In the Body of the World (3 page)

All I know is that I waited too long. The tumor moved like an irrepressible army, like CO
₂
through the atmosphere. It touched and destroyed and eroded and suddenly it was too late. I had not been a good steward to my body. I was afraid to ruffle feathers, afraid to make noise in the dark. Afraid to say what was happening. Then it would be real, then all fantasies would die. Then I would have to take responsibility. You are touching me where you should not be touching me. This is wrong. This is incest. Then I would be calling my father out. I would lose my father and the future and the love and safety and life itself. Then I would be outside the circle—alone. My old boyfriend used to say you have to choose between family and dignity. But I think the choice is deeper. I think it’s a choice between being awake or half asleep. Being alert, not surrendering to the drowsiness, the delicious and comforting somnolence that will in the end be the death of us all.

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CANCER TOWN

How to describe Rochester, Minnesota? It is essentially cancer town. There is one massive hospital complex called the Mayo Clinic, the thirty thousand people who work there, and everything else in the town exist either to support or supply it. Rochester is simultaneously something out of a bizarre sci-fi-we-destroyed-the-Earth future and the most ordinary middle-American town. It is kindness incarnate, almost frighteningly so. Everyone knows that everyone who comes there is finding out if they’re sick, already sick, getting better from being sick, or too sick and will probably die. The whole town is like one palliative care unit. The waitresses are grief counselors. They serve you hamburgers and hold your hand as you weep for your son, daughter, mother, father, wife, or husband. All the sales people, the street cleaners, the airport shuttle drivers have an eye out for the wounded. There
are wig stores on every corner. In the one upscale restaurant you see people in wheelchairs hooked up to their IVs having dinner or sitting outside stealing a smoke on the street. In the Marriott Hotel every room is filled with a sick person or a person hoping not to be sick. If you have been in massive denial up to this point about illness and how many people, for example, have cancer, this would be the end of your denial. If you were afraid to take in the inevitability of illness visiting your body, this would be your “holy shit” moment. I cannot say if cancer town was a comfort or a horror. Like everything in America it was huge and consuming. I was wary. It reminded me of going to Disney World and dropping acid. Things were going very smoothly until I suddenly realized that we were inside a totally perfect consumer bubble and that even the horse’s shit was being collected in little pans before it hit the ground. All unpleasantness had been removed so that the people could be happy, happy, happy. On acid I began to panic that I would be forever stuck in this happy land and that just entering it meant they had laid siege to my mind. As I began to have the worst bummer trip of my life I remember feeling grateful for the anxiety because it defied this world of Pluto and Donald Duck, this world of animated automated amputated America.

But I was not tripping now in Rochester. The diagnosis was so out of the blue, so shocking it had propelled me unwittingly into a kind of trance, and as I made my way through the homogenized, sanitized, Muzak-singing world I was grateful to be overwhelmed by beige.

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DR. HANDSOME

The most handsome doctor in the world comes in to examine my rear end. What else, of course? I am obviously shell-shocked. I lie on the table, my underpants around my ankles, and think this is it. This is what the end feels like. The most handsome man in the world knowing that I have some horrible tumor inside my colon or rectum or uterus and that he has to feel it. I have already died from the humiliation and terror that are now merged in a cocktail of sweat and nausea, and I am curled on the table, hoping he will not see me, that I will disappear, and at the same time all I want is for him to see me and for this to be part of what it means to be human, and at that moment Dr. Handsome walks from one side of the examining table, where he is facing my back and naked ass, around to the other side, and he looks me in the eyes and says, “Before we begin, I want you to know how much I admire you and
all you have done in this world for women and all you have written and all the ways you have made the world better. It is a privilege to care for you and I will do my very best.” I feel like a little shaking dog picked up by a stranger in the rain, and this moment makes everything that follows in the next days bearable, and I know I can trust him with my body and I bet he will save my life. Doctors never believe how simple it is to give patients dignity. It takes a sentence. It takes a short walk around a table.

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WHAT WE DON’T KNOW GOING INTO SURGERY

Whether it’s in my liver. How many nodes are involved. Whether I will need a bag—that is, an ileostomy bag. Whether the bag will be permanent. Whether they will be able to find it all or get it all.

They don’t say: We don’t know whether you will wake up, or have a bad response to all that cutting and bleeding and anesthesia. They don’t say: We don’t know if you will ever be the same, or what it will be like when the scar tissue forms and feels like rawhide under your skin, or how well you will handle the abscess that may follow the operation.

I try to imagine what it looks like inside without a uterus, cervix, ovaries. What will my vagina be connected to? I didn’t know the difference between my rectum and my anus. Do you? I didn’t know I
was attached to my uterus. I never really thought about it.

They don’t say: There will be this huge absence.

Or that we may have to take some of your vagina.

I am glad they didn’t say that. Between the bag and the liver, there was enough to think about, and the idea of dying from cancer in my vagina was just too fucking ironic and weird.

I don’t tell them they’re removing what seems like a tumor but is really a flesh monument inside me. Huge and round. A taut ball of cellular yarn spun out of the stories of women, made of tears, silent screams, rocking torsos, and the particular loneliness of violence. A flesh creature birthed out of the secrets of brutality, each blood vessel a ribbon of story. My body has been sculpting this tumor for years, molding the pieces of pain, the clay residue of memories. It is a huge work and it has taken everything.

I do know that the night before the surgery, my dear friends gather in my room, and Kim—who is obsessed with ritual and has memorized about a thousand poems, which spill out of her in any emotional situation or moment like iambic Tourette’s, insists that I state my intention with this whole journey and I think in my head, uh, surviving …

But I say, I do not want to be afraid.

I want to get rid of my fear, any fear, and then she flashes her deck of turquoise poem cards and says, “Pick one.” And I pick:

THE JOURNEY

Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice—

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations—

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice,

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do—

determined to save

the only life you could save.

I have been sober for almost thirty-three years and it is crazy how much I am looking forward to being drugged, I mean super drugged, out for the count, not dead but surely not here. Here is too much—the bag, something in my liver, a missing uterus, men wearing masks cutting into my body. The nodes. What the fuck is a node? Then there’s my son who I adopted because his first mother died. My friends who look very worried. Getting up at 4:00 a.m. to be put to sleep. An enema
first thing. My mother who is not here. My mother who I haven’t told because I don’t want to worry her. The women of the Congo who don’t have the luxury of drugs or CAT scans or bags.

Saving my own life.

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THIS IS WHERE YOU WILL CROSS THE UJI RIVER

It’s dark in cancer town when we get up. Toast, Kim, and Paula walk me from the hotel to the hospital. We are all dazed from Valium. They are holding me by my arms, propping me up, and no one is saying a word. I feel like Gary Gilmore on his way to being executed at Utah State Prison. I believe he was killed by a firing squad, four shots to his heart. This could easily be my last morning, and there isn’t even any bloody sun. My final memory will be the last thing resembling beauty, the faux Pakistani carpets in the Marriott Hotel lobby. It’s dark in Tumor Town, but it’s prime time, busy. There are so many of us online at 4:30 a.m. that it feels like the airport. The crowd is midwestern and overweight, starving and empty from last night’s enemas and cleansers. The Mayo workers are way too cheerful for this time of day. But here in the Cancer Airways
terminal there is no time. There are just the sick and the people who help the sick, the people who are about to be put to sleep and the ones who will put them to sleep. There are the madly chipper airline workers and the rest of us who are all going somewhere with our matching plastic heart-you ID bracelets but who are not so sure if and how we’re coming back.

I relinquish my clothes and my jewelry and attempt to wrap myself in the skimpy hospital gown. I find some comfort in the bare cotton blankets. After endless bathroom trips from the final enema, and after I have tried not to worry my friends by being too dramatic and saying things like, “If I don’t come back, please give my books to …,” they come to wheel me away. As I climb onto the gurney, I understand why you don’t walk into the operating room. Your bare legs just wouldn’t take you there. There is no one going with me on this trip. This one’s on my own. This one is the big one.

I see Toast and Kim and Paula waving. I flash them the V and give them the best smile I can and I close my eyes. I am standing in the wide-open field in Panzi at City of Joy in Bukavu. It is right after one of those mad Congo downpours. The Earth is wet and green and now the sun is just breaking out. The mountains are in
the distance. I see the buildings are finished. I see the women strong and moving from class to class. They are becoming leaders and revolutionaries. I see them cooking and dancing. Mama C and Dr. Mukwege are greeting me. Alisa is there and Jeanne and Alfonsine and Mama Bachu. I have made a promise. That is all that matters. Keeping my promise. I do not think about all the people who are suddenly standing around the gurney in masks and gowns with needles and machines and tape. I do not think about what they will find inside me, that I could wake up with a death sentence or never wake up. I do not think that my mother is not there and my father is dead. I do not even notice how much I am shivering from the freezing cold. I am in Bukavu. It is hot there. I am in the sun. I keep my promises.

You must be firmly resolved. Do not begrudge your fief; do not think of your wife and children. And do not depend on others. You must simply make up your mind. The reason that you have survived until now when so many have died was so that you would meet with this affair. This is where you will cross the Uji River. This is where you will ford the Seta. This will determine whether you win honor or disgrace your name. This is what is meant when it is said that it is difficult to be born as a human being, and that it is difficult to believe in the Lotus Sutra. You should pray intently that Shakyamuni, Many Treasures and the Buddhas of the ten directions will all gather and enter into your body to assist you.

The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin
, Volume 1

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TWO QUESTIONS

I open my eyes as they are wheeling me down a long corridor and my sister suddenly comes into focus. She is standing next to Dr. Deb. I am sure I have died. I have not spoken to my sister in years. They are both smiling at me. Well, my sister is trying to smile. There is something about her trying that makes me want to cry. My face is not yet attached to me, so I do not know how to cry or smile. I hear myself saying through strange things that appear to be my lips, “Is it in my liver?” Dr. Deb says, “No.” “Do I have a bag?” Dr. Deb says, “Yes, but it’s temporary.” Okay. It is not in my liver. My bag is temporary. My sister is here. Blackout.