I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on. I didn’t feel nauseous and I wasn’t in any pain. I didn’t have any buildup of phlegm or odd-colored feces. It was completely different from both my childhood illness and the time my mother slipped rat poison into my food. I just felt a little off-kilter, a similar feeling to the one I had when I realized four months late that I’d forgotten my own birthday. But was there really nothing physically wrong with me? Well, there was one thing, though it was more odd than anything else. I detected a faint, strange odor rising out of my skin. Very faint. Hardly an odor at all, really. Sometimes I couldn’t smell it. But other times I caught a whiff and yelled out, “There it is again!”
One morning I worked out what it was.
Anyone with an overactive imagination, in particular a perversely negative one, need never be surprised by anything. The imagination absolutely can catch out imminent disasters as they’re warming up, especially if you keep your nostrils open. People who can accurately read the future: are they gifted at seeing or gifted at guessing? This is just what my imagination did that morning. It saw all the possible tomorrows, then narrowed them down in a short instant to only one. That one I spoke aloud: “Fuck me! I’ve got a terminal disease!”
I guessed further- cancer. It had to be cancer; it couldn’t be anything other than cancer, because it was always cancer that haunted my waking nightmares, ever since I saw my mother devoured by that king of diseases. Even if you fear death on a daily basis, there are certain deaths that you dismiss- scurvy, giant squid, falling piano- but no one with a brain cell left rattling in his head can ever dismiss cancer.
So! This was it! Death! I always knew that one day my body would kick the shit out of me! My whole life I’d felt like a lone soldier trapped in hostile territory. Everywhere were enemies to my cause- back, legs, kidneys, lungs, heart- and they would eventually conclude that the only way to kill me was a kamikaze mission. All of us were going down.
I rushed out of the house and drove fast out of the labyrinth. Speeding through the green suburbs, I was horrified to see that everything was bathed in gorgeous summer sunlight. Of course it was- nothing brings out sunshine faster than cancer. I took myself straight to the doctor’s. I hadn’t been for years and I went to the one closest to my house. I needed any doctor, just as long as he wasn’t too fat (one must be as suspicious of obese doctors as of bald hairdressers). I didn’t need him to be a genius either; I just needed him to confirm what I already knew. DR. P. SWEENY the brass plaque said on the door. I sprinted into his office. It was dark inside, the dark of a room in which everything is brown: the furniture, the carpet, the doctor’s mood. Brown. He was there drumming his fingers on his desk, a middle-aged man with a placid expression and a full head of thick brown hair. He was one of those men who never go bald, who go to the grave needing a haircut.
“I’m Dr. Peter Sweeny,” he said.
“I know you’re a doctor. You don’t have to wave it in my face. Don’t you know the title is only useful for directing mail, to distinguish you from all the unpretentious Mr. Peter Sweenys of the world?”
The doctor reclined his head a couple of millimeters, as if I had been spitting.
“Sorry,” I said, “I guess I’m a little stressed out. So what if you call yourself doctor? You worked hard for the right to plunge your hand inside the human body! Elbow deep in viscera all day, maybe you want to let everyone know you’re a doctor so they won’t offer you offal or a plate of haggis. What right have I to cast judgment on a man’s prefix?”
“You seem pretty wound up, there. What can I do for you?”
“I’m pretty sure I have cancer,” I said. “And I just want you to do whatever you have to do to confirm or deny it.”
“What kind of cancer do you think you have?”
“What kind? I don’t know. What’s the worst sort?”
“Well, prostate cancer’s the most common for men in your age bracket.”
“You’re the same age as me!”
“OK-our age bracket.”
“Well, my cancer won’t be the most common, that much I can tell you. What’s the worst one? And I mean the absolute worst.”
“Do you smoke?”
“Sometimes.”
“If I smoked, the cancer I wouldn’t want for myself, for fear of kicking myself all the way to the grave, is lung cancer.”
“Lung cancer. I knew it! That’s the one. That’s what I’ve got.”
“You seem pretty certain.”
“I am certain.”
Even though he was obscured behind his desk, he made a shift as though he’d put his hand on his hip. “All right,” he said finally, “I’ll order the tests. They aren’t pleasant.”
“Neither is lung cancer.”
“You’re right about that.”
I won’t detail the weeks that followed- the intrusive tests, the cruel waiting periods, the stomach-pummeling anxiety. Of course Jasper didn’t notice anything, but Anouk sensed something was wrong. She kept hounding me to tell her what it was, but I was tight-lipped about it. I wanted to be 100 percent sure before I told anyone. I didn’t want to get their hopes up.
It was a month later when I went back to Dr. Sweeny’s office to hear the results. In the waiting period I had been plagued with hope, and nothing I could do could put those pesky optimistic feelings to rest.
“Come in, Mr. Dean. How are you feeling?”
“Let’s not waste time. It’s cancer, isn’t it?”
“It sure is.”
In the old days the medical profession didn’t tell you that you were dying. It was considered a breach of ethics. Now the reverse is true. Now they can’t wait to tell you.
“Lung cancer?”
“I’m afraid so. How did you know?”
Christ! It was true! I was being murdered by my own body! I burst out laughing.
Then I stopped laughing- I remembered why I had started.
I left the doctor’s office in a daze. So! It turned out my lifelong pessimistic stance was entirely justified. Imagine if I had been optimistic all this time! Wouldn’t I be feeling ripped off right about now? Yes, I was in for a slow, violent death. And I don’t sleep peacefully, so dying peacefully in my sleep was out of the question. The best I could hope for was that maybe I’d die fitfully in my sleep. Oh my God- suddenly all the other possible deaths had slipped into the unlikely. How often does a man dying of cancer suddenly choke to death on a chicken bone? Or get decapitated by jumping up and down on his bed, forgetful of the ceiling fan? Or die from asbestos poisoning or obesity? No, there just wasn’t enough time to get really, fatally fat. If anything, my illness was probably going to make me thinner.
Over the following weeks I was an emotional wreck. The slightest thing sent me into tears. I cried at television ads, at the autumn leaves turning brown. One night Jasper came in and caught me sobbing over the death of some idiotic pop star I’d never even heard of. He’d been shot in the head and died instantly, lucky bastard!
What made me cry was the fear that I’d be unable to kill myself when my quality of life dropped below par, when my daily task became choosing between pain and painkillers, between the ravages of the disease and the destruction of the treatment. Even with my lifelong meditation on death, my existence had still seemed something permanent and stable on the planet Earth- something dependable, like igneous rock. Now that cancers were metastasizing to their heart’s content, atheism seemed like a pretty cruel thing to do to myself. I begged my brain to reconsider. I thought: Won’t I survive somewhere, in some form? Can I believe it? Please? Pretty please can I believe in the everlasting soul? In heaven or angels or paradise with sixteen beautiful virgins waiting for me? Pretty please can I believe that? Look, I don’t even need the sixteen beautiful virgins. There could be just one woman, old and ugly, and she doesn’t even have to be a virgin, she could be the town bike of the ever-after. In fact, there could be no women at all, and it doesn’t have to be paradise, it could be a wasteland- hell, it could even be hell, because while suffering the torments of a lake of fire, at least I’d be around to yell “Ouch!” Could I believe in that, please?