Half Empty (23 page)

And
still
she is unrepentant! “This is what comes of trying to have clean feet,” she says, consoling herself that everyone is looking at her with envy. Even so, such attention cannot stop her from being overwhelmed with a hunger that seems to eat her very insides. She wonders if she can stand it much longer, but endure it she must. For much, much longer.

Up above, life goes on without her, but she is not forgotten. The hot tears of her mother splash down upon her forehead, to no avail. “A mother’s tears of grief for her erring child always reach it, but they do not redeem; they only burn, and they make the pain greater.” (Let it never be said that the Jews have cornered
the market on maternal guilt.) Her employers remember her as a sinful girl. “She did not value the gifts of our Lord, but trampled them underfoot. It will be hard for her to have the gates of mercy opened to let her in.”

Like many a fallen woman, Inge becomes a cautionary tale. Children are put to sleep with her story; they jump rope, keeping time with chants about her ignominious and richly deserved fall from grace. Only one little girl expresses sympathy for Inge. Eight decades later, this same little girl, now an old woman on her deathbed, once more sheds a tear for Inge, the scalding, purifying drop reaching all the way down to Hades to burn the forehead of the wretch, who is instantly resurrected as the most modest and abstemious of timid brown sparrows. Cowering in doorways, Sparrow Inge takes only the barest sustenance for herself from the crumbs she gathers, giving the rest away to other birds. Finally, after she has given away crumbs equal in volume and mass to the loaf she had defiled with her selfishness, only then is she taken up to heaven to serve at His feet.

The Happy Prince is a gilded, jewel-encrusted statue, a brilliantly shining colossus standing proudly above a harbor town. One autumn evening, a swallow flying south decides to stop overnight before continuing to Egypt to meet his friends. Nestling himself comfortably between the Prince’s feet, he is disturbed by a raindrop on his head, although the sky is clear. Looking up, he sees that it is the statue crying.

In life, it seems, the prince had lived a beautiful and sequestered existence behind the walled gardens of the palace of Sans Souci. But now, seeing all the human suffering below him, the Happy Prince cannot help but weep, even though his statue heart
is made of lead. (“ ‘What, is he not solid gold?’ said the Swallow to himself. He was too polite to make any personal remarks out loud.” Wilde interjects, unable to resist.)

The prince entreats the swallow to pluck the ruby from his sword hilt and fly with it to the poor home of a haggard seamstress whose child is ill. The swallow does so and fans the feverish boy’s head with his wings, sending the sick child into delicious slumber.

The next day, with the cold incrementally creeping in, the swallow bids goodbye to the prince and makes ready for his flight to Egypt, but the prince begs him to stay just one more night, and to pluck out one of his sapphire eyes and take it down to a destitute playwright, too distracted by the cold to write in his chilly garret.

Same drill the next day. Much colder, and another thwarted sayonara as the prince implores the swallow to pluck out the other sapphire and deliver it to a little match girl (Wilde cribbing his archetype of abjection from Mr. Andersen).

His jeweled eyes gone, the prince is blind now, and the swallow vows to never leave his side, encroaching winter be damned. The swallow tells of all the suffering he sees in his flights over the town, and slowly denudes the statue of its gold leaf and distributes the valuable wafers among the poor.

Fully winter now, the statue is dull and the swallow a goner. With one last kiss upon the prince’s once-rosebud mouth, the bird falls dead at his feet, the gentle thump of his tiny, flightless body followed by a muffled crack, the sound of the prince’s lead heart breaking in two. Both carcasses are thrown upon the town rubbish heap.

The story ends with God dispatching his angels to earth to bring back the two most precious items in Christendom. The
dead bird and cracked heart are brought to heaven, presumably to spend eternity in a paradise of self-denial alongside the little Sparrow Inge.

Is it any wonder, then, that I should feel destined for great things? (And by great, of course, I mean terrible.)

Dr. X looks a good deal older than his Web photo; he is a man over seventy. He finds me in a consulting room. “Mr. Sauer?” he asks, beckoning me into his office. “No, Rakoff,” I correct him. I smile at my sister, who has come down from Toronto for the meeting. We’ve still not told my parents, who are abroad. I don’t want to ruin their trip, especially if all that is required is another minor surgery.

Dr. X continues for a good few minutes wondering aloud who Sauer is, offering me some of his onion bialy, asking me once more if I’m
sure
I’m not Mr. Sauer, insisting that I really ought to take some bialy, and suddenly remembering Sauer. I like mildly eccentric people and Dr. X has a certain cantankerous New York Jewish sensibility I’ve always enjoyed. What does become a little frustrating is the almost thirty minutes he spends talking to me, while my scans and pathology slides sit on his secretary’s desk not fifteen feet away and he makes no move to get up and examine them. When he finally does, the news is not good. My malignant peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, high grade—not quite as amusingly Navajo-Yiddish sounding—was likely caused by the radiation I received for my first bout of cancer at age twenty-two. The margins are not clean. He shows me in the microscope, which frankly interests me only marginally. It is the Friday before Christmas. He wants me to come in on Monday to be fitted with a port, so that on Tuesday I might begin a double dose of chemotherapy, “a rough course,”
he assures me, all leading up to the main event in three months’ time, the complete amputation of my left arm. Only surgery will tell if there will be enough cancer-free shoulder or collarbone to preserve some sense of thoracic symmetry for the attachment of a cosmesis (the only-for-show, functionless cousin of a prosthesis). I get mildly weepy in the waiting room when I think that I will predecease the parents, something I emphatically do not want to do. I have a CAT scan of my neck and chest, and some blood work, but Dr. X leaves before looking at the results. Still, I feel safe in his hands. I might even love him a little, this third physician in three weeks upon whom I have bestowed all my hopes.

My sister, cousin, and I go for clam chowder (establishing once and for all that there is essentially nothing in the world that can put me off my food). My sister and I call the parents that midnight, early morning where they are visiting. We ruin their holiday and then go to bed. I will say this only once, but I will mean it thousands of times, and with all,
all
of my heart: thank you, you various alcohols, benzodiazepines, and codeine derivatives. I love you all very, very much.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes, and while there are not words to convey how little I want to lose my arm, I am still not moved to either pray or ask “Why me?” I am angry that I ever got the radiation for my Hodgkin’s back in 1987, although if it’s anybody’s fault, it is mine. It had been presented to me as an easier option than chemotherapy. Less comprehensive but also less toxic, no vomiting, for example. I opted for the radiation out of fear of the more difficult but more pervasively effective alternative. Dave the Brave had proven himself unworthy of even his cheap medal and made the easy decision, rather than
embracing the fear and the rigor of the strenuous life. In the end, the radiation didn’t even work, and I had to have the chemo anyway. There is little I can do about it now. I try to take comfort in remembering David Lykken’s twins study:
They’ll take my arm off in March, and six months after that, I’ll be back to my old self. By September I will be fine
. I say this over and over again. (I do, however, want to call up the acupuncturist and say, “Hey, Einstein! Hey, genius! Remember that
wind
in my arm?”)

The parents arrive and take the bed and I join my sister on the pullout couch. The median age in the apartment is now sixty, which is also the approximate number of square feet per person. Things are looking up, actually. In the intervening two days since I saw him, Dr. X has been discredited by no fewer than three other oncologists I speak to. One diplomatically states that “He gets amazing results that cannot be duplicated,” which is essentially calling him a fraud, although it’s not nearly as damning as a former colleague of his who simply screams an alarmed “NO! You must not be treated by this man!” when he hears X’s name. My heroic friend Kent gets us in to see a sarcoma specialist at Sloan-Kettering, the world-famous cancer hospital that sponsors the public radio morning broadcast, and where they’ve seen more of this quite rare cancer (ain’t I special) than anywhere else in the country. Kent assuages my fears by pointing out that Sloan is very conservative in its approach to amputations, only performing them in the most extreme cases. In the meantime, my mother the physician has worked her extensive Toronto connections and I will also fly up for a second opinion at the cancer hospital where I was treated twenty-two years previously.

I cook a Christmas Eve dinner for eight, but it’s really a second Thanksgiving, the army of friends who have mobilized in my behalf, and the restored and continued attachment of my left arm chief among the things for which I am grateful, ambidextrous
huzzahs all around.
How silly to have ever thought to trust a dangerous quack like evil, stupid, fucking Dr. X
, I chide myself. My medical crush officially over, my too-freely-given transference is rescinded and I wait, dance card and pencil in hand, ready to jot down the name of my next savior.

My sister leaves on Christmas Day to be with her family. My parents leave the following morning. I put them in a cab and go directly to the gym. In general, there is no colder, no more clinical nor honest referendum on one’s desirability than the gym, specifically the steam room at the gym. One’s powers of conversation, one’s wit, books one might have written, even one’s pretty eyes won’t get you very far. But lo, behold three randy Magi, bearing not frankincense or myrrh, nor gold but for a thin chain on one of them, with little more than towels (and barely towels, at that), and yet with these humble gifts do we provide one another succor, diversion, release. Verily, we are risen. It is a Boxing Day miracle.

The very nice radiation oncologist lays his warm hands on my neck and collarbone and talks in his warm Irish voice about the treatments: five weeks or so, followed by surgery to remove whatever tumor is still there. I can do it up here in Toronto or down in New York, which would be my preference. It’s only at the moment before he’s about to send in the surgeon that he says, “Now
he
might say something completely different,” that I get that old twinge of antecedent-phrase-leading-up-to-an-as-yet-unspoken-but-inevitably-hope-dashing bombshell, like “I think you have a future in film,” or “You’re a great guy, David, who deserves love.”
A-ha
, I think in anticipation.

A-ha indeed. The CAT scan seems to reveal a fairly significant amount of tumor still there, one that looks like it’s wrapped
around the major nerves and blood vessels of the arm. This is no longer crazy Dr. X talking. When an expert who is not a psychotic charlatan goes out on a limb
(har de har har)
to even mention such a thing, he’s essentially telling you it’s a fait accompli. My arm is back on the table, so to speak.

My mother is shaking a little, but only in the hands. We thank the doctors. They leave. We put our coats back on and embrace briefly, both dry-eyed. “Rough sledding, Davey,” she says. If I have ever shown any stoicism in my life, I know where it comes from.

And down the rough hill we sled. I am back to trying to be unsentimental about a nondominant limb, doing the trade-off in my mind: an arm for continued existence. It’s an exchange I can live with, although I am fixated on how radical the cut: from neck to armpit, leaving me without even a shoulder to balance things out. I imagine that the rest of my life I will see the tiniest involuntary flinching on the faces of people as they react with an immediate and preconscious disgust at the asymmetry of my silhouette. Nevertheless, I become Julie Norem’s little foot soldier, defensive pessimism in action, puncturing my fear by learning to go without something before it’s officially discontinued; weaning myself off of saffron or Iranian caviar before it becomes no longer available, and trying to ascribe a similar luxurious dispensability to my left arm. I begin to type with one hand. (One finger is more like it. Considering what I do for a living, it’s appalling that I’m still hunt-and-peck.) I accomplish a host of tasks: putting on my shoes (new slip-ons purchased without even looking at the price tag. I remember this kind of heedless spending in the face of illness), buttoning my fly, showering, dressing, shaving. I manage to cut an avocado in half by wedging the leathery black pear against the counter with my stomach and, thus steadied, go at it with a knife. In the evenings, with my bloodstream a sticky river of Ativan, wine, and codeine, it all
feels eminently doable. In the cold light of day, however, unable to carry a chair to move it into a corner, for example, what I’m about to embark on feels a little bigger and harder.

There are other extra-functional and non-cosmetic realities I have to consider. How does someone without a left arm know he’s having a heart attack, for example? And the sarcoma, for reasons they don’t know—or can’t stop, anyway—has a one-third to one-half chance of reappearing in my lungs. If it’s something small they can excise, great, but it might also appear as a bloom of lesions for which they can prescribe aggressive chemo, but it doesn’t really work, and that would be that, I’m afraid. Such thoughts, which I try to keep at bay, build to a momentum that inevitably leads to the conviction that the metastases are already under way; that, like it or not, just like that film monologue stated, this is exactly how people die; the cemeteries are crowded with indispensable men, those younger, more beautiful, more deserving of futures than I, multitudes of people who were more full of life (until, I suppose, they weren’t), who had parents more adoring. A few years back, I knew and said goodbye to scores of young men who died criminally before their time, and certainly it was not because they wanted to live less than I do. Barack Obama’s grandmother, for heaven’s sake, a woman who essentially raised him, died mere days before he was elected. Surely she would have lingered to see him become the most powerful person in the free world if she could have. It gives the lie to those well-worn anecdotes of people managing to hold on to see daughters married or grandchildren born. There will be little I can do about it, ultimately.