Matthew Revert - The Tumours Made Me Interesting

It wasn’t until the third time I caught myself staring at Fiona’s details that I knew I was falling victim to the insincere promise it provided. A reality wherein these details would lead to an eventual cure wasn’t something I could believe in. Determined to retain freewill, I scrunched the paper into a ball and tried to swallow it. It lodged in my throat like smoker’s phlegm and I began choking violently. I slammed myself back-first into the wall, improvising what I understood the Heimlich maneuver to be. Three fruitless slams later and I’d crashed right through the wall into the neighbouring apartment.

Assuming I was a particularly unsubtle burglar, the man of the house, Vince Stotson came down on my chest with a golf club. The ball of poorly swallowed paper flew from my mouth and clung to their ceiling. I was naked, covered in rubble and clutching my chest in agony.

With his adrenaline subsiding, Vince attained enough lucidity to realise it was merely his quiet neighbour writhing on his floor.

“Holy flip, it’s you, Bruce!” he said, coming to my aide. “What did you come through the wall for? It’s not a particularly sensible way to enter a domicile”

“Accident,” I wheezed. “Very… sorry… to have… disturbed you…”

“Rhonda!” yelled Vince. “We got ourselves a situation here. We’re gonna need bandages and some Vaseline.”

My eyes fluttered open with the speed of hummingbird wings. Vince and Rhonda had their faces uncomfortably close to my own. I was wrapped in a blanket and contorted on their couch, which was far too small to accommodate a full-grown man at full stretch.

“Two questions,” said Vince while holding up three fingers.

I gave a slight nod.

“Why are you naked and why did you break the wall? We’re not angry, mind. We’re just intrigued. This isn’t something one expects to experience on any given day.”

“Umm…”

I was a mess of verbal stasis. Sub primal sounds escaped my mouth that couldn’t be attributed to any language.

“Oh, leave him alone, Vince,” said Rhonda. “We’re terribly sorry about the little cancer situation.”

I stared hard at the two of them. It was only now that I noticed the leather bondage gear they were wearing. In my opinion, they were both a little too overweight to pull it off. Rhonda was perhaps the shortest woman I had ever seen and Vince was quite possibly the tallest. The extremity of their physical opposition somehow made them a perfect couple in my eyes. Like most of my neighbours, I hadn’t talked to the Stotson’s much. Occasionally I’d bump into Vince during a rooftop walk and we’d discuss the weather or something equally as superficial. Truth be told, I quite liked these people. If I were a more socially apt person, I’d have no problem envisioning a friendship between us. Although, it seemed reasonable to suspect that my positive feelings toward the Stotson’s had more to do with their propensity toward leaving me alone than anything else. Right now though, I was dumbfounded that they somehow knew of my cancer.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“It was on the news,” replied Rhonda.

“The news?”

Vince started to chuckle. “Yes, it’s a new preventative measure apparently. They figure that they’ll publicly shame the cancer. The logic goes that if the news networks spend ten minutes each night naming cancer sufferers, the cancer will feel so ashamed and embarrassed that it will cease attacking people such as your good self. There was some massive write-up about it in yesterday’s paper. The results of a trial were published and even I, cynical as I am, had to admit that the findings were very convincing. They chose five volunteers, all of whom were definitely not suffering from cancer and for three weeks they were subjected to a barrage of reports about new cancer diagnoses. Guess what? At the end of the three weeks, only two of them had developed cancer. That’s less than half!”

“Your cancer was mentioned right toward the start,” interjected Rhonda. “Vince and I were aghast at the horrible news. At the same time, we couldn’t help feeling a bit star struck. And to attack your backside like that! Nasty. Simply nasty.”

I was immediately infuriated. I didn’t give those fucks permission to publicly broadcast my illness. Whatever happened to patient confidentiality? How many people now knew? The indignity of it all stole my breath. Then it hit me like an abusive father — what if my mother had been watching? Since confirmation of the cancer, I hadn’t even contemplated how I was going to tell her. She was the only person who would actually care. My mother was someone who, without any shadow of doubt, loved me and cared about my wellbeing. The news would be crushing and the thought of her finding out via the repulsive, fake smiles of plastic news presenters enraged me. The throbbing pain in my golf club-beaten chest dissipated, the hangover fog whistled out of my ears. I was lucid — perhaps for the first time in weeks. It was enough to deal with the cancer but to have to deal with this shit too? It was too much. If I was going to die, couldn’t I at least enjoy a modicum of privacy?

I dismounted the Stotson’s couch and marched through the hole my misguided Heimlich had created.

“Don’t worry about the wall right now, Bruce,” yelled Vince. “We can fix it up later. We have nothing to hide.”

The two began engaging in the masochistic sex games I had clearly interrupted earlier. I picked up the phone to call my mother with the alien sound of their eroticism ringing in my ears. I hoped like hell mum hadn’t been watching the news. If anyone was going to tell her, it needed to be me.

Ihad become phobic of my own bowel movements. The morning toilet trip always revealed some new, horrifying physical deterioration. Today it was pink anal foam. I had grown used to blood, mucous and stools of every sort but the foam threw me. How could something so foreign to my own experience form in my body? We live with ourselves for every miserable, waking second and yet, there’s so much about what we experience that we don’t know. Within me was an invasion that I couldn’t see. My outward appearance possessed the eerie calm that heralds the start of a storm. I was beginning to convince myself that I could feel the tumours growing. Ever since I was introduced to them, they had a physical presence. I felt more like an incubator than a person.

I was readying myself for one of the most awkward conversations I was ever likely to have. Thankfully my mother appeared blissfully ignorant when I spoke to her on the phone, which meant that at least it was in my hands. I arranged to deliver her medication and tend to her bed sores. It was a struggle to keep from crying when I heard how excited this made her. Ever since my brother moved to Poland to mock death metal bands, I was all she had. I was about to take that away from her and it was the single most painful aspect of the whole ordeal. The more I tried to kill the thought, the more powerful it grew until it was throbbing like a headache.

I was thinking much more clearly this morning, which was a mixed blessing. I didn’t miss the hangover but I longed for the way it stifled my depressing clarity. With clarity came reality and reality was a bitch. The apartment was abhorrently messy. It was so stereotypically ‘single male’. There was no design aesthetic at all. The only ‘art’ on the walls were faded posters of Olympic steeplechase champions, which I won in a raffle 20 years ago. The only reason I was so insistent about their display was because they were the only things I’d ever won. Clinging to these now seemed profoundly pathetic but I still couldn’t bring myself to remove them. That said, Marina Pluzhnikova was an undeniably handsome woman.