Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

After a minute Irene said, “Do me one favor?”

“Anything.”

“Tell Sara while I’m asleep.”

Dr. Zarrani said she’d be glad to and to page the nurse when she gets here. Then she hugged Irene firmly, like an aunt, and excused herself.

When she was gone, Irene leaned over to the side table and scooped up the mascara-stained tissues. She slipped them into a Baggie and hid them deep down inside her overnight bag.

Irene wasn’t disappointed. It reminded her of when she’d signed up to run a half marathon and was limping and staggering through the tenth mile alone when it had begun to pour torrentially, and an organizer pulled her aside to say that the race had been called off. To not have to finish, in that moment, was more than Irene could have thanked him for.

When Sara arrived an hour later, Irene paged the nurse and then pretended to fall asleep. At some point she must have actually fallen asleep, or slipped into the haze of the morphine drip, for she awoke with a start to the sound of Sara’s voice, demanding explanations. What had gone wrong? How could it have been avoided? What could they have done differently? Already conducting the postmortem. Irene knew that for herself, there were too many what-ifs to count. If she hadn’t ignored it for so long. If she hadn’t hidden the second tumor before the trip. If she had made more of an effort to keep her strength up. If, if, if, if…

Of course Sara still refused to give up the fight. “We’ll see another doctor. We should have done that months ago. She’s going to beat this. I know you think it’s all bullshit, but we’re in the middle of a very promising alternative therapy.”

Irene nearly snorted. No way in hell was she still drinking that wheatgrass-algae juice. The week before, William had brought her another bottle of Bollinger Blanc under his coat (paid for, this time), but she hadn’t been able to taste it at all. The same with the bowl of pasta George had brought, covered in Momma Murphy’s marinara sauce (shipped on dry ice, special). That had actually scalded every sore in her esophagus. It all made her wish she’d known it was hopeless back in June. Then she might have really enjoyed those last, disappointing months instead of wasting them trying to make the inevitable evitable.

Irene waited until Sara finished a series of tearful phone calls to George, Jacob, and William before she pretended to wake up. She’d hoped that, maybe by that point, Sara would be cried out. But of course Sara started all over again when she saw Irene’s eyes open. Nice try , Irene thought to herself, as she sat there, consoling her friend over the fact of her own death.

George came later and, like Sara, urged Irene not to give up. And so began the process of getting Irene well enough to go home for a little while before beginning the work of dying in earnest. Though she had more trouble moving or breathing with each passing day, George encouraged her to walk laps around the eleventh floor at seven a.m. It took twenty minutes to do one lap: about fifty yards up the hall and another fifty back. They could usually get two in before he had to kiss her goodbye and report to work. Only as the residual chemistry of the treatments left her system did Irene feel a bit better but also a little shorter of breath. Sara came every morning at eight and sat by Irene’s bedside until eleven-thirty p.m. They watched TV, and mostly Irene tried to sleep or read William’s copy of The Iliad, which she was still hoping to finish.

On that last, chilly Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, William brought her a pumpkin latte. He had gotten up at five and gone all the way down to East Fourth Street to get one from Irene’s old coffee shop there — because she had mentioned once how it was always the start of fall to her, and she liked to celebrate by taking the first cold day in November to put on her winter coat and buy a pumpkin latte and wander through the West Village looking for Christmas presents for everyone, always eventually getting hopelessly lost in one of those terrible diagonal intersections, where Sixth somehow crosses Bleecker and Downing and Minetta — or in the nexus between Seventh and Barrow and Commerce. It was her favorite part of the city, messy because it was original, made before the orderly grid above it had been imagined. Blocks of triangular madness in the otherwise rectangular city.

“I got lost for about ten minutes on Perry,” William told her, putting the paper cup on a tray near her hand. “It’s all loose ends down there.”

He kissed her clammy forehead and held her hand. She felt a wave of sleep about to come over her, the likes of which no pumpkin latte could fend off, if she’d even been able to swallow anything in the first place.

“Where’s my birdcage?” she asked him suddenly.

“Your… we put that in storage, remember?”

Her eyes would barely stay open. She had to think very hard about the shape her lips should take to form the words. She tried to say something else, but it was no good. A moment later she couldn’t remember what she had wanted to say anyway.

“The nurses are saying that if you’re up for it, they’ll let you leave for a few hours so you can come over for Thanksgiving. Sara’s doing a thing at my place.”

For days Sara had been flipping through Cook’s Illustrated and Martha Stewart and The Joy of Cooking , describing mouthwatering dishes to Irene to try to motivate her: a crown roast of lamb chops with whipped potatoes and slivered green beans. An icebox zebra cake for dessert. Irene didn’t begrudge Sara this. She had been desperate to keep busy, now that Irene’s needs were being met by the nurses at Mount Sinai, and she and George had officially given up thinking about the wedding until things “got settled.” She’d given notice at the Journal , planning to look for a new job in Boston after the spring semester started and George became a genuine Harvard professor.

That day — the day before Thanksgiving — Sara had shown up at eight in the morning. She had to leave at noon, she told Irene. “But don’t worry, George as always is coming for the whole afternoon. I need him out of the kitchen anyway.”

“I don’t need babysitting,” Irene said. “He should help you carry bags at least.”

“Oh, he’d only slow me down. And I’ll be back by nine and stay until eleven. Don’t worry.”

Irene hadn’t been worried. In fact, she wished that Sara would not come back at nine or stay until eleven. She wished they’d all go on with their own lives and not spend their own precious hours sitting there waiting for her to die.

It was while George was watching her that afternoon that Irene made up her mind to save them all from any more trouble. He’d been reading to her from the Iliad, getting pretty animated as he sipped contraband bourbon from a hospital Dixie cup. Irene promised not to tell Sara on the condition that he let her have a sip. It burned her throat like a forest fire, but it was a refreshing pinch against the sweet, steady stream of morphine that kept easing her further out.

As George read the final battle between Achilles and Hector, he got sweaty and loud. When it was over and Hector was defeated, Irene began to cry. She hadn’t cried since well before Dr. Zarrani had told her the treatments were a bust. Somehow she found it far easier to weep over poor Hector, and the way Achilles was pulling his corpse around the camp with his chariot before leaving it face-down in the dust until he felt like dragging it around again. A better description of her own recent weeks Irene couldn’t imagine.

George read about Apollo coming down and wrapping Hector in his golden shield so that his skin wouldn’t rip… and then swearing at his fellow gods (and here George got up on his chair and shook his hand up at the drop ceiling), “‘Hard-hearted you are, you gods, you live for cruelty! Did Hector never burn in your honor thighs of oxen and flawless, full-grown goats? Now you cannot bring yourselves to save him — even his corpse—’” and then George dropped the book when Nurse Darren came in and told him to get down or go the hell home. He resumed, more quietly, a moment later.