Just in from my friend Danny:

What strikes me first in this email is not the email but the To: list. First, it evinces that you are a collector of people.  I’ve been hearing about some of these people for over 20 years.   Second, I notice in the list a few curious and bold names, particularly David Eisele and Jeane Quivey.   This is an interesting stratagem, to include the yanker and the zapper, in your update.   They either will despise you for trivializing their life’s work (which in both cases is momentous and unachieveable by 99%+ of humanity), or bond with you for your irreverence to their acheivements.

He’s right on that.  I guess I am a collector of people, in the same way that people are collectors of things.  We treasure the memories that we have assigned to things (all those tchotchkes in our houses are mnemonics intended to remind us of different events we’ve experienced in our lives.  Except some times we cease to see them.)  And resident in people are all those shared memories.

To lose people is to lose a part of oneself.

But beyond that, people are so friggin’ cool.

Regarding the bold inclusion of my surgeon and radiation oncologist, I guess it’s symptomatic of the experiential Tourette’s that I’ve been expressing of late.  Do something bold and unqualified regardless of consequence.  At the same time, I feel I need to cc them in the interest of full disclosure.  And I also hope it will keep me honest.

Dr. Eisele, Dr. Quivey, Dr. Shiboski, Nurse Tang – if you do choose to read this, I’m counting on you to keep me honest.

And lastly, I have only the utmost reverence for the yanker and the zapper as practitioners, but more importantly as human beings.  Any trivialization of their life’s work and their persons in part reflects my own inability to communicate the immensity of it, as well as the responsibility we all have to keep one another humble.  In the end I’ve chosen to place my well being in their hands.  I doubt there’s any higher commendation.

I met CatsM today. For those who haven’t read below, this is the chick who had a stage IV tumor of the parotid. Two months after finishing her last cycle of chemotherapy the punks have recurred in her lymphatic system. She said she’s actually proud of how strong her cancer is – it resisted even the goddamn chemo. And unfortunately this gal is worthy of a strong opponent.

It turns out I was wrong: when I wrote my last post she wasn’t within a six mile radius. It turns out that at the time she was only two blocks away. We’re living in the same neighborhood. I’m lucky. I had a tumor. Everyone around me has cancer.

But there we are, the two of us in this coffeshop, both of us members of the Club of Scarves intended to hide our beautiful exquisitely rendered scars and protect our forever sun sensitive necks. So where we at? I’ve had two surgeries so I’ve bested her one, but she had some chemo during her rt which made the whole experience pukable. Her body is a toxic soup of chemicals and nasty things that she’s trying to kill and in the heart of it she didn’t shit for two weeks and she puked up so much of the world that eventually she was puking up just water. Hands down she’s fighting the bigger one. Bless her heart. That’s actually a request to whomever is reading this.

She offered to take me out – I’m a guest in her city afterall. I told her forget it, I’m actually on a medical vacation.

Well I am too, she said.

Really? I asked.

I am so lucky, she said. So damn lucky. Before I had this, I was so unhappy. I was burnt out. I hated my job. I was fighting with my boss. I was fighting with my boyfriend. Since my diagnosis, it’s been the happiest time in my life. I’m so happy.

I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t know it to be true. My 53 year old Czech Chernobyl friend tomorrow boards a plane to Tahiti. Last fall she was at the base camp of anapurna. This morning she bought a bowl of soup for her lunch, walked outside and promptly gave it to someone asking for change. Whatever. She’s spreading her wings at a point in her life when most people are tucking them in.

And I whither before the clear eyed gaze of the head scarved women who walk so calmly, scared, and forthrightly into the clinic.

Each morning I bump space with an elderly Vietnamese man in the men’s waiting room. He doesn’t speak much English and he must be in his 70’s which puts him in his 30’s during the Vietnam war. That guy no doubt has a story to tell. The first couple days we sat across from one another and nodded. A few days later we started to smile. A few days after that we would look at each other and laugh. It turns out we share the same linear accelerator table. If I show up early I scoop him. If I show up late he takes my spot. A few days ago that’s just what happened. When he stepped out from the treatment area he pounded me on the shoulder and laughed long and hard from the gut. He and I have never spoken.

It’s true that you can get there. But who among us would willingly pay the price?

I awoke this morning for the first time in San Francisco feeling a little scared.  I lay for a long time in the darkness listening to the wind chimes and the dirge of the fog horns.

I dreamt last night that I was being chased by a man on a motorcycle.  It was dusk.  I was in a moving truck and I pulled off the road into a snowy field.  I climbed out and dove head long into the snow and I buried myself many feet below except that I closed myself in entirely and then I could no longer move.  I could no longer breathe.

I read last night about competing methods of rt and was reminded again that this is no child’s play.  This shit is something that under normal circumstances one tries to avoid.  How could I so willfully and with relatively little forethought have subjected myself to it?  I’ve probably spent more time deliberating over whether to purchase a particular car.

Last night I also cruised through message board posts from people with questions who were undergoing similar treatment.  Call it bad popcorn.  There is so much body wreckage minor and major in this mine field – I don’t want to tread it.  Except that I am.  I awaken right in the middle of it.

I’m midway through my second week.

This morning for the first time I decided to open my eyes and see what I could through the mask. The face of the large machine (I don’t even know what to call it) slowly circled and hovered proximate to my neck and jaw. I felt like I was staring into the mouth right at the pearly teeth of a great white.

What if someone comes up and offers you two million to do six rounds with Mike Tyson? Yeah, sure, I can do that. So first round you hop into the ring, for two minutes you dance around a bit, all is good, fun even, and then he pops you one. And then things change. This suddenly doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.

My side effects have begun to manifest themselves. Yesterday my morning cup of coffee tasted funny. My saliva is turning sticky. The inside of cheek feels abraded. And if sunlight strikes my neck it instantly feels like a sunburn. No one need remind me to keep it covered.

From the very beginning of this adventure I’ve wondered about the Homer Simpson factor: what happens when you put your average clod in close proximity to a nuclear reactor?

Yesterday in my weekly meeting with Dr. Quivey I asked how they knew if they were succeeding, how did they know they were actually getting the tumor cells?

She looked directly at me with a gentle clear-eyed intensity.

We don’t, she said. And it’s incredibly frustrating. We are in the position of only being able to observe and manage the negative side effects.

But how do you know you’re right? The machines for example – do they ever get out of whack?

The resident quickly piped in. The machines are calibrated every night, he said.

Quivey concurred and added that they check and calibrate the intensity every day. As for the beam vectors they regularly check the alignments.

She once again smiled at me. But they’re machines, she added. And I don’t trust machines. Machines are not to be trusted.

And the 40 variable algorithms?

The same, she said. Sometimes we need to lie in order to get the algorithm to do what we want.

She seems to find great pleasure, glee even, in this. I think of Ahab’s mad glee that drove him to the bottom of the ocean and left Ishmael floating in his coffin. But that glee somehow also tells me that my rad onc is no Homer Simpson. To revel in the risk and the uncertainty, you must first understand deeply what those risks and uncertainties are, perhaps more deeply than all those around you.  And therein lies the beauty:  those who profess to know are liars.

On my busride home today I spoke with my friend Patrick. He asked about my plans and I explained that I needed to unpack, move into my new place, fix the Internet connection, write a bunch, perhaps do some other stuff.

My god, you’re on fire, he said. Perhaps this radiation is turning you into some kind of super hero. Maybe you should get it on a regular basis, he said.

He’s absolutely one hundred percent right.

Perhaps everyone should, I answered.

I’m tired and its done with.

My car, parked on the Santa Cruz pier, is filled with my brother’s stuff. It’s night and I’ve done my best to decompress, eating a fish taco, drinking a beer, and staring out at the double masted boats floating in the placid harbor. The sun has set, it’s dark out, and its time to drive back to San Francisco on Route 17, the torturous curvy highway heading over the hills into Los Gatos and the valley.

I know what that road is about and I’m suddenly conscious of the load we are carrying – my brother’s life, his psychic distress, and the handful of volcanic rocks that 10 years ago he pilfered from Hawaii. Ever since then his luck has not been so good and at different times he faults the rocks. We all grew up with the Brady Bunch and goddamn do we ever know the power of that pumice: after taking some while on their family vacation, Greg Brady almost died in a surfing accident. The power of these things are not to be messed with. And god knows, my brother has had his share of surfing accidents: broken cars, broken relationships, lost jobs, all manner of misfortune. And at each bad turn in the road he’s vowed that he has to retrieve those rocks and return them to Hawaii.

Which is fine. I support him in that endeavor except that I now find myself in the curious position of being the ring-bearer. I am in possession of these things – their totemic power real or imagined, it does not matter. I am the one now responsible for carrying them a few steps toward Mordor. I have to carry them over the mountains, into the valley and back to San Francisco, at night, in uncertain traffic. What have I stepped into? This is not at all something I wish to be part of. And then suddenly I sense that I need to make an offering. I need to make a sacrifice. As we leave our restaurant table, I cast about looking for something, anything. I take a piece of jicama from my plate and some tortilla chips which I crush up and wrap in a napkin. But as we walk down the pier I realize that a sacrifice can’t be a paltry leftover, it means giving of something important, something that matters. But what do I have to give? I ask my friend Eva for something sharp, a penknife or safety pin. She wants to know why. Just to prick my finger, I tell her. Her face immediately registers concern, even fear. Are you crazy? she asks. I explain about the rocks, but she shakes her head in frustration – they’re rocks, she says. This is stupid, we just drive home.

I insist and walk away over to a fisherman who in the darkness is longpoling off the pier. I ask if he has a spare fishhook. He too looks at me as if I’m crazy, which at this point I guess I am. What for? he asks. Eva takes my arm and leads me away. Communism has done its work on her – prayer is a fiction. She is dyed and true a spiritual materialist who refuses to believe in superstition. But she has no idea from where I come. We stop by the car and I walk away to the railing and I lean out over the black and inky water. I think of that water, that immense body from which we all emerged. I think of it extending almost boundlessly to the west out into a deep and impenetrable darkness. I think of those specks of land in its midst, a place in which the core of the earth itself is heaving up, molten and hot and breaking forth into the air and universe. I think of Pele, of her anger and spiteful temper. I think of her boundless hurt, of her wanting to be heard. I tell her that I want to reconstitute her, but I am only a servant in this. I can only play a small part. But I can do my best. I will do what I can to return what is hers, to make her once again whole. I have her interests at heart. Trust me. Protect us and carry me home. I unfold the napkin. The contents fall and drift silently through the air and I feed the water.

Mid-day on Friday, Hiroshima Day, I drive to Santa Cruz with my current roommate Eva Pavelka.  She has the day off and I have just received nominal permission from my brother to go to his old house and retrieve his most important belongings.  He and his former girlfriend are no longer speaking and he’s unable or afraid to enter the house and if these things are not removed they will all be put in the trash.  He has listed on the back of a napkin the items I should look for:  his bag of volcanic rocks from Hawaii, a taillight, a small box of feathers that had belonged to our mom, a box of photos, some clothes, a sleeping bag, a book about the 20th century.  I ask Eva to come to bear witness and to help intervene as a neutral party in case there are any issues.

As we drive into Santa Cruz, my brother calls and ask us not to get his things.  It’s all over, he says, he wants nothing to do with his girlfriend, he doesn’t want any further violation, it’s all over, he says.  But it’s too late, the train has already left the station. We have entered Santa Cruz and we drive to his house and his girlfriend welcomes us into the living room stacked floor to ceiling with his boxes.  It’s complete chaos.  I set to going through them, quickly, methodically, with absolute intent.  The rocks are outside.  Journals are found.  Photos.  The small box of feathers.  I find wonderful books, bought new, still in their bags, lost in the bottom of boxes.  In one, I find a stunning art photo book, 100 Suns, documenting in large format photographs 100 nuclear mushroom clouds.  The book, new, untouched, still taped up in mylar, feels terrifying and hot.  I know why my brother has it.  Our father had died of a brain tumor.  In the 1950’s and 60’s he was researching mining history and spent several summers in Nevada at the time of the nuclear test blasts.  I grab the book and without thinking thrust the volume into one of the boxes that Eva carries outside to put in the car.

The girlfriend is sad and distraught over the breakup.  At some point her mother comes out – a sweet woman, with the air of being intensely calm and tired, she is dying of ovarian cancer.  Over three hours we find most about everything.

We are about to wrap and leave, when the girlfriend asks tentatively if we had taken 100 Suns. She was afraid to ask, had been wanting to ask, but couldn’t.  It had been promised to her as a Christmas present, but she had never received it.  Of course.  As far as I knew, it was hers to keep.  Eva retrieves the book but I ask if I can unwrap it and for just a moment look at the pictures.  When I am finished I stand and carry the book to the girlfriend, for a moment the book rests in the center of a triad – she, Eva, and myself.

Perhaps herein lies my brother’s genius.  Who cast these vectors that have traveled through time and space to intersect here between us in this fraction of a second in the nucleus of this book?  The girlfriend and her mother burning into dissipation; me, each morning gratefully submitting to a machine that fires high dose x-rays through my skull and brain; and Eva, who one morning twenty years ago had awoken in Czechoslavakia to learn of a burning reactor hundreds of kilometers away that by then had already dosed her body with toxic levels of radiation.

I’m being watched. And grateful for it. So grateful. There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, during the Purges, the reign of terror, under Stalin. At the height of the cult of personality, the terror was coupled with an intense cowering before and adulation of the immensity of it all. In particular of the Big Guy. At night couples, families would be walking through Red Square and they would see a lone light burning in the Kremlin. “Look,” they’d say in hushed whispers. “Stalin is working.”

Of course it might not have been adulation at all and instead standard issue Russian black humor.

Regardless. Beneath the heat of that gaze be it real or imagined, partial and human or that of a cool eyed whithering executioner, we’re reminded to get with the program.

It’s so important to get with the program.

Okay. I’m downstairs in the Grand Cafe. I order a dry cap, but the foam is a little too wet and already collapsing, the shots pulled long. I get my box of pastries. Good enough.

Back at the room, I run the bath, I gather up the paper, I organize my coffee and my pastries, and I climb in the water. It’s hot. I mean really hot. I’m sweating. I take a bite of pastry. Okay. I try to read, but its kind of hard. I’m sweating. I think I’m reading about whether we’re entering a recovery or not. I take a sip of coffee.

I wait a few minutes, but my phone doesn’t buzz.

Dang it.

What’s the pleasure in something undeserved? A bath, any pleasure really, must be earned and earned in the right way. Even by the end of today if I’m lucky I’ll have spent the better part of my time writing. But I will not have run 12 miles or heaved a ton and a half of coal or been zapped by a few centigrays of uranium. No heavy lifting (really heavy lifting) whatsoever.

So there you have it: stuck yet at the Monaco, staring at the most lovely of cakes, with no desire (let alone right) to eat it.

So I’m in this hotel. I got some crazy ass free upgrade. Corner room – actually rooms, like 900 sf. and a bathtub that could fit three people. Except that I don’t have three people: just me. And it’s 9:30 am and I feel I need to take advantage of this tub and I have this fantasy (wait, stop, check your thoughts – this isn’t going where you think):

I’m in the deep swimming pool tub. The water is hot and steaming. A dry cappuccino in a porcelain cup rests delicately beside me. A plate of buttery pastries with fruit jam. I’m reading the New York Times, careful not to get the edges wet. My phone buzzes. I pick it up and glance at the message. 4 letters, some number. I purse my lip and ponder for a moment. I carefully text back the word SELL. I return to my paper.

Nice.

Sanraku is cold. Some good cuts of fish but standard presentation. Riyoku presents warm towels, applies fresh wasabi and a broader selection of fish from japan.