Chapter One ~ Fading Away

When Shareen died there weren't as many tubes. Even when his mother died finally, after nearly a hundred years of telling the world how a corpse is best interred, her bodily integrity was preserved. Is this what death is then, several clear plastic tubes hooked to various parts of his anatomy? His most profound struggle wasn't the feeling that his own death was tearing down upon him like a runaway truck on a hill, but rather trying to keep from hurting the feelings of others.

Some of it couldn't be helped. Kids who volunteered in the hospital because they were hoping to be nurses or doctors would tear up when he cried out in pain, and some of the nursing staff felt the absence of guests more than him. He didn't want them to care. They only needed to perform their job. The friends who should have been at his side hadn't been informed. They were old themselves, and didn't need yet another reminder of their mortality.

He tried to grit his teeth through the delay in the morphine drip, and shove down the tendency to be querulous and difficult, but more than once he snapped at an aide, and then later had to apologize. Their faces were as bland as weak tea. They'd seen it all before. But they didn't seem to realize that it was all new for him. He didn't plan for any of it, and when one tube after another was inserted, each indignity hovered over him like a rotting tree too close to the house.

The initial doctor's visit had been innocent enough, some difficulty with constipation that had plagued him on and off for at least ten years. "If you'd come sooner," the doctor told him.

He said that to the cabbie on the way home. "I should have gone sooner."

"And then what?" the cabbie had asked. "So you get there sooner. Then they diagnose, pump you full of chemicals."

He remembered who he was speaking to and lapsed into silence.

"Fifteen years ago I was fine." Shareen was alive. He wasn't alone. And reruns on television weren't constant reminders of how many years lay between him and his youth.

The cabbie said nothing more and when it came time to pay he kept the tip at ten percent. Any less was an insult and a comment, and any more and he'd be betraying himself.

His house felt as though someone had broken in and moved around the furniture to suit themselves, as though he had a squatter who'd forgotten to announce himself. As if a roommate had decided that he needed rounded corners on his furniture, that his shoes should be lined up and not thrown in a heap at the bottom of the closet, and the contents of his pantry labeled until he knew exactly what needed to be eaten first.

He'd grown organized. In the old joke the doctor warned against buying green bananas, and he'd thought to try that on the dry-eyed doctor who looked through the test results as though seeing them for the first time, but when the moment came his throat was dry and his hand sore from twisting his fingers.

"Pancreatic," the doctor said when he asked.

"That's a bad one, isn't it?"

"We have had some successes, but I'm not going to lie to you"-the doctor had the look of a man who was about to lie-"for every success story there are a hundred others not nearly as positive."

At the time he'd wondered, incongruously, if the man had wanted to follow a different muse. Maybe he'd wished to be a wordsmith, to bend the prepositions and comparisons until his face was red and the crowd was huffing with delight. He was too verbose to be a writer, so maybe that had driven him back into Nightingale's arms. He would cure the world, he'd likely thought, although the dream of being on the radio warning about viruses running rampant hadn't materialized. Instead, he'd become the type who cautioned about an impending doom, like a serial killer who wasn't ambitious enough to do his own killing and had to be satisfied with happenstance.

That diagnosis and the subsequent speech had led directly to the chemotherapy, to the endless nausea and pitying looks, and then finally to the morphine drip and the catheter. The worst was the pain and the humiliation. He would have been happier not knowing what was happening. His body weakening day after day, he would plan his meals well in advance, guessing that he'd be around to enjoy them, instead of counting vials the nurses dumped into the tube as though that was his lifeline.

The needle in his arm itched. That was something that they'd never told him, and his bowels, never very efficient to begin with, had begun to shut down as a result of the drugs. He'd complained but the doctor had merely looked out the window and asked if he needed him to notify anyone.

The preacher who came by was a distraction, and he needled him with the soul he would lose if he didn't try hard enough. "I find myself questioning the meaning of life more and more," he explained. "I just can't wrap my head around why a god would go out of his way to worry about me dying when there are little kids all over the world he is letting be raped every moment. I think he needs to get his priorities in order."

"He is working on every problem in the world," the preacher's pancake syrup voice assured him. "He sees all need and is answering their prayers."

"Doesn't seem like he's working very hard. It sounds like you might have picked the wrong hero, preacher. You even read that book?"

Such exclamations failed to drive the man away, but his delivery of platitudes became curt and the dry weeds that were the long hospital days were bleaker for the mockery he inflicted on the man. Soon he slept as much as he could. Despite remembering his mother saying that she would have lots of time to sleep in the grave, he dreamed that he would merely slip away. Each drip took him closer to where the preacher crouched beside an open pit, and each whispered instruction was a wish-list of what he could have done.

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