Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Machinery (8)

(July, 2002)

I'm standing in the middle of my bedroom, naked and soaking wet, reaching for the telephone. I'm shivering, not because I'm cold but because I know it's my mother on the other line and I know why she's calling.

If the phone rings when I'm getting ready for work, it means my mother is calling. And it always seems to be just as I'm stepping into the shower. I'll hear the phone ring, go to voice mail, then ring again. That second call, I've learned, means it's my mother and she's frantic to get in touch with me. It might also mean she's already attempted to get in touch with my father (who's already at work and unavailable), or my sister (who's preoccupied with her own children), and each unanswered call is amping up her anxiety.

As summer progresses, a pattern has formed: each ring now elevates my own anxiety, turning the phone into both a transmitter and conductor of distress.

It was just before July 4, because that was the weekend I started to unravel. I stood in my bedroom, having sprinted to grab the phone before it stopped ringing. (After this I would begin bringing the phone into the bathroom with me.) Less than an hour later I was with my mother, in one of the private rooms they allow you to use for the treatments.

It was around this time that I started having difficulty sitting through meetings at work. The small, windowless conference room began to feel like the stockade inside a submarine. The meeting would commence and someone would close the door (someone always closed the door) and I would immediately wish we'd left it open.

The weekend of July 4, I sat in my living room, forgetting how to breathe. I found myself pacing around the condo, breaking into a full-body sweat and eventually seeing no option but to get out, into the soul-crushing humidity. I needed to feel real air and see the sun and the trees and, if necessary, collapse onto the grass and stare up at the sky.

(This is how it happens, I understood. When you get sick it's seldom a real-time reaction; usually the infection is already inside and once your body begins to respond, the system succumbs. I was not unacquainted with anxiety, but I'd been fortunate never to have experienced the symptoms of a panic attack. It was during these times that I couldn't help thinking the cancer, metastasizing inside my mother, wasn't satisfied only with her. Its tentacles were long and reached out in the darkness, slipping between cars and houses, slithering over telephone lines, and crouching inside my computer. The cancer was attacking my entire family, working its way into our heads so it could take over our bodies.)

The room was cool and quiet and I held my mother's hand as she snoozed. She was ceaselessly exhausted yet seldom able to sleep, which seemed crueler than even the diarrhea and dehydration. Everyone has heard how depriving a person of uninterrupted slumber is the most effective-and sadistic-form of torture; it's insulting to the point of overkill when a sick, scared patient is not able even to rest comfortably.

The fluids worked away, silently swimming from the bag into the tube that hung above her emaciated arm. The saline drips were innocuous in almost every way: without color or scent they looked like water, the source of life. This was the same solution they dispense before and after routine surgeries, a simple process with predictable results. Lately, it wasn't a simple matter of dehydration (itself never a simple matter); her body was dangerously low on potassium, which meant a whole other series of solutions.

Once again I thought about machinery: we were back in unwelcome territory, where medications assumed a prominent role. Until now, they'd been part of a process designed to improve, however slowly or unsatisfactorily. A witches' brew of ingredients manufactured in laboratories, now replacing what her system lacked; no matter how much functionality they restored, they couldn't substitute what a body, when healthy, naturally produces. These fluids were not healing so much as supplanting, and in some subtle but insidious way they were turning her into something slightly less than human.