Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

Maybe I could just tell my friends to buy the merch. The girlfriend designed the merch. The hoodie was cute — it had a silkscreened PET scan of Jamie’s most recent tumor, with a universal No symbol slashed through it. You could toast Jamie’s survival with “Immuno Suppress This, Bitch” shot glasses. There would be karaoke at the fund-raiser, and the couple was already taking duet requests via e-Jukebox. Each song cost a dollar. My fund-raising skills didn’t really seem needed.

“What can I do?” I asked him. I pictured myself grocery shopping after his next surgery, making pharmacy runs to several different pharmacies until I found the anti-inflammatory he needed to counteract whatever gene therapy had inflamed. He didn’t get bald from this therapy, and he looked pretty good, though sometimes lymph leaked out of his groin.

“Just be you,” he wrote.

Being me didn’t pay for cancer treatment. The newest trials had promise, but there weren’t enough survivors of Jamie’s cancer for a walk celebrating those who’d survived. Walks were for the lucky cancers, the lipstick cancers, though even within those cancers, the unlucky could be shunned, kicked off a survivors’ board if the disease recurred or they died. I’d heard of this happening in my Long Island town. Beating cancer was more Girl Scouts, but instead of cookies, you had to sell continuing to live. Instead of badges, you got those pink baseball caps, the ones that all seemed to be for the same team no matter whose logo they printed on them. It was offensive to baseball. Jamie’s cancer was vigil cancer, forget-the-color-of-the-ribbon cancer, and would Jamie’s blogging be enough to change it to a walking kind? Were words enough? He started posting more photos — him grinning beside an IV drip, the health insurance wedding at City Hall.

“Who’s the lucky lady?” wrote Julie, obviously not following the blog closely enough to know that the lucky lady was one former spork. I felt, as a fellow Bestie, that Julie might not be as committed. I emailed, asked what she was doing for the fund-raiser.

“We’re making cookies,” she wrote. “Me and Rose.”

Who the hell was Rose? I hadn’t seen her in the comments. There was always another girl, with a name like a flower, coming up right behind your nearest rival to nothing.

—

I LOOKED for the cookie booth as soon as I arrived. The fund-raiser was in a music hall that liked to throw parties for the season finales of bourgeois television shows. If it was a period drama, people would show up in period costume and pretend to be as hard-drinking as the show’s characters. If it was an office comedy, people would wear their most depressing work clothes. At this party, we all dressed as Jamie. I saw the wife right away, wearing the T-shirt, the bracelet, the hoodie, the hat. She’d married into the whole outfit. Julie and her friend were just wearing the T-shirts, tucked into some skirts, but their cookies were warm. Rose asked how I knew Jamie.

“ISTB,” I said. I’d coined the blog’s abbreviation on the spot. The friend didn’t care, was just being friendly behind the baked goods, but Julie was paying attention.

“How do you earn the bracelets?” she asked. I was wearing three.

“He just gives them to his friends.”

This was a lie. Everyone got a bracelet. They were in a basket by the door, like condoms.

“Oatmeal raisin brigade!” shouted Jamie. He grabbed a warm cookie without paying, then got into a group hug with all of us.

“These are fantastic,” he said. “I’m really glad you came, Captain.”

The hug was group, perhaps photo-op group, but inside this hug, his body was alive against my body. New options — divorce, survival — presented themselves. Flash went off and Jamie shook himself out of our hug, gave uploading instructions to the camera guy.

“I didn’t make these,” I said, to bring him back to the cookie moment. “But I was aware that they were being made.”

“You guys are fantastic!” he said, then turned to tell the people who’d made almond bread that they were fantastic. A microphone was being tested, perhaps for karaoke. Someone had spelled out “Jamie Beans for the Cure” with jelly beans.

The whole place had a heady-early-days-of-AIDS feel. Sickness, death, loomed, but the Immuno-Suppress-This-Bitch-a-thon was about concerned members of our community making a difference for one member of our community. Or so Jamie said, thanking us and Big Pharma for keeping him alive, before launching into a rap about kicking Big Pharma’s immunosuppressive ass. The rap noted that he was white, to great laughter. Were we laughing because he was white? Because he was sick? Because he was not really a rapper?

“These bracelets are made in China,” said someone by the dip. I was drawing patterns in the hummus with a community-garden carrot. I drew a smiley. Someone was willing to call it as they saw it. The bracelets weren’t local. They came from the same place that made cancer bracelets for all the cancers. That place was apparently China. The Chinese were manufacturing our hope for the cure. Someone could post this on a blog as evidence of America’s decline. People could link to the post, comment on it, then get angry at one another’s mutual friends.

The local band was doing sound check. We were all getting ready to like them no matter what, for the fund-raiser. Audience friends nodded and said the last happy thing before a band starts playing, oblivious to the anger they would feel the next day on a comment wall. I saw Jamie, already wrapped around his wife from behind, the vanguard of concert snugglers, the two of them grinning the grins of organizers who appreciate everyone coming out, who’ve just put their mics back into the mic stand and are now ready to aggressively enjoy music.

Was I being unfair? Who was I to begrudge the terminally ill their right to concert-snuggle smugly? The healthy were wrapped. Man hands above girlfriend hips. I had never gotten to do this, no matter how good the band, but I wasn’t maybe dying really soon. Dying was going to take me a while.

The local band made life seem longer. Minutes went by where I wasn’t sure if the rest of the music was worth whatever had happened here. Normally in the presence of lack of greatness, I would focus on the bassist’s arms, the drummer’s shoulders, the differences between their T-shirts, but they were all wearing the same T-shirt. They ended their set by bringing Jamie back onstage and handing him a large guitar. He did the multiple encores we had to ask him for.

“Let’s go backstage!” There was Julie in her extra-small tee, wriggling a cancer bracelet over her fingers. I wasn’t sure if she wanted Jamie or just the fast friendship of groupie-dom.

“But it’s time for the dance-a-thon,” I said.

“He said he has something for us,” she said.

I pictured bongs with Jamie’s face on them, joints with cancer ribbons wrapped around them. I hoped it was pot. I needed perspective.

Julie rushed us past what should have been a bouncer, but was just another girl collecting raffle tickets.

“Thanks,” she said, to no one.

We entered a room with mirrors on the ceiling. Guys in the band were dragging their instruments across the floor. Jamie had taken his shirt off. Tattoos I knew well from pictures were right in front of me. A phallic spray of flowers erupted over his shoulder blade. Lupine. I had read about his wildflower identification hobby. His wife was kneading the tattoo like a boxing coach, or a geisha. It was time to give the wife some attention.

“You guys met doing karaoke?” I said. Jamie had told the story of their meeting in his first-date-anniversary blog post and on three different social media sites. Maybe it would be different live.