them. Dahlias and begonias and irises that will split open and surge into green shoots and bloom into flowers later this summer.
My back aches from the labor and my eyes throb from the sun, but I keep at it, trying not to be such a cancer. But does she thank me? No, she does not. Every time I see her in a window, she pulls her face away. Every time I clomp into the house for a drink or a piss, I hear her soft steps easing into another room.
Later—when I’m in the first-floor bathroom, soaking in the tub, toeing on the hot water every few minutes—I hear a soft knock at the door. “Busy,” I say.
“I know,” says the voice, my brother’s. “You’ve been busy all day, and I can’t tell you how much I—we—appreciate that.”
“Finished a wall for you. Planted some bulbs for you.”
“Thank you,” he says. “Where did you get the bulbs, by the way?”
“Stole them from the garage of an old lady down the street.”
“Oh. Good. I mean, I didn’t want you spending your money on us.”
The water has gone gray and scummy. My body, weirdly magnified beneath the surface, looks like somebody else’s.
“What do you think about June?” The door shudders in its frame, and I imagine him leaning his head into it, his eyes closed. “In a few months? Finding your own place? I’ll help, of course. Cosign, put down a deposit. Whatever I can do.”
I sink into the bathwater—to escape his voice—and then the pain hits and I jolt upright with my hand pressed to my ear, trying to contain my scream. The noise that comes out of me is like a knife dragged across concrete and my brother rattles the knob and says, “Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?”
Every day I nurse the tumor and every day it grows a little bigger, like a spring-planted bulb. The vodka sloshes out. The lid will barely screw on. I go for a walk one night and come back to find the jar shattered on the garage floor, a starburst of glass. The tumor is gone.
I almost call out for it in a panic, but then I spot the damp trail leading across the concrete to a shadowy corner of the garage where my brother stores his ax, his shovel.
Slowly I approach it. Slowly I crouch and scoop it off the floor and cradle it in my hands. It is the size and color of a liver. I can feel it pulsing in time with my heartbeat. “It’s okay,” I say. “I promise to take care of you.”
I feel so empty inside, suddenly starved, and I bring the mass of it toward my open mouth.
Someone is here. Even out in the backyard, I can hear the doorbell. Twilight has come. The air purples and the first fireflies spark and glimmer. I keep on digging in the garden—hoping the visitor will go away—but the doorbell continues to sound, over and over, like an alarm.
It’s only when I throw down the shovel and whisper across the grass and clomp through the house that I remember. Kimmy has been planning a party. For the Oscars. She hosts it every year. Everyone has to dress up as a movie character. She rolls a red carpet down the front stoop and along the path. She makes big bowls of popcorn and hangs a string of glittery letters from the entryway that spells out Hollywood. She has movie trivia games and movie goodie bags. Everyone drinks champagne.
The first guests must be arriving. A man and a woman costumed from one of those old black-and-white movies everybody is crazy about. They smile at me when I open the door. “Who are you supposed to be?” they say when they see my blood-splattered, dirt-smeared clothes. “Some kind of monster?”