Stephen Dixon - Love and Will - Twenty Stories

He moves the chair from the left side of his window to the right. He turns the chair around to the window and pushes it within inches of the window. He opens a bottle of wine, sits in the chair and drinks while he faces at an angle the now unshaded room. The day gets darker. He can see a big chunk of the sky from here. His phone hasn’t rung, when he’s been in his apartment, for almost two days. Stars come out. Two, three, then a few of them. The bathroom window shade stays down. The light in the bathroom goes on and off a few times in the next two hours. Twice it stayed on for only a few seconds, once for almost a half-hour. He finishes three-quarters of the bottle of wine, has to pee. It’s now night. Many stars are out. He can see the moon’s light but not the moon. The bathroom light hasn’t been turned on for about an hour. If the bathroom is part of the same apartment as the bedroom, he’s sure the woman who likes to shower would have walked into the bedroom by now. Or at least a door would have opened from the bathroom or some other part of the apartment — a hallway — into the bedroom and let some light into it by now. But no light’s come in. A little light from the moon perhaps. But now the bedroom’s almost black. He can’t see anything inside it. He finishes off the bottle. Now he really has to go to the bathroom or he’ll have to do it in his pants right here. Maybe into the bottle, but that would end up being a mess. He tries to hold it in. He doesn’t want to miss that person or persons, if there is more than one person living in that apartment containing that room, discovering the shade up and then pulling it down. And he’s certain it’ll be pulled down. But he can’t hold it in anymore and runs to the bathroom. He takes his watch off the dresser while he’s there. The shade’s still up and the bedroom’s still dark when he gets back. An hour later he has to go to the bathroom again. He runs to it, pees, runs to the kitchen and gets a beer out of the refrigerator, runs back to the chair. Nothing’s changed in that room. He opens the beer, sips, puts it down, wakes up in the chair and finds the shade down but the room still dark. He doesn’t know how long he’s been sleeping in the chair. He should take a walk. He looks at his watch. He can’t make out the luminescent numerals and hands. He squints. Still can’t make them out. He gets up and turns on the side table light. It’s past two. That’s hard to believe, he thinks. He should go to sleep. Maybe have a bite to eat from the food in the refrigerator and a slice of bread and then go to sleep. No, just take off your clothes, pull out the bed and go to sleep.

He gets a disease and suffers from it and dies. Before that Kirt visits him in the hospital several times. Once when Chris went in for tests to see what was giving him so much pain. Other times when he was in the hospital suffering from the disease the tests showed he had, and then the last time the day before he died. Kirt also visited him at home between the times he was in the hospital and also met him at a coffee shop once, but Chris got so sick there that Kirt had to take him to the hospital.

Chris was sitting up in bed the first time Kirt saw him in the hospital. He said “I know I’m very sick, even if they don’t know what I got yet. But it’s not in the head. Meaning it’s not in my mind, because the truth is I think what I got’s going to spread to my head. But that’s not here nor there now. Right now I know I’m very sick in the liver, in the stomach — one of those organs around there and maybe a couple of them. I know it’s going to kill me but I don’t know when. I’m almost sure I won’t be around in a year or so, and my real feeling is I won’t last six months.”

Kirt told him “The worst thing you can do is diagnose yourself. That’s what we have doctors and pathologists and people like that for. Ninety percent of the time the patient’s wrong in his self-diagnosis. What I’ve heard is that about sixty to seventy percent of the time the results from the tests turn out to be much better than what the patient predicted they’d be and that about twenty percent of the time the results aren’t as bad as the patient thought. It’s fear that makes you think it’s worse than it is. Just go through the tests, try not to worry about anything, don’t build things way out of proportion, think you’re going to get well and feel better and that what you have isn’t so bad and in fact is nothing, and your chances of something not being wrong with you will greatly improve. It has something to do with the body’s chemistry, I heard, but don’t ask me to explain what exactly that is or how it works. All I know is that if you think positively about your health, you’re already a few percentage points — maybe even ten to fifteen percentage points — better off than if you think the worst about your physical condition. And eat well, do what the hospital people say, sleep well — all of it adds a percentage point or two to your getting better and staying healthy from then on.”

“No,” Chris said. “I know it’s bad, I know it’s terminal, and I can’t face it. Maybe if I had had years and years to get used to it, but coming so suddenly, I just don’t have the courage to die.”

The next time Kirt saw him was at Chris’s home. He said to Kirt “Well, I got the test results from the doctor this week and I turned out to be absolutely right. What I have is fatal. The word is that people with my disease and in the form it’s taken and rapid way it’s progressed, usually don’t last a year. So, unless a miraculous cure’s discovered in the next few months — and the researchers working on it aren’t even close to one — I’m on my way out for sure. I can’t face it. I’ll never adjust to it. I’m going to get crazier and crazier in the head because of it. Long suffering and then death are the two things I fear most. What should I do? Tell me, you’re smart — what should I do?”

“Think that everything’s going to be all right, and I mean that,” Kirt said. “Think that the doctors, for all they know, could be wrong too. Think that they’ll find that the most important test result that came back was wrong. Or that one of the treatments they give you will work a hundred percent. Or that they will discover a miracle cure for your disease in the next few months and one that will take effect immediately on you. Listen. Even if you told me now that only five percent of those who have your disease survive after a year, think that you’d be one of those five percent. You will live and eventually be healthy, believe me. I know it in my bones and everywhere else inside of me that you’re going to pull through, and you have to believe that too.”

Chris was admitted to the hospital a week later. When Kirt saw him there, Chris was suffering terribly. “Nothing they give me stops the pain,” he said. “The experimental painkiller that was giving me some relief apparently has hurt more people than it’s helped, so they took me off it for the time being till they test it out some more. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. They’re putting me on I.V. Please don’t tell me I’m going to get better. I’ve done nothing the past few months but get worse. If I’m going through this much pain without anything much to alleviate it, what should I expect to come next? I’m also as scared as I ever was not only of dying but of being dead. My brother, who to him spent a considerable sum to fly here, couldn’t take my complaining and morbid talk anymore and flew back to France. You’re in charge of running things for me if you’ll do it. These are my instructions: I want to be kept alive no matter what. Life support systems and experimental drugs and treatments, if the more proven stuff doesn’t work, all the way. In the end, anything they’ve never tried before but want to start on someone, give it a shot on me. Only after I’m flat and out dead do I want the systems turned off. I’ve written all this down and my last wish to you is to carry them out.”