Faces in the Fire (8 page)

“Personal belongings. Mostly, um, the clothing you were wearing.”

She was printing some paperwork, so he opened the bag and sifted through it. It smelled like smoke, dark and dangerous; scorch marks and bloodstains tattered the shirt and jeans. Evidently his hospital bill wasn't going to include laundry charges.

In the back pocket of the jeans he found a wallet with some credit cards, his commercial driver's license, and fifty dollars in cash.

He smiled. No, not ten thousand dollars in cash.

He transferred the wallet to the back pocket of the new jeans he was wearing, then dug through the front pockets of the scorched jeans. His fingers brushed plastic, and he grasped it and pulled it out.

It was a plastic bag holding a napkin with a number written on it: 1595544534. The number from Corrine. Surely, that part hadn't been physically real, had it? In many ways, that seemed the most disjointed of all.

And yet, here he was, holding the napkin. And now, as he looked at the number, he realized what it was. A ten-digit phone number.

He put the napkin into his pocket and began to sign the discharge paperwork the nurse was stacking in front of him.

He wasn't ready to touch the last two items in the bag yet. The shoes would have to wait.

67.

The shoes fit amazingly well. He had to admit that.

He still didn't understand the reversed 3 or the other writing, but he knew these leather shoes that had walked a thousand strange miles were now, somehow, his alone.

So he wore them. And he welcomed the image of the catfish (not a shark, but a catfish), which he now recognized was not simply swimming in a sea of orange. It was swimming in a sea of fire.

As he himself had done. As he himself would continue to do.

He returned to his home, opened his workshop, returned to the cold storage at the back of the shop. Inside, he heard the plaintive voices of the ghosts, begging for his help. He found the silk dress, pulled it out, listened as the ghost in the dress asked him to help find her sister.

He smiled, holding the dress lightly in his hands. “Tell me the name of your sister,” he said.

And he listened to the ghost inside the dress, no longer afraid of what it might say. No longer afraid of what the ghost inside his own clothing might say.

68.

Later that night, he took a break from the catfish sculpture. Yes, he would finish it. Yes, it would be the centerpiece of his exhibit. Macy had been able to reschedule the show, and was excited because his accident had created some buzz around the event.

He took the napkin, shielded inside the plastic bag, out of his pocket. He studied the number for a few moments, not sure if he really wanted to dial it or not.

In the end, he forced himself not to think about it too much, and he dialed.

It rang once, twice, and then a voice answered on the other end: “Hello?”

He recognized the voice immediately; the tears began to stream from his face. An odd sensation, really. Crying. When had he last wept?

For the first time in years, he spoke to his mother.

Moving forward, moving backward.

Human.

Second Stanza

Bottom-Feeder

20.

It was hell to watch the needle pierce her skin.

She should be used to it, of course. And thankfully this wasn't a chemo session; the R-CHOP kicked her to the ground every time, making her puke.

Or worse.

This was just a CT scan, and the IV would only be in her arm for a few minutes. Then it would all be over, and she would head back to her apartment and send out a fresh batch of e-mails while she waited for the next round of chemo in another ten days.

“Okay, you'll feel a rush,” the radiation tech said to her.

Corrine nodded, as if this were all news to her. As if this radiation tech had never seen her before. As if she didn't know the radioactive solution would spread a wave of warmth from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, leaving the taste of old pencils in her mouth.

As if this whole cancer thing were nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

She closed her eyes, listened to the tech leave the room, listened to the hum of the scanner cycling just above her head.

After a few seconds the scanner cycled at higher RPMs, and the tech's voice came over a tinny speaker: “Take a deep breath and hold.”

She did as instructed, keeping her eyes closed as she felt the table beneath her moving, carrying her through the giant doughnut-shaped machine. She wasn't a diver, but that's what she imagined it to be like; you took a deep breath, held, sank beneath the surface, lost all sensation. It sounded comforting, really, to be in a place where she couldn't feel anything. It would be a nice break from what she'd been in the midst of, which was the exact opposite: feeling everything.

The table beneath her stopped moving, and the radiation tech's voice came over the speaker again: “Breathe.”

Yeah. Breathe. A good command, one she'd told herself after Dr. Swain gave her the news. It hadn't been the way she'd seen it in places like the Lifetime channel, with a doctor who placed a comforting hand on her leg while speaking with a tremulous tear in his eye: “I'm sorry, but you have cancer.”

Instead, Swain had been looking at a folder of notes, black-and-white X-ray images on the screen next to him as he spat out a big mouthful: “It looks like you have diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma.”

Not even a “sorry” worked in there.

The table beneath her came back to its starting position, and the disembodied voice told her to take another breath and hold it.

Diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Swain had said it without looking up from his notes—the pathology report from the biopsy, she knew—and she half wondered if he was reading it to make sure he said it properly.

She'd been holding her breath ever since sitting down on the bench in his office, waiting for him to flip a page of the report and give her the news. So she'd been given the news, and she knew there was no reason to keep holding her breath, but the problem was: she couldn't breathe.

Nothing in, nothing out. She just sat there, dumbfounded, not really taking in anything he'd said except that last word. Lymphoma.

The doctor had looked up then. “You okay?” he asked.

Well, that had been a stupid question, hadn't it? She'd just been told she had some gobbledygook kind of lymphoma, and he wanted to know if she was okay. Still, she was thankful he'd asked, because it's what broke the paralysis of her lungs.

She'd laughed. Actually laughed.
Are you okay?

The CT scanner finished its second cycle, and she heard the voice tell her to breathe again.

Yeah. Breathe.

22.

An hour later, back in front of her computer screen, waiting for a mass e-mail to relay through several fake IP addresses, she heard her cell phone ring. She recognized Dr. Swain's office number; since being diagnosed three months ago, she'd dialed it many times.

Could be bad news. Of course it could be bad news. But then, it could just be a reminder to give blood; she always had to give samples a week before each round of chemo
to make sure her counts were holding up. Probably that, now that she'd thought of it; she faintly remembered being told to give blood on the day of her CT scan, but she'd forgotten until just now.

“Hello?”

“Corrine. Dr. Swain.”

She smiled grimly. “Hi.”

“You had your latest CT scan today.”

“Yeah.”

Surely he wasn't calling just to tell her this; she had, after all, been present at the scan, so this wasn't exactly news to her.

“I just talked to the radiologist, and he's still doing a report, but I wanted to talk to you about it right away.”

“Oh.” Just oh. That was the only word her mouth would form.

He paused, and when he did, she knew it was bad. Good old Dr. Swain wasn't a pauser; this was the guy, after all, who had casually blurted out her cancer diagnosis while he scanned pages of a report.

“I'm afraid,” he said, “we're not seeing much of a response to the R-CHOP. Your chemo regimen.”

And there it was again. That holding of the breath, that paralysis of the lungs, that inability to speak or think.

Breathe. Breathe normally.

“Okay.”

“I think we need to look at other options.”

Options. That was a good word, wasn't it? She held on to it.

“Which are?”

“You can come in and we'll talk about it, but I think you should consider a bone marrow transplant.”

Transplant. That wasn't such a good word.

Dr. Swain was on a roll now, able to talk about the kinds of technical things that gave him comfort.

“We'll look at the donor registry, hope for a match. If I recall, you don't have any siblings.”

“No.”

“Related donor is the best, but if we can find a good

match . . .”

She waited, but Dr. Swain evidently felt he'd uttered a complete sentence.

“But I can't have a transplant until we get rid of the lymphoma.”

“We'll switch chemo regimens. High-intensity, myeloablative.”

Myeloablative. Score that one on a Scrabble board.

“And that means?”

“That means, essentially, a very high dose. Higher than what you've been getting. Kills off the lymphoma cells, but also kills healthy cells—in your bloodstream, in your bone marrow. Then you receive new donor cells to bring back your blood counts.”

Blood. From someone else. How Count Dracula.

“And?”

“And, if all goes well, you're cured.”

“That's what you said about the R-CHOP.”

Another pause. Actually, he hadn't said that, exactly. What he had said, not long after the old “You've been diagnosed with . . .” line, was “This is a highly curable form of cancer—85 percent or more. It's a good one to get, if you get cancer.”

She had laughed at that line, too, because really, what else could she do? That Dr. Swain was a real comedian.
Are
you okay?
after dropping the lymphoma bomb, followed quickly by
This is a good cancer to get.
Swain would kill—
kill
—at the Improv.

“Hello?”

She shook her head, trying to wrap her mind around this latest news. “Yeah. I'm here.”

But for how much longer?

She pushed the question from her mind.

“As I said,” Swain continued, “we need to search the registry. Several thousand names, lots of people on it. There's a college football team, even, that signs up for the registry during spring drills—kind of a tribute to their coach.”

Wow. Now they were talking about college football.

“What . . .” Her tongue felt thick. “I mean, this transplant thing . . . is it dangerous?” Okay, that was a stupid question, but she figured old Swain could give her a break. Especially after some of his one-liners.

“It's a complicated process. You'll be in the hospital a minimum of a month. There's a treatment-related mortality rate of . . . well, perhaps 10 to 15 percent. And after-wards, GVHD—Graft-versus-host Disease—but a little bit of that is actually helpful. Let's just take the first step with the registry.”

“Okay.”

But that Swain-speak euphemism was sticking in her mind: treatment-related mortality. Really just another way of saying
death
. So 10 to 15 percent of people died just going through the transplant.

“I'll call you Monday. We'll talk more then, and I should have some news on the registry.”

“Okay.” She hung up the cell phone, glanced briefly at her computer screen to make sure her e-mails were still spooling.

Breathe. Breathe normally.

25.

Most people would never be able to become bottom-feeders. Corrine knew that. Their sense of self-worth prevented them from doing so, along with their sense of order and hierarchy. For the vast majority—and this included people everywhere, not just in the good old US of A—the true comfort zone was a basement in their souls. No matter what they did for a living, there were always people in their own personal basement who were farther down the chain of misery. Prostitutes and druggies lived in that basement, sure. Hicks from the sticks or down in the holler. Welfare moms in the projects. Used-car salesmen. Tobacco executives.

That basement was there so people could say, no matter their lot in life:
At least I'm not that guy on the corner with a
WILL WORK FOR FOOD
cardboard sign. At least I'm not that woman living
in a tin shack without air-conditioning, waiting until the first of the
month so I can get more food stamps. At least I'm not that firebug
I keep reading about in the papers and seeing on the TV news, a guy
who gets his kicks by burning down buildings.

Corrine understood this. But she also understood that, in reality, most people were too weak to be part of the basement. That was the contradiction of it all. The bottom-feeders, the basement people, were the ones who were
real
because they didn't constantly stuff their egos with talk about how they were doing just fine.

Corrine understood this because she'd been a bottom-feeder since age fifteen. First as part of a traveling sales crew, carted from city to city and door-to-door trying to sell people overpriced magazine subscriptions so she could “fund her education” or “stay off the streets and out of trouble.” Those were carefully rehearsed lines drilled into the heads of any kid on a traveling sales team, designed to appeal to that fear inside the people answering their doors.

See me? I've sunk so far that I'm going door-to-door hawking magazines, and I'm only fifteen or sixteen years old. By buying a magazine subscription from me, you'll be able to feel better about yourself because you'll believe it's improving my lot in life—if I win, I get a college scholarship—and because you'll be able to reinforce the disembodied voice that speaks to you from the basement of your own soul. The voice that says well, at least I'm not stuck going door-to-door like this poor kid.