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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Capricorn
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As an oncologist, I was familiar with Wilm’s tumor. I was aware the tumor presents only 500 times a year in the U.S., and how very unfortunate that made my daughter for having one. And I knew how responsive to treatment Anna Belle’s cancer was: it was classified as highly responsive, which meant there was a 90% chance she’d live to five years- the age of nine- and how empty that promise really was. But it was still early days- she was only stage I, so they cut out her cancerous kidney and put her on chemo. At that point I was still enough of an oncologist to argue for aggression; I wanted them to cut out both her kidneys, to be safe, and take one each from myself and my wife.
A year passed, and with it came stage II, and her other kidney and half of her ureter had to be removed; I punched her doctor. Apparently our administrator explained to him that I’d get a slap on the wrist for the assault, but he’d get an inoperable railroad spike implanted in his anus from the malpractice suit. So I got to keep practicing medicine there. We did a histo-compatibility test, and my daughter and I shared 5 out of 6 HLA antigens; Sharon only shared 3 out of 6 (the minimum- since 3 of 6 comes from each parent), which meant giving her both kidneys at once was a bad idea. Of all the kidney transplants every year, statistically only one of them generally has complications, so it went off without a hitch. Theoretically, her 10-year survival rate should have been in the 70th percentile, but really it just meant the kidney wouldn’t quit until after the rest of her had. We started abdominal radiation on her fifth birthday. We lied and gave her her cake and presents, including the Last Unicorn DVD, the day before. She told me she wouldn’t cry at all so long as I watched it with her. By the next year she’d reached stage IV, with metastases to her liver and the lymph nodes beneath her arms. I manipulated her into a drugs trial at a clinic in Harmon County; I lied to them about my profession, because I knew they’d disqualify her. Sharon and I were fighting, and I hated that we were becoming a clichéd couple whose marriage depended on the health of an ailing child. I don’t know if I did it because I was tired of that trajectory, or because I was really truly alone by then, but I slept with one of the interns at work. And I told Sharon; I didn’t apologize, I just told her. She served me with divorce papers the next day: benefits of working in a law firm, I guess. Anna reacted poorly to the treatments, and she was on the verge of being bounced from the study when they realized I’d fudged her paperwork, that I was a doctor, and that she only had one transplanted kidney. Of course I lost my job, but the administrator- hell, I guess he’s earned a name: Steve- managed to have my license revoked without disciplinary action. He told me, “Get yourself right, and you can take up medicine again- just not in this state.” Of course, by then I was spinning psychotically towards fantastic self-destruction. I embarked on a road trip across the world, seeking panacea, desperate to save my daughter or at least be missing when I failed her. I eventually found myself in China. That’s where I met Merrick, in Shanghai. I’d been drinking, waiting for another contact I was certain would never show. He was British (or Australian- or maybe some bastardization between them), and talked enthusiastically about hunting and tracking. At some point during the conversation, he told me flatly that I had the look about me of a man hunting for something, and that he had a knack for tracking even stranger game. My contact eventually showed. He brought us into a little village in the mountains across the border in Tibet. I called him Qiang, though it was only later I realized that was the name of his nomadic race, meaning “goat people.” During the trip, Qiang was silent, and once we arrived, he pointed me to a small tent and explained, “What you seek is through there.” I’d been nearly a year wandering, and I’d seen all manner of spiritual, magic and religious hokum, but the tent, and the way it whipped in the mountain’s breeze, it cooled me more than the chill on the wind. Inside was a beast as tall as I at its back, like a horse, but also like a goat, with a single straight horn protruding from its head. I couldn’t speak. There was an odd calm inside the tent, and the animal, whatever it was, regarded me with a gentle eye. Qiang entered softly behind me, and told me that she was the last of her “one” kind. Legends of unicorns date back to at least Greece, where the beast was associated with the cornucopia- thought to be the horn of the goat that nursed Zeus, accidentally broken. The magic of the beast, perhaps absorbed from the suckling god, transformed his caprine nursemaid into the magnificent one-horned creature legend, while its broken horn became an object of plenty. The chiru of Tibet were thought to be one of the inspiration of the unicorn’s legend, but this was too large, larger than most horses, too be just another goat. Qiang said there was truth to the legend of their horn’s magic, that ground to dust the horn could save any person from death- though in the removal the beast would also die. He told me her name, but I wouldn’t know how to begin putting it into Roman characters. He told me to approach her, to stroke her neck, and I did. He asked if I could kill her, end her line forever, to save my daughter (though I had not, to that point, explained my purpose for seeking him out). And it was at that moment that I remembered my mother, and the few times she’d taken me to a stable, and I whispered, “She’s pregnant.” “With twins: one boy, one girl,” he said. I remembered my mother once told me that the incidence of monozygotic twins in horses was 1 in 10,000; the odds of dizygotic twins had to be greater still, but the little Tibetan man smiled wide and just told me, “They have the luck of fate on their side.” And he asked again, this time taking a long knife from a sheath at his hip to illustrate. “Could you cut her throat, kill her children, so your daughter might live?” I looked again into the animal’s eyes, but they weren’t a horse’s empty rectangles; in them I could see that she understood the proposition, she understood why I might do what he said. And my hand shook as I reached for his blade, and the shaking became so violent that my hand stopped moving forward at all, and I realized the answer at the same moment I spoke it aloud: “No.” Qiang pressed the blade into my palm. “You are a good, a lost man, but still with goodness in you.” She bent her head downward, exposing her long, graceful neck towards me. “If you wish to exchange her life for your child’s, she will allow it. Had you taken the knife from me to steal her horn, you would have received nothing: a murdered unicorn bequeaths no gifts.” I closed my eyes to steady my hand, as he continued to speak. “They are a species extinct because they eschewed Darwin’s code: they loved man more than themselves.” The long knife slipped from my fingers, and I felt I might never open my eyes again, except Qiang asked, “Are you aware that your companion has a gun?” Merrick had pulled back the hammer on a large revolver, the one he’d told me in Shanghai he’d used to hunt rhinoceros in Africa. Merrick said something, an unfelt apology to the effect of following me to hunt larger prey. I lunged forward, unthinking. The gun barrel glanced off my shoulder, and the shot went high, through the roof of the tent, as I pushed my fist past his nose. It caved in, cartilage and flesh shattering into a paste that splattered across his face. I hit him several more times, until the heavy revolver clattered in his hand to the ground. Qiang gave Merrick something from a wooden bowl, and told me it would make it so “He won’t remember the way back.” “Here?” I naively asked. “Anywhere.” He said. When that was done Qiang asked me one last time if I was sure; she gave of herself freely, without guile or pretense. But I knew that what he asked, the price, even for something so precious, was too high. And that brought me back here, to my daughter’s hospital bed. She’s dying, and not in some abstract, at some point in the next few months or years way. Her breathing’s labored; the cancer’s everywhere inside her, now, weighing all of her organs down like some horrible black anchor. She’s rarely conscious, which is a blessing, because when she is, she’s begging for more morphine. But we keep her DVD playing, and every time it ends, we press play again. It makes her smile when she wakes up, in that instant before the pain comes back; I live and die by that smile. And I hate myself for the choice I made, and I veer from thoughts of suicidal ideation to finding Qiang to prevent him from letting him make his offer to anyone else. But as silly as it sounds, I couldn’t make my daughter live in a world without unicorns- so I pray they’re waiting for her in the next one. |
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