Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

The doctor wheeled her chair over to a flat-screen computer monitor and, with a few clicks of the mouse, opened a file so that George could see it.

“Your tumor,” said the doctor, “is here.” She pointed to an area in George’s brain that George believed to be near the front.

“It is shaped like a barbell,” the doctor pointed with her finger to show the two sides of the tumor. “Part is here in the frontal lobe, and then part is over here in the temporal lobe, both on the left side of your brain. Do you see?”

“I do,” said George. George thought, People with brain tumors have hallucinations. That’s what they have. They have hallucinations. They don’t have visitations from gods who explain physics concepts. They have hallucinations of visitations from gods who explain physics concepts. A much different thing.

“So, to our questions. I know you have had headaches for quite some time now. And they were diagnosed as migraines, and you’ve been taking narcotics to control the pain. But do you ever see things that aren’t there? Smell anything odd that doesn’t make sense to you? Hear things?”

George looked up at the goddess of the race, who was standing behind the doctor still but was now gesturing eagerly, waving her arms in front of her as if to say no, stop, don’t . George looked at her and felt as if he was being torn apart by inches on the inside. He didn’t want to lose her, didn’t want to lose the goddess of love, and the coy sex goddess, and even the god of wealth, and the god of war, the mermaid, the goat, the mistier ones like Quetzalcoatl and Osiris, the firm ones like Philanthropy and Revenge. These familiar figures, present in his life for such a long time.

“If you take out the tumor, all that will stop?” he asked the doctor.

“All what?” said the doctor. “All what?”

Irene stood on the Golden Gate Bridge. The red metal of the railing was cool under her hand and very solid, but there was a fog over the bay hovering just below the bridge itself, so that the bridge seemed truly suspended. It was a dream bridge floating over nothing, as if one could just fall off the edge of it and be buoyed up by the air.

So many people had jumped off this bridge that there was a plaque next to Irene on one of the girders, advertising a crisis hotline, with an emergency phone under it that you could call if you were feeling sad. The plaque told her the consequences of leaping from the bridge were fatal and tragic. The first she could not dispute. The second, she pondered as she leaned out over the fog, was not so clear. Maybe death was not so terrible. How could it be, when she had practiced it so many times? What was waiting for her on the other side: A leafy island? A new, more cheerful Hinterland? George?

Irene listened to the dampened sounds of the seabirds, the hiss of the cars passing behind her over the bridge. There was no city, and there were no mountains. Only fog and the strangely transmitted few sounds: water lapping, a ringing bell, the thump of her heart under her armpit. She thought about what George said about inhabiting the transitional point between life and death. Did she do it because she was a suicidal coward, as she believed, or because she was victorious over the weak impulse for death, as George suggested? Empirical evidence suggested she was not a jumper. She had never jumped. The data supported George’s hypothesis.

Irene’s phone barked. She took it out of her pocket and looked at it as if it were an artifact from another world. At the conference, physicists were walking around, going out and in the doors of the different meeting rooms at the hotel, along with the businesspeople who gave physicists their money. Maybe she was late. How long had she been standing here? The area code was from Toledo. It could be someone at her lab, someone with a problem. Maybe one of the pieces had come back from the fabricator already. Maybe it was ready to be installed.

“Sparks,” she said. Her voice echoed a little bit.

“Irene,” said Sally. “It’s Sally. George’s mother. You know.”

Irene imagined Sally standing in her office in Toledo, perfectly groomed. She pictured her standing on a pedestal, clothed in a drapey robe, blindfolded, holding up a set of scales. She pictured her presiding over Sam Beth’s marriage with George. She would wear the clothing of a high priestess of Babylon, and it would be pretty strange on such a Norwegian-looking lady, but then Sam Beth was Korean and seemed to pull it off alright.

“Hello,” said Irene. “Is everything alright?”

“Well actually, it’s about George.”

“Did he go to the doctor? Is there something wrong with his brain?”

“How did you know that?” Sally asked, her voice suddenly sharp and accusing.

“Never mind,” said Irene. “Is he sick? What did the doctor say?”

There was a long pause, and Irene chewed on her lip. She reached into her pocket and found a pen there, began stabbing it into the railing of the bridge, making a very small blue mark there.

“Irene, it’s actually … George has a brain tumor, the doctor said.”

She paused, and Irene scraped the railing with her pen. “It’s threatening—” began Sally. Irene could hear panic leaking into the older woman’s voice, and felt horrified that she might start to cry. But Sally didn’t. She went on to explain the tumor, its shape, its slow rate of growth.

“They can do a needle biopsy,” she said. “They can drill down into his—head”—her voice caught but she continued—“and pull out a piece of it and see what it is. Or they can do an open biopsy, where they go in to take out the tumor and biopsy it during the operation. Right there at the same time.”

“That sounds better. The open biopsy. When are they going to operate?”

“That’s the thing,” said Sally. “He doesn’t want them to operate.”

“Why not?” Irene asked. “Why would he not want that?”

“He says the symptoms have been steady for so long, it cannot be growing at a dangerous pace.”

The consequences of jumping from this bridge are fatal and tragic. A person falling from this bridge would surely die. In her mind, she had always felt she would die in Toledo, in the Maumee River, like an Ohio person. But the feeling she got from inhaling deeply on this bridge, so tall the biggest ships could pass beneath it, made her feel that something else was possible. She could do a world tour of suicide bridges. She had never seen the Brooklyn Bridge, the Gorge Bridge above the Rio Grande. She could explore the possibilities of not jumping from every vantage point in the world. The towers of Europe, now that she could fly. The minarets. Everywhere she could find to not die.

After falling asleep so many times, she could only die once. After slipping under every night of her life, she could only crash into one water.

“He has a brain tumor!” Irene screeched into the phone. She turned and leaned her back against the railing, kicking at the barrier with the heel of one shoe. A young couple passed in front of her on the walkway, and the woman looked at her with a concerned frown, as if to say, Are you alright?

“Calm down,” said Sally. And the crying sound was gone from her voice. She was all business. “You don’t know everything about this. OK? So listen.”

“Fine,” said Irene. She was pacing up and down beside the railing now.

“The tumor is in two parts,” she began. “And the operation is dangerous. He could forget who he is, a little bit or a lot. Forget who he knows, or what he knows. Or not, it just depends on what happens in the surgery. So he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to lose anything.”