Charles Bock - Alice & Oliver

Alice smiled. Then her façade collapsed.

“A donor will come through,” Tilda assured. She wrapped her arms around Alice’s shoulders. “Oliver got the insurance taken care of, right? That was huge. Now they’ll find this. It will get solved.”

Alice sniffed, looked up at her friend.

“It’s impossible to explain,” said Alice. “How tired I am of being less than myself.”

Both women considered her words. Soon, Oliver would as well, noticing that Alice had absorbed the sentence into her repartee, repeating it, verbatim, to at least four other guests.

Sparrow was the last of them. The healer listened, gave a slight nod, then searched inside her brightly beaded shoulder bag. A bronze figurine about the size of a baseball. The healer placed it into Alice’s palm. Cool to the touch, carrying a surprising weight. “A common misconception is that a bodhisattva is some kind of god,” Sparrow said. “But a bodhisattva is just a mortal who has spiritually advanced into a being of enlightenment.”

Alice examined the figurine, running her fingers along its grooves, into its nooks. A first glance could easily mistake it for a tree. With closer study, Alice realized it was something else: growing out of that stout, crooked trunk was a stout female figure. Her face showed large eyes, three of them. Arm after arm rose from out of her trunk like branches, or perhaps a peacock’s fan.

“Guanyin is one of the four great bodhisattvas,” Sparrow said. “Translated from Sankskrit, the name means: observing the cries of the world . She embodies pure compassion. But there were too many beings she couldn’t save. She watched armies of souls stream into the gates of the underworld. She tried to reach for them, but was so disheartened, her arms shattered into a thousand pieces. Buddha Amitabha aided her, transforming those pieces into a thousand arms, that she might reach out to those in need.”

Sparrow sat up, onto her knees, was directly across from Alice, facing her on the bed. “I have a meditation exercise.”

She ordered Alice to sit up, helped her into a facsimile of a lotus.

“Trust me, this has very good results. I want you to look at the hands on the figure Guanyin. On the palm of each hand is an eye. See that? The plumage of a thousand arms each looks in a direction. Each arm takes in the suffering of others. When you are unhappy, when your lot is too unfair, or too hard for you, I want you to be an arm of Guanyin. Close your eyes and stare in the direction of suffering. Slow down. Back straight if you can. Imagine a young mother in sub-Saharan Africa. She has a family and is starving and is experiencing the same illness as you. Keep breathing now.”

Alice opened her eyes and made contact, wanting to follow orders, but also skeptical.

“When you inhale,” Sparrow continued, “I want you to take in the breadth of that mother’s pain. Take in that family’s pain. Now exhale, release, let all that pain go. Your sitting lotus is very strong. Excellent. And now we become another arm of Guanyin. Ready?”

Whitman Memorial, 1220 York Ave., Hematology/Oncology, Rm. 421A

Nearly eleven pounds, the size of a healthy baby on the plump side. Only this was lodged inside his face, encompassing nearly all of his jawbone. The tumor didn’t respond to a number of treatments, so his final option was taking out the mandible joint and nearly all of his lower jawbone.

He was under the knife for more than sixteen hours and the surgery worked — the removal of the hinge helped the jaw to slide out — but the doctors also had to remove his tongue, and the membrane inside his cheek, and his lower lip. It took months before the wrappings and gauze came off, and more months before the swelling and bruising went down — and then his best friends and loved ones saw him. His sister struggled to keep a neutral expression, but he could tell she was horrified, fighting back tears. He couldn’t say anything in return. That part of his life — the speaking part — was now behind him.

And chewing. No lower jaw meant he was done with chewing, too. A tube, surgically inserted into his esophagus, flowed liquid baby formula nutrition down past his stomach, into something called the jejunum. No more flavors — their savoring, their enjoyment. He wouldn’t ever recoil from a jolt of unexpected bitterness. Not being hungry was about as good as he got. He was learning to make do with that, the pleasure of fullness. It was an adjustment. He was doing better at some parts than others. There were tastes and flavors out there that could not be satiated. Never again would he kiss his dog, let alone the proverbial cute girl he hadn’t yet met, but who was out there, waiting for just him. Dating in the city had been hard enough with a full face. His life hadn’t even started in a way that felt like it mattered. Young couples were always getting out of the city for a weekend, taking a weekend in Hudson at some quaint bed-and-breakfast. Lazy mornings in bed. Cozy brunch spots with bright yellow eggs, thick, sizzling bacon, all sourced from local farms. It sounded so simple, and it was impossible now.

He still could laugh, though, even if his laughter was different… off. He didn’t make any sound, the way normal people did. Instead his whole body vibrated, and his breathing got clipped, the air coming out in short explosions. It could be kind of painful. His sister lived in the city. Sometimes she’d visit after a day of teaching pre-K, spend the night with him, correcting homework and doing lesson plans. She might tell him about something one of the squirts did, sitting all day learning his letters, jolly in heavy, soiled diaper. He’d start his laughing and shaking. That first time, she freaked out, tensing up, wanting to know what was wrong, if she should get a nurse. Nowadays she was used to it though. Now and then, his shakes even got her giggling. He’d laugh and shake and she’d laugh and her chest and cheeks might get red. She went and imitated him once, shaking on her own in her chair. The two of them laughing and shaking together and he couldn’t even tell you why.

THE ORIGINAL IDEA — JUST dump all the text from other word-processing programs into a blank field — had revealed itself as asinine. Dumping text sounded simple, but actually doing it meant incorporating every other programming code — lifting and carrying the words and symbols while still keeping intact all the formatting commands, something akin to transporting a body of water — a lake, say — into a larger body of water, one bucket at a time. Actually, it was worse — transporting the body of water, but then having to reconstruct it, putting every single drop in its prior location. Oliver had to do this inside the Generii field. The water wasn’t going to stay in place. Not a chance.

Glitches and fuckery were perpetual: a minute typo sent the cursor careening, or created a second cursor, which went careening. Merging paragraphs from different programs demolished all margin settings, resulting in impossibly long vertical lines of language. No end was in sight, although it was also true, inside the reams of confusion, pockets of joy were available: solving the solvable, fixing the tedious. Five hours knocking items off your never-ending list of mistakes, that had its own perverse jolt. And there were worse feelings than ending the day with the sense that maybe, if you kept fixing, this thing could actually get done.

Oliver adjusted the angle of the desk light, called up his master file, stared at the green strings of data.