Half Empty (25 page)

After a year and a half, I am a connoisseur of unpleasant physical sensation. All the subtleties of my pain and its gradations become quite clear. Sometimes its onset is stealthy but definitive, like having one’s boat gently ease up onto a sandbar with a gentle, granular squeak and there you are, stuck. I take something, and after a while, close to an hour as I sit there in my run-aground vessel, the water level gradually rises until my skiff is lifted and I am afloat once more.

At other times, the pain comes on like the various instruments of a jazz combo in the wee small hours. The surgical site starts the riff with a slow but steady rhythm—cymbals caressed with brushes—joined shortly thereafter by the piano pulsations of my thumb and forefinger, the old standbys who began it all. Finally things get into full swing with the lead melody of the triceps, a forceful trumpet. Once the song has begun in earnest and I’ve sat through a few choruses, I head to the pill bottle to take one (vainly wishing I could follow the implicit advice of Dave Brubeck and actually take five). My analgesics of choice are Percocet and OxyContin, the latter apparently the stuff the kids in middle America are ruining their lives over, albeit by crushing it up and snorting it. In the absence of discomfort, and taken so heedlessly, it must be wonderful, but all it really does is take me from negative five to zero, and that’s enough. Perhaps these OxyContin kids are young positive psychologists in the making, staking out their right to go from zero to positive five.

Despite this Inuit-fifty-words-for-snow taxonomy of pain’s manifold forms, I cannot fashion a dwelling from frozen blocks of it, or cunningly use a thinly falling curtain of it to conceal my
form while hunting seal. The most I can glean from it is a siren call to seek pharmaceutical attention, and I got that message a while back.

I have been asked a few times if I’ve learned anything. It’s not a chastising question, the way one might interrogate a tearful four-year-old after releasing him from his time-out in the corner, and I don’t know that I have the answer. This isn’t my first time at the rodeo. I’ve already faced mortality and my body’s rather startling lack of allegiance once before, but was I perhaps in need of some cosmic corrective of my venal ways? Did I need to be rendered more thankful, less cavalier, less glib, maybe? Again, I’ve tried to be all of those things, although whether I’ve been successful is not for me to say.

After a lot of urging myself and others to regard terrible outcomes unflinchingly, to
really think
on such matters and championing those among us who cannot help but do so, it turns out that, with the wolf just outside my open windows—closer at hand than I really feared he would ever get to me at this age, with his hot breath bothering the curtains—I’d rather not dwell on it, which is kind of funny, if you think about it.

As for the fear that has marked a lot of this, it is bereft of larger lessons. Other than the reflexive survival instincts it triggers, avoiding being something else’s dinner, it seems completely useless. I don’t mean that as a macho preamble to the phrase “so I choose not to feel it and just go on as if I didn’t.” I mean that fear lays waste to one’s best reserves. It foments rot in my stores of grain, eats away at my timbers. If I dwell on the possibility that I might be dead by forty-seven, I can’t really find a useful
therefore
in that. Therefore I will train for the marathon, confess the long-unspoken torch carried for X, etc. I once joked
that if I knew the world would end in one day, I’d probably just break into a bakery and eat all the éclairs I wanted. But true fear—which, luck of the draw, doesn’t ambush me as much as it might or as much as I’d thought it would—just leaves me frozen; amotivated and stunned. Dinner, in an evolutionary word.

I have scans at the three-month mark. My lungs remain unchanged, thank goodness. As for the surgical site, they see a lot of changes, but are fairly comfortable in deeming it postoperative inflammation.
Fairly
comfortable. They will watch it closely and send me for an MRI in another three months, and another scan three months thereafter. And so begins my life for the next five to ten years, if I’m lucky. There is just a baseline uncertainty that will need to be lived with. I finally understand what Julie Norem meant when she told me that one could be simultaneously anxious and happy. The assurances are momentary, at best half comforting, like being told “That’s not a man in your room. It’s just your clothes draped over the back of a chair casting a shadow, see? However, there
is
actually an insane, knife-wielding murderer loose in the neighborhood. G’night.”

Everybody’s got something. In the end, what choice does one really have but to understand that truth, to really take it in, and then shop for groceries, get a haircut, do one’s work; get on with the business of one’s life.

That’s the hope, anyway.