the truth about cancer
The grass in the backyard needs to be cut. He used to mow it every week. Now the hose just lies there, semi-unraveled, wild and stringy like a floppy bone.
I try to picture what a bone marrow transplant looks like in my head. Do they take out all the poisoned marrow first? I picture the bone de-flating-- a popped balloon. It's a red garden hose lying in an unkempt lawn. I picture my Mom sitting in the waiting room while a doctor puts a pearl-colored balloon up to his lips. It takes two months to blow it all the way up and when it is, it's a new bone. Then they cut him up and put in the new one.
I try to picture what it is going to be like for him not to have a spleen. Will he inherit a weird new laugh? Will he start crying at inappropriate things? I picture us all a month from now, driving by an apartment building. A small, orange cat sits in the window cleaning its paws. He bursts into tears-- a common side effect of spleenectomies is unpredictable bouts of emotion at the sight of small, orange cats, the hospital-release papers will say. Like an allergy warning on a box of cereal.
I try to picture California sliding away from the rest of the United States. There is an earthquake in my chest. I know the ground is there, but there are pictures on the wall and a vase full of sunflowers on the table. I never know what is going to fall off and when. Sometimes I'm breathing and I become aware of each breath. How the air shakes around inside me. My Mother and I trade turns being the hypersensitive bitch and he is quiet. He can't show fear-- his emotions are too precious to him and he only shares them with himself.
He is the one with leukemia and lymphoma but we all have it too. We inhale the toxins every day. It breeds, this phantom tumor. It spills like mean milk all over our heart-floors. We are all too busy staring at the Alphabet canal painting on the wall to see if it is going to fall over, so nobody cleans up the mess. It just stays there until it permeates the rug and every time we walk into that room something smells sour but nobody can say quite what it is.