I
STAGE 2A
left neck; clavicle;
lymph node involvement;
abdomen clear
After two years of fiddling with the lump on my neck, and all the jokes about it being cancer, it turns out to actually be cancer. I shouldn’t have said anything. There’s a sense in my gut that I manifested this, that at nineteen I have developed some fell power to make the darkest comedy real. Dad and I and my younger brother and sister — the twins, Alex and Angela — are down on Vancouver Island getting together school supplies and taking a little medical vacation. My third year at the University of Victoria, and the chemotherapy will begin soon.
Dad booked us into the sketchy Island Travel Inn on Douglas. People are often having mental health crises in this patch of downtown. There are as many garbage bags as suitcases in the hands of people on the street.
While the twins watch TV, Dad takes me to the hospital for some tests. I think blood tests. I think weighing me, hopefully weighing me — the number low now, exercising very hard. I’m set up in a dark room with spotting lamps, everything else in shadow, though hospitals are meant to be well-lit — this is more a theatre or opera house.
The nurse, as she wheels in a sheet-covered steel cart, says, “The marrow test isn’t a popular one.” The what test? She peels back the sheet to reveal tools I do not recognize. It’s important to recognize tools.
She goes on. “It’s not everyone’s favourite thing, this test.”
Her eyes say more, though. They say, Do you know about marrow? With marrow we must make sure.
I’m certain there are things you don’t want in marrow. When things appear in marrow the timeline can become truncated — I learned this from movies. But where do we get the marrow? Where is it from?
The doctor enters next, gloved, not making eye contact, and tells me to get into the fetal position facing the wall. He says my body will do so naturally once he begins, so I may as well get a head start.
This was described to me as a regular visit for regular tests.
Did Dad know the actual reason? He seemed not to in the cab on the way over, but now I wonder. Now that I’m in the fetal position facing the wall, I can see bristle marks in white paint. The metallic ringing of things being assembled starts up in my blind spot. I look back, and there’s what could be called a needle, but it’s a foot long with jackhammer-style hand grips.
The doctor notices me looking. “This will be uncomfortable. Young people have hard pelvises.” Bones must soften with age, but I do not have age. “It will be fast,” he says. Seconds. Insertion. Aspiration. Bone marrow is a semi-solid tissue.
The doctor numbs my skin with a regular-sized needle. Next, to ascertain the numbness, he prods the skin with a sharp spike and asks me if I feel it. I say no. He plants the giant needle’s tip against my lower back — I can’t tell exactly where because of the numbing, won’t know until it punches through the bone that isn’t numb. Am I ready? Big push. His entire body weight on the giant needle. An animal sound leaves me. Such pressure. The needle goes through skin, then muscle, catches against my pelvis for a brief instant, then through, into my centre. I feel the marrow sucked out. Thickness going up the straw. I’m puddled in sweat. I think we are done. He says that I can take a few minutes to collect myself on the table before going home, and that it’s probably not in the marrow, rarely in the marrow, he’s sure I’ll be all right.
•
I’m back in Yukon for my first winter in years. Done the undergraduate degree now, the writing school. I miss it already. The lassitude, the slovenly lifestyle. To be back home living with my folks out in the woods is different. Before, my siblings were always there to talk with. I’ve never lived here like this.
The days go dark. Cold spreads through everything and forms a rime of ice on the house’s windows. I sign up for a playwriting night class at Yukon College, driving the twenty kilometres twice a week through blizzards. A writer I know is teaching it — she’s the mom of my little sister’s best friend. Everyone here is so connected. I haven’t done much playwriting, but it can’t be that different, right? Just put the story into words and have the characters say them. Pretty basic.
For the class, I write a play about a genius writer named Victor with a serious head injury. They are tragic, head injuries. Will he be okay? So much on the line. And because he’s a genius, it’s sadder still. Will he lose the genius and be worthless and undeserving of people’s love? Come find out. Everyone else in Victor’s writing classes knows he’s a serious artist. They are all in awe. In the world of the play, he’s writing a short story about a water control officer who starts putting barbiturates and sodium thiopental — hokey truth serums — into his city’s water supply in the hopes that people will, under the influence of these extremely strong drugs, love each other more. Soon, I realize that the substory of poisoning the water is more interesting than the main story about the head injury, but it’s too late to change the plot.
At home, I try to smoke weed in secret and probably do not succeed. Strange having to again meet shady guys in parking lots at night. Yukon is not the same as B.C. Back on Vancouver Island, weed was always available. I’d join the orderly line out the door of the dealer’s downtrodden apartment on Shelbourne, a tattooed assistant girl who was probably his wife asking what I was lining up to buy. Here, it’s frozen-over parking lots, negative thirty degrees, scrambling from my car to their driver-side window. I throw in money, they hand me something, and I drive home, the big highway lamps casting gold light into the car in a left-to-right swirl, like a siren spinning in its little glass cup. I’m broke, unemployed, and trying not to smoke weed but still smoking, sometimes just the black resin-goo at the bottom of the pipe, up in my childhood room, staring at the map of the world that’s still on the wall, no pins on it or anything, no markers for where I’ll go.
Still working on the play for class. There’s a girl character now who loves Victor and visits him in hospital while machines beep and lines squiggle on monitors. They are in love. The love goes without saying and doesn’t require risk or participation. They have snazzy conversations where both of them are being mean, but it’s smart enough to not seem mean. One of the main themes is the concept of pareidolia, things appearing like other things — clouds that resemble dogs, trees that resemble people. As the play progresses, more and more things in Victor’s life take on the likeness of other things. It’s possible he’s trying to tie it all together to overcome the trauma of having his skull cracked open. It’s very difficult, and he struggles.
A few of my also-graduated friends are back in Yukon now, too, pursuing careers. I think they’ll stay long-term, most of them. Or they leave and get pulled back. We go out to bars on weekdays and get obliterated, not everyone with jobs yet, not everyone caring yet. On nights I don’t go out, I work on the play or the novel. Chipping away in the dark, as the office is right next to my parents’ bedroom, Dad always yelling through the wall to be quiet. The novel is just everything I’ve ever known or thought, and it’s kind of shit because I haven’t known or thought that much. But I also think it’s amazing, for the same reason.
It dawns on me that a good way to end the play would be for Victor to mostly rediscover his genius after the head trauma. Like, he can still be a genius. But — and this is crucial — he himself doesn’t believe he gets it back. He himself doubts that the head trauma hasn’t permanently damaged him, believes it has made him less of a genius, and will forever wonder what he’s lost. It’s not clear if the head-on collision was even his fault. When the accident happens, he’s driving home from class after arguing with the girl he loves and who loves him, and then there’s the crash and it’s brutal and in slow motion. The argument that preceded the crash was mostly about how he was right about something having to do with writing craft — remember, he’s a writing genius — and she’s like, “Well, you don’t have to be such an asshole about it,” and he’s like, “I’d rather be right than happy,” and the play subtly hinting that this is a deranged thing to believe. In the end, they stay together, I think, though I never get that far. The class ends before spring, when the days are still short and the sky is white and the ground goes soft with mud that freezes each night and thaws each morning.
•
An old couple sits near the water fountain, close, their knees touching. Window light pools in the dishes below the woman’s eyes. Her hair is the colour of ice. The man has no hair. He’s dying. The thinness. Like a child’s drawing of a person. She holds up a tissue, and he blows his nose. A minute later she holds up another tissue, and he blows again. And again, and again, and it doesn’t stop, this ragged bleating. I don’t stare. I pretend to look elsewhere. The woman holding each tissue like an orchid, with a particular fold, practised. On her lap is the kind of shallow box that holds twenty-four soda cans, and she places the used tissues inside it. Her having brought the box, knowing how it would be. The box will need to be emptied soon. Judging by the sounds that come from him, the tissues must be despoiled, but in the box they all look white.
I realize he isn’t blowing his nose. A white plastic spigot juts out of his throat just below the Adam’s apple. She holds each tissue over the end of the spigot, collecting. And then folds the tissue and places it in the box with the others. The box so full now it looks like the preparation for a raffle.
•
I’m on Frank’s couch in late morning, my intestines all coiled up. We’re not roommates anymore, Frank and I, but this hangover makes it feel like we are. The malaise reminds me of being in university and makes me want to go back. Grad school applications are due soon — I will do them, for sure. His folks are gone, so a bunch of people have crashed at their beautiful home overlooking the Yukon River valley. Out the window, snow-crusted spruce lean against one another. Banks of frozen fog rise from the valley basin like cotton. Ice crystals tattoo the windows. Last night, as we got drunker and drunker, the cold seemed to melt off us, and we undid jackets and took off toques and rambled through the night from
one bar to the next.
There are no blinds on the ten-foot windows. Must be late with this much daylight. The moon stands out in the sky’s pale blue. So many craters, how they accrue across millennia and never heal. I roll onto the floor and scramble upright. Where is my jacket? This type of cold, you always want to know where your jacket is. My wallet is in the jacket, also. I check behind the couch, the entryway, the bathroom I was throwing up in earlier. Forty below and no jacket? I don’t remember getting back here — must’ve been a cab. I curl into a ball on the couch and drag the wool throw over my aching body and face. If I block out the sun and moon a bit longer, I’ll be okay. Plotting now. A return to my car. An escape.
I sleep another hour and wake feeling like I’ve eaten batteries.
Mom is working at the college today, so I call to ask if I can visit. Frank drives me, lends me a thick wool pullover that itches whenever I move. It’s not as warm as the jacket I can’t find, but it’s better than nothing.
There are few people in the college’s halls as I begin to look for the nursing wing. At least it’s warm. I follow signs until I see the one with my mom’s name on it and enter a makeshift medical ward, still feeling dizzy and half-asleep. Eventually, I find her office by just walking down the hall. She’s at her desk, working hard, like I knew she would be. Always working so hard. She gives me a look of concern, noticing that I don’t have my jacket, but she doesn’t ask. I explain that the jacket got stolen, that you cannot trust people in this town.
There’s a mock hospital room off the hallway. With a gesture, she leads me to one of the pretend beds, says I can sleep it off. I roll into the thin quilts, burrowing, not wanting her to see me shiver. A pink mannequin stares blankly at the ceiling from the other bed. It’s studded with a million little holes where students practise inserting needles. Eventually, another nursing teacher comes in and asks how I’m doing. She has a knowing look.
“Just recently admitted,” I say. “Could be anything.”
“Let’s check you out.” She takes my vitals, hums at the right moments, wonders at my condition.
•