Tornados
Fiction: On cancer and illusions of choice
I lie across the sterile bed as the hostile lights beam down at me. Careful, the nurse warns as she inserts the needle. The dye makes people think they’ve wet themselves. She leaves and I’m left alone with the machine. It’s at this point that no one else can stay.
Do not breathe. Do not swallow, commands the pre-recorded voice of the machine.
I lift my arms in surrender as the ceiling above me swells, threatening to collapse. The needle rattles against my skin as warmth hisses through my veins and into the back of my throat. The scanner putters on, whirling around my body in a dizzying dance. A mirror is warped along the edges of the metal loop encasing me; within it, my face has been replaced by one lonely eye, which I promptly squeeze shut.
The warmth of shame starts to gush between my legs and I am stuck in place, unable to reach down my gown to feel whether it’s real. How much poison will you consume throughout the course of this disease? When you’re sick it seems absurd to ask.
Taped to the back of the exam room door is a drug advertisement showing a woman my age corralling a herd of kids. I was tired. I hurt all the time. Now I have the energy to do the things that matter.
I dress and emerge from the dark into the room where my mother waits. I start to speak, but she holds out a manicured finger as though to pause an argument that hasn’t yet begun.
I hold the door for her as we leave the cancer clinic, welcoming the brisk autumn air on my washed-out cheeks. She glides past me in snakeskin boots, grey bob bouncing along the shoulders of her chic wool coat as she joins the throngs of students crossing the campus. With ragged nails I rip at the cracks in my lips, copper filling my mouth as I toss the dead skin away. She retches, I thought you’d grown out of that.
As we near her department building, I suggest we stop at the café across campus, the one that sits below my office, to keep her to myself for just a few minutes longer.
She lifts an eyebrow in my direction. Sorry love, you’ll have to go without me. Evading my gaze, her eyes drift up toward her office. I have meetings all afternoon. A distracted kiss on my cheek and with a quick wave she is gone.
I had thought it fortuitous to be assigned a treatment team at the university where we both work, but thus far it has not been the touching reprise of maternity for which I had hoped. This campus has belonged to her far longer than it ever will to me.
I start to shout after her, Remember, the specialist’s tomorrow… But she is too far away to hear.
I walk alone, imagining that I’m crossing the arteries of my mother’s heart to my own special compartment, however distant it may be.
*
As a child I was afraid of everything, and I sought warmth where I could find it. I’d sneak into my mother’s bedroom while she slept between classes, brushing away the term papers and textbooks to make room for myself between her arms.
Mama, I would whisper into her chest, What if I fall in quicksand? What if a flasher kidnaps me? What if a tornado flies through our home?
Tornados never go through cities, she sighs back. A reassuring lie can become routine.
Then one day, a shift: You keep making that clicking noise with your throat.
It calms me down. I can’t help it. I push myself into her cold arms.
She considers this, but only for a moment. I’m too tired. And you’re too old. A dry kiss on the forehead and she turns to face the other direction. The next day I went to join her again, only to find that the door was locked.
*
As the specialist lectures me about the risks of radiotherapy I become consumed with the poster above his head, in which a woman receives an antiquated form of radiation invented at this university. The light beams down from nowhere, slicing across the woman’s breasts as she smiles up in awe.
The specialist informs me that the radiation has a chance of causing a different, rarer type of cancer down the road. The treatment can also be the cause. How much poison, I wonder. It feels absurd to ask.
I have to ask, he lowers his voice conspiratorially, stepping forward. He is close enough that I could reach out and pull him into my arms. Do you have intentions… of becoming pregnant? Because of the location of the treatment, so close to your ovaries, you would be severely discouraged from becoming pregnant. For at least a year. My heart drops, from a place I can’t recognize.
A year? I spit.
Perhaps longer than a year, he muses. It depends on whether the radiation is successful or not.
Good thing she’s single, my mother scoffs.
Unfortunately, with your age, he continues, by the time the treatment is over…
You’re saying it might be too late for me by then, my voice cracks.
The room spins: do not breathe, do not swallow. I saw on your scan that you have an IUD, he ventures. How quickly cancer renders us naked, open to exploration by others.
Registering my discomfort, he takes a lighter tone as he asks whether I still want to receive treatment. Another poster to my right; this one commands me to tell my doctor if I’m expecting. In the image, a foetus with a detailed face nestles in the belly of a woman whose face is left unseen.
I’m not ready, I reply. Not yet.
*
I had an IUD inserted during a prolonged break-up over my ambivalence towards motherhood. I had cried as the stern doctor pried apart my legs, pushing the device into my uterus as she shouted, Remember, five years of free birth control! My abdomen cramped for two full days, but in the foggy aftermath of pain I felt that I’d given birth to a freer life than had been available to my mother when she was my age. These days, it mostly just feels out of place.
I don’t know why I’m so upset, I blush, wiping away hot tears.
It’ll be fine, my mother soothes, reaching a cold hand out to my cheek. Reassuring lies become routine. Besides, she snorts, maybe you’ll get lucky and the treatment will make you infertile. Her laugh, a sudden guffaw, doesn’t match her carefully slender stature. I have the same laugh, though no one has ever noticed.
I haven’t told her, but I’ve been seeing one of the instructors in my department. He’s older than me, and twice-divorced. It’s still casual between us, though he often asks to spend the night, only to leave at the crack of dawn before the parking metre starts to run.
Maybe I thought I still had some time to choose, I let out an empty laugh.
I wonder if I ever even had a choice at all; perhaps I was doomed all along for being hers. I watch as students trickle around us on their way to class. Would a passing stranger even know we were related? Would I?
*
When the treatment ends, I take her for coffee. I am depleted, hollowed-out. The radiation has left a burn the size of an areola around a puckered nipple of an incision scar. How quickly cancer renders us naked, such that I feel embarrassed even displaying the wound.
Do you want to know the worst part of radiation? I ask her, sharing the burn.
Tell me, she answers.
It’s when everyone you love leaves the room and you’re left alone with the machine.
I rest my head on her shoulder. I click my throat. She allows it.
Maybe you’ll get lucky one day, and just have boys, she teases. I return a stiff smile, and she whispers, But, girls aren’t so bad either.
I breathe. I swallow.