Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

Sifting through the videocassettes, the Mother wonders what science fiction could begin to compete with the science fiction of cancer itself — a tumor with its differentiated muscle and bone cells, a clump of wild nothing and its mad, ambitious desire to be something: something inside you, instead of you, another organism, but with a monster’s architecture, a demon’s sabotage and chaos. Think of leukemia, a tumor diabolically taking liquid form, better to swim about incognito in the blood. George Lucas, direct that!

Sitting with the other parents in the Tiny Tim Lounge, the night before the surgery, having put the Baby to bed in his high steel crib two rooms down, the Mother begins to hear the stories: leukemia in kindergarten, sarcomas in Little League, neuroblastomas discovered at summer camp. “Eric slid into third base, but then the scrape didn’t heal.” The parents pat one another’s forearms and speak of other children’s hospitals as if they were resorts. “You were at St. Jude’s last winter? So were we. What did you think of it? We loved the staff.” Jobs have been quit, marriages hacked up, bank accounts ravaged; the parents have seemingly endured the unendurable. They speak not of the possibility of comas brought on by the chemo, but of the number of them. “He was in his first coma last July,” says Ned’s mother. “It was a scary time, but we pulled through.”

Pulling through is what people do around here. There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn’t bravery at all. It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess — an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow? “Everyone admires us for our courage,” says one man. “They have no idea what they’re talking about.”

I could get out of here, thinks the Mother. I could just get on a bus and go, never come back. Change my name. A kind of witness relocation thing.

“Courage requires options,” the man adds.

The Baby might be better off.

“There are options,” says a woman with a thick suede headband. “You could give up. You could fall apart.”

“No, you can’t. Nobody does. I’ve never seen it,” says the man. “Well, not really fall apart.” Then the lounge falls quiet. Over the VCR someone has taped the fortune from a fortune cookie. “Optimism,” it says, “is what allows a teakettle to sing though up to its neck in hot water.” Underneath, someone else has taped a clipping from a summer horoscope. “Cancer rules!” it says. Who would tape this up? Somebody’s twelve-year-old brother. One of the fathers — Joey’s father — gets up and tears them both off, makes a small wad in his fist.

There is some rustling of magazine pages.

The Mother clears her throat. “Tiny Tim forgot the wet bar,” she says.

Ned, who is still up, comes out of his room and down the corridor, whose lights dim at nine. Standing next to her chair, he says to the Mother, “Where are you from? What is wrong with your baby?”

In the tiny room that is theirs, she sleeps fitfully in her sweatpants, occasionally leaping up to check on the Baby. This is what the sweatpants are for: leaping. In case of fire. In case of anything. In case the difference between day and night starts to dissolve, and there is no difference at all, so why pretend? In the cot beside her, the Husband, who has taken a sleeping pill, is snoring loudly, his arms folded about his head in a kind of origami. How could either of them have stayed back at the house, with its empty high chair and empty crib? Occasionally the Baby wakes and cries out, and she bolts up, goes to him, rubs his back, rearranges the linens. The clock on the metal dresser shows that it is five after three. Then twenty to five. And then it is really morning, the beginning of this day, nephrectomy day. Will she be glad when it’s over, or barely alive, or both? Each day this week has arrived huge, empty, and unknown, like a spaceship, and this one especially is lit a bright gray.

“He’ll need to put this on,” says John, one of the nurses, bright and early, handing the Mother a thin greenish garment with roses and teddy bears printed on it. A wave of nausea hits her; this smock, she thinks, will soon be splattered with — with what?

The Baby is awake but drowsy. She lifts off his pajamas. “Don’t forget, bubeleh ,” she whispers, undressing and dressing him. “We will be with you every moment, every step. When you think you are asleep and floating off far away from everybody, Mommy will still be there.” If she hasn’t fled on a bus. “Mommy will take care of you. And Daddy, too.” She hopes the Baby does not detect her own fear and uncertainty, which she must hide from him, like a limp. He is hungry, not having been allowed to eat, and he is no longer amused by this new place, but worried about its hardships. Oh, my baby, she thinks. And the room starts to swim a little. The Husband comes in to take over. “Take a break,” he says to her. “I’ll walk him around for five minutes.”

She leaves but doesn’t know where to go. In the hallway, she is approached by a kind of social worker, a customer-relations person, who had given them a video to watch about the anesthesia: how the parent accompanies the child into the operating room, and how gently, nicely the drugs are administered.

“Did you watch the video?”

“Yes,” says the Mother.

“Wasn’t it helpful?”

“I don’t know,” says the Mother.

“Do you have any questions?” asks the video woman. “Do you have any questions?” asked of someone who has recently landed in this fearful, alien place seems to the Mother an absurd and amazing little courtesy. The very specificity of a question would give a lie to the overwhelming strangeness of everything around her.

“Not right now,” says the Mother. “Right now, I think I’m just going to go to the bathroom.”

When she returns to the Baby’s room, everyone is there: the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, all the nurses, the social worker. In their blue caps and scrubs, they look like a clutch of forget-me-nots, and forget them, who could? The Baby, in his little teddy-bear smock, seems cold and scared. He reaches out and the Mother lifts him from the Husband’s arms, rubs his back to warm him.

“Well, it’s time!” says the Surgeon, forcing a smile.

“Shall we go?” says the Anesthesiologist.

What follows is a blur of obedience and bright lights. They take an elevator down to a big concrete room, the anteroom, the greenroom, the backstage of the operating room. Lining the walls are long shelves full of blue surgical outfits. “Children often become afraid of the color blue,” says one of the nurses. But of course. Of course! “Now, which one of you would like to come into the operating room for the anesthesia?”

“I will,” says the Mother.

“Are you sure?” asks the Husband.

“Yup.” She kisses the Baby’s hair. “Mr. Curlyhead,” people keep calling him here, and it seems both rude and nice. Women look admiringly at his long lashes and exclaim, “Always the boys! Always the boys!”

Two surgical nurses put a blue smock and a blue cotton cap on the Mother. The Baby finds this funny and keeps pulling at the cap. “This way,” says another nurse, and the Mother follows. “Just put the Baby down on the table.”

In the video, the mother holds the baby and fumes are gently waved under the baby’s nose until he falls asleep. Now, out of view of camera or social worker, the Anesthesiologist is anxious to get this under way and not let too much gas leak out into the room generally. The occupational hazard of this, his chosen profession, is gas exposure and nerve damage, and it has started to worry him. No doubt he frets about it to his wife every night. Now he turns the gas on and quickly clamps the plastic mouthpiece over the baby’s cheeks and lips.