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The second orderly starts arranging my custom-made lead shields over my lungs and kidneys and internal organs. Using the few small holes in the lung guard to check on where the tattoo is, he makes sure everything’s properly lined up.

So long as I breathe, I will be all right.

Now black straps go over my breasts, making an X, belting me in. They’re looped through the poles and pulled, and it’s so tight I can’t move, can’t so much as twitch. The first orderly positions the bicycle seat directly beneath my bottom.

“Just in case,” he says.

I’m told if I pass out, the straps will keep me in place until the session is over.

—

So okay, Goddess, the first day wasn’t so bad.

I need to keep letting go. Maybe I just need to sleep. Here is not so bad. Here is where I am. Just keep focusing on what I can do in here—I can write, I can read, I can meditate, I can draw, I can knit, I can paint in my limited, clumsy fashion. I know that I want to be a clear channel. The truth is, I’m not miserable. This little part of me nags, a dog nipping at heels, yipping, wanting me to be sad, to worry.
Remember, you’re miserable! Remember, this is terrible!
But haven’t I lived with the black box on my chest for so long? When I’m at my best—which is not often but sometimes—I know I don’t have to live inside my fear, but can carry its weight. I wonder what happens if I open the ribbon to my black box and pull off the lid? What happens if I put soil inside, plant seeds, add water and regular light?

Look at how life has surprised me today. Look at all the ways I was taken care of, all the ways I had fun.

After the second treatment blast, after I was wheeled back to my room, I was greeted by the wondrous surprise of Jynne, Susannah, and Patty, as well as a double shock of a treat—Geeyan, straight here after flying all night from the coast. I hadn’t been able to finish my second round of radiation without sitting on the bicycle seat, and was tuckered out, but it felt so good to see them. Geeyan was a glamorous and wonderful mess after her red-eye, and had finagled a screener that even out-of-the-loop me knows is the hottest movie in years, something ridiculously violent and cutting-edgy that won everything at Cannes.

“The director’s supposed to be some geeky savant. He uses pop culture in a way that’s both low and high. Dude’s got all of Los Angeles repeating lines about what you call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in France.”

In another life I’d have been beyond interested. In truth, I
did
feel tinges, that familiar desire not just to know but to be inside, not just to see this film but to
have seen
it. And I could tell that my friends—all of them plugged in—were excited. Geeyan wanted to get a video machine and watch the film all together. She promised insider gossip about the district attorney’s preparations for the Simpson trial.

“Give it up,” said Susannah.

“Everything,” said Jynne.

“What’s taken you this long?” said Patty. “Spill.”

They continued with the third degree, but I felt myself shrinking, and started playing with the letters on the magnet board—one of the presents that Susannah brought me. Soon enough Jynne noticed. She’d brought poetry, took out a paperback, read out loud to us. It was wondrous, and if I could not keep my attention through parts about a grasshopper—I think, washing her face, snapping open her wings—we still took some of the poet’s lovely phrases, made affirmations on the whiteboard (“I do know how to pay attention! I do know how to be idle and blessed!”). We also tried some drawing and painting exercises. I still can draw,
quel relief,
but have never been great with a brush, and was surprised that making thin straight lines had such a powerful effect on me. “It’s funny,” I said. “I’m having such a hard time painting while trying to address my fear of imperfection. I think it brings up my desire to be perfect. But also a counterinstinct, the feeling that it’s okay, I don’t have to be perfect.”

I laughed. “This is the perfect medium for me.”

I want to paint small pictures for Sue and Susannah and Julie for Christmas. That’s my project for this week. Who else? Tilda? Debb? On small pages, I can draw a little heart or flower in pen, then paint it. It might take practice. But this afternoon was a joy. My friends talked about their problems, their lives, and I got to escape myself a bit, fluttering in and out, my naps and fugues. My friends gave me loving looks. They whispered around me, their fixed gazes and quiet words acting as my blanket. I heard them updating one another: Jynne’s promotion, Geeyan closing on her new house, weather, omelets.

And Patty is so good! Coming back from the pantry with something to munch on, she asked, “What’s the guy in the next room have?” She didn’t know this ward’s for cancer patients only.

“I know,” I said. “Depressing, right?”

Jynne told me the same thing: everyone else here looks like they’ve given up.

I get these incredible women every day! These incredible visits each afternoon!

Let Oliver be miserable. I hope his conscience
is
eating him alive. I’m more than fine each afternoon when he sulks away, I guess to his office, who knows? Maybe this is just our personalities. He’s tortured and miserable a lot. I often am not. He should be miserable for what he’s doing to me. I’m not large enough to be at a place where I feel anything but fury and humiliation. I just can’t let these feelings sink me.

Jynne also read us some Thoreau, and I wrote down the line: “as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones.”
Yes,
I said.
That’s how every doctor sees me
. Thoreau also wrote of his prison: “I did not for a moment feel confined.” I also felt that today. If I died, would it really be so bad for my consciousness to be released into the universe? I feel myself closer to making peace with this, even while I plan on keeping going, staying here, and raising my Doegirl. It’s a contradiction, I know. The other times I’ve been in here, I wanted pictures of other people’s strength; now I’m grooving on my own. I want to go into the mountains and have someone take pictures of me naked, posing on a rock, a pillar of strength.

The big specter looming is the transplant. But that is not today. That is not today.

—

Each time he picked up the phone and called the number on the card and spoke carefully in terms of what kind of flower he might like—a little bouquet from the Far East; something busty and Russian—Oliver knew he was breaking a covenant. Still, he placed his orders, and made sure to avoid asking for a Friday appointment, for they were always fully booked, filled by jacked-up businessmen from out of town, or bosses emptying and readying themselves for that long weekend at home. (Just thinking of what a full schedule meant made Oliver squirm, especially when you were offered a later time.) The booker always talked in terms of
flowers.
Delicate Asian flower, very young, full on top, very special, in bloom for just next week. Only three hundred flowers.

If Oliver didn’t ruin himself by getting too excited and jacking off the night before, or didn’t chicken out—canceling with some obvious excuse, emphatically busying himself with some task—then he’d begin that dreary set of rituals: placing withdrawn company cash into a plain white envelope; calling back for the location; spitting out his gum and entering that saloon at the appointed hour; setting eyes upon the tastefully dressed woman alone at the end of the bar. And still. Every time he was buzzed inside some designated building and headed up or down a stairwell while his heart raced; every time an apartment door was opened ever so slightly, beckoning; whenever he went through with all these small moments and kept heading forward, doing all the ridiculous work of scheduling and running around, through every passing second, he understood the magnitude of his betrayal. Oliver understood he was failing her.

He also understood that he was failing his own idea of himself: the decent and upstanding husband doing right by his woman, the best person he’d ever known.

Although, again, she had insurance. The transplant was happening, wasn’t it? The child was more than cared for. And he was here each day, destroying his spine and throwing his company in the crapper, all to take care of her. Whether he was having sex behind her back or owning up to it, how did that measure against being by her side, devoted to getting her better?

Except he
felt
his dishonesty. Because he hadn’t given her a choice. He’d deceived her until it was too late for her to do anything. She was already helpless.

He couldn’t talk about this—not to Ruggles, not to Jonathan, certainly not to his poor father (halfway across the country, barely conscious at the crack of dawn, working just to follow along with each medical update). He couldn’t live with them knowing. So, Oliver admitted his feelings to the prostitutes. Afterward, when they were sweaty and lying on the bed and still breathing hard, Oliver unburdened himself. The women listened, usually: lying on their sides and staring at him, or with backs flat while looking at the ceiling, or with their eyes shut, their faces ruminative and placid. Some didn’t understand enough English to follow along. At least one said her mother went through something similar not all that long ago.

Then it was just after dawn. Once again he’d compartmentalized, was back at Whitman, stumbling through the corridors, taking a right, getting himself reaccustomed to not using the bathroom in their room.

Oliver flushed, washed his hands. Returning down the hallway, he garbed and masked once again. When he entered, Alice was motioning for him.

She awoke to a feeling. “Pushing.”

Mumbling, her voice a flutter. “At my jaw.”

She had him place his hand on her throat. The nodes, glands, whatever.

“Swollen,” Oliver confirmed.

“I feel like a chipmunk.” Her eyes glistening, her expression pained.

Nurse Hwan responded to the buzz and promptly examined Alice. Without alarm, she explained this was a common side effect of the radiation. “We have a mouth rinse that usually works for this.”

“Also my kitty feels a bit itchy.”

The practitioner stared over the top of her eyewear.

“It burns when you urinate?”

“No.”

“Any discharge?”

“No.”

“Discomfort?”

“Just what I said.”

“A bit itchy?”

“A bit itchy.”

When the doctors on rounds made their way to the room, Alice played her role to perfection, answering the questions of the attending (old man; trim gray beard), correcting his facts, then making new admissions: her ears were filled with fluid; she’d had two attacks of dry heaves during the night, felt a seasick sort of stomach pain. Her thermometer check revealed fever. Examining her mouth revealed blood clotted along the inside of her cheek, the inside gums.

The doctor prescribed a few drugs, as well as a couple of tests.

Nurse Hwan took the samples, and the breakfast tray arrived. “I’m famished,” Alice said, but Oliver noticed she took only two bites of her bagel. Then her hand stretched toward her stomach. Her legs rose. She cringed.

Nurse Hwan reached for the house phone, told the floor operator to page the attending.

“So easy to be positive when you aren’t feeling horrendous,” Alice whispered. “The pain melts all of it.”

Oliver started toward her. She winced again. Nurse Hwan told them she was still on hold.

And knocking. A thin orderly, his smock reaching toward his knees, pants bunched in folds and creases around what looked to be hunting boots. He pushed a wheelchair inside. “Transport here. Up to radiation—we ready to bounce?”

Alice studied him, her face twisted, a dawning horror. “Oh no. I’m so stupid. My lotion.”

“Lotion?” Oliver asked.

She staggered, rose to the side of the bed, and unplugged the Christmas tree of IV bags and batteries. Alice was a soldier with orders now, wheeling the tree to the bathroom. She stood over the sink; water ran. She raised a wet cloth and soap to her face, began a vigorous rubbing.

“Yes,” Nurse Hwan was saying, into the phone. “Correct.”

—

A new nausea medicine was ordered from the pharmacy, and the doctor was explicit in his desire for it to be humming through Alice’s veins before she went down to radiation. But this was not Oliver’s trigger. Rather, it was that skinny homeboy, the orderly. Homie heard the news about the new infusion bag, he looked down. Dude sort of shifted his weight from one mosquito leg to the other, cursed under his breath—Oliver saw that he was irritated by the wait, and this is what got him.

Oliver estimated how long it would take for the medicine to arrive, then for the IV bag to empty. He guessed at the waiting time in a backed-up radiation center, plus two hours for the physical procedure. It all but guaranteed that today’s coffee klatch would be here by the time Alice got back. He needed to survive a little longer. Make it that long, freedom was his: the city streets, their clutter and hassles; skies full of bus exhaust, a train pulling into the station while he waited to buy a token. Oliver went to Alice’s laundry bag and checked its contents. He tightened its strings, checked her drawer, made a mental note to himself to buy her new underwear, so she would not have to wear the hospital’s mesh ones before this load came back. He asked through the bathroom door if she had a preferred or favorite place.

He grabbed the 9 heading downtown—best thing he could do was get to the office.

—

Basically, Generii was done. The graphics, interface, and layout all worked: a grayish white field, a minimal ruler setting off page dimensions. You could import paragraphs, even whole files. True, the goddamn cursor kept going loopy when it ran over the bottom quadrant, meaning Oliver still had to track down that erroneous line of code. And any extra spaces, colons where semicolons should be, or slight typos resulted in all kinds of weird shit. There was still a laundry list, thousands of fixes.

He’d also done what he could to hold off the oncoming financial disaster, subletting out the new office space for a few months, moving the base of operations back into the apartment until Alice came home. But the Brow only came around one night a week to code, and even that was for a few hours at best, claiming he had no spare time, was back in graduate school.