“They move the D around to the front,” repeats the Mother.
“Yup!” the Oncologist says. “I don’t know why—they just do!”
“Christ didn’t survive his wine,” says the Husband.
“But of course he did,” says the Oncologist, and nods toward the Baby, who has now found a cupboard full of hospital linens and bandages and is yanking them all out onto the floor. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow, after the surgery.” And with that, the Oncologist leaves.
“Or, rather, Christ was his wine,” mumbles the Husband. Everything he knows about the New Testament, he has gleaned from the sound track of Godspell. “His blood was the wine. What a great beverage idea.”
“A little light chemo. Don’t you like that one?” says the Mother. “Eine kleine dactinomycin. I’d like to see Mozart write that one up for a big wad o’ cash.”
“Come here, honey,” the Husband says to the Baby, who has now pulled off both his shoes.
“It’s bad enough when they refer to medical science as ‘an inexact science,’ ” says the Mother. “But when they start referring to it as ‘an art,’ I get extremely nervous.”
“Yeah. If we wanted art, Doc, we’d go to an art museum.” The Husband picks up the Baby. “You’re an artist,” he says to the Mother, with the taint of accusation in his voice. “They probably think you find creativity reassuring.”
The Mother sighs. “I just find it inevitable. Let’s go get something to eat.” And so they take the elevator to the cafeteria, where there is a high chair, and where, not noticing, they all eat a lot of apples with the price tags still on them.
Because his surgery is not until tomorrow, the Baby likes the hospital. He likes the long corridors, down which he can run. He likes everything on wheels. The flower carts in the lobby! (“Please keep your boy away from the flowers,” says the vendor. “We’ll buy the whole display,” snaps the Mother, adding, “Actual children in a children’s hospital—unbelievable, isn’t it?”) The Baby likes the other little boys. Places to go! People to see! Rooms to wander into! There is Intensive Care. There is the Trauma Unit. The Baby smiles and waves. What a little Cancer Personality! Bandaged citizens smile and wave back. In Peed Onk, there are the bald little boys to play with. Joey, Eric, Tim, Mort, and Tod (Mort! Tod!). There is the four-year-old, Ned, holding his little deflated rubber ball, the one with the intriguing curling hose. The Baby wants to play with it. “It’s mine. Leave it alone,” says Ned. “Tell the Baby to leave it alone.”
“Baby, you’ve got to share,” says the Mother from a chair some feet away.
Suddenly, from down near the Tiny Tim Lounge, comes Ned’s mother, large and blond and sweatpanted. “Stop that! Stop it!” she cries out, dashing toward the Baby and Ned and pushing the Baby away. “Don’t touch that!” she barks at the Baby, who is only a Baby and bursts into tears because he has never been yelled at like this before.
Ned’s mom glares at everyone. “This is drawing fluid from Neddy’s liver!” She pats at the rubber thing and starts to cry a little.
“Oh my God,” says the Mother. She comforts the Baby, who is also crying. She and Ned, the only dry-eyed people, look at each other. “I’m so sorry,” she says to Ned and then to his mother. “I’m so stupid. I thought they were squabbling over a toy.”
“It does look like a toy,” agrees Ned. He smiles. He is an angel. All the little boys are angels. Total, sweet, bald little angels, and now God is trying to get them back for himself. Who are they, mere mortal women, in the face of this, this powerful and overwhelming and inscrutable thing, God’s will? They are the mothers, that’s who. You can’t have him! they shout every day. You dirty old man! Get out of here! Hands off!
“I’m so sorry,” says the Mother again. “I didn’t know.”
Ned’s mother smiles vaguely. “Of course you didn’t know,” she says, and walks back to the Tiny Tim Lounge.
The Tiny Tim Lounge is a little sitting area at the end of the Peed Onk corridor. There are two small sofas, a table, a rocking chair, a television and a VCR. There are various videos: Speed, Dune, and Star Wars. On one of the lounge walls there is a gold plaque with the singer Tiny Tim’s name on it: his son was treated once at this hospital and so, five years ago, he donated money for this lounge. It is a cramped little lounge, which, one suspects, would be larger if Tiny Tim’s son had actually lived. Instead, he died here, at this hospital and now there is this tiny room which is part gratitude, part generosity, part fuck-you.
Sifting through the videocassettes, the Mother wonders what science fiction could begin to compete with the science fiction of cancer itself—a tumor with its differentiated muscle and bone cells, a clump of wild nothing and its mad, ambitious desire to be something: something inside you, instead of you, another organism, but with a monster’s architecture, a demon’s sabotage and chaos. Think of leukemia, a tumor diabolically taking liquid form, better to swim about incognito in the blood. George Lucas, direct that!
Sitting with the other parents in the Tiny Tim Lounge, the night before the surgery, having put the Baby to bed in his high steel crib two rooms down, the Mother begins to hear the stories: leukemia in kindergarten, sarcomas in Little League, neuroblastomas discovered at summer camp. “Eric slid into third base, but then the scrape didn’t heal.” The parents pat one another’s forearms and speak of other children’s hospitals as if they were resorts. “You were at St. Jude’s last winter? So were we. What did you think of it? We loved the staff.” Jobs have been quit, marriages hacked up, bank accounts ravaged; the parents have seemingly endured the unendurable. They speak not of the possibility of comas brought on by the chemo, but of the number of them. “He was in his first coma last July,” says Ned’s mother. “It was a scary time, but we pulled through.”
Pulling through is what people do around here. There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn’t bravery at all. It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess—an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow? “Everyone admires us for our courage,” says one man. “They have no idea what they’re talking about.”
I could get out of here, thinks the Mother. I could just get on a bus and go, never come back. Change my name. A kind of witness relocation thing.
“Courage requires options,” the man adds.
The Baby might be better off.
“There are options,” says a woman with a thick suede headband. “You could give up. You could fall apart.”
“No, you can’t. Nobody does. I’ve never seen it,” says the man. “Well, not really fall apart.” Then the lounge falls quiet. Over the VCR someone has taped the fortune from a fortune cookie. “Optimism,” it says, “is what allows a teakettle to sing though up to its neck in hot water.” Underneath, someone else has taped a clipping from a summer horoscope. “Cancer rules!” it says. Who would tape this up? Somebody’s twelve-year-old brother. One of the fathers—Joey’s father—gets up and tears them both off, makes a small wad in his fist.
There is some rustling of magazine pages.
The Mother clears her throat. “Tiny Tim forgot the wet bar,” she says.
Ned, who is still up, comes out of his room and down the corridor, whose lights dim at nine. Standing next to her chair, he says to the Mother, “Where are you from? What is wrong with your baby?”
In the tiny room that is theirs, she sleeps fitfully in her sweatpants, occasionally leaping up to check on the Baby. This is what the sweatpants are for: leaping. In case of fire. In case of anything. In case the difference between day and night starts to dissolve, and there is no difference at all, so why pretend? In the cot beside her, the Husband, who has taken a sleeping pill, is snoring loudly, his arms folded about his head in a kind of origami. How could either of them have stayed back at the house, with its empty high chair and empty crib? Occasionally the Ba
by wakes and cries out, and she bolts up, goes to him, rubs his back, rearranges the linens. The clock on the metal dresser shows that it is five after three. Then twenty to five. And then it is really morning, the beginning of this day, nephrectomy day. Will she be glad when it’s over, or barely alive, or both? Each day this week has arrived huge, empty, and unknown, like a spaceship, and this one especially is lit a bright gray.
“He’ll need to put this on,” says John, one of the nurses, bright and early, handing the Mother a thin greenish garment with roses and teddy bears printed on it. A wave of nausea hits her; this smock, she thinks, will soon be splattered with—with what?
The Baby is awake but drowsy. She lifts off his pajamas. “Don’t forget, bubeleh,” she whispers, undressing and dressing him. “We will be with you every moment, every step. When you think you are asleep and floating off far away from everybody, Mommy will still be there.” If she hasn’t fled on a bus. “Mommy will take care of you. And Daddy, too.” She hopes the Baby does not detect her own fear and uncertainty, which she must hide from him, like a limp. He is hungry, not having been allowed to eat, and he is no longer amused by this new place, but worried about its hardships. Oh, my baby, she thinks. And the room starts to swim a little. The Husband comes in to take over. “Take a break,” he says to her. “I’ll walk him around for five minutes.”
She leaves but doesn’t know where to go. In the hallway, she is approached by a kind of social worker, a customer-relations person, who had given them a video to watch about the anesthesia: how the parent accompanies the child into the operating room, and how gently, nicely the drugs are administered.
“Did you watch the video?”
“Yes,” says the Mother.
“Wasn’t it helpful?”
“I don’t know,” says the Mother.
“Do you have any questions?” asks the video woman. “Do you have any questions?” asked of someone who has recently landed in this fearful, alien place seems to the Mother an absurd and amazing little courtesy. The very specificity of a question would give a lie to the overwhelming strangeness of everything around her.
“Not right now,” says the Mother. “Right now, I think I’m just going to go to the bathroom.”
When she returns to the Baby’s room, everyone is there: the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, all the nurses, the social worker. In their blue caps and scrubs, they look like a clutch of forget-me-nots, and forget them, who could? The Baby, in his little teddy-bear smock, seems cold and scared. He reaches out and the Mother lifts him from the Husband’s arms, rubs his back to warm him.
“Well, it’s time!” says the Surgeon, forcing a smile.
“Shall we go?” says the Anesthesiologist.
What follows is a blur of obedience and bright lights. They take an elevator down to a big concrete room, the anteroom, the greenroom, the backstage of the operating room. Lining the walls are long shelves full of blue surgical outfits. “Children often become afraid of the color blue,” says one of the nurses. But of course. Of course! “Now, which one of you would like to come into the operating room for the anesthesia?”
“I will,” says the Mother.
“Are you sure?” asks the Husband.
“Yup.” She kisses the Baby’s hair. “Mr. Curlyhead,” people keep calling him here, and it seems both rude and nice. Women look admiringly at his long lashes and exclaim, “Always the boys! Always the boys!”
Two surgical nurses put a blue smock and a blue cotton cap on the Mother. The Baby finds this funny and keeps pulling at the cap. “This way,” says another nurse, and the Mother follows. “Just put the Baby down on the table.”
In the video, the mother holds the baby and fumes are gently waved under the baby’s nose until he falls asleep. Now, out of view of camera or social worker, the Anesthesiologist is anxious to get this under way and not let too much gas leak out into the room generally. The occupational hazard of this, his chosen profession, is gas exposure and nerve damage, and it has started to worry him. No doubt he frets about it to his wife every night. Now he turns the gas on and quickly clamps the plastic mouthpiece over the baby’s cheeks and lips.
The Baby is startled. The Mother is startled. The Baby starts to scream and redden behind the plastic, but he cannot be heard. He thrashes. “Tell him it’s okay,” says the nurse to the Mother.
Okay? “It’s okay,” repeats the Mother, holding his hand, but she knows he can tell it’s not okay, because he can see not only that she is still wearing that stupid paper cap but that her words are mechanical and swallowed, and she is biting her lips to keep them from trembling. Panicked, he attempts to sit. He cannot breathe; his arms reach up. Bye-bye, outside. And then, quite quickly, his eyes shut; he untenses and has fallen not into sleep but aside to sleep, an odd, kidnapping kind of sleep, his terror now hidden someplace deep inside him.
“How did it go?” asks the social worker, waiting in the concrete outer room. The Mother is hysterical. A nurse has ushered her out.
“It wasn’t at all like the filmstrip!” she cries. “It wasn’t like the filmstrip at all!”
“The filmstrip? You mean the video?” asks the social worker.
“It wasn’t like that at all! It was brutal and unforgivable.”
“Why that’s terrible,” she says, her role now no longer misinformational but janitorial, and she touches the Mother’s arm, though the Mother shakes it off and goes to find the Husband.
She finds him in the large mulberry Surgery Lounge, where he has been taken and where there is free hot chocolate in small Styrofoam cups. Red cellophane garlands festoon the doorways. She has totally forgotten it is as close to Christmas as this. A pianist in the corner is playing “Carol of the Bells,” and it sounds not only unfestive but scary, like the theme from The Exorcist.
There is a giant clock on the far wall. It is a kind of porthole into the operating room, a way of assessing the Baby’s ordeal: forty-five minutes for the Hickman implant; two and a half hours for the nephrectomy. And then, after that, three months of chemotherapy. The magazine on her lap stays open at a ruby-hued perfume ad.
“Still not taking notes,” says the Husband.
“Nope.”
“You know, in a way, this is the kind of thing you’ve always written about.”
“You are really something, you know that? This is life. This isn’t a ‘kind of thing.’ ”
“But this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it’s the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.”
“I told you that.”
“I’m quoting you.”
She looks at her watch, thinking of the Baby. “How long has it been?”
“Not long. Too long. In the end, maybe those’re the same things.”
“What do you suppose is happening to him right this second?”
Infection? Slipping knives? “I don’t know. But you know what? I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta just walk a bit.” The Husband gets up, walks around the lounge, then comes back and sits down.
The synapses between the minutes are unswimmable. An hour is thick as fudge. The Mother feels depleted; she is a string of empty tin cans attached by wire, something a goat would sniff and chew, something now and then enlivened by a jolt of electricity.
She hears their names being called over the intercom. “Yes? Yes?” She stands up quickly. Her words have flown out before her, an exhalation of birds. The piano music has stopped. The pianist is gone. She and the Husband approach the main desk, where a man looks up at them and smiles. Before him is a xeroxed list of patients’ names. “That’s our little boy right there,” says the Mother, seeing the Baby’s name on the list and pointing at it. “Is there some word? Is everything okay?”
“Yes,” says the man. “Your boy is doing fine. They’ve just finished with the catheter, and they are moving on to the kidney.”
“But it’s been two hours already! Oh my God, did something
go wrong? What happened? What went wrong?”
“Did something go wrong?” The Husband tugs at his collar.
“Not really. It just took longer than they expected. I’m told everything is fine. They wanted you to know.”
“Thank you,” says the Husband. They turn and walk back toward where they were sitting.
“I’m not going to make it.” The Mother sighs, sinking into a fake leather chair shaped somewhat like a baseball mitt. “But before I go, I’m taking half this hospital out with me.”
“Do you want some coffee?” asks the Husband.
“I don’t know,” says the Mother. “No, I guess not. No. Do you?”
“Nah, I don’t, either, I guess,” he says.
“Would you like part of an orange?”
“Oh, maybe, I guess, if you’re having one.” She takes an orange from her purse and just sits there peeling its difficult skin, the flesh rupturing beneath her fingers, the juice trickling down her hands, stinging the hangnails. She and the Husband chew and swallow, discreetly spit the seeds into Kleenex, and read from photocopies of the latest medical research, which they begged from the intern. They read, and underline, and sigh and close their eyes, and after some time, the surgery is over. A nurse from Peed Onk comes down to tell them.
“Your little boy’s in recovery right now. He’s doing well. You can see him in about fifteen minutes.”
· · ·
How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That’s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth’s eager devastation.