Fraud (22 page)

But privacy isn’t really the name of the game when your mother has to drive you to the hospital. I have never been licensed by a sitting government to drive a car, and I am far too weak to take public transport. By happy coincidence, my mother’s office is two blocks away from the hospital. It is a precisely timed operation. After breakfast she says to me euphemistically, “I’m going to start the car. Why don’t you go upstairs and
get ready?
”—emphasis and winking italics my own. If this freaks her out, she doesn’t let on. She’s a physician herself, so it might just seem par for the course to tell your youngest child to go upstairs and salute the archbishop and then join you in the car.

My deed done, not my finest effort after what has arguably been half a lifetime of practice, I put on my coat and grab the jar. It is made of clear plastic. In college, my friend’s parents came to New York for a psychoanalysts’ convention. Getting onto a hotel elevator, crowded with their colleagues, my friend turned to his mother and stage-whispered, “Jocasta, I want you.” But it is just me and my mother in the car. There are no Freudians to entertain with the discomfort of the Oedipal situation. Even in my weakened state, I’m certainly not going to ride next to my mother with a transparent vial of spooge in my lap. I look around the kitchen for a suitable bag and find the perfect one. It is four by six, of white paper. It has clearly been in the kitchen since I was very young, because when I turn it over I see that it’s printed with the image of an orange pumpkin and a black cat and, in dripping, blood-soaked calligraphy, the words
Trick or Treat.

I fly up to Toronto on a gray day in January of the new century, visiting, for the first time, the new Princess Margaret facility. It is beautiful, occupying an old art deco insurance building. It is imposing and elegant and graced in the center with a soaring six-story atrium. It is nothing like the old hospital where I was treated. I feel a little jealous as I walk in. There is even a multifaith chapel, which I don’t recall from the old place. Outside of it, on a white board, someone on staff has written: “Just a thought:” and then a quote: “Joy is not in things, it is in us.” It is attributed to one Robert Wagner, whose dates are
1813
to
1883
. Presumably this is a different Robert Wagner from the wattle-concealing, turtleneck-wearing star of
The Towering Inferno
and
Hart to Hart.
So different a Robert Wagner, in fact, that when I try to look him up in my
Bartlett’s Quotations,
he is not listed. Who
is
listed there, with exactly the same dates, however, is Richard Wagner, he of the proto-Nazi operas of heroic
übermenschen.
This puts a decidedly different spin on this little homily. And, funnily enough,
Bartlett’s
doesn’t list this lovely caveat against materialism among the composer’s notable quotes. But it’s a lot more suitable for an oncology chapel, after all, than “To be German means to carry on a matter for its own sake,” don’t you think?

This new place is completely devoid of anything I might recall. Not a single doctor who treated me still works here. All along the front hallway are framed pictures of hospital directors past, my oncologist among them. Like most official portraits in oils, it misses something essential about the person. Now he just looks benignly Olympian and creamy. In the entrance is an official royal portrait of Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret. Taken recently—in
1998
, according to the frame—she wears a gown of mushroom-colored satin, adorned with jeweled medals. And of course, being a real princess, she wears a crown. But the truly stunning feature, the one that announces to the world that we should not for an instant confuse her with her dowdy older sister, is Margaret’s hair, a startling shade of brown-black. The unrelieved shock of too-youthful darkness over her not unattractive face of a certain age has turned her otherwise friendly smile into a toothy leer, that last tenuous stage of propriety before full-blown laughter at a dirty joke. It makes her look what used to be called “fast.” Behold another porn archetype: the Randy Divorcée, lingering at her front door, swirling the ice cubes in her midday highball, saying to the strapping gardener, “You must be tired and sweaty after all that yardwork. C’mon in and cool off in the air-conditioning.”

As for the fondly remembered X-ray photograph of her hand, it is nowhere to be seen. I ask the volunteer at the desk if they brought it here from the old facility.

“It was on the way to radiation,” I say.

“I was also a radiation patient,” she replies. “I don’t remember it.” She is apologetic. I then ask her if she remembers the music during treatment. She doesn’t dismiss my recollection, but she’s not sure herself, it was so long ago. All memory is porous. Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand with sickness, and a good thing, too. But of these two details—that X-ray photograph, that music—I am sure.

I think.

Since no one official or medical will talk to me at the sperm bank and I don’t know anyone anymore at the cancer hospital, I spend the better part of two days hanging around the atrium. No one pays me any mind. When I look up I can see that the railings on the floors above are shielded with Plexiglas about eight feet high, well over the head of any potentially suicidal patient. Not long prior to my trip, I had a drink in a hotel with a huge atrium that goes up at least thirty stories. I asked the waitress if people ever pitched themselves over the sides in what would be a very public and punishing death, landing with a viscous splat at the patent-leather Mary Janed feet of a little girl on her way to her first Broadway show. The waitress seemed so bored, so in hate with her job, that when she answered my question with, “Yeah, thirteen people so far,” there was an almost wistful tone in her voice, as though a falling body might just break up the monotony of her day.

Paradoxically, here at the cancer hospital things are decidedly cheerier. I walk back and forth, I listen to an extremely good jazz quartet playing the lunchtime concert. All hospitals are built around waiting. I don’t stand out. In my year and a half of treatment at Princess Margaret, eighteen months of waiting, I never once saw anything that could have remotely been described as attitude. Not one patient, patient’s guardian, partner, or parent ever got pissy that I could see. And I’ll go out on a limb here and say that in the world of cancer it’s not inconceivable that someone might have a right to feel like being at least a little pissy.

It might speak to that stereotypical Canadian reserve, but I choose to see it a little more heroically and politically. When medicine is socialized, when you have true universal health care, when everyone’s treatment is the same regardless of socioeconomic station, those strong-arming attitudes of entitlement just aren’t part of the vocabulary. This atrium, this lovely space in a hospital with a world-class reputation, is actually the equivalent of a state hospital. That American sense that someone somewhere else is getting what you’re not, and the attendant demands that go along with that perceived injustice, well, it’s just not in the equation here.

I’ve recently been told there is a chance that so many years after cure, my fertility might have rebounded. I decide to get tested back in New York, if only to stop having to pay the storage fees on my old sample. My friend Scott, who, for other reasons, was getting tested around that time, told me stories about the comfort and sheer titillation of the lab he went to: armchairs, privacy, pornography of every stripe; a masturbatorium, he called it. Maybe it’s an insurance thing, because at the Upper East Side lab I go to, I am given a plastic vial, a Zip-loc bag imprinted with the international symbol for biohazard, that vaguely sinister trillium, and pointed to the bathroom. It is directly off the reception area.

Have you ever been a temp, or in your first week in a new job, and right outside your cubicle your new office-mates hold a birthday party for one of their number? Do you remember how alienating and strange and embarrassing and generally impeding of your performance that birthday party was? I am the only patient in the lab that morning and the only man in the place. Through the door I can hear the technicians talking about their weekends, the scratch of the receptionist’s ballpoint as she fills out a magazine quiz, the crisp turning of a glossy page. This feels very public. To add to my difficulties, the bathroom is a standard-issue interior with very little to jog the mind. I peek out through the slats of the metal blinds on the window; maybe I can find a construction site or something to focus on. Nothing doing.

In the end, species will out, and I manage. Sheepishly I leave my sample at the front counter and leave. Why must everything be clear plastic?

The average fertile thirty-five-year-old man has many million sperm, a few million of which are motile enough to knock someone up. When I get my results, I find that I have ten. Not ten million: ten. Three are dead in the water, and the other seven are technically motile but given a grade very close to dead. I’m shooting blanks, as they say.

“Hey, at least you’re shootin’ ’em,” says my doctor.

I come up with the idea of naming them. For all the male-of-the-species reproductive good they’ll do me, I consider calling them all Janet. Then I settle on Radcliffe, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Vassar.

Among my destinations on my trip up to Toronto is the site of the old hospital. I’m told it’s being used now as a homeless shelter. It was in one of Toronto’s few rubby-dub neighborhoods. There were a lot of hookers and also a Christian television ministry back when I was a patient.

The area has clearly been cleaned up, because I can’t see any hookers or visibly Christian folks, either. And the purported homeless people going into the old Princess Margaret all look like backpacking northern Europeans. Perhaps it’s a hostel. I stand in the circular driveway, the place where the smoking patients used to congregate with their IV stands and enjoy their last fuck-it-all-to-hell cigarettes. I think of that song “This Used to Be My Playground.”

I’m trying to actually feel something about the whole thing as I stand there, but I’m not really coming up with anything. The building is possibly one of the more important structures in my life. I feel I should well up with some sort of nostalgic yearning, mourning my youth, anything. But it’s just not happening, which is very strange. Or not.

Once, on my way home from radiation, a man came running out of the Knights of Columbus chapter near the hospital. Another man came running after him and, like a cartoon panel come to life, the man giving chase actually yelled, “Stop, thief!” I remember thinking to myself, Well, that’s very cliché. I was close to the robber. I could have stuck my foot out and tripped him, perhaps. But I didn’t. He made it across the street, dodging traffic, and was out of sight in a moment. The man from the Knights of Columbus stood frustrated on the sidewalk as the cars rushed by. He turned and gave me a dirty look for my inaction. I wanted to say something. I wanted to explain how weak and tired and sick I was at that point. But more than that, how I had essentially let go of any sense of agency. I could lie on a table, they could shoot me full of gamma rays, I would eat what was put in front of me, the hair could fall from my head, my throat could be burned. But I was not involved; I was a stranger here. That he could even see me standing there seemed vaguely surprising.

The week before I moved back to New York, after having finished chemotherapy, I went back to the ward to thank the nurses for saving my life. To aid me in expressing my gratitude, I took them some chocolates. Good ones. Hard centers. No chart on the inside lid. I showed them the surgery scar from the final extraction of a burned-out lymph node from my abdomen. I thanked them, we all cried.

As a prophylactic against nausea, I had always gone to chemotherapy having taken an Ativan, a divine tranquilizer (I wish I had some right now) that does little to combat the vomiting but does induce retroactive amnesia. As I wept with those women who saw me through the most physically intense ordeal of my life, I had the chilling realization I did not know a single one of their names.

They say that times of crisis are the true test of one’s character. I really wouldn’t know, since my character took a powder that year, leaving in its stead a jewel-bright hardness. I was at my very funniest that year. This was not the Humor of Cure; it had nothing to do with the healing power of laughter. It was more of an airless, relentless kind of quippiness—the orchestra on the
Titanic
playing an upbeat number as they take on water. Every time a complex human emotion threatened to break the surface of my consciousness, out would come some terrible cleverness. Come on, Give Us a Smile!

I was Thanatos’ rodeo clown. I still am. And Eros’ as well, as it turns out. Years later, in a tender embrace in bed with my first real boyfriend, he said my name. “Oh, David.” I stopped, sat up, and responded in my best Ed Wynn, “Yeeeesssssss??????” This kind of behavior more or less killed things between us.

There was a period during the illness when I was at my very sickest, at
115
pounds hovering in and out of consciousness. This month and a half was the one period in my life when I was perhaps not faking it; where I was not deflecting every emotion with repartee. That it would take millions of cancer cells, lining up for their big Esther Williams finale in my lymphatic system, for me to finally shut up is sobering. Or would be were I to think about it.

What remains of your past if you didn’t allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don’t have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories. Procedural and depopulated. It’s as if a neutron bomb went off and all you’re left with are hospital corridors, where you’re scanning the walls for familiar photographs.