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“We lost him,” the nurses said, referring to the patient from room 2413.  2413 was the gentleman in the room on the other side of the nurse’s station.  Jane had seen him wandering up and down the hall in his gown.  He’d looked comfortable, like he’d given up on the idea of getting out.  He smiled at the nurses.  ”We lost him.”  It sounded absurd, like you took a kid to the mall and turned around and he was gone.  ”Paging the patient from 2413.  Your mother is waiting for you by the Toys R Us on the second level, please return there immediately.”  Though as far as Jane could tell, 2413 didn’t have any family left to lose him. He got lost all on his own.

The checkup, the routine tests, then the middle-of-the-morning phone call, the “we’d like you to come in please” said by a receptionist like it was any other thing that a receptionist might say, the panicked phone call to the best friend who lived on the other side of the country – that was how it started, the cancer.  After all of that, Jane went to the movies.  She got a big tub of popcorn and cried as Tom Cruise attempted to stop an alien invasion.  The next day she went back and saw the movie again.  Weeks went by before she made an appointment with an oncologist.

She picked Dr. Bradley off of the hospital’s online catalog because he looked handsome.  His thick brown hair, perfect teeth and milk and coffee skin, had – Jane assumed – landed him in this peculiar business of telling women that they were dying.  Jane imagined if he applied himself he could land a gig hosting a televition talk show – Cancer Hour with Dr. Bradely – or at the very least a recurring news segment on CNN or MSNBC.  Handsome, she thought, was what she needed.

“How have we been feeling?” he asked during their first meeting, in what she thought was his best TV personality voice.  The antiseptic smell of the cancer ward had nearly made her gag.  Dr. Bradley sat behind an oak desk, white coat over a ocean-blue button-down, looking like someone you wanted to trust.  He talked calmly, like there was nothing to worry about, like this was every day.  He didn’t look at her like she was dying.  Listening to Dr. Bradley was soothing in the way that listening to news anchors on television is soothing, even when they talk about murders and tornadoes and missing children.  Here was a man who could tell you that your life was over and not cause you to flinch or look up from your TV dinner.  Jane filed him under “keeper.”

“Have you been experiencing any sypmtoms?” Dr. Bradley asked.  He opened the file on his desk – her file – and flipped the page.

“Symptoms?” Jane said, like she was stupid, like she didn’t recognize the word.  Was that a symptom?  ”Not unless you consider having cancer a symptom.”

At thirty-two, Jane had not had much experience with this line of questioning – except for the occasional headache, she very rarely felt anything more complicated than fine.   The mass that was growing on her ovaries had come up in a routine checkup.  Its alleged presence inside of her had caused Jane to start thinking of her body as something separate from herself, something finite and limited.  Alone at night she imagined the cancer growing, its sinews spreading to her other organs, taking over.  Lying there in the dark she’d start to hyperventilate and claw at her abdomen. Like that helped. Like anything could have helped.

“Tell me about what you would consider ordinary, then” Dr. Bradley offered. The great thing about Dr. Bradley was that he could talk to you without ever looking right at you, looking two or three inches to your left maybe, maybe panning over to camera two.

“What are you, a shrink?” Jane finally returned.

Dr. Bradley smiled.  His teeth were perfectly lined up one after the other, little white caps between his lips.  One had to assume that he’d never have cancer – the cancer wouldn’t dare.

“No, I’m not a shrink. Would you like to talk to one?”

****

The cancer websites talk about support networks.  Everybody has them, it seems.  If you don’t have a support network you are a unich or a leper and belong in a state institution with young boys in white helping you bathe and make your bed.

****
The hospital where Dr. Bradley worked was a lean fourteen floors in the middle of a crowded city block.  The front doors slid open and shut, open and shut, open and shut.  Cabs shuffled around in a line out front, picking up, dropping off, sometimes idling for a little while then leaving, the air a mixture of exhaust and antiseptic.

Inside, the elevators were expansive, like the elevators in warehouse buildings, as if all those lives in all those rooms were goods to be traded for and shipped out.  Everything was color coded, like one of those toys for toddlers where there is only one way to fit the pieces together.  Hallway A was colored blue and led to the emergency room.  Hallway B was orange and led to oncology and pediatrics.  Hallway C was red, and so on. Nurses wore yellow, physicians wore blue, residents wore green, techs wore purple.  Medications were coded by color and size – small green vials, skinny blue vials, large magenta vials.  Test-tubes of Jane’s blood left the room and never came back.  The nurses and the younger residents looked at her with a kind of undifferentiated kindness afforded to the elderly and the dying.  Other patients, some hanging on to walkers or IV poles, staggered out of their rooms and were ushered back in.  Pillows were fluffed, sheets were changed, medications were administered.

During the weeks after her first appointment Jane clocked in at the hospital about as often as she clocked in at her job across town.  Dr. Bradley wanted to do tests.  Some of the tests required nothing of her except to be present, cancer and all.  Other tests required her participation, required that she eat or not eat or not bathe or not open her mouth or not move her head or her feet.  The nurse at the front desk of the oncology unit – a maudlin woman in flower-print who was doubtless responsible for the Lilith Fair sound-track and the pastel floral arrangements – handed her xeroxed sheets with instructions that made Jane feel unoriginal, like she and her particular fears was something that had happened many times before.

I remember first my grandfather, or, more specifically, my grandfather’s back, as I follow it through the crowds of the St. Petersburg market.  My grandfather, the general: shoulders squared, hair combed with the comb that is in his breast shirt pocket, cuffs folded, collar starched. He floats through the crowd like a ship, unstoppable.  Everywhere else is filled with faces – tired faces, work out faces, young dazed faces, women’s worried faces, kids’ crying faces, faces dried out in the sun from picking the raspberries that they sell in newspaper cones to strangers passing by.  All the faces are saying things to each other, or to everybody, or to nobody in particular, and maybe, terrifyingly, to me.  Young women with their hair pinned to small white caps look out from behind their wheeled-in counters with jaded faces, faces that say “the last man I talked to was mauled by a bear – go ahead and try me.”  My grandfather’s back moves easily through all of them, his steps even, his jaw moving just a little bit from side to side like his teeth no longer fit into his mouth.  His old hands are clenched around the handles of the empty woven satchel that my grandmother handed him for the groceries.  My grandfather’s hands look like they are cut from wood and would require a special key to operate.  I am five years old, my own fist clenched around the skirt of my summer dress, learning what it must mean to be brave.

He sat in the cafe and waited for his aloneness – a state that felt, right then, so welcoming – to turn on him. He knew it would eventually betray him, sell out to the cheap advertising that peddled the facsimiles of human connectedness, even in this place where he still knew very few people. He knew that when his solitude betrayed him he would have very few options for escape, and so prayed that this quiet would last for another thirty minutes, or, if he was lucky, another hour. But it wad too late. He could already see himself on the other side, wandering into the local bar, taking a shot of tequila (or maybe something stronger), leaning over to the stranger next to him and saying, with little pretense or intention: “Did you see the papers this morning, mate? They’re talking about war over there.” He would gesture in a southernly direction, not that it would be obvious enough to matter. The stranger would stare back for several seconds, take a sip of his beer, understanding fully the rules of the game, then say, “Yeah, man. War.”

Winter was just starting to sneak in through the old window-frames of my new apartment, and my mother, on the other end of the telephone wires that ran between Boston and New York, was talking about homegrown insulation measures, like blankets under the door and peppers in one’s socks.  Was my heat on, she wanted to know. I mumbled something noncommittal.  Mom wanted to know about my week, and hmm’ed and uh-uh’ed as I walked her through my comings and goings.  It was our weekly weekend ritual.  It was what we did.  And then everything went wrong.  I had purchased a new coat that week, which, with her concern about the perils of winter, I was certain she would like, but everything about it was wrong.  I had gone to the wrong store, where they sold fashionable clothes that tore and frayed.  It was a size too small – good coats were supposed to be big enough to fit a sweater or a scarf.  And, worst of all, it wasn’t even warm.  And she was right, I had chosen the coat because wearing it made me feel the tiniest bit like a French baroness, like I could command the kind of authority that all those women in the fashion magazines commanded, and mom found the whole affair terribly impractical.  We hung up the phone on a note of mild agitation, which always made me feel uneasy, the way one feels when a pipe in the basement is leaking and there’s nothing you can think to do to stop it.  I poured myself a cup of coffee and plopped onto the couch to flip through the channels with no volume.  

That evening I was headed uptown on the one train to meet some friends for dinner. I pulled my new coat off the hook and modeled it for myself by the yellowish light coming from the kitchen.  I picked out a scarf from my closet, and a pair of gloves that went with it and a hat that went with the gloves, and stared into the mirror until I thought myself a presentable adult, which I could never quite manage to convince myself I was.  The coat looked good one me.  I pulled the scarf close around my neck.  What did mom know about trying to fit yourself into a life you were sure needed you to be more serious, more determined than you really were?  What did mom know about proving yourself?

“Robert!” his mother’s voice from the kitchen cuts the room into pieces and scatters them all around the floor. “I said fifteen minutes of *playing*.” She dissolves into kitchen sounds. The living room fills with the smell of onions sizzling.

Robert has been sitting at the piano in the living room. Just sitting there, not playing it, just looking at it, tracing the old-timey font of the music book with his laser vision.

His mother’s voice leaves an echo, like an alarm going off. Robert lets a second glide through the air without saying anything back. It hangs there and hang-glides out of the room. Another second follows, then another. He wonders how many seconds he can hold out against the threat in his mother’s voice without giving in. He wonders how many seconds before she comes into the room to find him staring down the piano. On the fourth or fifth second he pictures his mother’s face: forehead smeared with grease, jowl squared, not kidding.

Robert surrenders. “I know!” he says loudly enough to be heard over the kitchen noise. His voice is voice still high pitched and unthreatening, not like his brother’s voice. His brother’s voice is low and unshakable. His brother has taken the car keys and gone out. It has been an hour, maybe. Maybe more. His mother has the phone in her apron pocket in case he calls, even though he never does. His father is at work, but he’s been checking in. “Just checking in,” he says in his best dad voice every time anyone picks up the phone. His father won’t come home until seven or eight. He has meetings.

The baby grand sits in front of Robert like a cockroach with a toothy grin, its guts perfectly linear underneath its opened exoskeleton. When Robert presses a key he notices the un-connectedness between his finger, the key, and the sound, like when you say a word over and over to yourself until all you can hear are the individual syllables not talking to each other. There is a kind of seriousness to the baby grand that Robert has never been able to muster. The piano demands attention. The piano knows things. The piano knows the pitch of a siren going off. The piano knows why his father is at work and his mother is in the kitchen not saying anything to him, and why the house is so quiet all the time that Robery has to tiptoe so that nobody will hear him coming or going. The piano knows where his brother goes, which is something that even mom doesn’t know. The piano is all powerful.

His mother is in the doorway between the ficus and the painting of the fat people that she likes so much.

“I *said* fifteen minutes of *playing*.” Robert stares at her and wonders if he can pretend that he’s gone mute. She probably won’t believe him, even though Mrs. Murphy said that it’s technically possible. Anyway, his mother is off her game today. Her face looks worn, like old wrapping paper and her hands are doing that thing they do with the kitchen towel when her head is clouded over with trying to figure something out. Looking at her makes Robert’s knees feel like they are made of jell-o.

He turns to the piano and plays a chord – three keys with three fingers, every other key. When you play the keys that are next to each other it sounds wrong. His mother turns around and goes back to the kitchen. Robert stares at the piano. He imagines that he is one of those kid prodigies with the vests and the shiny hair. He gives a flourish with his hand but his fingers don’t know where to go, and the sound they make with the keys doesn’t make any sense. He looks desperately at the sheet music, but he can’t remember which black dot matches which key. He stares at it, tries to lazier it with his eyes again. He shuts the book and looks back at the piano. His legs are stuck to the leather of the piano bench and make a sticky noise when he tries to lift them. He starts to pick out the happy birthday song with one hand, in the middle of which his mom comes back and tells him that she has a headache and if he isn’t going to practice anyway he should just go to his room. For a second Robert wants to argue, but something in his mother’s voice won’t let him. It’s like her superpower. The stairs creak as he walks up, lifting each knee with his hands, for effect, and to see what it’s like to be a cripple.

Robert shares a room with his brother, so going there is like entering a warring nation. It’s got everything that they talk about in those black and white war movies except a trench to hide in, though Robert often uses the space between his bed and the wall. His brother is into music. His guitar is sitting on a stand in the corner on his side of the room. It’s the kind you have to plug into things, so there are wires running all over the place.

There once lived a woman who loved a man who didn’t love her enough. They had been married for a year and shared a room in a communal apartment at the edge of the city of Prague. One Saturday morning the husband went to the city to buy some presents for his mother.  He liked to give his mother presents, even when there wasn’t a holiday to call for it.  The wife stayed at home, as usual, cooking and cleaning and generally looking after everything. She scrubbed the kitchen, and polished the bathtub, and paid all of their bills and organized their closet, where they kept their shoes and coats.

When the husband came home the wife was cutting up potatoes for a stew, which was the husband’s favorite meal. When it was time for dinner the wife set the table with plates and glasses and utensils, and poured the milk and ladled the stew and put out the salt and the pepper from the cupboard. Just when everything was almost ready, an elderly neighbor who lived alone in another room of the apartment came out to the kitchen and started rummaging around the refrigerator, but left quickly, sensing that her presence was not welcome. The wife sat down and waited for the husband to come out of the bedroom, and when he did she smiled at him, but he ignored her and sat down to his plate. He put salt and pepper onto his stew and picked up his spoon. He glanced up at the wife, who made sure to look away so that he would not see her staring at him. He swallowed a mouthful of stew, and then reached down for another. The wife watched as he ate the whole bowl, not eating any herself, and then said: “Did you like the stew?” and the husband said “Yes,” and got up from the table and went into the bathroom to wash his hands and face.

The next day the husband came home from his job at the factory next door, and the table was already set, and the stew already on the table. The wife was busying herself at the sink and made sure not to look at him as he took off his coat and went into their bedroom to change out of his uniform. The husband sat down and at his bowl of stew without saying anything and when he was done the wife asked: “Did you like the stew?” and the husband answered “Yes,” and went into the bathroom to wash his hands and face.

Mr. Henderson is going for a walk again. There’s a clear plastic tube coming out of his arm. A nurse was dispatched from the big desk in the middle of the hallway to make sure Mr. Henderson doesn’t fall over or abscond from the hospital in his quiet meandering way. She says his name a few times, like a vocal tick she cant help. “Mr. Henderson. Mr. Henderson. Mr. Henderson.” Mr. henderson pays no attention. Mr. Henderson has a gangly forty-something daughter who visits on Tuesdays. His wife is dead, I assume. Or maybe she’s just ex-ed. I don’t know what Mr. Henderson is in for, but when you are that old maybe you don’t really need a reason.

I am in for my lungs. I spend a lot of time staring at my chest as it goes up and down and thinking telepathic thoughts at my internal organs. Though I guess maybe it’s not called telepathic when the recipient of your telepathy is inside of you, and a lung. There is a plastic tube with two little offshoots coming out of my nose that is tucked around my ears like a pair of nose glasses, and is hooked up to a tank, like the tanks they use to fill up helium balloons, only smaller. Sometimes I take the tube out of my nose to see if maybe my lungs have kicked themselves into gear while the nurses were busy following the elderly around the halls. When I start feeling lightheaded and like if I tried to stand up I would maybe fall back down, I put the tube back in. One time I forgot and fell asleep and woke up with a nurse sitting by my bed, looking at me with her most stern “I may not be your other, but I am not above calling her if I have to” look. The plastic tube had been taped to my face, on booth sides. My mother is 300 miles away, in Ohio. When I turned 21 she said I was a grown up and could handle this on my own. My mother has my little sister to take care of, which she does on her own because my father left. The nurse looking in on me every fifteen minutes for a whole day. This is how they do it here at the hospital.

My doctor tells me that eventually I will need a lung transplant. That’s the kind of thing they can do now – take somebody else’s lungs and just stick them in your chest and watch you walk away, the lungs expanding and contracting underneath your ribs like they actually belong to you. It takes a few hours to hook up the tubes, but other than that, no biggie. The doctor smiles his “let me reassure you” game-show-host smile when he talks about the lung transplant, even though he hasn’t said anything he would need to reassure me about yet. I imagine him practicing this smile in his bathroom in the evenings while his hotshot lawyer wife makes meals out of The Joy of Cooking in their kitchen. I hate the “let me reassure you” smile. I practice giving it back to him while the nurses change the bed-pans of the 60-something woman I share a room with. On these afternoons the head nurse gives me the “oh dear, here we are again” expression that I absolutely adore, but I think I need to be older to be good at it.

The hospital is like it’s own untamable ecosystem.

Nineteen, and the only deaf girl in her college class, she has, she thinks, finally found her place in the world. On Friday afternoons she grabs her bag, slips into a pair of flip flops, and walks twelve blocks to the campus movie theater. She walks up to the touch-screen ticket teller and keys in her information: one adult ticket, four o’clock showing, no discounts. Four o’clock is the weekly foreign film slot. She moves quickly through the screens and reaches for the tickets, efficient to the T. She is relaxed. She is happy, even, if she thinks about it. She hands her ticket to the kid at the door, whose name-tag says his name is Curt, and slips inside.

She smiles at the boy behind the counter, who is her age, with black wavy hair and dark, smart eyes. He smiles back, and she gets a little jolt in her gut. She has never stopped to buy anything, so he doesn’t know that she’s deaf. She feels like she is pulling off a magic trick. The theater lobby is sweet with the smell of popcorn and burnt sugar. Besides the boy, the lobby is busy with beautiful, lanky girls with floral print dresses and smudged lipstick leaning into their boldly bespectacled boyfriends. Along the walls old couples stand together in that way that old people have of filling in each other’s spaces. Some of the older women wave to her, quietly, the gesture barely noticeable, and she waves back. She feels at home among these foreign-film-goers. These Friday trips have become the anchor in her life – the bit she always comes back to when she starts to feel like she’s drifting out at sea. She walks into the theater and picks a seat up front, where she’ll have no trouble seeing the subtitles. She’s made it, and now everything is easy. The people next to her chat amiably and reach for the phones to set them to vibrate. Then the lights dim and they all disappear.