I’m waking up.

Shit.

I fight it, wedging myself against the slippery well of consciousness, knowing what’s coming. The grittiness of eyelids is what I feel first. Then, the other: A bloom, with razored petals of force clawing into my core. I feel it growing, enveloping other cells, amebic, making them its own as it rips through nerves and sinew to get to them.

My hand grabs the switch, pressing out the cowardly morphine to hide behind. The force lessens, but doesn’t go away. The flower continues, camouflaged in my flesh. It eases into the sharp ends of wires, compressed into a tight ball, ready to spring if I let go.

What next? I suppose I should open my eyes. I wonder how many calories it takes. The flower begrudges me the energy. I thought when I was working twelve hour shifts at the foundry, I knew exactly what tired was, thank you very much. And my reward for this? For stepping into this bright, stinging light?

Grays.

Cancer steals color. I know there were colors because, so far it hasn’t bothered with my brain - directly, it’s been content to play with the nerves and cables it’s attached to. I wonder if it’s saving my brain for last. For dessert.

“Good morning sweetheart.” My wife’s voice is fangs snapping through my skull. I turn my head, the pain comes in bursts of strobed light. I want to sleep.

Her face is gray too, now. It was the final thing to lose color. I think my heart was pumping it to her by invisible pipes. I remember it was peach, the eyes were blue, the lips were pink. She’s wearing her hair up. It was brown.

“The doctors said the new treatment is promising.” Lea says it slowly, or maybe that’s how I hear now. If she is doing it on purpose, she must think I’m stupid instead of sick. A muffled, far-away anger comes. Swallowing is a savage rasp against stiff cardboard. My lungs, no longer pink and cheerful balloons, push a drowned, deep smell through my mouth. “No...more.” A thrumming is in my ears. Things lose focus like a finger is pressing onto the lens of my eyes. I close them. I want to sleep.

I think again of my plan. Of wrapping the rubber band, the freedom in the desk, around the switch and my thumb. I was an electrician and know which monitoring cable to unplug so they won’t come to stop it. I have to hoard energy for that, somehow. I want the calm glide into black more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

“Joe, I know you’re so tired baby, please don’t give up.” She is sobbing. I know the blue is surrounded by red. When she takes my hand off of the switch into hers, I don’t get mad. I squeeze that I’m sorry, instead. It makes her feel better. “I don’t want to lose you.”

It started small, this thing that’s making me dry; that’s killing me by inches: I noticed it, or it noticed me, on our vacation at the river. Which still pisses me off. You really should discover things like this when you’re in an uncomfortable place. We’d bought the white stilt-house that winter, cheap because of the floods in 93’. We were in the new bass-boat. Since Lea had finished school and got her job at the hospital, we had more money.

My son, Brian, was looking at me from an angry - “you don’t know shit, you scared old pussy, “- fifteen year old place. Like my dad saw and probably every dad sees.

“Why? I can do it. It’s just water.” This one was over my telling him he couldn’t body ski.

“Water turns into concrete at forty-five miles an hour Brian.”

He looks disgusted. “Is that what getting old is? Being afraid of everything?”

It’s odd that as you age, your concept of old is pushed a set distance from you. At thirty-seven, it’s fifty. At his age, it’s thirty-seven. “Ok, try it.” He jumps into the water.

“Joe, don’t let him do it.” Lea is a beautiful woman who thinks she isn’t. She is wearing a modest, tan one-piece, still wet from her ski-run, clinging to her small curved body, her dark nipples pebbly and hard. After sixteen years, looking at her still makes my flesh rise. I wish Brian weren’t with us. “I’ll take it slow.” I tell her.

At twenty MPH, he’s smiling. He manages through the spray, to do it smugly. I push the throttle forward. Twenty-eight MPH. The smile is tight now.
“That’s enough Joe.” She grabs my arm.

“All he has to do is let go of the rope.” My Marine drill-instructor’s voice rings in my head;

“The hu - man body can withstand in - cread - able torment, maggots. Yew can make your body stainless steel by the apple - la - cation of your will.”

I push the throttle. Thirty-four MPH. The smile is gone. Lea’s fingernails dig into my arm. Let go of the rope, I mouth at him. He doesn’t. Just looks at me with the same hard brown stare I see in the mirror.

I drop the speed to fifteen MPH and he lets go of the rope. He refuses my hand when he climbs on board. His pale, freckled skin is red with deeper red marks dappling it. His orange hair, same color as mine, is sticking up like a cartoon roosters.

“My turn, take the wheel Brian.” I jump into the water.

“What is this guys? We’re supposed to be having fun here, not a contest.” Lea’s voice rises.

I grab the rope and wave them on.

It’s nice at first. The water is a whirlpool. It’s July, hot and humid enough to punch holes in. The Mississippi’s spray feels cool on my face. Brian looks at me. I smile. The water gets harder. My skin starts stinging. I keep smiling, unable to see them now. The water turns solid, a sheet of greenish-blue glass. My body skips across it, bouncing up and down. It feels like the boxing lessons my dad gave me, when he knew his belt stopped working.

From a hidden place I keep smiling, keep my hands from turning the rope loose. When the water gets soft, the beating stops but I feel a grape-sized wrongness, a thready point, dark in my side. I refuse his hand. Lea doesn’t look at me. Brian heads for the pier. It’s harder to breathe.

“How fast did he take it?” I said that night. She was still back- turned angry.

“I didn’t tell him, and I’m not going to tell you. What is it Joe? Some vestigial pride from caveman days? I hate it. It’s not really you, you’re a fine person, it has to come from someplace else, outside of you. Why?”

“It’s a guy thing.” I said. The point felt bigger.

The guy thing made me wait too long before telling anyone that there was something wrong. Stupidity. That’s its real name. I woke up in the hospital after I had passed-out at work, almost falling into a vat of zinc.

“Mr. King, you asked for the truth.” Doctor Fox said. “The node has metastasized, if we’d caught it sooner the prognosis would be promising.”

“I’m fucked huh?”

“Never say never, where there’s life there’s hope...” He closed the door where Lea was waiting in the outer room. “Look Joe, I’m gonna drop the bullshit. You are. Fucked. But you can still live fairly well until the end. You have to fight for it.”

I did. For months with days that were years. Pain gets boring. I’m ready to trade hells for the novelty.

“Dad.” I hear faintly.

“Daddy.” A strong hand squeezes my shoulder, pulling me back up to the grays. My eyes scrape against their sockets as I look at him. I know his face is white, I wonder if the brown is surrounded by red.

“Joe..” Lea is holding my hand. Brian’s face comes close.

“Stainless steel.” He whispers. His face goes away.

I fight the flower for energy. My throat tastes like pennies.

“Desk drawer.”

I hear it pull open.

“What dad? What’s in the drawer?” I move my hand from Leas, missing the touch but needing the switch. It is fighting me. It knows.

“Band.” I hear him moving things around.

“This rubber band?” I shake my head yes. A brittle static fills my ears.

“Shitcan.” I tell him.

“You got it, dude.” I hear him shoot it at something metallic.

“What did he say?” Lea asks.

“He wanted me to throw the rubber band away.”

The bloom shrivels as I hold their hands. There is something different about the ceiling, bright and struggling to be seen. I close my eyes, glad they can’t understand. Sleep comes.

Copyright ©1999 Jerry Newman.  All Rights Reserved