Speculation
“You’ve got your mother’s smarts”, he said. I had told him that he knew my mother. I mentioned the name of his high school they attended and even went far enough to throw out her name. He just wasn’t connecting the dots. So I finally blurted it out.
“I’m her daughter.”
He began to tell me about what a wonderful person he knew her to be. How I had her round face, but not her long hair. I would’ve told him how that was the closest I would get to going bald, in support of those with Crohn’s and colitis who are too malnourished to grow their own hair, and how my brother almost thought he had one of them a few days before I cut it, but that was neither here nor there. He had hardly had a conversation with my mother. From what she told me, he refused to talk to anyone who wasn’t in his classes.
He had learned to bind himself only to those who pushed himself academically. And he pushed himself. His father was a math teacher there, and I suppose he refused to have an anti-intellectual son. So he made him read A Tale of Two Cities. Told me he liked the book, but he couldn’t remember who said the last quote. Even fought me when I said it was Sydney Carton.
But he admitted he was wrong. And he admitted that was my field, not his. And that was the most he could ever give you. He had this antagonistic personality when it came to books. He liked an argument, but he loved winning even more than arguing. So he would hammer his students into submission, speaking over them until they just realized they shouldn’t be speaking at all.
Where it all turned I will never know. Probably had something to do with some poem I wrote in twenty minutes. It was about a pianist succumbing to syphilis. He played piano. Says he took it up after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Something about needing to look for the beauty in life. Either that or life was too short to do what he was doing. And what he was doing wasn’t working anyway.
He was a premed major. I guess that’s what all the whiz kids liked to do. Either that or his father put him up to it. I’ve seen enough profiles of perfectionists in the making to know who decides for them. He had probably been listening to Chopin and Haydn, because his father, trying to prop him up to become the academian he wasn’t, knew that everyone who made a living at it had to be well rounded. And nothing would be more well rounded than a mathematition or a scientist who knew about classical music.
He was told to know just enough to be able to mention the composers in passing. But not enough to like it. And he liked it. So he kept listening to “The Surprise Symphony” with his door closed, telling his father he was working on some problem that had stumped his high school math team. He was enamored by all of the layers of variations within the “Surprise Symphony”, and the way it suddenly crescendoed midway into the second movement. He tried to analyze it again and again. He was taking out all the books he could find on Haydn, hidden beneath the biology books his father was making him read to prep him for his major. College wasn’t for two years. Which meant that he was just early enough to study it intensely.
He was going to Yale. He hadn’t applied yet, but his father would drill him until he was a shoo-in. So he buried himself in textbooks on the human anatomy. He tried to balance it with his taste for music. But as he grew closer to the application date, he realized he couldn’t find time for the two. He reassured himself that the music was only a hobby; he only had something to gain from having ever listened to it in the first place. But he was still too enamored with what he was hearing, so he weaned himself off it by one hour every day. It was one week and he was off of it.
He promised himself that he’d get back to it, when he had established himself in Yale. He scraped by. He was getting As. His father pretended not to boast about it. He told everyone he ever met. That reputation required maintenance. So his father encouraged him to keep at it. And he was spending more and more hours buried in his medical books until he wasn’t sleeping.
He couldn’t sleep. He had this pounding in his head. Starting every midnight. It was downright rhythmic. He was 23 and close to his degree. So he grinned and bore it, promising himself he’d take care of it once he was in grad school. But the headaches turned to dizziness, and he was only comfortable turning his body to the left side when he lied down. He finally walked into an emergency room when he realized he wouldn’t be able to see his diploma.
It was initially chalked up to exhaustion. He thought he’d be given a pill and walk home the next day. But he was feverish. He was told to stand up straight just so he could be taken for a cat scan. He stumbled onto the floor. Paramedics normally would worry more about stabilizing someone in his shape than running tests. But something seemed indescribably different about this case. So they laid him flat and waited for a doctor to examine what he could make out in a CAT scan. There were these little white bumps scattered along his brain. They were actually pretty difficult to make out; it wasn’t the size, but the location. The bumps were pressing on his occipital lobe, which explained why he had trouble seeing straight.
There had been several year remissions reported for several similar cancers, with some new techniques called chemotherapy and radiation. This wasn’t one of them. The average patient with this kind of cancer was given one year. He had six months. Chemo might extend it one week; combined with radiation he was given another two months.
The most effective option was a new surgery where only the affected areas could be removed. But fifty percent of patients lost their sight completely. Another thirty-five couldn’t be accounted for, because they didn’t make it past the operation. He hesitated at first. If he survived, he would go back to a major he didn’t like pursuing, and to lab work he didn’t look forward to doing. He would’ve rather had cancer kill him a long time ago. But he did it, because his father reassured him that a fear of death kept him back. He was afraid that the operation would kill him; if he didn’t have it, he’d die anyway and he’d die a chicken shit. He made the appointment for that Friday.
Doctors had kept him under supervision. He stayed in a white robe, looking at books he couldn’t read. He tried to count the pages in A Tale of Two Cities. He couldn’t hold the book straight. So he just kept his eyes closed and wondered if and when they would just roll back into his head.
They were nailed open. And so he occupied himself with whatever mindless programming was on TV, while he watched his body atrophy. He was encouraged by several nurses to walk around, because it meant less of a chance he would be on life support post surgery.
He didn’t care enough to get up. He’d seen prettier scenery. Several trays of food were brought over. He turned away all of them. Eventually, nurses stopped bothering him, telling any new ones on staff to stop wasting their time.
And so he wasted like this for one week. He was about to go to sleep when he was wheeled into the operating room. He was introduced to whoever was going to cut him open and whatever was going to make the room dizzy that day. And he was smiling as he closed his eyes. It was the first time he smiled in several months.
He had trouble telling what went where. But he had this thick white bandage around his head. He tried to peel it, only to have his hands curl and fall back down to his side. He tried again several times, and by the seventh, just threw his head back down where he tried to pick it up.
He began to sleep. And he dreamt that he was walking, with no machinery attached to him. It was a field he used to play in when he was growing up. He was with his mother. He hadn’t seen her since he was about five, when his parents divorced and he was asked to pick the parent he wanted to stay with. She never visited and never called, despite whatever attempts he had made later on in high school through letters and phone calls. But this was when he existed to her. He saw the flowers as he was going to run into them, and how she told him he could make a wish and blow on it and all of the pedals would disappear.
It was 4:00 A.M. A nurse came in, saying she had to take a blood test. He woke up. He was crying. She wrapped a rubber band around his arm and told him to make a fist. His veins were bursting.
A sound was coming from the next room. It was a violinist. Her father was waiting for a heart transplant. He loved to hear her play. So she serenaded her father before he would be wheeled off.
He couldn’t tell what he was hearing. And he was too tired to guess. So he closed his eyes, and let himself listen idly. It was goddamn beautiful. He promised himself that, once he was off these machines, he would learn to play the violin. And he would play it every bit as well as she did. He hasn’t put it down.
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