Michael Grant - BZRK - ORIGINS

Our son Stone is trying to play the stoic, and maybe he really is able to master his emotions, I don’t know. I’ve never been a great father to him. I don’t know him as well as I should. What is he now, thirteen? Hah, I’m not sure unless I do the math. Yes, thirteen. I should know that.

I’m closer in some ways to my daughter, Sadie. She’s only twelve, on the verge of becoming a woman. An old soul, a smart, perceptive girl who watches her mother waste away and demands to know why.

Why is this happening?

Sadie is angry, looking for someone to blame.

Both kids are old enough to understand about cancer, but their understanding is almost poetic. Cancer as demon. Cancer as foe. But they have not seen what I have seen. They have not touched it. They have not walked on the surface of that tumor. They have not seen the capillaries turning to the tumor like flowers turning to the sun.

The capillaries welcome the tumor, did you know that? My wife’s own body, her own blood vessels feed the monster within. Like slaves rushing to a murderous master. It’s an act of self-destruction, cancer is. It is the body’s own mindless suicide.

And you may think you grasp that, but like my children you see it only in the abstract. It’s an idea to you. It’s a dry fact. But it is not yet truth for you.

Walk on the surface of a tumor and then . . .

I created the technology. I created it, you see, but I am not a brave man and never wanted to use it. I thought it was a job I could outsource. I thought there was time.

My great work. My brilliant work. It opened up a whole new world for me. A world of madness and terror and red, red truth.

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