“Sounds like you’ve had experience with that,” I said.
There was silence. I’d seen small rocks rolled over and over in a river’s flow, black pebbles ground and polished until they gleamed like marbles. Paul Garcia’s eyes were just like those river stones. Flat, glittering. He stared straight through me, and his voice was flat.
“I was ten weeks in-country. Little town called Kandahar. It was supposed to be an easy walk-through, but none of it’s easy. We knew that, prepared for it. Problem is, training doesn’t cover everything. We knew that, too. Six ATAVs trying to get from one side of town to the other. Shouldn’t be that hard. Enemy activity was supposed to be low. This was part recon, part showing face. Remind the locals that we hadn’t pulled out. Five minutes into town, an IED takes out our number three vehicle. Standard tactical approach. Split the line and take out each half.”
I said nothing.
“I was on point in the first ATAV. We came under fire and the second IED went up. The driver and my lieutenant were hit right out of the gate. I was on the mount gun. Armor took most of the bullets meant for me, gave me enough time to bring the M-80 around.”
Paul hadn’t moved while he spoke. His hands were still clasping his knees, his back still perfectly straight, not even touching the cushions of the couch. If he’d blinked I hadn’t seen it.
“The firefight lasted three hours. We were pinned down for every minute of it. Number two had been hit just as hard as we were. Number three was gone, flipped over. Couldn’t even see four, five, and six, through the smoke. We found out later that they’d decided to make a tactical retreat, figuring they could wait for backup, then rush the bad guys. Problem was, this was supposed to be a low-threat recon mission, so there
was
no backup. Three hours went by and the shooting stopped. Just like that. One minute, a thousand rounds a second, like it was the end of the world. Next minute, nothing. Silence. We thought we’d held them off, but the reality was they’d done the damage they wanted. They’d simply decided it was time to cut and run.”
Paul’s eyes regained focus, seeing me for the first time since he’d started talking. “My lieutenant bled out while we waited for that backup. The driver is at Walter Reed, learning to walk again. Number two lost another one. The guys who hit the IED were gone, but four through six walked away without a scratch.”
The air in the room was stifling. The decorations and tidy appointments in the room and the near-summer May morning outside all seemed obscene in light of what Paul Garcia was describing. I wonder if he and the other survivors of all the wars that ever were walked around thinking the same thing, that the world that they’d fought so hard for was so trivial, so without meaning or cause, that it was like some terrible joke. Someone had conned them, it was a great swindle that they’d fallen for the moment they’d signed their name on the dotted line.
Paul suddenly got to his feet and with a tight, “Excuse me,” hurried from the room and down a hall. I heard a door open and close, then a bathroom fan masked all other noises. I stood and paced the living room, finally stopping by the TV with all of the family pictures on top of the cabinet. I looked them over again. The family portrait of Danny, Libney, and Paul seemed almost mocking now; I was sure it had been taken before Paul had shipped out to Iraq. I thought somehow that, if it had been taken after, I would see it in the face staring back at me.
Near the back was a blurry, low-quality snapshot at odds with the other more staged studio pictures. It was in a simple black frame with one of those cardboard tripods in the back. I picked it up. A candid shot of a younger Danny Garcia wearing a Dallas Cowboys jersey and sporting a puffed-out grin, like he was valiantly holding in a mouthful of beer after being told a really good joke. The lighting was poor, but I could see it had been taken in someone’s backyard. A thinner Bob Caldwell in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts was caught in mid-guffaw. Apparently, he’d heard the same joke. He was about to slap Danny on the back, maybe in jest or maybe to keep him from choking. A grill was going in the background and the chef, a big guy wearing a number 69 Redskins jersey, had his back to the photographer. There were a few out-of-focus people in the background including a gaggle of skinny white, brown, and black kids wearing mismatched fluorescent shorts and tops, swinging on a jungle gym. I wondered if Paul was one of the kids.
I put the picture back as I heard the toilet flush and the bathroom door open. Paul reappeared a second later, looking pale and smelling strongly of mouthwash.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Singer?” he asked.
I smiled politely and gestured to the picture. “Looks like a good time.”
His eyes flicked to the picture. “It was.”
“Any special occasion?”
He thought about it before answering. “It was the summer before my father started working undercover. A celebration. Undercover was an assignment he’d always wanted.”
“There weren’t any more picnics? No more happy times?”
His gaze seemed to sink into the picture. He gave his head a little shake. “Those days are gone for good.”
Chapter Seventeen
My oncologist’s office was in Old Town Alexandria, in an unassuming brownstone building not far from where George Washington ate the occasional meal and danced the cotillion with powdered and be-wigged Colonial ladies. I normally enjoyed going to Old Town—the place was cute as a bug and appealed to my love of history—but today was my cancer checkup, and I was so distracted that I barely saw where I was going on the drive down, let alone the architecture or the cobblestone streets. I could’ve been driving into an airplane hangar or a meat-packing plant for all the impact it had on me.
In the waiting room, I fiddled constantly with my watch, picked up and put down all the magazines, crossed and re-crossed my legs three dozen times. I’d forgotten to bring a book, something I’d done on most of my trips to chemo, though I wondered if anything I read would’ve actually registered. My nervousness was obviously irritating the one other person in the room, a well-dressed older woman with a perfectly stationary mane of white hair that swept back from her forehead in a rounded wave. She was trying to read a copy of
Chicken Soup for the Soul
, but my jitters seemed to have gotten under her skin. From her sidelong glances and sighs, she had obviously reached the stage where she found it impossible to ignore me and now even my breathing was starting to peeve her. She was anointed in a lavender perfume that, even across the room, made my eyes water and my nose itch, adding to the list of small, annoying body movements I was making.
Just as I thought she was going to jump up and stab me in the eye with the sign-in pen, my favorite nurse, Leah, came out of the magic door and called my name. The old biddy, who’d been there longer than I had, huffed and said, “Really!” under her breath, just loud enough for me to hear. As I walked by, I stuck my tongue out, but she’d already buried her nose in
Chicken Soup
.
It wasn’t nice, but hey, I wasn’t a cop anymore.
. . .
The office was familiar territory by now, full of desks, countertops, scales, charts of the human body, filing cabinets. I knew their three examining rooms intimately, had studied their framed copies of great American landscape art minutely. They administered chemo in a large room in the back of the office which I called the lounge. A half-dozen comfy chairs with access to various medical apparatuses were arrayed in a semi-circle. I was also familiar with each lounge chair, since they were where I’d spent three to four hours once a week for three months—give or take a few—and had a succession of anti-nausea, cancer-killing, and chemo-flushing chemicals pumped through my body. It was like having my oil, transmission fluid, and break lines flushed.
This time, however, Leah led me back to one of the examination rooms. She was a cute Asian girl with about as positive an outlook as you could have and still be an oncology nurse. Her well-timed wisecracks and zero-tolerance for self-pity had kept my head above water through some rough patches.
We went through some medical rigmarole. My life as a patient had been made easier by the insertion of a medi-port, a little gadget surgically implanted near my collarbone that let the nurses draw blood and access by bloodstream without jabbing me every time. Leah used it to draw some blood, which she took away with a smile and a sidelong remark about how fat I was getting. I’d lost thirty pounds since the day I retired.
I was feeling positive, both physically and mentally. I’d tried to take charge of my future and done some reading on my disease. No, make that a
lot
of reading. My prospects seemed good. I’d handled the symptoms of the cancer and the side effects of the chemo well. The pain had receded, or the medicine had made it seem so, and I hadn’t exhibited any setbacks. All signs were up. Colorectal cancer was one of the most survivable cancers, we’d caught it fairly early, and once my doctor had scaled back the chemo so that I didn’t pass out afterwards, I’d taken to it just fine. Many victims of CR cancer had to have partial or full colostomies and that had never been mentioned for me. Any day I didn’t have to poop in a bag was a good day.
Dr. Demitri came in about ten minutes after Leah had departed. He was a stocky guy with the black hair and sun-soaked tan of his Mediterranean ancestors. He could be locked in a box for a year and he’d come out looking like he’d spent a week at the beach. The white lab coat and tie looked perpetually out of place to me. Maybe it was insensitive, but I always pictured him in a blue and white striped shirt, holding a jug of wine in one hand and a fish in the other.
He smiled, we shook, and he sat down.
I coughed and sat back, trying to smile.
He shuffled through papers in a dossier with my name on a red tab in the corner and I felt the first stirring of dread. He was taking too long to talk. The air conditioning kicked on and the rush of air seemed very loud.
“It didn’t work, did it?” I asked, trying to take the sting away by pre-empting him.
He canted his head. “I wouldn’t say that. The chemo treatment didn’t work to the extent I’d hoped. That doesn’t mean it didn’t do something.”
“Come on,” I said. A rush of peevishness and fear bubbled up, fast, from somewhere deep down. I’d sat on my emotions pretty well for three months and was only just realizing how close to the surface they really were. “Don’t bullshit me.”
He held out a hand to placate me. “I’m not, Marty. If I’ve learned one thing in twenty years of oncology work, it’s that you can never lie. You can’t even sugar-coat. It doesn’t get you anywhere. Not only is it unethical, it’s unfair, and can make things a lot worse in the long run. So, if I say the chemo did something, believe me, it wasn’t ineffective.”
“How effective? What did it do? What didn’t it do?”
“The simple story is that I’d hoped that the cancer would be highly receptive to the chemo. That the chemo would, in effect, take it out. What happened instead is that it was moderately effective and reduced the disease by a considerable amount, but not one hundred percent.”
“Was it because I couldn’t take the full dosage you’d started with?”
He shook his head. “No. What I’m seeing is that the cancer was partially resistant to the chemotherapy we launched at it. This happens sometimes. Doubling your dosage wouldn’t have done much to the cancer, but it would’ve done all kinds of things to you.”
I closed my eyes. Emotionally, I saw myself crawling across a sliver-thin bridge. On one side, despair. On the other, pity. I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. “So where do we go from here?”
“It’s your red blood cell count that tells us the chemo wasn’t one hundred percent effective, but we need to take a look inside to see what’s left. It would be something like the first time you had a sigmoidoscopy. The difference is that we would be prepared to do surgery if what we found would respond to what we call a local excision, or partial removal of the colon.”
“Poop in a bag,” I said in despair.
Demitri smiled despite himself. “Not necessarily. Think in terms of baseball. A home run would’ve meant the cancer is gone. A triple or a double might mean there’s so little cancer that a simple excision is called for and you’ll just need recovery time. A, um, single would be partial or total removal of the colon or maybe another round of even more aggressive chemo, the kind that keeps you in bed twenty-four, seven. I don’t think that’s where we are.”
“What about a bunt?”
“That’s where the baseball analogy starts to break down. If you had, ah, struck out, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, we’d be rushing to surgery. Or talking about palliative care.”
“What did I hit, then?”
“Let’s call it a double with a chance to steal third,” he said, smiling. “We’ll get you into surgery, take a look around, and, if things look good, we remove what we need to, to make you better. If not, we regroup and talk about options.”
I took a deep breath. “When do we have to do this?”
“Sooner the better, Marty. Cancer is a replicative disease. It’s not going to stop for very long.”
“I’m…involved in something that needs my attention. And I don’t know for how long. Can I afford to put this off, say, a month?”
He sucked in his lower lip, thinking, then shook his head. “I can’t recommend it. Anything more than a week would make me nervous.”
I thought of the bronze lion, the one-inch-high names carved into a wall nearly a city block long. “There are lives on the line, doc.”
He nodded a little, then looked at me square. “More than yours?”
. . .
My phone rang that evening, just as I was about to sit down to a hearty meal of watered-down vegetable soup and white bread—a meal that three months of dealing with chemo side effects had made normal. And, while my nausea had been under control for a few weeks, the news I’d gotten from the doctor threatened to undo all that. I thought I’d better stick with the regimen.