Nonfiction, Howie Good
So there I was, marooned on a remote desert island, the Academy of Lifelong Learning. I had what the doctors called an “oddball cancer,” one of the 14,000 cases of liposarcoma annually in the U.S. Down in the basement, behind a steel door, is a special X-ray machine, a linear accelerator, that resembles a giant praying mantis poised to devour her sex partner. The radiation burned up the cancer cells, but also healthy tissue. I am mostly empty space on the long car ride home.
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Music was usually playing when I entered. Billy Joel, Wings, Elton John. Stuff just this side of elevator music. One day a radiation tech asked if there was anything in particular I wanted to hear. “The Ramones?” I suggested. I heard “Sheila Is a Punk Rocker,” “I Want to Be Sedated,” “Beat on the Brat,” “Blitzkrieg Bop”– frenzied anthems of alienation, the screeches and shrieks of civilization and its discontents – while I lay face down on the X-ray table, forbidden to move. All I could do was think about death and dying. At the end of a torturous twenty minutes, the tech popped back, my day’s treatment done. “Great job!” she said. “Must’ve been hard to lie still.”
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I dreamed that my tumor grew back. The rest is indistinct, but I remember a new tumor was growing in the same spot as the original. I once asked my brother, a doctor, why there are so many cases of cancer. The environment, he said immediately. He meant the human impact on the environment, our trashing of the planet, the carcinogens we have introduced into the soil and water and air. You probably know people who had or have cancer. Maybe you yourself are in treatment. I sometimes wish that I could find one of those lost dogs whose photos are stuck on telephone poles and lamp posts and return it safely.
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When I was growing up in the late Fifties, early Sixties, seemingly everyone smoked and they smoked seemingly everywhere – on packed buses and trains, at work, in bed. My parents smoked. My teachers smoked. My pediatrician, Dr. Miller, smoked. Older kids smoked in secret. My childhood was passed beneath endless, rolling clouds of cigarette smoke. No one saw anything wrong with it. In Amsterdam, where they betrayed the hiding place of Anne Frank to the Nazis, “Cancer Jew” is a common slur.
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I look different. It’s the weight loss and the pallor. Less than a month ago, I finished radiation treatment, 30 sessions in six and a half weeks. The plants were still underground. Someone may have called or texted me, extended congratulations with the morbid charm of a certain type of serial killer, a Ted Bundy. I don’t remember. The flow of reminiscence isn’t even a trickle; it’s a dribble. What matters is that I’m done. Her hair hangs down in my face. The bed emits happy little squeaks.
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"Stay strong," I tell myself, but fail miserably. Every afternoon at about this time the fatigue from radiation treatment overwhelms me. The mind peels away from the body. Shadows swarm. Nothing matters except sleep. As a child, I expected to live longer than I will. You want to talk about it; I can't. A rodent leads the way. I wave to all the ages I have been.
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“Your call is important to us,” the pleasant, computer-generated female voice lied. I was practically comatose from the new pills the doctor I was phoning had prescribed for anxiety and depression. We’re the protagonist of our own stories, but only a minor character in everyone else’s. Working people were waiting for the loop bus in front of Kappy’s Liquors with the forlorn aspect of castaways. One kept mice in a fish tank at home. Likewise, Van Gogh loved paint so much that he once drank a jar of it and nearly died. I Google the spelling of “bingeworthy.” There’s no hyphen. Even so, the spelling looks wrong, the way a three-legged dog does.
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A gaunt, gray-skinned woman in the turban of a chemo patient sits quietly among her loud, chatty friends at a picnic table alongside ours at Spanky’s Clam Shack. As a cancer survivor, I’m tempted to speak to her, say something supportive, offer advice. I bite a large fried shrimp in half instead.
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Bobbi says I should download Calm, “the #1 app for meditation and sleep.” Instead, I keep phoning the Cancer Center to complain about my pain. One person says to try heat or ice. I say I have; it doesn’t help. Another tells me to take Tylenol or Advil. I sigh loudly in response. At that point, it’s recommended I go see the psychiatrist on my “care team.” I say I don’t need a psychiatrist, I need something strong for pain. The psychiatrist works out of the same cubelike concrete building where I received radiation. “What should I call you?” she asks once we’re seated. “Napoleon,” I say.
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Inside Home Depot, I hear but can’t see the birds chirping away among the exposed steel beams overhead – house sparrows, presumably. Halloween has only just ended. The red Christmas poinsettias on display prove to be fabric when I touch a leaf. I ask a man in a carpenter’s apron who isn’t a carpenter where the heavy-duty tarps are. “Aisle 41,” he says and points. I haven’t be able to entirely put from my mind the thought of cancer. It follows me everywhere. Cancer may be the scariest word in the language, scarier somehow than “death.” The sparrows go on chirping their simple three-note song as if there is no extra time for complexity.
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I had stopped taking my pills. Liars and cheaters were still firmly in charge, though, and imposed disasters on the rest of us. Night was dark; day was darker. The people around me raged, wept, cackled insanely. I felt the surgical scar across my back wriggle like a worm. Think about that when it’s late, and your doors are locked, and only ghosts are watching.
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Because of its small size, a ukulele looks like a kid’s toy, a prank instrument, something humorously odd, Tiny Tim tiptoeing through the tulips, but when I fingerpick or strum mine, there’s no cancer, barely any distress, it feels safe, our dog, Dewey, curled up in a ball on the couch beside me, and my fingers moving automatically through complicated chord changes, sweet ripples of sound in joyous, peaceful protest at death.
Howie Good is the author of the poetry book, The Dark, available from Sacred Parasite, which will also publish his book, Akimbo, in 2025.
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