Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

Dr. Zarrani stood stiffly. “I know it seems silly, but studies have shown an improvement in patient recoveries.”

William balked. “What, like through some ancient Shinto magic or something?”

The doctor led them back into the infusion area. “It has to do with the patient being more relaxed and inspired to face the hard work ahead.”

“Aesthetics are important, William,” Irene snapped. “Hence, why I wanted to look nice.”

“You look very nice,” Dr. Zarrani said to her as William raised his hands in apology. “Now take a seat here by this blue… pagoda thing. The nurses will be out soon to begin you on doxorubicin and cisplatin. It takes a few hours, so I hope you brought a good book.”

Irene eyed the nearby Vogue s and Cosmopolitan s suspiciously. She’d read the same ones yesterday in the waiting room.

“I can run out to a bookstore and find you something,” William offered.

“Well…,” Irene said, looking mischievous as she pulled a heavy volume out of her purse. “I took this off your shelf this morning. I hope that’s all right.”

He did look a bit startled at the sight of his copy of the Iliad , the Jacob-disapproved-of Lattimore translation, surely filled with old college notes and underlinings, but he shrugged, not knowing, Irene was sure, that the notes and underlinings were precisely why she wanted to read it.

“Can I wait here with her?” William asked the doctor.

“For eight hours? Don’t be absurd. Go buy your mother something for Christmas. And get some sleep. I know you were wide awake all night.”

William wanted to stay until they started, but Irene wouldn’t hear of it.

“You go or I go,” she said. So William went.

Dr. Zarrani came in to start the drip. “The doxorubicin distorts the shape of the helix, which prevents it from replicating, and then the cisplatin binds the DNA to itself, which triggers a kind of self-destruct order inside your cells.”

Irene felt her nervousness quieting in the comforting hands of the doctor, as she scrubbed the crook of Irene’s elbow with a cotton ball soaked in yellow antiseptic. Irene had thought that they’d inject something into her face, not her arm.

“How do the drugs know to go from there all the way up to my eye?”

“Unfortunately, they don’t,” Dr. Zarrani explained. “Normally we’d do surgery first, but in the interest of not damaging your eye, we’ll start with this and hope it shrinks the tumor a little. The chemo drugs go into your bloodstream and go everywhere. They’ll get the tumor but also everything else.”

Irene sat up straighter in her chair. Not a surgical strike then, she thought, just a full-on scorched-earth policy. And then she remembered her dream from the night before. She’d been crawling, for what seemed like hours and hours, through a barren desert. Finally she’d come across a great black leaf, and she’d hidden in its shade. But once there, safe, something very strange happened. She’d begun to spit, uncontrollably. Great threads of saliva flowed uncontrollably from her mouth, and she’d felt drier than ever as she’d writhed about, trying to stop. Only when she’d thought she’d desiccate completely like a mummy in a tomb did she realize the great threads she’d released weren’t saliva but silk. And while she’d been writhing, she’d inadvertently, or perhaps instinctually, woven this silk into a great shimmering womb, its walls glistening with cool dew. She’d been just about to climb inside and sleep for a thousand years, when she’d woken up on top of William.

“Now this will sting a little bit,” the doctor said.

There was a terrific pinch, and then Irene could feel something alien inside her arm. It would be there for hours, and she would keep on feeling it there, long after.

• • •

William had already found gifts for everyone in his family except his mother. So he stopped at a Salvation Army a few blocks from the hospital, where he spotted an enormous and truly heinous pink vase covered in golden chrysanthemum blossoms, on sale for five dollars. The gift itself wasn’t as important as how little he’d paid for it. Any present that came from a retail store she’d return later and then complain about how much money he’d spent. Always she had seen the exact same item for a tenth of the price at some church sale just a few weeks earlier.

As a boy, he had once spotted a beautiful silk kimono on sale at the gift shop of the Guggenheim, where he was taken on a class trip to see an exhibit on Eastern Art. He’d sold his collection of Aqualad comic books to Mi-cha Yu so he could buy it. But then Christmas morning arrived and his mother opened the gift. “What is this?” she’d asked, so he’d told her, “A kimono” and she’d given him a withering look. “Kimonos are Japanese. We are Korean .” She’d dragged him all the way back to the Upper East Side to return it, but since the Eastern Art had gone out and the Monets had come in, they no longer stocked the kimonos. Furious, his mother had flung it deep into a guest-room closet, where it hung still.

William walked down Third Avenue with the vase under one arm for blocks and blocks, trudging over the snow that was still unshoveled in many places. As cold as he was, William kept on walking without fully thinking about just where he was heading, though his feet seemed to have some idea. The storefronts were quiet; the roads were empty. It wasn’t often, he thought, that you got to have the city to yourself.

By the time he realized where his feet were taking him, he was far closer to Fourth Street than to the hospital, where he knew he ought to turn around and go. Something about the way that she had taken his Iliad off the shelf had struck him, as if it actually belonged to her. Without thinking, he had found himself lifting the keys from her purse while the doctor had been explaining the chemotherapy to her. He’d thought he could surprise her — run inside, despite the bug-bombing, and bravely grab a bag of clothes to wear to dinner that evening. She couldn’t show up wearing William’s old blue jeans and a necklace made from a curtain chain. As he came down Avenue A toward her block, he told himself that she’d be delighted.

But by the time he got to her building, he knew he was kidding himself. Irene would surely not appreciate what he was about to do, but his mind was unquiet with questions. Where was she from, and why had she run away? The thought that maybe she had been abused, or worse, was difficult to push aside — even though she’d assured him it hadn’t been that. Who was “Alis-ahh”? Had he even heard her properly? Was she one of these girls that she claimed to have slept with?

Irene’s building was a crumbling brownstone with trash cans around the entrance that were chained up and overflowing. The ground floor windows were covered with boards, and the boards were covered in long-faded concert posters. He opened the door and walked up three flights of crooked stairs; the railing became more bent the higher he climbed. Hadn’t she said her whole building was being fumigated? There was no sign on the front door, and he could hear people in the other apartments. He climbed all the way to the fifth floor and came to her door, expecting to find a department of health sticker, or caution tape on the knob, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. The cheap vase still tucked under his left arm, he slowly unlocked the door and stepped into Irene’s apartment.

Looking around, William could see haphazardly discarded blankets and workout clothes heaped on the floors and over the top of the bathroom door. The apartment was filthy, from the overfilled sink to the paint-peeled ceiling. He stepped over the remains of a Sunday Observer and several brown boxes filled with flea market objects: glittering marbles, rusty doorknobs, a tangle of wiring, old movable type letters, several novelty wristwatches, bookends shaped like cartoon faces, dozens of Barbie dolls still in their individual packages, empty mirror frames, children’s soccer trophies, and a plethora of silk flowers. He was just about to ask himself what on earth it was all for when he saw the far end of the room.