[sic]: A Memoir
Authors: Joshua Cody
A MEMOIR
JOSHUA CODY
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
|
NEW YORK • LONDON
The text that follows is a memoir. With the exception of members of my immediate family, I have altered the names and scenarios of all persons figured herein in order to preserve their privacy. Thank you for your understanding. We will now return to the program.
I
THE DIVINE PROPORTION
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
—
Francis Bacon,
Of Beauty
Twelve sessions, one every two weeks; but you
have no idea what this means, really, I mean how could you,
and neither does anyone else, so everybody’s at a loss for words;
and it’s ironically reminiscent of those lead grey–laden, amaranthine after-school afternoons of childhood, on the dusty playground, class is out but it’s still too early to go home, so you wait with the others, and there’s no need to speak and there’s the sense of communion. The big difference is that now, here, there is, palpably, the need to speak. Thing is nobody can. The unspoken words, ultimately, are “What’s it going to be like?” And that’d be a funny question even if somebody could voice it: not what is it going to
be
, but what is it going to
be like
? But anyway nobody says it out loud, so what can you do but ignore the odors and peruse the list of side effects, around eighty per drug, ordered into three categories, common side effects, uncommon side effects, rare side effects. (Death was inevitably included, and was inevitably “rare.”) They hand this information to you on orange pamphlets, professionally printed, the Garamond font levelheaded, direct but never alarming, confidential, appropriate; poised; the thickness of the paper just right, more consequential than flimsy copy stock, but a good long way from cardboard, which would be terrifyingly permanent. The care that takes, the thought that goes into it: all the parameters are really masterfully designed, as if the hospital had hired a PhD in semiotics from Brown. The rhetoric. You’re dealing with a balance not easy to achieve. One of my favorite devices was what screenwriters call the plant: “You may notice . . .” It was always answered by the payoff “. . . this is temporary.” “You may notice
x
; this is temporary.” (Well, not in the case of death. They never write, “You may notice death; this is not temporary.” That’s understood.) I read these pamphlets over and over, like a mantra; they’re trying to normalize the experience, to throw the patient back into civilization, which is where the patient was, at some point in the past—the patient realizes this, remembers being there, what it was like: what it felt like, how things tasted differently, how different kinds of fabric smelled differently, how even the air smelled differently, somehow: how watching a football game then was so different from watching one now; how different the meanings of things were then—even the meanings of things as simple as water, or taxonomy, or, indeed, what it means to mean. Once, the patient was a child wondrous at the mysterious fact, just learned, that some people are left-handed and some aren’t: dividing humanity in two like that: the child wondered why he was one, not the other. Or once, it was nighttime, and the patient was a child sitting in an airport, pretending to read a magazine but in fact watching the airplanes taxi through the tarmac, flush with anticipation of his first flight. Or, for that matter, once, the patient was a child realizing that music, and for that matter sound, and for that matter what’s the difference, anyway, isn’t in fact immaterial, but rather the eminently material slapping of air molecules against the tympanum in the ear, thereby rendering it the only of our arts that actually involves physical contact. Or once, the patient was standing on a playground. But now the patient—standing between those pamphlets and the unknown experience that beckons, the future to which the pamphlets point—is standing somewhere very high, a vantage point from which civilization is visible, but muted, condensed into a grey mass. I thought of Philippe Petit on that taut tightrope between the Twin Towers. They tell you, for example, how long the infusion lasts: about fifty minutes. Not that experiencing those fifty minutes for the first time will be remotely like any previous experience of fifty minutes. I wanted to know the kind of chair I was going to sit in, what color? Stripes? Canvas, or plastic? What temperature would the room be? Chilly, like David Letterman’s studio? Or warm, like a pub in London? Can you (are you supposed to) listen to music, are you expected to carry on a conversation with the nurse? What’s the etiquette? Are you alone, doing chemo, in a room, an enclosed space? Are there people around?
You turn around and the question is answered: it turns out there are people around—at least there were for me, I don’t know how it’ll be for you (because you must remember that you’ll go through it too, almost certainly: it’s part of life in the twenty-first century). A large open room painted in rather ghastly shades of orange. At least a dozen patients at any given time. The sheer number of people was startling. Pleasant conversation between nurses and patients, as it turned out: the ambiance is that of an airport gate, or people on the subway, or what I imagine a nail salon must be like. At first I took the complacent cheeriness as an effort on the part of the staff to mask the dread, but after a few sessions I discovered there was in fact no artifice here, nothing feigned: that it was, for them, about as earth-shattering as a trip to the dry cleaners, another chore on the list.
The extras were suspiciously well cast, suspiciously well represented in a socioeconomic sort of way: the pinkfaced, heavyset businessman (he might as well have a highball in his fifty-nine-year-old hand); the good-looking woman wearing jeans and a nice pair of sandals, doubtless with literary ambitions; the gay man chatting loudly on his cell phone about Italian wines; the black woman in a jogging suit, with her patient husband; the Korean girl, looking spiffy in Ann Taylor, typing on her laptop. And I never saw the same person twice. These are the twenty-first century’s faces of death? Pleasant. And yet there was something exceedingly grotesque about it all, as if
everyone were sitting around (I hesitate to use this image, but it did come to mind repeatedly) defecating while making affable conversation. (When I was in grade school, fifth grade I think, I read about an African tribe whose members thought nothing of defecating in public but would rather be caught dead than found eating. I think that was my first introduction to cultural relativism. On an unrelated note, I don’t view art as excretory.) Chemo can be infused with a simple IV to a vein in the arm, or, as in my case, they can implant a small catheter port, a small silicone disc, into the chest, which leads directly to the jugular vein. I always felt a surge of adrenaline as the nurse pierced my chest with the needle, and the energy never really subsided but melted into the effects of the steroids, the first of four bags of liquid. The steroids do much to mask the effects of the other drugs; I’d be charged up for about forty-eight hours.
The Allen-Bradley Clock Tower, Rockwell Automation Headquarters, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
So that was what it was like, I sat there for an hour and talked to the nurse and then got up and walked out and that was that. And so it would be eleven more of these sessions, one every two weeks. Six months. Time exists only in its measurement, and we can’t help but measure it: even in an anechoic chamber—an echoless room, in other words a space of total silence, they have one at Harvard—even there we have our heartbeat and our respiration tapping out a countdown, as a composer once discovered, to his dismay. Time isn’t a substance that flows or flies and can thus be traced: unlike space, it cannot lurk behind a map of itself. (Calendars aren’t maps. Can’t be.) During the six months of chemotherapy, a big clock—I imagined a big, octagonal, four-faced clock looming over an industrial cityscape, perhaps a tower that marked the division between the city’s north and south sides—ticked twelve times; everything else between those ticks was suspended animation, stasis, flatness, against which the heartbeat bravely, fruitlessly banged its head. (Later I learned this was called depression. Luckily it didn’t take.) The twelve “treatments” (a euphemism I learned to detest like I detest few other words, and that is saying something) as rigid as the twelve black grooves on a child’s first cheap ruler, rigid as cuneiform. I would arrive late to my appointments as often as possible, but this wasn’t an attempt to assert control, to make them, my tormentors, wait for me, to “show them who’s boss.” That’s what a shrink would say, and indeed did. What the shrink didn’t understand, among very many other things, was that my habitual tardiness was the manifestation of a patently absurd hope that some sense of the organic malleability of life could extend to these rendezvous that sliced and diced my existence apart like those things on television infomercials you see at three-thirty in the morning, just twelve low monthly payments but wait there’s more. In French, the word for editing a film or television show or television commercial is
montage
, putting together; the German word is
schnitt
, slicing apart. Two-week-long strips of old film, brittle, sliced apart, sutured back together, the cuts the piercings of the chest. This’ll sting for a moment, she says, pushing the needle through, the frozen little venomous mouth seeking the port, into which it will empty its vomit, its poison. In other words, this was discontinuous time, a curve broken into pixels, things didn’t lead to other things, they just switched, crosscut. Since there was no trail—no path, say, from my apartment to the subway to the hospital—I often had the uncanny sense that I wasn’t actually present; that the setting laid out before me was a painted illusion, for without a past leading to this present moment how could I have this present moment before me?
I’m exaggerating a little bit, because counterpointing this, I’ll admit, was a different time, the time of the body: the body recovering from the infusion of poison. In complete contrast to ticking-twelve-time, body-time sang its song in slow dissolves. Gradual transformations, slow washes, a slowmoving music of colors, of thick chords. The shape of these modulations was all curves, parabolas, the organic transformations of nature, the majesty of that tempo, the utter indifference of the sunset, of cloud formations, of an increase in humidity: the pace of the needle measuring barometric pressure. It would take about two days for the steroids to wear off; this would give way to the nausea that the steroids had been veiling, but the nausea was erased
beautifully with these little white pills they give you now (at about a hundred bucks a pop) that magically dissolve under the tongue. The pills act fast. But in those slim intervals between the sudden decay of one pill and the onset of another, the nausea was briefly sensible, like when you’re going through mountains on one of those high-speed European trains really fast and it’s all blackness in the tunnel and then a woosh and your ears pop and the white noise of the train’s speed is an octave higher, and it’s a blur of green and
brown and white right up against the window, and far behind that stands an inviolable hillside—like in one of those late medieval paintings, where you have a glimpse of landscape perfectly in focus, through the fenestration of the castle chamber wall, which is behind the girl who looks like a discarded figurine, the weird way her neck is bent as she looks at her baby, who looks older than she does.
The little glimpses of nausea had different hues as the days went by, like there was some pure form of ultimate nausea that the body refracted, prismlike, and ordered the colors on a temporal palette; or, palimpsest-like, continually erased and re-erased the current state to reveal another that had always been behind it. The whole spectacle inevitably culminated in a kind of final chorus: a mysterious throbbing pain, as if the body required one last push to purge its cells of the poison, a dark pain that began in the lower back and radiated in crippling pulses up the spine and out. (The disease itself being a pebble thrown in water, a friend who knows told me: the rippled rings radiate out, not in.) And after that, I would feel quite normal; this usually occurred a day or two before the next chemo, chemo number
x
plus one. Or 12 - (
x
+ 1), as I tended to think of the next one, counting backward, or calculating the percentage, or ratio: one out of twelve, two out of twelve; or two down, ten to go; three down, nine to go; four to eight; five to seven—kind of like the way they express Supreme Court decisions except there’d be twelve justices instead of however many there actually are, a figure that eleven out of twelve Americans, I’m sure, don’t know.
Before I started chemo, I went on medical leave from the university where I teach as a fellowship graduate student in music (composition of music, to be precise). I didn’t know if I’d be able to teach; I didn’t know whether I would “breeze through,” like the high-powered lawyer the nurses always talked about who never missed a day of work; or whether I’d be more like a guy I spoke to, a writer and professor, who vomited constantly for six months. As it turned out, my case was far closer to the former than the latter; I never threw up, not once, and in retrospect I certainly could have taught that semester. (
Not the following one, however.) But counting down the days and observing the body became, temporarily, a full-time vocation. I wanted to perfect the art of being a patient, I read books, took a Kundalini class—a type of yoga centered on breathing, with a heavy meditation component—and practiced, practiced, practiced imagery techniques, relaxation. I even bought some green tea and drank a box of that; I couldn’t stand the taste but I kept thinking of an interview with the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch I had read in the Sunday
Times
magazine, I think, and he was drinking green tea so that helped—nobody’s cooler than Jim Jarmusch. The deep breath of the day: the day inhales in the morning and exhales in the evening. Meanwhile I wasn’t really feeling too bad: I wasn’t losing any hair, I kept wondering if any of this was really working. They kept saying don’t worry—it’s cumulative, it adds up. But I felt pretty good.