Remission
A story of a regular guy loosing his mind to brain cancer, and the odd world he enters. What is real is up in the air, but the reality of a miracle finds him in the end. To publish perhaps by 2025.
Chapter 1 Prognosis
The newspaper was held half folded, confined by the space of the breakfast nook cluttered with the microwave and the high-backed stools that had seemed such a good idea. Aaron shook the newspaper awkwardly to dislodge a lady beetle that was crawling slowly along the edge. It slipped slightly to the side, then resumed its journey in search of a summer that was now long gone. Aaron noticed the brilliance of the sun on the edge, on the beetle, making both glow like angels in a dream, then remembered his purpose and held the paper again against the light.
His purpose was not to read, but to hide his anxiety in the dark ink of words, in the headlines of mass carnage and bylines of football scores. But nothing could draw his attention from the impending apocalypse that lay cloaked by time in the small phone half-hidden in the clutter on the table. Between butter and breadcrumbs, this tiny plastic box could land a mortal blow at any moment, could strike him as certainly as the blade swung by a hooded horseman. He noticed everything in painfully sharp detail while his thoughts were muffled in the wooly fog of fear. Every nerve strained to deny and to hear the awaited voice of doom, the messenger from the glinting labs of the clinic. Unbelievably, in those eerie labs they were drawing a diagram of the machinery of his corpse and would soon determine if the sum of his parts equaled continuing function or obsolescence. They said they would know this morning.
He hid behind the paper even though everyone knew. His wife had heard him question his body’s signals from the beginning, from the first regular headaches to the floating pin-prick lights to the numbness of his left arm, each a sign to look into like a horoscope or goat entrails or the flight of a crow. She had been the one to force him to the doctor’s, tiring of his amateur research, trying to bring an end to the worries one way or another. There was no hope, she had said, in not knowing; only the certainty that more time was lost in the diagnosis and, if necessary, the cure. This was logical but terrifying, but he had gone, had been tested, and now waited more alone than at any time in his life. Even his 12-year-old son, who had at first been frightened to tears, seemed as distant and unconcerned as any modern child hypnotized by his Game Boy. There was no comfort in anything or anyone. He prayed hard, hard to his God who he had never forgotten, to please let them call now, please let it be something else, high blood pressure, something for older men to worry about. God, he was not even close to being ready.
He nodded absently to his son, who talked non-stop about one classmate or another doing this or that to neither and both he and Karen as he noisily ate from a box of dry cereal. Karen, he knew, was so absorbed in her word puzzle that Jeff could have said that he was running off to Mexico with his math teacher and she would have pleasantly replied, “that’s good.” After hearing for the 5th time about the humongous fart Eddie let out by Richard’s face, his attention was finally brought to something that carried him gratefully from his world. In one of the more barren sections of the paper, the local section of the Black Hawk Daily, an item on page 3 surprised him by its tragedy and its thoughtless placement on page 3. The brief story was captioned, “Divers Search for Missing Car,” and read,
(Three Mounds, WI) ‘Emergency divers were brought to Three Mounds to begin a search for a suspected auto submersion in Black Hawk Lake this Monday evening. No missing persons have so far been reported, but the presence of an auto has been confirmed by tracks leading from the edge of the lake to a newly frozen patch of ice a half mile from shore. The lake at the location of the possible submersion is 110’ deep or more, and near-zero temperatures have slowed progress on the initial search. Fire department chief Captain Benson warns that it may take several days to search the bottom given low temperatures and poor visibility at such depths beneath the ice. “There is total darkness at less than 40 feet, and freezing equipment and unreliable ice has hampered our initial attempt. We hope to have more divers this evening.” He also warned that there could be no hope for anyone who may have been in the auto. “Even with oxygen, the cold would have caused sever hypothermia within 2 minutes, and death within 15.” Crews will continue to search for another week, weather permitting. Any further attempts would be halted until spring.
‘The incident was reported by Karl Schlemle of Drumlin at 5:35 PM Monday. In a phone call with this paper Tuesday, he stated that he had been fishing on the shelf ice along shore when he saw the car “drive rapidly” towards the middle of the lake. “I figured he was just coming out to the shoal here with his drill, but when I seen him keep going at that speed, I knew he was going past the safe ice. The ice’s just formed over the middle. You see some crazy things out here after New Year’s. It was close to dark, and I watched the taillights go further and further, and then saw them go up in the air, and then disappear. That’s how I knew he’d gone down.”
Police have asked for anyone with information on a missing person to contact them immediately at…’
Aaron curled his hand around the warm coffee mug as he imagined the cold and the dark and the panic of the driver when the unseen icy water rushed into the blackness of the sinking car. He pictured the scene as if from a tower or cable car suspended over the lake: he saw the fisherman sitting on a plastic bucket in his Carhaart overalls, a thick flap hat low over his brow, a bottle of brandy in his padded hands, his eyes on the little flags set to rise by the drill holes. The fisherman would notice the car come onto the ice, turn back to his lines, then look up with alarm as the lights flew past him towards the middle. The sky would have been nearly dark then, perhaps a slash of pink still glowing on a wisp of cloud from the hidden sun, the brighter stars and planets already showing through blue-black dusk. The car would dim to shadow as it raced further out, and then to only lights. Then, in the deep purple cold of early winter’s night, the lights would rise up for a second and disappear. The fisherman would stare with open mouth for a few seconds, think of running to the rescue for another few seconds, think twice and run for the nearest phone. He would not have brought a cell, even if he owned one (why would he be ice fishing at night but to be alone?), and would have taken ten or fifteen minutes to find a house to call the police. The fisherman would be left with the same thoughts that Aaron had now: why had the driver been so foolish? Even drunk, who would drive out to the middle of the lake now? Maybe he was a flatlander from Illinois and didn’t know better. Maybe it was a suicide, or even a murder. Maybe it was just a car, a stick on the accelerator, a bad high school prank. Who could go missing for two days and counting without the absence being noticed?
Then again, maybe the driver was dying of a fatal disease, and this was his last farewell, his Viking funeral. Maybe his family had kept his last intentions from the police so that the life insurance policy would not be invalidated. Or maybe they kept silent out of shame. Would Karen be ashamed?
The cold blackness, those last moments, the horror and finality and loneliness. How could anyone do it? But with the promise of a long and frightening and certain death, could anyone continue?
The ringing phone jarred him from the gray background of thought, causing his arms to spasm and tear the paper that had been held absently for unknown seconds. Jeff had already pushed from the table and grabbed his backpack, pulling Karen along in the vortex of the drive to school, her face lost to him but for one glance, a split-second look. Icy electricity was running down his spine, paralyzing him, keeping his hand from the phone. The look came, authoritative. Do it. This is no time for games. His hand jerked to movement without initiative. Neither action nor inaction cleared a path to survival.
Karen and Jeff were past the door to the garage when he first recognized the voice of his GP, a long-time acquaintance and member of his church. Doctor Paul had promised to keep in touch with his colleagues in the clinic and be the first to call if anything unusual appeared in the MRI. Aaron had thought that hearing bad news from a trusted friend and professional might make the news more tolerable. He knew after Doc Paul’s first words that he had been wrong. It was clear that nothing could soften a message of doom.
“Morning, Aaron, you sitting with your coffee? Sorry I’m late, I hadn’t really expected a call and had to write down the details of the analysis. Anyway, I want you to understand that none of this is in stone. The brain is very complex and poorly understood, and we just don’t know half the time. 2 % of random autopsies show brain tumors, so…”
“So it’s a brain tumor?”
“That’s what it appears to be. Nothing can be certain without a biopsy, but they believe it to be infiltrative astrocytoma.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a primary carcinoma…”
“I have cancer?”
“That’s what it looks like, Aaron. Listen, this would be better at my office. I can make some time for you this afternoon.”
“Goddamn. What’s the next step?”
“Let’s talk about it this afternoon. I don’t know, you want to make it lunchtime? How about we meet at the Timberline?”
“Goddamn, Paul, you think I can eat? OK, ok, around noon at the Timberline. Jesus.”
“Take it easy, huh? Listen, you’re not alone. We’ll go over the options, work something out, OK?”
Aaron looked at the phone that was now back in place, a quiet piece of plastic again, and couldn’t remember having put it down. He was shaking, from the cold sweat, from his racing mind that repeated “cancer” over and over, the word dancing among images of hospital beds and tubes and hanging bottles and bedpans and gray, sick people. Everything around him had become sharper still, edged in brittle outline, and his own hands seemed foreign, someone else’s. His mind would not be his, either, not for long. God, would he go mad with dementia or get senile and weak, or would one follow the other? Would he allow a lobotomy to excise the cancer, or radiation treatment to fry the tumor along with the brain? Would there be any options at all?
He looked around out of habit for Karen, to tell her the news, before he caught himself with a hard and inflexible realization: she could not help him. No one could, the doctor had been wrong. If “infiltrative” had any of its original meaning, the cancer may have already spread beyond hope, if it could have been removed before. Perhaps if he had gone sooner for testing, but he had been a coward and now might die for it. A hero dies but once, a coward…He knew, his body had known all along that something was wrong. It had given him signs that he had refused to see, not just the headaches and the shifting sense of smell and the white floating lights, but the dreams. Always, many times a week for two years, the same monster would appear, a looming, inescapable shadow that sucked out the air, leaving him claustrophobic and gasping and terrified. It was very clear now what it meant, and he could have understood it so much sooner if he had had the courage to listen. Coward. Now there was only death.
When he noticed the tears, he had had enough. None of it helped, all of it only made things worse. He was not the first person in the world to receive bad news. He was neither better nor worse off than the millions and millions of others, and all of them, all, had lived or died with what had been handed them, and most with a strength that lent them dignity. And he did not know the outcome for sure. No one did, as the doctor had said.
A look at his watch gave him a customary jolt of anxiety. After 8:00 already, with the Boeing job days behind, it was past time to grab the keys, scoop out the pocket jar, rush to the door, catch his coat on the railing – he flew through the practiced ritual until he came to the stairs, the lights to the garage off so that the walkway was almost dark, causing him to pause. What’s the rush? With a death sentence still ringing in his ear, what could hurt him? A late notice, disapproval from the production manager, snarling customers, what were they before the grim reaper? If there was a time to smell the roses, this was it. And remember them, each one, for as long as he could.
The garage slumbered in the damp, thin light, smelling only of gas and old oil and tires. As he reached for the latch to the garage door, he smirked momentarily at the thought of roses in January. What a bunch of horseshit. But as the light from the diffuse gray of early morning appeared, his fear and cynicism melted like ice in summer sun. The Naw Kaw River stretched out frozen white from the yellow willows, split in the middle by a black streak of fast, open water. Wisps of cloud rose from the water in arcs, bent by the steady west wind. The heads of geese floated in and out of this icy steam, moving with the smooth grace of poured honey. Snow hung in ragged patches from rocks on the far shore, hardened at the edges with layered frost. The dimmest hint of sun illuminated the rippled purple-gray strata of sky that was unique in pattern and color, never before shown to the world, never to be seen just so again. As with each breath of each day.
Oh Jesus, the wonder. Never had he been so conciouse of wanting life. The tears came again, but this time they were left to mark their course. The memories that meant the most were unassailable in their simplicity. Few photographs could evoke the feelings of that morning, none so deeply, the gray and blue-gray and cold that was shot through with something so profound that it brought wisdom and eternity to the portal of the mind. The picture could be raised again and again later, like a recorded track of music, the intertwined nuances faithfully stirring the soul for as long as the blood flowed freely through that mass of pulsing neurons in his head. When the flow stopped, what became of the passion? Where went the soul?
Driving the car from the garage, the pictures in his neural mass were anything but simple. While the ice and flow of the river had found an enclave of peace within, returning to the flow of the social world brought nothing but waves of confusion and panic. In the river lay the eternal in the play of life and death. In the human world, there was no room for death or eternity. Any consideration of his precarious condition shattered like glass against the edifice of quotidian life. His disease could be, it was, but it couldn’t be. We worked, we strove, we bought, but we didn’t die. Other people, old people long removed from daily life and pushed behind the curtain of retirement faded innocuously from existence, but never the productive young. This couldn’t be his time, just as it couldn’t snow in July. His was a condition of nature that was unnatural. It seemed as if a deal, a sacred truce had been broken between man and fate, and redress must be made. Through the shellshock, a desperate search was going on in his mind for the judge, for the arbiter of life. His ending simply could not come because everything would end with him.
The loop of thoughts played on, interspersed by glances at the river and decisions of the road. He would not take the bypass today but go straight through town as everyone had done for so long. The bypass was 7 years old and still largely surrounded by cornfields. Main Street in Fort Timbers remained fully functional, the pharmacy and the clothing store and the Timberline Tavern and Grill privately owned by people he had grown up with, or who were related to someone he had grown up with, or who were friends of a friend of a friend. Everything was personal, from the sidewalk that had served as his skateboard highway to the river bridge where he and his friends had brought their girlfriends on soft summer nights to watch the lights from the fishing boats glitter in the water. New developments beyond town had already begun, but Main Street for the moment still hummed as it had when its primary edifices were built in the surge of hope and energy and greed of the late 19th century. With a simple change of car models, the square 3 and 4 story buildings of red and creamery brick with white cement cornices and trim could have been witnessing Armistice Day or Black Friday or the lowering of flags for President Kennedy’s funeral.
The cell phone jolted him from his thoughts as he stopped for a red light at the turn to Harrison. He saw the caller ID of his wife and slapped his forehead. He had forgotten to call as promised and now had forgotten his rehearsed lines. A search for new brave words caused his throat to tighten, bringing with it the realization that he would probably not be able to say much of anything without breaking down. As he picked up the phone, he hopelessly wished that they could avoid the topic altogether.
“Hey!”
“Hey.”
“So, what’s the verdict? High blood pressure and cholesterol, right? It’s not the animal fat, but the trans fat, you know. History will see that as our poison pill. We could both use a diet, anyway, and we won’t have all those old fries to vacuum from the car seats. What did they say at the lab?”
“It was Paul, he’s handling this for me. He was too rushed. We’re going to meet at the Timberline for lunch.”
“His idea, right? To show you how to eat. Insist that you pay, you owe him the favor.”
“Sure. Shit!”
He had seen the blue car only for an instant, an old Japanese model, as he turned left with the green directional arrow. For half that instant he saw it continue through the light, too short a time to do anything but swear. The impact tore the phone from his hand and threw his head against the window and then everything settled into an alien dimension of stillness. When time started again, he looked first at his hands, then at the men running from the blue car. They were Mexican, four of them, all in pants smeared with concrete dust and grime. He caught another glimpse of them briefly in the rearview before noticing the large Coca-Cola semi that was slowly creeping up from behind. The alternator lights shown red on the dashboard, but a single turn of the key brought the VW to life. As he pulled over, he heard the sound of broken glass under his tires and felt a low shudder from the front right wheel. The dismal consideration of major car repair turned his stomach and brought him to an awareness of the throbbing in his head. In the mirror he could see that a small streak of blood ran along a large purple swelling on his left temple. This was quickly dismissed with thoughts of the car. Still shaking from the adrenaline rush, he pulled himself unsteadily from the seat and leaned shakily on the hood until he reached the damaged side.
A great scratch of blue from the old Toyota ran from the front end to the middle of the front door. Safety glass gleamed like bluish diamonds from the blacktop, although the windows of his own car were intact. He looked to the Toyota. Sprawled like the corpse of a horse beneath the stoplight, it had caused traffic to move alternately around it in single file. The collision had caused it to face north, giving Aaron a frontal view. The windshield had been smashed through in two places and the driver’s side door had been left open, hanging from a single hinge, its window gone but for a few icicle-like shards. The driver and front passenger must have hit the windshield. If anyone cared to, he could probably have tracked the runners by the trail of blood.
The source of the vibrations was quickly found: the impact had pushed the wheel-well fender against the tire. He grabbed the cold metal with his two hands and pulled until he felt movement. The effort caused a sudden burst of dancing stars to appear before his eyes, and as he paused to lean against the hood, the sound of a voice blew the sparkling lights away like milkweed fluff.
“Aaron. Aaron, you all right?” It was Jim Gerrick, the town sergeant of police. The clear intensity of his voice had not changed in all the years since high school.
“Jim! Jeez, you scared me. What the hell, huh?”
“So what happened? Where’s the other driver?” A tow truck had stopped behind the VW station wagon, idling besides two police officers as they inspected the Toyota.
“I was going left with the turn signal when these guys came through from across. They didn’t even slow down. There were four of them, Mexicans. They skedadled before I could get out of the car.” The two of them looked distractedly at the pavement at the mention of “Mexicans.” There was an awkward pause. Ten years before, there had been a few dozen of them, all illegal but no one cared. Now there were over a thousand living in the two small towns of Fort Timbers and Harrison, and everyone could feel the old ways slipping beneath them like sand beneath their feet. The Mexicans did seasonal farm work and menial jobs in the food processing plants, making the right people happy, which gave the authorities a curious blind spot. No one did anything about the growing problem at all. In small town Wisconsin, people were taught to get along and not cause trouble, but the values that had once made them strong now only made them silent.
“I’ll put that in the report. ‘2nd party to accident fled the scene from unregistered vehicle.’ That ought to make it easy for your insurance company. Oh, and look at the side of your head. You should get some medical attention immediately.” Aaron had just turned so that the sergeant could see the swelling, larger and darker than before. It was only his police experience that had kept him from a shocked reaction.
“I have an appointment at noon. Just my good luck.”
“I don’t know if I’d wait that long. Really. I should be able to finish the report during lunch, if you want to get a head start on your claim. You sure you’re OK to drive now?”
“It looks worse than it is. I’ll make it to noon. See you sometime after lunch. Thanks, Jim.”
“You betcha. Drive careful.”
Bending stiffly to get back into the car, he caught a glimpse of the swollen side of his head, blood now crusted over the dark mound. He turned the mirror away and got quickly to the business of driving. What did a little bruise matter now? It was his job that was important. With him or without him, the family would continue to have bills, just like all the families of everyone who worked at the mill. They were all dependent on him for now, and it was not their fault that he might become a driveling idiot in the next few months. It was up to him to keep the impossibility of a re-roll mill alive in the Naw Kaw valley.
To have a profitable steel mill away from Lake Michigan or the Fox River had been a long shot since the beginning. In the late 19th century, it had been the dream of the commercial interests in Fort Timbers to take advantage of its location between the northwest mines and Milwaukee and become the southern lake center for steel production. The idea was to dig a canal connecting the Naw Kaw River with the Fox, and thereby reduce the total tonnage, and costs, of finished steel brought to Lake Michigan ports. The canal was begun and extended for three miles to the east, but the costs became prohibitive. The remains of the canal now formed a three-mile-long stretch of sluggish cattail marsh, but the dream of a successful mill did not stop with work on the canal. Karl Armstrong, a blacksmith who had made money investing in rail transport, and his brothers began a specialty steel mill, one that would make small quantities of customized alloys for high prices. The lighter loads could be shipped profitably to several ports by rail instead of by water, and the mill could save money by having options for water freight. When unionization came to steel in the late ‘30’s, the struggling Armstrong Specialty Metals Co. suddenly had a remarkable advantage. The small and loyal workforce of the area settled for union equivalence in pay, minus what would be used for union fees. Individual workers could also shift from one job to another when necessary, and would accept temporary layoffs in a pinch. These factors allowed Armstrong to survive the lean years and to overcome the later threat of trucking. In the recession of the early ‘90’s, the temporary abundance of educated workers helped Armstrong develop new lines of precious metal alloys that fed the computer-led high-tech boom that marked the rest of the decade. Now, the company was in search of a new niche. The order Aaron supervised from Boeing was the tide that currently kept them afloat.
When he arrived at the parking lot, not a soul could be seen. He was now nearly an hour late, and in his effort to rise from the car quickly, almost fainted. He had to put one hand on the roof while he held the side of his head with the other, the bruise throbbing as if it had its own heart. A thought struck him as the throbbing eased – cripes, he had forgotten to call Karen back! He gingerly retrieved the phone from the passenger side floor where it had been thrown and hit the redial button. After several rings he was shifted to voice mail to leave a message.
“Hey, Aaron again, sorry to miss you. Had a fender bender while we were talking and everything skipped my mind. All’s OK, I’ll try again later, got a busy day. See ya.”
It wasn’t until the phone was in his pocket and the entrance was nearly reached that the lie of his words caught him and brought him back to the center of his thoughts. He wasn’t OK, not at all, and it seemed as if the world were collapsing around him liked a giant wave on a reef. He caught the whisperings of the inner voice still in search of the Universal Arbiter just as he grasped the handle to the door. Amid tones of denial and astonishment and complaint came a single phrase, over and over: “This can’t be real, this can’t be real.”
The light of day had barely been left behind for the florescent gloom of the factory when Chuck Snyder’s voice silenced the churning thoughts.
“Aaron, where the hell you been? This is your time table, not mine, and if you let me down…Christ, what happened to your head?” His long, aggressive strides were stopped short at the sight of the abrasion, his recoil almost one of disdain. Chuck Snyder was the production manager, hired almost exactly a year ago, an MBA from the big city via Stony Lick, Indiana. He was tall and aggressive and shaved so closely that his pink face shown like a greased pig at the county fair. No one liked him, which was exactly as he had planned. He moved among the floor workers like a senator among the plebeians in Imperial Rome, his size 12 shiny brown shoes eliciting vaguely stifled mirth from the mill operators who always spilled an extra dollop of lubricant on the floor just for him.
“Hit the window in a little mix-up this morning. Sorry, nothing I could do about it. We got the #3 slitter working?” Aaron wanted everything to return to normal now, to shift his thoughts back to work, to the shared world. The bruise on his face was like a scarlet letter announcing to everyone that something was different about him. He almost cursed Mexicans, but remembered quickly that they made up the bulk of the warehouse crew.
“What do you think? I should be in sales now, but instead I’m doing your job and it looks like that’s the way it will be. You can’t stay here without a doctor’s permission. You know what liability is.”
“I’ve got an appointment at noon, but the morning’s a go. Doctor said so himself. I’ll see if we can get the slitter going, finish off the annealing for the 550 batch and push the rollers. No reason we can’t make Friday.”
Chuck’s face twisted into a sneer, but he reminded himself of the need for aloofness and quickly tightened the look to one of stern reprimand. “If you could do all that, we wouldn’t be in this jam now, would we? Last day for all that. Last day.”
Aaron nodded slightly as he moved, scarcely giving Chuck a glance. Chuck’s incumbency was partly his fault: after the old chief had retired, the job was his to lose. Sales, however, were dropping and costs were rising, two areas in which he felt he lacked sufficient experience in a time of crises. He conferred with Fred Armstrong and both agreed that they needed an outside hotshot for the job. Chuck had proven he could make sales contacts, and was a natural in purchasing, but his arrogant and impersonal style had destroyed moral. While orders were up and costs were stabilized, efficiency and quality had suffered. Regardless of the reason, this fault officially fell on him. The last 6 months had seen one panic after another.
It was only he and Ted Borsky who kept the whole thing from falling apart. Ted was his technical counterpart, the guy who kept the machines running and who had the greatest respect, and influence, on the floor. It was Aaron’s job to coordinate the upstairs office with actual production, and it was Ted who determined the parameters. The two of them had worked efficiently together for years, but with the coming of Chuck had come increased demands on a downsized workforce that was given no incentive but the tentative reward of the job itself. Ted could only ask the rank and file to do so much, and Aaron was restrained by Ted’s delicate position between the floor and management.
The problem was now at the slitter, or steel cutter. Normally, a product would begin at the annealing furnace, where it was heated to a specific temperature and then run through rollers to produce the required thickness. The heating and rolling – often, the steel would have to pass through both processes more than once – also effected the hardness of the steel. The hardness, thickness and desired width of the product then determined the slitter it was sent to. This particular job, a huge order, required the qualities of slitter #3, and only #3. Aaron had calculated the time necessary for everything and had added a 10 % buffer as well, but a cog in the drive mechanism of the slitter had broken and a replacement had taken all the buffer time and more to arrive. If the repairs could be finished by noon, and other less crucial jobs were placed on hold, and nothing else went wrong, they could make the promised deadline. This, of course, would cause a rush on the delayed jobs later, again at the expense of the operators.
Aaron moved past the machinery towards the #3, cupping the swollen bruise with one hand as if protecting his ears from the grinds and the roars of the factory. At first he could see no one at the slitter, but then spotted Ted and two helpers under the conveyor, their coveralls so soaked with grease and oil that they blended in like darkly spotted fawns in a field of steely-gray snow. He had to shout twice to get Ted’s attention, who responded to the sound of his name with a look of frustrated annoyance. Aaron’s appearance softened it only slightly.
“So, what’s the good news?”
“That I get to drink tonight, if I can still walk to the bar. What’s the new demands?” Ted brushed his hand over his face as he spoke, leaving stripes of grease that made him appear like a commando ready for an assault.
“Get this monkey rolling by noon, drop everything else. Get the guys off the #2 if you need ‘em and beg these guys to do overtime. Have the shipping crew ready to go by noon Friday. Other than that, nothing.”
“Yeah, you buyin’ afterwards? It’s not like Santa gave us a Christmas bonus in our stockings this year.”
“OT, Ted, plenty of OT. It’ll keep you guys from playing with yourselves so much. You’ll have all that extra time not shaving your palms.” Ted had to laugh, but then got to the point.
“We can do this one, sure. And the next. But that asshole boss of yours let 10 guys go last year and we needed every one. This better end soon, or you’ll break this place. Save now, pay later. Tell that to the asshole. And do something about that fucking head of yours, will ya?”
Aaron noticed that his hand had slipped from his temple, then nodded with a tight half-smile. It was the same old squeeze every shop faced, particularly nowadays with FICA and insurance payments: save a fortune by cutting the workforce, but lose your ability to do the work. He hoped he could get Chuck to understand that the yo-yo needed to come back now. If not, he would go over his head to Fred, but then he would be betting everything that Fred would go along with him. Chuck would not let a failed bid like that go unpunished. And without health insurance, Aaron could squander everything he and Karen had ever saved.
There was still an hour until lunch, which was used to update the workflow in the layout department where sales orders were broken down into the necessary processes for the mill. At a quarter to, he checked out with relief from the office for the day, tired of enduring the stares from layout and wisecracks from sales about his “swollen head.” He breathed in bright cold air in the parking lot, feeling the customary relief of freedom for a moment before the great predicament of his life stormed back with a vengeance. He did not want to meet Doctor Paul and hear the pronouncement and procedures and platitudes and all the other lifelines they throw to doomed men. It seemed that as long as he did not confront the diagnosis face to face, it would remain in the realm of the theoretical, a textbook example of what might happen to a theoretical human being who was burdened with this disease. He was not hungry, either, and might never be again, and so had no compelling interests at the Timberline. He could drive with his battered head in his battered car to the West or to the South and never stop, just keep driving until the height of the Rockies or the open waters of the Gulf swallowed him up, took him into their forbidden chambers of delight and mystery and eternal life.
Just the same, he got into his car, the interior still in chaos from the accident, pulled from the lot and headed south down Rt. 18, directly towards his appointment.
Years ago when he was his son’s age, 12, there had been a pause in his frantic pursuit of growing older and bigger. As the reality dawned that the life he had lived was about to end forever, he had suddenly dragged his feet. For the first time he recognized the joy of blowing bubble gum and counting the hits on his paddle ball to one thousand and catching grasshoppers and stalking frogs. For the first time he grasped the joy of intense purpose without purpose, of ‘doing’ for its own sake. A year before, he had seen the high school present the musical Peter Pan, and had been unimpressed with the longing for childhood. Then, for those few months, he understood, and resisted the flow he had so long desired until a new feeling, a sense of pride, began to dominate. This pride made taking from others distasteful. He came to realize that Peter Pan and all children lived only because someone else gave them the essentials to do so. Counting hits on a paddleball would not provide food or heat, and accepting them from others would only continue the servitude of a child’s life. He came to see that he would rather face the world and be his own man. It was one thing to not know reality, like a child; it was another, a weakness and a shame, to hide from it.
He was driving along the river now, looking at the big weather cracks that had broken through the brilliant white snow like giant black veins. Minutes later he passed the scene of the accident, the car gone, everything as it was except for a sprinkle of glass caught in a clot of leaves by a drainage grate. It was almost as if nothing had happened at all. In fact, the past would be a mirage, a confusing dream, were it not for the trace footsteps it left, the signs that the sane read as ably as an Apache tracker. The planted tree, the mowed lawn, the still soccer ball, all spoke stories to us of our time and depth and singular importance in this world. Without this ability to track, without this miraculous keenness of mind, we would walk like ghosts in a land with only height and breadth, a flat two dimensions with nothing to look back on and nothing to build on for a life ahead.
The bridge of his adolescent love, under whose shadow he had first felt beneath a bra, was crossed too soon, and the black, gold trimmed sign for The Timberline came before him whether he was ready or not. This was how it was. Running away would not make it go away. If there was a solution, it could only be found by confronting the problem.
On Monday there was never a problem for parking, as if everyone felt too stunned by the start of the workweek to think of self-indulgence, and he trotted up the three chiseled-granite steps that he had known since his father had brought him here since as far back as he could remember. While the outside had remained unchanged for a century, the inside had undergone remodeling with every passing of ownership, the upstairs once closed, then reopened, then closed again, the side room morphed from storage room to dining room to party room, but nevertheless the interior, too, had maintained an essential permanence. The smell of beer and grease and spices, not cloying or stale but balanced, the receding light from the old hanging lamps, the deep booths with their thick oak tables, the cool stillness at noon, the glitter of glasses around the brass beer taps that gleamed behind the original bar of deeply stained wood, all this had retained the same familiarity and feel that Karl Armstrong must have known at the passing of the last century.
Aaron had ceased to be a regular since the early years of marriage, but he felt the feeling of ease and the anticipation of mild pleasure as his eyes gathered in the dark and the glitter. It was a minor shock to see that the bartender was now a girl who appeared far too young to be working there, her face a seamless moon that had known nothing of conflict and ambiguity and loss. In the fashion of the day, unthinkable in Karl’s era, her tight pullover shirt rode above her navel, and her jeans fell so far south that it seemed anatomically impossible that her mound of pubic hair was not on public display. She gave Aaron a quick professional smile and then stooped to rinse glasses, riveting the three pairs of eyes of the men at the bar to the unmistakable exposure of the crack of her backside. A small red-inked butterfly danced at the edge of the beltline on her left cheek.
This would have entertained Aaron for some time as well the day before, but today the old familiarities and customary pleasantries fell away like cardboard cutouts. He looked around the booths apprehensively for Doctor Paul as his anxiety soared like wildfire. There were two middle-aged women in one of them, nibbling on nachos as they ignored their glasses of rose-colored wine, while the other three were empty. He turned to Miss Butterfly and ordered a pint of Spotted Cow out of habit, not thinking that it was too early for that until he had already spoken. On second thought, when could an early drink be more appropriate? When could any negative affects be less so?
The men at the bar looked quickly to see if the butterfly would reappear, then drifted back towards the mute TV that displayed several uncommonly ugly people talking silently to the show’s host. An unfamiliar pop-country melody crooned from the jukebox as he accepted the tall glass of foam-topped amber and started a tab. He chose the third booth down, the one just before the corner booth where he and Karen and their friends had often shared pitchers years before. He sat facing the door and barely had time to register the period photos around him of Fort Timbers in the early 1900’s, pictures of the railroad bridge still in operation and the railroad depot that was now a liquor store/apartment building, when Doctor Paul fell through the door as if pushed by blizzard winds. He looked nervously around, bit his lip, and looked again until he found Aaron. His smile was short lived as he hustled over, taking off his gloves.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said flatly, his words only a distraction from his thoughts. He saw the beer, then leaned out from the booth towards the bar. “Give me a double, Amber, thanks.” He gave a weak smile as he unzipped his coat, then stared directly at Aaron. “So, how ya doin’?”
“Like I need that double more than you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m taking the afternoon off. I’m getting too old for this. You’ve probably guessed I’m not bringing too much in the way of good news.” The drink arrived and Paul gave Amber a wink with a click of his tongue. “Thanks, sweetheart.” She fixed him with another professional smile that built a moat between her youth and his senior years and turned back towards the bar. The walk over had made her pants shift down an inch or so, exposing the red butterfly that they both watched for a moment in silence. Paul was first to speak.
“You heard the words already: primary carcinoma, infiltrating astrocytoma, and so on. What the lab tests mean essentially is that it’s a malignant glioma, brain cancer pure and simple, which has spread along the nerve fibers from the limbic system throughout the white matter. That’s the mush below the gray cells. Where it comes to the surface is so buried in the gyri – that’s the folds of the brain – that they tell me any excision would be impossible. There is the possibility that there is a higher rate of differentiated cells than expected – that would give you a longer survival time, and a chance for chemotherapy.” There was no hopeful glimmer in that last phrase. Paul sipped down the first half of the double. Aaron found that his glass needed a refill, and he waved it towards the bar without looking.
“So – uh – what we looking at here? What kind of time? I mean, if it’s like you think.”
“The numbers aren’t good. With something this extended and this inaccessible, you have maybe a 20% chance of surviving over a year. Chemo and radiation add another 5%. About half of patients make it to two years, some a lot longer.”
Aaron’s hands were shaking. His voice squeaked, now not his own. “What about that 12 and 1/2%? How’s that happen?”
“God only knows. Really. It’s not a trivial number. For instance, only 5% survive with detectable lung cancer. But I don’t want to give you false hope. We’ll get a surgeon to look at the tests right away…” Aaron could see that Paul wanted to say something else, but no words would come.
“Jeez, Paul.” The beer had just arrived, and he took a long swig. He did not notice Miss Butterfly at all. “Jesus.” They both drank for a moment in silence.
“Don’t suppose this beer will hurt me too much now, huh?” The joke came from nowhere, out of nerves through a throat almost too tight to move. He felt a need to laugh or cry or do something. He drank again to bury a hint of tears, turning his head towards the bar.
“Jesus, Aaron, what the hell happened to your head!”
Aaron felt the lump and heat of it with his hand. He had forgotten about the accident and everything else completely. A foreign voice spoke from somewhere within his chest, eerily sympathetic to his plight. “Does it matter?”
Paul’s lips moved again without words. He finished off the small well of whiskey before he was able to produce meaningful sounds. “Don’t be like that. You’ve got some time, only God knows, only God knows for all of us. Enjoy each moment while it lasts.” A small reddish ring had formed under his eyes, perhaps from the whiskey and the barroom smoke. “You probably don’t know this, but I had a heart attack 15 years ago. I was only in my early 50’s. Sure, it scared the hell out of me. Lots of us doctors think we’re beyond illness. But it made me take that platitude to heart, literally. Our time here is nothing, gone before we know it. It’s all a big and terrible and beautiful mystery, yet we’re so unaware, as if we had plenty of time for reflection later. Look at these bored kids, moping around like an eternity of youth was before them. We who know better know there’s no time for trivia and boredom. Believe me, I’ve gotten a hundred years out of these last fifteen.”
He finished with a weak smile, a shrug to the inevitable, but Aaron had only heard a few words: ‘scared’ and ‘terrible’ and ‘mystery.’ They seemed to follow his drifting thoughts down a long, gray tunnel that pulsed with a queasy feeling of nausea. “Fifteen” came from nowhere, like a bell in the middle of the night. He jerked his head, which made the ache come alive. The doctor continued.
“Fifteen years, when I wouldn’t ‘a given myself five. So you gotta take care of yourself. I’ll call the office and get you an appointment right now. You could have a concussion.”
The only thing Aaron wanted now was a cozy seat by a fire, someplace without this knowledge, or maybe a seat by his brother before the TV on Saturday morning, 30 years ago, with nothing to do but laugh and throw couch pillows around. It had been so good, so safe. “No, Paul, not now. I have to be alone. For now. I have to think. Just don’t tell anyone, OK? Let me handle this. Let me, you know, get a grip on it first.” The nausea was rising again and he knew he couldn’t finish the beer. He had gotten the vague notion with his first order that he might fall into alcoholism, but the thought now repulsed him. Alcohol would diminish his horror only briefly before it added another.
“You haven’t told Karen yet?”
“Haven’t had time to.”
Paul pushed himself from the booth and stood by the table. “You can’t hide this from her for too long. This means a lot to her, too. Anyway, you wanna go for a walk?”
“Really, I’ve got to be alone.”
“Sure. You call me when you’re ready, understand? We can talk about the symptoms, the progress of things, what help is available.” He gripped his arm briefly, waved with a scribble of his hand to Amber, then walked towards the door. “Take care, Aaron. You never know.”
Chapter 1 Prognosis
The newspaper was held half folded, confined by the space of the breakfast nook cluttered with the microwave and the high-backed stools that had seemed such a good idea. Aaron shook the newspaper awkwardly to dislodge a lady beetle that was crawling slowly along the edge. It slipped slightly to the side, then resumed its journey in search of a summer that was now long gone. Aaron noticed the brilliance of the sun on the edge, on the beetle, making both glow like angels in a dream, then remembered his purpose and held the paper again against the light.
His purpose was not to read, but to hide his anxiety in the dark ink of words, in the headlines of mass carnage and bylines of football scores. But nothing could draw his attention from the impending apocalypse that lay cloaked by time in the small phone half-hidden in the clutter on the table. Between butter and breadcrumbs, this tiny plastic box could land a mortal blow at any moment, could strike him as certainly as the blade swung by a hooded horseman. He noticed everything in painfully sharp detail while his thoughts were muffled in the wooly fog of fear. Every nerve strained to deny and to hear the awaited voice of doom, the messenger from the glinting labs of the clinic. Unbelievably, in those eerie labs they were drawing a diagram of the machinery of his corpse and would soon determine if the sum of his parts equaled continuing function or obsolescence. They said they would know this morning.
He hid behind the paper even though everyone knew. His wife had heard him question his body’s signals from the beginning, from the first regular headaches to the floating pin-prick lights to the numbness of his left arm, each a sign to look into like a horoscope or goat entrails or the flight of a crow. She had been the one to force him to the doctor’s, tiring of his amateur research, trying to bring an end to the worries one way or another. There was no hope, she had said, in not knowing; only the certainty that more time was lost in the diagnosis and, if necessary, the cure. This was logical but terrifying, but he had gone, had been tested, and now waited more alone than at any time in his life. Even his 12-year-old son, who had at first been frightened to tears, seemed as distant and unconcerned as any modern child hypnotized by his Game Boy. There was no comfort in anything or anyone. He prayed hard, hard to his God who he had never forgotten, to please let them call now, please let it be something else, high blood pressure, something for older men to worry about. God, he was not even close to being ready.
He nodded absently to his son, who talked non-stop about one classmate or another doing this or that to neither and both he and Karen as he noisily ate from a box of dry cereal. Karen, he knew, was so absorbed in her word puzzle that Jeff could have said that he was running off to Mexico with his math teacher and she would have pleasantly replied, “that’s good.” After hearing for the 5th time about the humongous fart Eddie let out by Richard’s face, his attention was finally brought to something that carried him gratefully from his world. In one of the more barren sections of the paper, the local section of the Black Hawk Daily, an item on page 3 surprised him by its tragedy and its thoughtless placement on page 3. The brief story was captioned, “Divers Search for Missing Car,” and read,
(Three Mounds, WI) ‘Emergency divers were brought to Three Mounds to begin a search for a suspected auto submersion in Black Hawk Lake this Monday evening. No missing persons have so far been reported, but the presence of an auto has been confirmed by tracks leading from the edge of the lake to a newly frozen patch of ice a half mile from shore. The lake at the location of the possible submersion is 110’ deep or more, and near-zero temperatures have slowed progress on the initial search. Fire department chief Captain Benson warns that it may take several days to search the bottom given low temperatures and poor visibility at such depths beneath the ice. “There is total darkness at less than 40 feet, and freezing equipment and unreliable ice has hampered our initial attempt. We hope to have more divers this evening.” He also warned that there could be no hope for anyone who may have been in the auto. “Even with oxygen, the cold would have caused sever hypothermia within 2 minutes, and death within 15.” Crews will continue to search for another week, weather permitting. Any further attempts would be halted until spring.
‘The incident was reported by Karl Schlemle of Drumlin at 5:35 PM Monday. In a phone call with this paper Tuesday, he stated that he had been fishing on the shelf ice along shore when he saw the car “drive rapidly” towards the middle of the lake. “I figured he was just coming out to the shoal here with his drill, but when I seen him keep going at that speed, I knew he was going past the safe ice. The ice’s just formed over the middle. You see some crazy things out here after New Year’s. It was close to dark, and I watched the taillights go further and further, and then saw them go up in the air, and then disappear. That’s how I knew he’d gone down.”
Police have asked for anyone with information on a missing person to contact them immediately at…’
Aaron curled his hand around the warm coffee mug as he imagined the cold and the dark and the panic of the driver when the unseen icy water rushed into the blackness of the sinking car. He pictured the scene as if from a tower or cable car suspended over the lake: he saw the fisherman sitting on a plastic bucket in his Carhaart overalls, a thick flap hat low over his brow, a bottle of brandy in his padded hands, his eyes on the little flags set to rise by the drill holes. The fisherman would notice the car come onto the ice, turn back to his lines, then look up with alarm as the lights flew past him towards the middle. The sky would have been nearly dark then, perhaps a slash of pink still glowing on a wisp of cloud from the hidden sun, the brighter stars and planets already showing through blue-black dusk. The car would dim to shadow as it raced further out, and then to only lights. Then, in the deep purple cold of early winter’s night, the lights would rise up for a second and disappear. The fisherman would stare with open mouth for a few seconds, think of running to the rescue for another few seconds, think twice and run for the nearest phone. He would not have brought a cell, even if he owned one (why would he be ice fishing at night but to be alone?), and would have taken ten or fifteen minutes to find a house to call the police. The fisherman would be left with the same thoughts that Aaron had now: why had the driver been so foolish? Even drunk, who would drive out to the middle of the lake now? Maybe he was a flatlander from Illinois and didn’t know better. Maybe it was a suicide, or even a murder. Maybe it was just a car, a stick on the accelerator, a bad high school prank. Who could go missing for two days and counting without the absence being noticed?
Then again, maybe the driver was dying of a fatal disease, and this was his last farewell, his Viking funeral. Maybe his family had kept his last intentions from the police so that the life insurance policy would not be invalidated. Or maybe they kept silent out of shame. Would Karen be ashamed?
The cold blackness, those last moments, the horror and finality and loneliness. How could anyone do it? But with the promise of a long and frightening and certain death, could anyone continue?
The ringing phone jarred him from the gray background of thought, causing his arms to spasm and tear the paper that had been held absently for unknown seconds. Jeff had already pushed from the table and grabbed his backpack, pulling Karen along in the vortex of the drive to school, her face lost to him but for one glance, a split-second look. Icy electricity was running down his spine, paralyzing him, keeping his hand from the phone. The look came, authoritative. Do it. This is no time for games. His hand jerked to movement without initiative. Neither action nor inaction cleared a path to survival.
Karen and Jeff were past the door to the garage when he first recognized the voice of his GP, a long-time acquaintance and member of his church. Doctor Paul had promised to keep in touch with his colleagues in the clinic and be the first to call if anything unusual appeared in the MRI. Aaron had thought that hearing bad news from a trusted friend and professional might make the news more tolerable. He knew after Doc Paul’s first words that he had been wrong. It was clear that nothing could soften a message of doom.
“Morning, Aaron, you sitting with your coffee? Sorry I’m late, I hadn’t really expected a call and had to write down the details of the analysis. Anyway, I want you to understand that none of this is in stone. The brain is very complex and poorly understood, and we just don’t know half the time. 2 % of random autopsies show brain tumors, so…”
“So it’s a brain tumor?”
“That’s what it appears to be. Nothing can be certain without a biopsy, but they believe it to be infiltrative astrocytoma.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a primary carcinoma…”
“I have cancer?”
“That’s what it looks like, Aaron. Listen, this would be better at my office. I can make some time for you this afternoon.”
“Goddamn. What’s the next step?”
“Let’s talk about it this afternoon. I don’t know, you want to make it lunchtime? How about we meet at the Timberline?”
“Goddamn, Paul, you think I can eat? OK, ok, around noon at the Timberline. Jesus.”
“Take it easy, huh? Listen, you’re not alone. We’ll go over the options, work something out, OK?”
Aaron looked at the phone that was now back in place, a quiet piece of plastic again, and couldn’t remember having put it down. He was shaking, from the cold sweat, from his racing mind that repeated “cancer” over and over, the word dancing among images of hospital beds and tubes and hanging bottles and bedpans and gray, sick people. Everything around him had become sharper still, edged in brittle outline, and his own hands seemed foreign, someone else’s. His mind would not be his, either, not for long. God, would he go mad with dementia or get senile and weak, or would one follow the other? Would he allow a lobotomy to excise the cancer, or radiation treatment to fry the tumor along with the brain? Would there be any options at all?
He looked around out of habit for Karen, to tell her the news, before he caught himself with a hard and inflexible realization: she could not help him. No one could, the doctor had been wrong. If “infiltrative” had any of its original meaning, the cancer may have already spread beyond hope, if it could have been removed before. Perhaps if he had gone sooner for testing, but he had been a coward and now might die for it. A hero dies but once, a coward…He knew, his body had known all along that something was wrong. It had given him signs that he had refused to see, not just the headaches and the shifting sense of smell and the white floating lights, but the dreams. Always, many times a week for two years, the same monster would appear, a looming, inescapable shadow that sucked out the air, leaving him claustrophobic and gasping and terrified. It was very clear now what it meant, and he could have understood it so much sooner if he had had the courage to listen. Coward. Now there was only death.
When he noticed the tears, he had had enough. None of it helped, all of it only made things worse. He was not the first person in the world to receive bad news. He was neither better nor worse off than the millions and millions of others, and all of them, all, had lived or died with what had been handed them, and most with a strength that lent them dignity. And he did not know the outcome for sure. No one did, as the doctor had said.
A look at his watch gave him a customary jolt of anxiety. After 8:00 already, with the Boeing job days behind, it was past time to grab the keys, scoop out the pocket jar, rush to the door, catch his coat on the railing – he flew through the practiced ritual until he came to the stairs, the lights to the garage off so that the walkway was almost dark, causing him to pause. What’s the rush? With a death sentence still ringing in his ear, what could hurt him? A late notice, disapproval from the production manager, snarling customers, what were they before the grim reaper? If there was a time to smell the roses, this was it. And remember them, each one, for as long as he could.
The garage slumbered in the damp, thin light, smelling only of gas and old oil and tires. As he reached for the latch to the garage door, he smirked momentarily at the thought of roses in January. What a bunch of horseshit. But as the light from the diffuse gray of early morning appeared, his fear and cynicism melted like ice in summer sun. The Naw Kaw River stretched out frozen white from the yellow willows, split in the middle by a black streak of fast, open water. Wisps of cloud rose from the water in arcs, bent by the steady west wind. The heads of geese floated in and out of this icy steam, moving with the smooth grace of poured honey. Snow hung in ragged patches from rocks on the far shore, hardened at the edges with layered frost. The dimmest hint of sun illuminated the rippled purple-gray strata of sky that was unique in pattern and color, never before shown to the world, never to be seen just so again. As with each breath of each day.
Oh Jesus, the wonder. Never had he been so conciouse of wanting life. The tears came again, but this time they were left to mark their course. The memories that meant the most were unassailable in their simplicity. Few photographs could evoke the feelings of that morning, none so deeply, the gray and blue-gray and cold that was shot through with something so profound that it brought wisdom and eternity to the portal of the mind. The picture could be raised again and again later, like a recorded track of music, the intertwined nuances faithfully stirring the soul for as long as the blood flowed freely through that mass of pulsing neurons in his head. When the flow stopped, what became of the passion? Where went the soul?
Driving the car from the garage, the pictures in his neural mass were anything but simple. While the ice and flow of the river had found an enclave of peace within, returning to the flow of the social world brought nothing but waves of confusion and panic. In the river lay the eternal in the play of life and death. In the human world, there was no room for death or eternity. Any consideration of his precarious condition shattered like glass against the edifice of quotidian life. His disease could be, it was, but it couldn’t be. We worked, we strove, we bought, but we didn’t die. Other people, old people long removed from daily life and pushed behind the curtain of retirement faded innocuously from existence, but never the productive young. This couldn’t be his time, just as it couldn’t snow in July. His was a condition of nature that was unnatural. It seemed as if a deal, a sacred truce had been broken between man and fate, and redress must be made. Through the shellshock, a desperate search was going on in his mind for the judge, for the arbiter of life. His ending simply could not come because everything would end with him.
The loop of thoughts played on, interspersed by glances at the river and decisions of the road. He would not take the bypass today but go straight through town as everyone had done for so long. The bypass was 7 years old and still largely surrounded by cornfields. Main Street in Fort Timbers remained fully functional, the pharmacy and the clothing store and the Timberline Tavern and Grill privately owned by people he had grown up with, or who were related to someone he had grown up with, or who were friends of a friend of a friend. Everything was personal, from the sidewalk that had served as his skateboard highway to the river bridge where he and his friends had brought their girlfriends on soft summer nights to watch the lights from the fishing boats glitter in the water. New developments beyond town had already begun, but Main Street for the moment still hummed as it had when its primary edifices were built in the surge of hope and energy and greed of the late 19th century. With a simple change of car models, the square 3 and 4 story buildings of red and creamery brick with white cement cornices and trim could have been witnessing Armistice Day or Black Friday or the lowering of flags for President Kennedy’s funeral.
The cell phone jolted him from his thoughts as he stopped for a red light at the turn to Harrison. He saw the caller ID of his wife and slapped his forehead. He had forgotten to call as promised and now had forgotten his rehearsed lines. A search for new brave words caused his throat to tighten, bringing with it the realization that he would probably not be able to say much of anything without breaking down. As he picked up the phone, he hopelessly wished that they could avoid the topic altogether.
“Hey!”
“Hey.”
“So, what’s the verdict? High blood pressure and cholesterol, right? It’s not the animal fat, but the trans fat, you know. History will see that as our poison pill. We could both use a diet, anyway, and we won’t have all those old fries to vacuum from the car seats. What did they say at the lab?”
“It was Paul, he’s handling this for me. He was too rushed. We’re going to meet at the Timberline for lunch.”
“His idea, right? To show you how to eat. Insist that you pay, you owe him the favor.”
“Sure. Shit!”
He had seen the blue car only for an instant, an old Japanese model, as he turned left with the green directional arrow. For half that instant he saw it continue through the light, too short a time to do anything but swear. The impact tore the phone from his hand and threw his head against the window and then everything settled into an alien dimension of stillness. When time started again, he looked first at his hands, then at the men running from the blue car. They were Mexican, four of them, all in pants smeared with concrete dust and grime. He caught another glimpse of them briefly in the rearview before noticing the large Coca-Cola semi that was slowly creeping up from behind. The alternator lights shown red on the dashboard, but a single turn of the key brought the VW to life. As he pulled over, he heard the sound of broken glass under his tires and felt a low shudder from the front right wheel. The dismal consideration of major car repair turned his stomach and brought him to an awareness of the throbbing in his head. In the mirror he could see that a small streak of blood ran along a large purple swelling on his left temple. This was quickly dismissed with thoughts of the car. Still shaking from the adrenaline rush, he pulled himself unsteadily from the seat and leaned shakily on the hood until he reached the damaged side.
A great scratch of blue from the old Toyota ran from the front end to the middle of the front door. Safety glass gleamed like bluish diamonds from the blacktop, although the windows of his own car were intact. He looked to the Toyota. Sprawled like the corpse of a horse beneath the stoplight, it had caused traffic to move alternately around it in single file. The collision had caused it to face north, giving Aaron a frontal view. The windshield had been smashed through in two places and the driver’s side door had been left open, hanging from a single hinge, its window gone but for a few icicle-like shards. The driver and front passenger must have hit the windshield. If anyone cared to, he could probably have tracked the runners by the trail of blood.
The source of the vibrations was quickly found: the impact had pushed the wheel-well fender against the tire. He grabbed the cold metal with his two hands and pulled until he felt movement. The effort caused a sudden burst of dancing stars to appear before his eyes, and as he paused to lean against the hood, the sound of a voice blew the sparkling lights away like milkweed fluff.
“Aaron. Aaron, you all right?” It was Jim Gerrick, the town sergeant of police. The clear intensity of his voice had not changed in all the years since high school.
“Jim! Jeez, you scared me. What the hell, huh?”
“So what happened? Where’s the other driver?” A tow truck had stopped behind the VW station wagon, idling besides two police officers as they inspected the Toyota.
“I was going left with the turn signal when these guys came through from across. They didn’t even slow down. There were four of them, Mexicans. They skedadled before I could get out of the car.” The two of them looked distractedly at the pavement at the mention of “Mexicans.” There was an awkward pause. Ten years before, there had been a few dozen of them, all illegal but no one cared. Now there were over a thousand living in the two small towns of Fort Timbers and Harrison, and everyone could feel the old ways slipping beneath them like sand beneath their feet. The Mexicans did seasonal farm work and menial jobs in the food processing plants, making the right people happy, which gave the authorities a curious blind spot. No one did anything about the growing problem at all. In small town Wisconsin, people were taught to get along and not cause trouble, but the values that had once made them strong now only made them silent.
“I’ll put that in the report. ‘2nd party to accident fled the scene from unregistered vehicle.’ That ought to make it easy for your insurance company. Oh, and look at the side of your head. You should get some medical attention immediately.” Aaron had just turned so that the sergeant could see the swelling, larger and darker than before. It was only his police experience that had kept him from a shocked reaction.
“I have an appointment at noon. Just my good luck.”
“I don’t know if I’d wait that long. Really. I should be able to finish the report during lunch, if you want to get a head start on your claim. You sure you’re OK to drive now?”
“It looks worse than it is. I’ll make it to noon. See you sometime after lunch. Thanks, Jim.”
“You betcha. Drive careful.”
Bending stiffly to get back into the car, he caught a glimpse of the swollen side of his head, blood now crusted over the dark mound. He turned the mirror away and got quickly to the business of driving. What did a little bruise matter now? It was his job that was important. With him or without him, the family would continue to have bills, just like all the families of everyone who worked at the mill. They were all dependent on him for now, and it was not their fault that he might become a driveling idiot in the next few months. It was up to him to keep the impossibility of a re-roll mill alive in the Naw Kaw valley.
To have a profitable steel mill away from Lake Michigan or the Fox River had been a long shot since the beginning. In the late 19th century, it had been the dream of the commercial interests in Fort Timbers to take advantage of its location between the northwest mines and Milwaukee and become the southern lake center for steel production. The idea was to dig a canal connecting the Naw Kaw River with the Fox, and thereby reduce the total tonnage, and costs, of finished steel brought to Lake Michigan ports. The canal was begun and extended for three miles to the east, but the costs became prohibitive. The remains of the canal now formed a three-mile-long stretch of sluggish cattail marsh, but the dream of a successful mill did not stop with work on the canal. Karl Armstrong, a blacksmith who had made money investing in rail transport, and his brothers began a specialty steel mill, one that would make small quantities of customized alloys for high prices. The lighter loads could be shipped profitably to several ports by rail instead of by water, and the mill could save money by having options for water freight. When unionization came to steel in the late ‘30’s, the struggling Armstrong Specialty Metals Co. suddenly had a remarkable advantage. The small and loyal workforce of the area settled for union equivalence in pay, minus what would be used for union fees. Individual workers could also shift from one job to another when necessary, and would accept temporary layoffs in a pinch. These factors allowed Armstrong to survive the lean years and to overcome the later threat of trucking. In the recession of the early ‘90’s, the temporary abundance of educated workers helped Armstrong develop new lines of precious metal alloys that fed the computer-led high-tech boom that marked the rest of the decade. Now, the company was in search of a new niche. The order Aaron supervised from Boeing was the tide that currently kept them afloat.
When he arrived at the parking lot, not a soul could be seen. He was now nearly an hour late, and in his effort to rise from the car quickly, almost fainted. He had to put one hand on the roof while he held the side of his head with the other, the bruise throbbing as if it had its own heart. A thought struck him as the throbbing eased – cripes, he had forgotten to call Karen back! He gingerly retrieved the phone from the passenger side floor where it had been thrown and hit the redial button. After several rings he was shifted to voice mail to leave a message.
“Hey, Aaron again, sorry to miss you. Had a fender bender while we were talking and everything skipped my mind. All’s OK, I’ll try again later, got a busy day. See ya.”
It wasn’t until the phone was in his pocket and the entrance was nearly reached that the lie of his words caught him and brought him back to the center of his thoughts. He wasn’t OK, not at all, and it seemed as if the world were collapsing around him liked a giant wave on a reef. He caught the whisperings of the inner voice still in search of the Universal Arbiter just as he grasped the handle to the door. Amid tones of denial and astonishment and complaint came a single phrase, over and over: “This can’t be real, this can’t be real.”
The light of day had barely been left behind for the florescent gloom of the factory when Chuck Snyder’s voice silenced the churning thoughts.
“Aaron, where the hell you been? This is your time table, not mine, and if you let me down…Christ, what happened to your head?” His long, aggressive strides were stopped short at the sight of the abrasion, his recoil almost one of disdain. Chuck Snyder was the production manager, hired almost exactly a year ago, an MBA from the big city via Stony Lick, Indiana. He was tall and aggressive and shaved so closely that his pink face shown like a greased pig at the county fair. No one liked him, which was exactly as he had planned. He moved among the floor workers like a senator among the plebeians in Imperial Rome, his size 12 shiny brown shoes eliciting vaguely stifled mirth from the mill operators who always spilled an extra dollop of lubricant on the floor just for him.
“Hit the window in a little mix-up this morning. Sorry, nothing I could do about it. We got the #3 slitter working?” Aaron wanted everything to return to normal now, to shift his thoughts back to work, to the shared world. The bruise on his face was like a scarlet letter announcing to everyone that something was different about him. He almost cursed Mexicans, but remembered quickly that they made up the bulk of the warehouse crew.
“What do you think? I should be in sales now, but instead I’m doing your job and it looks like that’s the way it will be. You can’t stay here without a doctor’s permission. You know what liability is.”
“I’ve got an appointment at noon, but the morning’s a go. Doctor said so himself. I’ll see if we can get the slitter going, finish off the annealing for the 550 batch and push the rollers. No reason we can’t make Friday.”
Chuck’s face twisted into a sneer, but he reminded himself of the need for aloofness and quickly tightened the look to one of stern reprimand. “If you could do all that, we wouldn’t be in this jam now, would we? Last day for all that. Last day.”
Aaron nodded slightly as he moved, scarcely giving Chuck a glance. Chuck’s incumbency was partly his fault: after the old chief had retired, the job was his to lose. Sales, however, were dropping and costs were rising, two areas in which he felt he lacked sufficient experience in a time of crises. He conferred with Fred Armstrong and both agreed that they needed an outside hotshot for the job. Chuck had proven he could make sales contacts, and was a natural in purchasing, but his arrogant and impersonal style had destroyed moral. While orders were up and costs were stabilized, efficiency and quality had suffered. Regardless of the reason, this fault officially fell on him. The last 6 months had seen one panic after another.
It was only he and Ted Borsky who kept the whole thing from falling apart. Ted was his technical counterpart, the guy who kept the machines running and who had the greatest respect, and influence, on the floor. It was Aaron’s job to coordinate the upstairs office with actual production, and it was Ted who determined the parameters. The two of them had worked efficiently together for years, but with the coming of Chuck had come increased demands on a downsized workforce that was given no incentive but the tentative reward of the job itself. Ted could only ask the rank and file to do so much, and Aaron was restrained by Ted’s delicate position between the floor and management.
The problem was now at the slitter, or steel cutter. Normally, a product would begin at the annealing furnace, where it was heated to a specific temperature and then run through rollers to produce the required thickness. The heating and rolling – often, the steel would have to pass through both processes more than once – also effected the hardness of the steel. The hardness, thickness and desired width of the product then determined the slitter it was sent to. This particular job, a huge order, required the qualities of slitter #3, and only #3. Aaron had calculated the time necessary for everything and had added a 10 % buffer as well, but a cog in the drive mechanism of the slitter had broken and a replacement had taken all the buffer time and more to arrive. If the repairs could be finished by noon, and other less crucial jobs were placed on hold, and nothing else went wrong, they could make the promised deadline. This, of course, would cause a rush on the delayed jobs later, again at the expense of the operators.
Aaron moved past the machinery towards the #3, cupping the swollen bruise with one hand as if protecting his ears from the grinds and the roars of the factory. At first he could see no one at the slitter, but then spotted Ted and two helpers under the conveyor, their coveralls so soaked with grease and oil that they blended in like darkly spotted fawns in a field of steely-gray snow. He had to shout twice to get Ted’s attention, who responded to the sound of his name with a look of frustrated annoyance. Aaron’s appearance softened it only slightly.
“So, what’s the good news?”
“That I get to drink tonight, if I can still walk to the bar. What’s the new demands?” Ted brushed his hand over his face as he spoke, leaving stripes of grease that made him appear like a commando ready for an assault.
“Get this monkey rolling by noon, drop everything else. Get the guys off the #2 if you need ‘em and beg these guys to do overtime. Have the shipping crew ready to go by noon Friday. Other than that, nothing.”
“Yeah, you buyin’ afterwards? It’s not like Santa gave us a Christmas bonus in our stockings this year.”
“OT, Ted, plenty of OT. It’ll keep you guys from playing with yourselves so much. You’ll have all that extra time not shaving your palms.” Ted had to laugh, but then got to the point.
“We can do this one, sure. And the next. But that asshole boss of yours let 10 guys go last year and we needed every one. This better end soon, or you’ll break this place. Save now, pay later. Tell that to the asshole. And do something about that fucking head of yours, will ya?”
Aaron noticed that his hand had slipped from his temple, then nodded with a tight half-smile. It was the same old squeeze every shop faced, particularly nowadays with FICA and insurance payments: save a fortune by cutting the workforce, but lose your ability to do the work. He hoped he could get Chuck to understand that the yo-yo needed to come back now. If not, he would go over his head to Fred, but then he would be betting everything that Fred would go along with him. Chuck would not let a failed bid like that go unpunished. And without health insurance, Aaron could squander everything he and Karen had ever saved.
There was still an hour until lunch, which was used to update the workflow in the layout department where sales orders were broken down into the necessary processes for the mill. At a quarter to, he checked out with relief from the office for the day, tired of enduring the stares from layout and wisecracks from sales about his “swollen head.” He breathed in bright cold air in the parking lot, feeling the customary relief of freedom for a moment before the great predicament of his life stormed back with a vengeance. He did not want to meet Doctor Paul and hear the pronouncement and procedures and platitudes and all the other lifelines they throw to doomed men. It seemed that as long as he did not confront the diagnosis face to face, it would remain in the realm of the theoretical, a textbook example of what might happen to a theoretical human being who was burdened with this disease. He was not hungry, either, and might never be again, and so had no compelling interests at the Timberline. He could drive with his battered head in his battered car to the West or to the South and never stop, just keep driving until the height of the Rockies or the open waters of the Gulf swallowed him up, took him into their forbidden chambers of delight and mystery and eternal life.
Just the same, he got into his car, the interior still in chaos from the accident, pulled from the lot and headed south down Rt. 18, directly towards his appointment.
Years ago when he was his son’s age, 12, there had been a pause in his frantic pursuit of growing older and bigger. As the reality dawned that the life he had lived was about to end forever, he had suddenly dragged his feet. For the first time he recognized the joy of blowing bubble gum and counting the hits on his paddle ball to one thousand and catching grasshoppers and stalking frogs. For the first time he grasped the joy of intense purpose without purpose, of ‘doing’ for its own sake. A year before, he had seen the high school present the musical Peter Pan, and had been unimpressed with the longing for childhood. Then, for those few months, he understood, and resisted the flow he had so long desired until a new feeling, a sense of pride, began to dominate. This pride made taking from others distasteful. He came to realize that Peter Pan and all children lived only because someone else gave them the essentials to do so. Counting hits on a paddleball would not provide food or heat, and accepting them from others would only continue the servitude of a child’s life. He came to see that he would rather face the world and be his own man. It was one thing to not know reality, like a child; it was another, a weakness and a shame, to hide from it.
He was driving along the river now, looking at the big weather cracks that had broken through the brilliant white snow like giant black veins. Minutes later he passed the scene of the accident, the car gone, everything as it was except for a sprinkle of glass caught in a clot of leaves by a drainage grate. It was almost as if nothing had happened at all. In fact, the past would be a mirage, a confusing dream, were it not for the trace footsteps it left, the signs that the sane read as ably as an Apache tracker. The planted tree, the mowed lawn, the still soccer ball, all spoke stories to us of our time and depth and singular importance in this world. Without this ability to track, without this miraculous keenness of mind, we would walk like ghosts in a land with only height and breadth, a flat two dimensions with nothing to look back on and nothing to build on for a life ahead.
The bridge of his adolescent love, under whose shadow he had first felt beneath a bra, was crossed too soon, and the black, gold trimmed sign for The Timberline came before him whether he was ready or not. This was how it was. Running away would not make it go away. If there was a solution, it could only be found by confronting the problem.
On Monday there was never a problem for parking, as if everyone felt too stunned by the start of the workweek to think of self-indulgence, and he trotted up the three chiseled-granite steps that he had known since his father had brought him here since as far back as he could remember. While the outside had remained unchanged for a century, the inside had undergone remodeling with every passing of ownership, the upstairs once closed, then reopened, then closed again, the side room morphed from storage room to dining room to party room, but nevertheless the interior, too, had maintained an essential permanence. The smell of beer and grease and spices, not cloying or stale but balanced, the receding light from the old hanging lamps, the deep booths with their thick oak tables, the cool stillness at noon, the glitter of glasses around the brass beer taps that gleamed behind the original bar of deeply stained wood, all this had retained the same familiarity and feel that Karl Armstrong must have known at the passing of the last century.
Aaron had ceased to be a regular since the early years of marriage, but he felt the feeling of ease and the anticipation of mild pleasure as his eyes gathered in the dark and the glitter. It was a minor shock to see that the bartender was now a girl who appeared far too young to be working there, her face a seamless moon that had known nothing of conflict and ambiguity and loss. In the fashion of the day, unthinkable in Karl’s era, her tight pullover shirt rode above her navel, and her jeans fell so far south that it seemed anatomically impossible that her mound of pubic hair was not on public display. She gave Aaron a quick professional smile and then stooped to rinse glasses, riveting the three pairs of eyes of the men at the bar to the unmistakable exposure of the crack of her backside. A small red-inked butterfly danced at the edge of the beltline on her left cheek.
This would have entertained Aaron for some time as well the day before, but today the old familiarities and customary pleasantries fell away like cardboard cutouts. He looked around the booths apprehensively for Doctor Paul as his anxiety soared like wildfire. There were two middle-aged women in one of them, nibbling on nachos as they ignored their glasses of rose-colored wine, while the other three were empty. He turned to Miss Butterfly and ordered a pint of Spotted Cow out of habit, not thinking that it was too early for that until he had already spoken. On second thought, when could an early drink be more appropriate? When could any negative affects be less so?
The men at the bar looked quickly to see if the butterfly would reappear, then drifted back towards the mute TV that displayed several uncommonly ugly people talking silently to the show’s host. An unfamiliar pop-country melody crooned from the jukebox as he accepted the tall glass of foam-topped amber and started a tab. He chose the third booth down, the one just before the corner booth where he and Karen and their friends had often shared pitchers years before. He sat facing the door and barely had time to register the period photos around him of Fort Timbers in the early 1900’s, pictures of the railroad bridge still in operation and the railroad depot that was now a liquor store/apartment building, when Doctor Paul fell through the door as if pushed by blizzard winds. He looked nervously around, bit his lip, and looked again until he found Aaron. His smile was short lived as he hustled over, taking off his gloves.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said flatly, his words only a distraction from his thoughts. He saw the beer, then leaned out from the booth towards the bar. “Give me a double, Amber, thanks.” He gave a weak smile as he unzipped his coat, then stared directly at Aaron. “So, how ya doin’?”
“Like I need that double more than you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m taking the afternoon off. I’m getting too old for this. You’ve probably guessed I’m not bringing too much in the way of good news.” The drink arrived and Paul gave Amber a wink with a click of his tongue. “Thanks, sweetheart.” She fixed him with another professional smile that built a moat between her youth and his senior years and turned back towards the bar. The walk over had made her pants shift down an inch or so, exposing the red butterfly that they both watched for a moment in silence. Paul was first to speak.
“You heard the words already: primary carcinoma, infiltrating astrocytoma, and so on. What the lab tests mean essentially is that it’s a malignant glioma, brain cancer pure and simple, which has spread along the nerve fibers from the limbic system throughout the white matter. That’s the mush below the gray cells. Where it comes to the surface is so buried in the gyri – that’s the folds of the brain – that they tell me any excision would be impossible. There is the possibility that there is a higher rate of differentiated cells than expected – that would give you a longer survival time, and a chance for chemotherapy.” There was no hopeful glimmer in that last phrase. Paul sipped down the first half of the double. Aaron found that his glass needed a refill, and he waved it towards the bar without looking.
“So – uh – what we looking at here? What kind of time? I mean, if it’s like you think.”
“The numbers aren’t good. With something this extended and this inaccessible, you have maybe a 20% chance of surviving over a year. Chemo and radiation add another 5%. About half of patients make it to two years, some a lot longer.”
Aaron’s hands were shaking. His voice squeaked, now not his own. “What about that 12 and 1/2%? How’s that happen?”
“God only knows. Really. It’s not a trivial number. For instance, only 5% survive with detectable lung cancer. But I don’t want to give you false hope. We’ll get a surgeon to look at the tests right away…” Aaron could see that Paul wanted to say something else, but no words would come.
“Jeez, Paul.” The beer had just arrived, and he took a long swig. He did not notice Miss Butterfly at all. “Jesus.” They both drank for a moment in silence.
“Don’t suppose this beer will hurt me too much now, huh?” The joke came from nowhere, out of nerves through a throat almost too tight to move. He felt a need to laugh or cry or do something. He drank again to bury a hint of tears, turning his head towards the bar.
“Jesus, Aaron, what the hell happened to your head!”
Aaron felt the lump and heat of it with his hand. He had forgotten about the accident and everything else completely. A foreign voice spoke from somewhere within his chest, eerily sympathetic to his plight. “Does it matter?”
Paul’s lips moved again without words. He finished off the small well of whiskey before he was able to produce meaningful sounds. “Don’t be like that. You’ve got some time, only God knows, only God knows for all of us. Enjoy each moment while it lasts.” A small reddish ring had formed under his eyes, perhaps from the whiskey and the barroom smoke. “You probably don’t know this, but I had a heart attack 15 years ago. I was only in my early 50’s. Sure, it scared the hell out of me. Lots of us doctors think we’re beyond illness. But it made me take that platitude to heart, literally. Our time here is nothing, gone before we know it. It’s all a big and terrible and beautiful mystery, yet we’re so unaware, as if we had plenty of time for reflection later. Look at these bored kids, moping around like an eternity of youth was before them. We who know better know there’s no time for trivia and boredom. Believe me, I’ve gotten a hundred years out of these last fifteen.”
He finished with a weak smile, a shrug to the inevitable, but Aaron had only heard a few words: ‘scared’ and ‘terrible’ and ‘mystery.’ They seemed to follow his drifting thoughts down a long, gray tunnel that pulsed with a queasy feeling of nausea. “Fifteen” came from nowhere, like a bell in the middle of the night. He jerked his head, which made the ache come alive. The doctor continued.
“Fifteen years, when I wouldn’t ‘a given myself five. So you gotta take care of yourself. I’ll call the office and get you an appointment right now. You could have a concussion.”
The only thing Aaron wanted now was a cozy seat by a fire, someplace without this knowledge, or maybe a seat by his brother before the TV on Saturday morning, 30 years ago, with nothing to do but laugh and throw couch pillows around. It had been so good, so safe. “No, Paul, not now. I have to be alone. For now. I have to think. Just don’t tell anyone, OK? Let me handle this. Let me, you know, get a grip on it first.” The nausea was rising again and he knew he couldn’t finish the beer. He had gotten the vague notion with his first order that he might fall into alcoholism, but the thought now repulsed him. Alcohol would diminish his horror only briefly before it added another.
“You haven’t told Karen yet?”
“Haven’t had time to.”
Paul pushed himself from the booth and stood by the table. “You can’t hide this from her for too long. This means a lot to her, too. Anyway, you wanna go for a walk?”
“Really, I’ve got to be alone.”
“Sure. You call me when you’re ready, understand? We can talk about the symptoms, the progress of things, what help is available.” He gripped his arm briefly, waved with a scribble of his hand to Amber, then walked towards the door. “Take care, Aaron. You never know.”