Under the Electric Sun

(Originally published in The New England Review, vol. 23)

I am a cancer patient; I am sitting in a square room with all the other cancer patients.
In the center of the room there's a large fish tank where fish with human faces swim.
The patients around me are in every imaginable state of decay. One is on a stretcher attached to a mobile IV. A man in a wheelchair dozes, his scalp a bright scabby red.
A klatch of men with oxygen tanks and blue kerchiefs sit in a corner looking like biker dudes. Then there are those like me: women wearing synthetic hair, clinging to
appearances. We read books or magazines, catch up on Julia Roberts's latest
problems, do office work just like we are waiting for the dentist. Our breasts are bare
or maimed beneath cotton print smocks, our expensive jewelry is still on.

This is the Cox Ward of Massachusetts General Hospital, Radiation Oncology
division. It's as busy as Grand Central Station, a state-of-the-art facility. Even those
of us with illusions, we know: if we can't be cured here, we can't be cured anywhere.

I am lying flat on a table with a two-million-dollar machine looming above me. The radiation technicians tattoo my breast in six places, tiny green tattoo marks they assure me won't be visible on my upcoming wedding day. My favorite doctor, Dr. Powell, soccer fanatic from Manchester, England, struts in quickly to oversee the mapping operations.
"How about that Leeds United!" he exclaims. My fiancé's home team is making
news among soccer diehards.
We've settled on soccer as the best topic of conversation, under the circumstances.
Our first meeting, we talked about the odds of my survival. He gave me an 85 percent, then looked up suspiciously, like a little boy who's just been asked a trick question:
"Why, did you ask Dr. Younger already? What did Younger say?"
Jerry Younger, my oncologist, is an imposing figure with gray hair and downcast
eyes. I can never resist trying to make him laugh because he always looks so low. When
he walked in on us this first time I said, this cancer, it's a blow to my ego. I've never
received less than 90 percent on anything in my life. The two men smiled, taken aback
that I could joke at such a time. Oh, I can always joke. It's what you don't say that's
hard.
In private, I imagine I am in a crowd of one hundred women. Fifteen of us will be
chosen. I continually reposition myself among the hundred, hoping to hide, to get
lost in the crowd. I try the same scene with only ten of us being chosen, then five. It
never feels any better.

Day 2
On Blossom Street there's a very black man in a blue MGH jacket pacing languidly on the sidewalk. He is calling out directions to the valets, and they are dashing back and forth parking cars. Everything around this man is a blur of activity, yet he looks calm. Why does he look so calm, like he's moving in a different atmosphere from the rest of us? Occasionally he hugs someone coming in or out of Cox. His name is Macallum Moore. Strange name for a black man. Mac tells me that his mother wanted to name him something "unusual." Later, I will have the eerie feeling that Mac is an angel.
Today they give me a patient card that has a bar code on it. I slide the card through a sort of ATM machine, which lets the technicians know I've arrived. I change into a cotton robe and take a seat in the waiting room. In another few days I will begin
to recognize people: the young man in a perpetual sweat, always neatly dressed in
slacks and button-down shirt; the man next to him, who must be his father.
The woman with half a normal face; the other half is drooped and blind. Her
husband sits next to her.
Volunteers in hot-pink jackets offer us drinks, but I develop an instant aversion to
them. They are always interrupting our conversations with their pinched little smiles
and offers of insipid sodas or coffee.
Why I don't like the volunteers probably has to do with the tepidness of their
niceness, the generic nature of it. We notice the difference between people with jobs
to do and people who unbidden will hand you a little piece of their souls.
Already, even on my first day of treatment, the waiting room has begun to divide
into patients and their companions. Of course, I recognize the usefulness of the
companions, but I don't need company now as I did when Gwen with the voodoo
doll pin pushed cylinders of Kool-Aid red liquid into my veins with purple gloves, to
protect herself from even the tiniest spill.
No, I don't want the niceness of the volunteers, I don't even want compassion. I
just want to get in and out of here as quickly as possible. I'm not envious of the
company the companions provide--I'm envious of their health. We, the sick ones,
have lost what they take for granted--a future tense. We must continually steal shreds
of it from our awareness of the odds, from our wounded capacity for denial, from our
dreams. Of course we're jealous. Sometimes, if we did not recognize how good they
were to be here at all, we would hate them.

Take a number, any number. Mine is #5, which refers to machine #5, a million-dollaR mama that zaps the hell out of brain, breast, and lung tumors. My technologists are Karen, Gidget, Mary Ann, and Tami. With the exception of Karen, who is large-built and fair, these women at first all look alike to me. It does not help that they move so quickly, swarming around me with a practiced efficiency, adjusting my body on the
gurney, the plates in the machine. They cradle my left arm above my head, pull me
left or right by a roll of skin, like I'm an Akita pup. They call out numbers to each
other from across the room. When they have everything just right they say, "All right,
don't move. We'll be right back." One of them puts on a Frank Sinatra CD, which I
make a mental note to complain about next time. It had been dark and cozy in here;
now they switch on all the overhead lights and scurry out, leaving me to stare up at
the dinosaur stickers placed on the ceiling for the children.
The children.

Day 3
I say hello to Mac, whose name I don't even know yet, and he surprises me with
a hug.
"How're you feelin'?" he asks, with an unmistakable Caribbean cadence. "You'll
be okay," he nods and pats me on the back. I think, grouchily, How could he possibly
know I'm going to be okay? Maybe I have one month to live. But I will soon learn
to trust what Mac tells me. Mac knows things. I don't know how he knows them, but
he does.
Downstairs, there's the sweating boy again with his father and the woman with the drooping face. Her hair has begun to fall out in patches. Today, they smile radiantly at me. I get to chatting with them, and the boy volunteers that he has a tumor the size of a football in his chest, inoperable. The woman doesn't volunteer her diagnosis, but I guess it is a brain tumor. Some of the other patients I will get to know by sight will never make eye contact with me, keeping their attention focused on their magazines.
Others will meet my eyes only when I am wearing my wig, not when I am bald.
I am beginning to get the hang of this. I position my body quickly on the table,
remember to ask Mary Beth to forego Frank Sinatra, and hear rather than see the
shocked silence.
"You don't like Frank?" she says from behind me.
I worry that I've lost points with Mary Beth just as Tami puts on Sean "Puffy"
Combs. The lights come on and they leave the room as fast as lemmings.
As I wait for the loud electric buzz I wonder whether they turn the lights on as a
way of indicating to others that there's radiation in the room. Too dangerous for
passersby. Not, however, too dangerous for me.

Day 4
An older woman who is finishing treatment today is handing out the most sinfully
delicious cookies. They're pink butter cookies shaped like hearts and they've got butter
cream frosting slathered on them. I could eat a dozen, but limit myself to two since--
stubborn vanity!--I am trying to lose weight for my upcoming wedding. You'd think
chemotherapy would make you thin but noif anything, it puffs you up with fluid.
What's more, when the days of intense nausea end you're ready to eat roast suckling
pig off a slow-turning spit.
When the woman leaves she waves to everyone. Good luck to you! God bless
you! She walks out happy and gratefulbut what will be her fate? In my present state
of mind, I can allow no one a spotless future.

Day 5
It is a warm morning and I leave my wig at home. This morning Mac greets me
with a hug and tells me I took pretty. I am bald as an egg but I have put on earrings
and some lipstick. Mac makes me smile. Still holding onto my hand (has he forgotten
he is holding it?) he tells me about a rich, well-dressed lady who came to Cox for
treatment. One day when it was very windy (Blossom Street is always cold and windy)
her wig blew right off and scuttled under a car. Mac trotted off to get it for her but
she just laughed and laughed. "Forget it," she told him. "Leave it there."
As for me and Olivia, as I call her, we have a strange and not entirely loving
relationship. Olivia is one of two wigs I own. The first, whom I despised almost
from the beginning, is Lydia. Lydia is a blonde. She is pure human hair and cost
over a thousand dollars. But her hair is coarse and scratchy, and makes me itch. What's
more, Lydia's hair is so straight and thick that she makes me look like an orthodox
Jewa pale northern Jew with a low, dim forehead.
Olivia I picked up on the cheap and I'm glad I did because she's very comfortable.
Peter, my fiancé, thinks she's "sexy as hell but a bit of a bitch." She's a gingersnap
brunette styled in a pixyish flapper-style bob, and when I wear her my blue eyes
pop out, and my skin glows as white as the glass of poisoned milk Cary Grant carries
up to Joan Fontaine. I don't think you can easily tell it is a wigbut it looks obvious
to me.

We go out to the Tuscan Grille with some friends. It's a difficult evening because,
while I'm happy to see my friends, I'm getting these drenching hot flashes one after
another. I feel like ripping Olivia off my head and throwing her onto the chef's expensive Thermador grill. Grilled wig con funghi!

Day 6
I've been offered a freelance job and must tell the group about it, since it will prevent me from getting zapped (a shorthand that sends proud Dr. Powell into a frenzy
whenever I use it) at 1:10, as we have scheduled. The women--whom I have begun
to distinguish from one another--are excited for me. They already know my occupation
because every morning last week I complained about the book review I was writing
that I could not get right even after eight drafts.
The job turns out to be only a brief respite from our dire financial straits. What's
more, it is miserably stressful. Before I know it, I'm in this swank advertising agency
in Concord and it's nine P.M. and snowing hard outside, and I have to pretend to
feel like I am filled with creative inspiration about some high-tech gizmo and not dying
on my feet. The truth is, I'm in no shape to work. My brain is damp and muffled, a
small place stuffed with rags. My body rains sweat at the slightest hint of stress. Half
a dozen young assistants offer me whatever I want--computer, books, phone, coffee--
but I just can't work like this, no matter how much they pay me.
After two days, they don't ask me back and I don't ask to return. Surely they
sense that something is not quite right about me, that my hair is too perfect, that I
am too pale and sweaty, that my eyes shine not eagerness but fear.

Now that I can finally tell my ladies apart, I must admit I'm getting a crush on them all. Karen strikes me as so mature and efficient, with a lovely sense of competence, yet not the least bit bossy. Mary Beth, a big girl in the boob department (get 'em checked, Mary Beth) looks like a cross between Mama Cass and a communist, with her long, brown hair and thick black-rimmed glasses. She is always radiating (no pun intended) good will. She seems less complicated than Karen, but I could be wrong. And Gidget, perhaps the warmest and most childlike of the group, bustles around machine #5 with awesome mastery, and I keep thinking: what mother names her girl Gidget?
When they hear about the job Karen gently suggests that this is "perhaps not the
optimal time" to be under such stress. We get to talking about a book I am working
on and of course they want to know what it's about. As always, our conversation takes
place in the few minutes during which they adjust my body, and is truncated by three
minute-long flights from the room. I try to make the book sound interesting, but
that's a tall order even when I'm not being interrupted. Even so, henceforth my
four loyal fans will always ask me how it's coming.

Day 7
I am happy that Mary Beth does not seem to be holding my dislike of Frank Sinatra against me. Once more they want to know about the book's progress, but when I reveal that I am getting married in seven weeks all literary discussion ends and loud shouts erupt from room #5. They want to know every last detail.
Again our conversation is truncated by the coming of the bright fluorescent lights
overhead, the hasty departure of human life, the expectant pause, then the long,
lazy buzz, like the sound of a fly trapped in a window. There are moments, increasingly frequent, when I can actually feel the radiation, a deep twinge of pain. I lie there and think, randomly: of Macallum Moore and his unearthly ease, the boy with the football-sized tumor, the woman with half a face. I think of the victims of Hiroshima, of their belated blackening. Of my mother's own breast cancer, about which she has never once complained. The question mark of my end, my imagination perversely striving to go as close to it as possible, like Icarus to the sun. Except, of course, that instead of light it's darkness my mind aspires toward. Over and over I imagine my final moments, replaying them until the whole scene should become comfortable, familiar. For I have this idea that only acceptance can release one from anguish and fear.

Day 8
I admit it: I'm a bit in love with Dr. Powell. And why not? He's adorable. He's got
this troll-like, dark little face with dark, sly eyes and a mordant wit, as precise as his
profession. We talk about Manchester City and Leeds United, me pretending to know
far more about British soccer than I do. The conversation is thus fairly brief. Then on
to the hidden virtues of talcum powder, and the possibility of becoming burned on
my backwhere the electrons exit, he explains. The idea doesn't bear dwelling upon.
Once a week I see Dr. Powell. I must wait to see him after my radiation, and it
displeases me to have to sit in a hospital robe even after I have finished on #5. I decide that from now on I won't wear the hospital robe. After all, I think childishly, they can't make me. It's mortifying enough that I have no hair, and I think: we start to
take control in militant fashion, even if it's only over tiny things.
I know all the magazines, have read them cover to cover. The trials and tribulations
of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman; George W. Bush's First Thirty Days. I have
even begun to recognize the tropical fish.
I look around: the men with oxygen tanks are still there in the corner of the waiting room. They're hunched over, like they could be playing poker: but really they are just trying to breathe. Few people today meet my eyes and no one seems inclined to talk. I watch the fish swim around in the tank.

Day 9
Every time I sit in this waiting room, I wonder: who among us will live, who will
die? It's impossible to tell just from looking, although the gray men with the tanks
do not inspire confidence. Nor does the small young man with the wife twice his girth.
His color is wrong. It is not a human color--not flesh or even white but a kind of
black-green. His color suggests to me that he has not long to live. When he coughs,
he can't catch his breath. It's painful to listen to him, but we all pretend not to hear.
He takes his wife's hand and places it on his back, so she can rub in gentle circles.

If I am early, which I try not to be, I avoid the waiting room. I stroll over to the
gift shop, looking neither right nor left but dead on, straight past blowup photographs
of women surviving metastatic disease, meant to uplift the seriously ill. I browse the
jewelry, the hats, buy myself a piece of chocolate.
Between distractions, I wait for the burn, but as yet it hasn't happened. I have pretty
much despaired of ever having a serviceable left breast, whom Peter calls "Leftie."
The nipple is sore and too tight and cannot bear any touching. My doctors think it
looks fantastic; they don't see what I feel.
I don't much care that I will be burned, but it is not pleasant to wait for pain. I'm
diligent with talcum powder and to pass the time I read. Big, engrossing books like
Fortune's Rocks, which I have begun to discuss with Karen and Mary Beth. They are
reading it in their reading group. As we discuss the book, I am once more struck by
my new friends' humor, intelligence, and elegant economy of movement. I like not
just how they move but the way they talk to each other, the rhythm of it--words used
only as necessary, in punctuated fashion, words made important by the dearth of time.

Day 10
There is a new person in the waiting room. Within minutes of seeing her, I know
she is different from the rest. She is a large woman with the familiar pale, puffy features.
She has a blue bandanna tied around her head and looks in her mid to late forties.
She is chatting amicably with a friend and with the boy and his father.
I listen in, as I am sitting right next to her. I hear her tell the story of how they
found the lung tumor and how, going in to take care of that, they found the one in
her brain.
"So the radiation is for your brain?" I ask, stupidly. But the great thing about
cancer patients is that they're pretty non-judgmental. What's more, if they're talking
in a group of more than two, you are free to join in.
Her name is Mary Ann, and she's a third grade teacher from Lincoln, Massachusetts.
"See," she said to me, pulling off her bandanna, revealing a full, thick head of hair,
oddly bald in spots. "My hair even grew back."
"Then why are you wearing a bandanna? Gosh I would kill for some hair like that," I say.
"I don't want to get too attached to it," she says ruefully.
"You mean, the radiation makes it fall out?"
She nods, though I know that hair is the least of Mary Ann's problems.
It is just moments later that I receive the news: Mary Ann had breast cancer, too.
Or, as she puts it, "Oh, that's what I had, too! Originally." She says it excitedly, like
she's just found out we come from the same home town.
On this, Treatment Day 10, I discover why so many of the others keep silently to
their magazines.
Mary Ann can see the adrenalin ricochet through my body. She reaches her hand
out to steady me, lets it rest on my forearm.
"Oh, honey, this won't happen to you. I'm one in a hundred."
I go home cursing myself for speaking to "those damned patients."
"She probably didn't have chemotherapy," my sister said reassuringly. "Put it
out of your mind. That's not going to be you."
But why isn't it going to be me? Because I'm a fantastic person? Well spoken? Highly
intelligent?
So is Mary Ann.
This, then, was the myopia that has you saying, "But I'm so ME! I am the center
of everything. I can't disappear."
Oh, but you can.
To rub up with this blunt truth is cause enough for depression. But after some
thought, the idea began to console me. For, while the world may lose meand while
I may lose myselfif the world itself doesn't disappear and I am not in fact the center
of things (an idea that I must at least entertain) then all is not lost. My son will have
his life, and his children will have theirs. It's not really necessary to the world, after all,
that I exist.
But it's necessary to me! the ego cries.
All this thinking doesn't get me very far. Still, Mary Ann's generosity would linger
with me far after the fear had passed.

Day 11
She is not in the waiting room today, and I sigh with relief. She is my worst
nightmare. From now on, I will look twice before I enter the waiting room. I do
the usual strip, put my clothes in a locker, change into a robe. I search for a magazine
I haven't read--no easy task.
I try to make eye contact with a woman wearing a straight blonde wig and sensible
but expensive Ferragamo pumps, but she won't look up from her magazine. I know
she can feel my eyes on her, so her unwillingness to meet my eyes is deliberate. Another
woman, slightly younger than me in a short brown wig, looks like a woman I met in
infusion. I decide to take the risk.
"Haven't we met?" I begin. "In infusion?"
She shakes her head.
"You're not married to Wayne?"
"No, I'm married to Jack."
Jack's wife goes back to her reading without giving me her name. Like everything
else under this electric sun, our personal space either dissolves altogether or becomes
absolute.

Day 12
My brother and sister-in-law have come to visit. I am delighted to see them but
worried I won't have energy for them.
Nancy comes with me to radiation and makes fast friends with Mac. She buys me a week of parking so I don't have to run up for my pass each day.
After radiation, we stroll down Charles Street, where I find my wedding band in
one of the antiques stores. We agree to bring Peter back to see it. It's a simple, patterned platinum band, just my size. While there, I spy a beautiful silver ladle and point it out to Nancy. We find Peter a Valentine's Day gift and have lunch together. Back on the street, Nancy lights up a cigarette and I say something about tempting fate. She's not happy with my comment. She lists the names of everyone in her family who has died of cancer, as if it is a club she hopes to join. I finally cut her short.
"Enough, Nancy. Enough."
How can people think that a cancer patient wants to hear about all the people they know who've died of cancer? And yet, "Cancer Deaths I Have Known" is often the first piece of information people share. I suppose it's their way of trying to connect, the closest they've come to the experience first-hand. Even as they speak, terror coils up tighter inside you.
The gift of tact--for isn't that the ability to think before speaking?can be found
in surprising places. For example, my mother has been exceedingly tactful with me
over the past few months. In all this time she hasn't said one wrong or harmful thing.
Her maternal desire to protect me from harm, never before strong enough to inhibit
a sometimes poison-dipped tongue, has prevailed. Now when my mother speaks to
me she calls me "sweetheart" and "darling," words I never in my life heard before.
My father, gifted but normally obstreperous, has likewise been a model of restraint.
In fact, after I broke the news to him he just said, "All right, so is that all?"
Having siblings, I of course hear snippets of what goes on behind closed doors, myparents' private suffering. Like how my father cried the day Peter shaved my head.
This was hard. The thought of my eighty-five-year-old father weeping was very hard
to bear.
Unlike my parents, my sister-in-law, normally quite alert to the faux pas, has said all the wrong things almost from the beginning--a verbal comedy of errors. When I first told her of my diagnosis she joked that every year she asks the doctor checking her breasts if she is "going to live another year." Sometimes I think she is so afraid of saying the wrong thing that she does sojust to relieve her tension.
But there are worse things than tactlessness. There are those who so are so afraid
to speak that they say nothing. They avoid you, or if they must see you, they avoid
the subject. And this silence is the worst thing, silence and having to pretend that
nothing has changed, when in fact nothing is the same.

Day 13
We all go back to the antiques store together, and Peter agrees that the ring is lovely and buys it for me. I go to show him the ladle but someone has already bought it, a fact that disappoints me although I know we have no money for such luxuries.
In the car, Nancy reveals a stash of candy. She's got them tucked away in a bag like they're a first-aid kit: chocolate-coated orange jellies from Trader Joe's, jelly beans,
salted nuts. I am both envious and shocked. I am used to an ascetic life by comparison.
But secretly I make a note to find those same little candies at Trader Joe's and buy them for myself. They remind me of my childhood, the simple delight of colorful
candy. Perhaps that's why Nancy likes them, too.

Day 14
Matt and Nancy have left, and the house feels too quiet and lonely. I am halfway
through my treatment, and still no symptoms except a lingering fatigue.
On the way to my appointment, I stop at Trader Joe's and buy the orange and
raspberry chocolate sticks. The raspberry ones in particular are totally addictive. But
I quickly realize my mistake and when I get home give one entire container to my
son, Alex.

Day 15
I bring an assortment of the little treats to MGH and present them to Karen and
Gidget. The candy cements our friendship right then and there. They take a few, then
put them in a cabinet in the treatment room. I can't help but wonder if they're going
to get zapped, since the only image I can think of, and which I know is inaccurate,
is that I'm a slab of meat inside a huge microwave. But surely the beams are far
more focused than that.

Day 16
My skin is beginning to tan from breastbone to armpit to the base of my neck. If
it just stays tan I'll be lucky. The novel is nearly finished. I am racing to get it done
so I can give it to my friends, for somewhere along the line they have offered to read
it in their reading group. It is an offer I accept, for unclear motives. Is it heavy? they
want to know. At the end of their day, they don't want anything heavy. They want
a good story. I hope mine is a good story, wondering even as they say the words what
such a thing might be.

Day 17
Mary Ann is in the waiting room this morning, this time with a different friend.
Her face lights up when she sees me, and in a split second I make the decision to sit
next to her even though I don't want to. There must be no trace of indecision, for
we patients are alert to ambivalence. Somehow, I am able to steer the conversation
where I have wanted it to go for several weeks: back three years in time, to her original
diagnosis. She knows why I want to know.
Mary Ann says she had been diagnosed at St. Elizabeth's hospital. Her tumor was
.8 centimeters upon discovery. She points to a place at the top of her left breast. No
trace of lymph node involvement. An excellent prognosis. And then, what I had
secretly longed to hear: no chemo.
"I begged them to give me chemotherapy," she says. "Begged them. They said I
didn't need it."
I just shake my head, ashamed of my relief.
Mary Ann talks about her brain tumor and upcoming surgery. As always, her very
existence moves me, as if we share a skin. Her presence makes me think about good
and evil, and states of grace: What is the best we can attain? Not in the sense of
achievement, but in our humanity?
Breathing in unison next to Mary Ann, I decide that it must be this seemingly
infinitesimal movement one soul can make toward another, this invisible but morally
gargantuan impulse to draw closer to another living being. To lend comfort and
solace, share a moment of humor, or regret, or just the profound commonality of
being alive at the same time in history. This moment with Mary Ann is as good as
we get. And nobody in the waiting room even notices.
At the sinister end of the spectrum, we patients likewise chill on contact with
another's coldness. Like the young Asian car salesman who saw me swerve into his
Acura dealership's parking lot at 60 mph and told me to move my car or they would
tow it. He saw how I trembled with my narrow escape. The car had suddenly died
in transit, had no power. But he repeated his threat to me and I thought, this man
has no chance of getting into Heaven.
Now, I don't believe in Heaven, but if there's some kind of cosmic retribution, I
hope the unworthy get their due. Peter, who is a believer, wants to know how it is I
think I can know which people these are, and I say without hesitation: I know. It is
the one who has never ventured beyond the false safety of his own skin.
I think of the psychopath in Flannery O'Connor's short story, the one named the
Misfit who chats with the grandmother a while before shooting her in the head.
"She would of been a good woman," he says almost plaintively, "if it had been
somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." We patients in the Cox
waiting room--we've got guns to our heads, and in our grief we become good and
beautiful.
It makes me recall the month before my diagnosis, when I found out that my
ex-husband's wife had melanoma. I had formerly despised this woman--she had once,
after all, been the other woman. But when I heard the news I trembled, and the next
day I drove to her house and we cried in each other's arms and I told her I didn't want
her to die. She said she didn't want to die, either. Then we walked together with my
son, whom she has always loved, along Revere Beach. I had cancer then, too, but I
didn't know it. And all this winter, she has rung me up after every infusion, the most
faithful of my callers.

Day 18
My hair has grown in sufficiently so that in all but job interview situations I am able to go wigless. Today I've got an interview so I put Olivia on with a black skirt, a
blue knit top, black lace jacket, and chunky platform shoes. The interview is downtown and afterwards when I arrive at the hospital I am in a drenching sweat. I have begun to feel occasional moments of really crushing fatigue as well, and this is one of them.
On Blossom Street I tear off my wig. I am standing on the sidewalk with Olivia
dangling by my side, fuzzy head exposed. Even so, Mac's eyes widen when he sees
me and he hugs me to him, tells me I look beautiful. He is standing with a young
friend, a handsome black man, and says, "Isn't she pretty? She's so pretty." The
other man smiles, and I am not sure if he agrees or not. To him, I must look pale
and old.

Day 19
My wedding is in six weeks, and I have begun the last mad quest for accessories.
In the MGH gift shop, I spy a string of blue pearls. They're expensive, but I put them
on the "maybe" list. The wedding plans have intensified, and they're an effective
distraction. I wonder, though: what will happen after the wedding? What thoughts
will then protect me from those other thoughts, that place in my mind to which I have
already decided it is not wise to go, and yet toward which I keep drifting?

Day 20
Karen, Gidget, and Mary Beth insist on having all the details as they evolve. What dress I'll be wearing, the food, where we'll go for our honeymoon. I enjoy telling
my new friends about the wedding.
The weekend is hot and clear, and I spend it scraping 140 years of paint off our
front door. It's a grueling, dirty task, but I am less afraid of it than I would formerly
have been. What's a little lead paint when you have cancer? Friends, neighbors, and
strangers pass by and smile at me in my mask and near-bald head. Some actually stop
and talk. Do they look at my hair and wonder? A friendly young woman asks me
how treatment is going. Try as I might I cannot remember having ever met this woman
before, or having told her my story. It's disconcerting.
It's Marathon day in Boston, and I let myself get pulled into the excitement. I
live just two houses away from the route on Commonwealth Avenue. Thousands line
the avenue, eagerly awaiting the sleek frontrunners. Across the street is a group of
children all in yellow MGH T-shirts, kerchiefs over their bald heads. I feel my arm
reaching out to them, waving as if to compatriots of a secret land.

Day 21
Today is the first of the last five visits with my beloved group. I am two days away from giving them my manuscript, but I don't tell them that. I'm so broke I don't
even have the money to copy it, and my printer's too decrepit to survive such a copy
orgy. But what choice do I have? Copy it I will, and worry about where the money
would come from later.

Day 22
Each day we grow more excited and nervous about our wedding. We spend hours
anxiously looking for last-minute items. We argue about things like what tie he will
wear; I buy several pairs of expensive shoes before settling on one pair of satin
sling-backs. I make a mental note to tell Maria, our caterer, not to overcook the pork.
Alex still needs a suit and shoes, but I do manage to find him a handsome French-cuff
shirt.
My life is coming to fruition, even as it may be coming to a close. (Peter says I am
being melodramatic, but it isn't melodrama. It's the ironic mode, that harsh light my
electric sun casts on everything.) In some ways I have never been happier: There's
this gorgeous man in my bed with a gleam in his eye despite my baldness. Every day
when my son returns from school I want to snuggle him like a baby even though he
is taller than his mother. I will have to learn to work with this: the fullness of life
irrespective of its duration. I will learn to live like a mathematician, fashioning eternity
from the halves of every distance.
Still, I can easily make myself distraught. I look at these beloved beings in my life and think, how will I be able to leave them? I cannot leave them. Not now, not in mid-fullness. No, no, no, no.
This is the loop that tightens: the happier I am, the sadder I become at the thought of the loss.
I am saying this over a beer in a restaurant. To lighten the heaviness of the moment, Peter, too, enters the ironic mode:
"Your happiness makes you sad."
"Exactly."
I know he is only pretending not to understand; he has understood me perfectly.

Day 23
When I get to Cox loaded down with all the manuscripts, I am dismayed to discover that neither Karen nor Mary Beth is in. Gidget, staring at the boxes in my arms, looks delighted but busy, and promises that the others will get their manuscripts the following day. I leave them on the counter, next to the monitor, which shows the skull of the human being presently lying on table #5's gurney. I feelnot envy, exactly, but loss all the same. I take a seat in the waiting room, uneasy at the dichotomy between myself as triumphant author on the one hand and vulnerable patient on the other. In the waiting room, I'm just another fuzzy-headed woman in an ill-fitting gown with a scar on her breast, which is beginning to burn.

Day 24
The thing about getting so close to the sun is this: suddenly, what once seemed
glamorous looms rudely with all its ruts and pits. Money, even a lot of money, can no
longer compensate for time. Still, I do want many material things: an addition we have
planned for the house with a fireplaced master bedroom. A sun room with French
doors leading out to a rose-covered patio. A little cottage in Maine. But do I want
these things badly enough to write about cell phones for the remainder of my life?
All at once, I'm at sixes and sevens. While I desperately need a job, I suddenly,
just as desperately, want to stay home and lead a life of the mind, pure and
unencumbered. I want to continue to write and to come to some kind of agreement
with death and tend my family and garden. And this is all I want to do. In sickness,
I have become as ascetic as St. Francis of Assisi.
Peter understood about happiness making one sad, but he truly doesn't understand this. He watches me silently as I work in my basement study surrounded by scant light and exposed electrical wires and dripping water pipes, and he tells me I need to get out of the house, that I'll go crazy if I don't. And maybe I do, and will. But I don't feel the need. I'm plenty busy right inside my head with my laptop propped up on a zip code book. I am very busy! But my work is invisible to others.

Day 25
This is my last day on machine #5. I am very sad, consoled only by the thought that I will see my friends again in a month's time. I realize now that I planned it that
way, used the book as a means to see them and not the other way around. For five
weeks these have been my daily fare: their quick, intermittent conversation, grown more familiar and personal over the weeks; their touch as they arrange my body on
the gurney; the sound of their voices calling out numbers and vectors to one another
above my head as they adjust lenses and angles. It is not ideal, not life as I have ever
known it. But at the moment, it is the only life I know. And I am not a little uneasy
at what lies outside of it, beyond my electric sun.

Day 26
Machine #2. The outgoing manner of my new radiology technician makes me recoil.
She and the others try to make conversation with me, unaware that I am glum and
in mourning for my ladies.
This machine is different: it is larger and the cone from which pure electrodes emanate noses rudely close, nearly flush with my nipple. When they leave the room, close the two-foot-thick steel door, and switch on the machine, I feel a jolt of pain. I am amazed that something invisible could be so powerful.
Why amazed? So many powerful things, I am learning, are invisible.

Day 27
I am early today. Once more I am wearing a nice outfit and Olivia, in my perpetual
quest for gainful employment. I am wearing makeup and sitting at the little
mini-cafeteria on Cox 1, eating a diet lunch because, despite the chemotherapy, I
haven't managed to lose a single pound. Except for the pallor against Olivia's gingerbrown
locks, I look normal. Mid-way through my egg salad sandwich, I look up and
see Karen and Mary Beth walking right past me. I wave and, after a second's confused
pause, they come racing up.
"You don't recognize me with my clothes on."
They smile and admit they didn't.

There is a burn beginning to take form in a perfect circle around my nipple. The
technician remarks upon it as we talk about my upcoming wedding. But I am impatient to be done and resolutely have no feelings toward any of these new people. I have
made my connections, am filled to bursting with them.
There is something almost biblical about the connections I make with others
now. They are swift, fierce, and uncompromising. I love or dismiss, praise or censure.
Former enemies become friends; and friends in whom I perceive cowardice become
irredeemable. My reactions, almost intolerably visceral, give rise once more to that
consoling inner dialogue: What makes a human being worthy of my friendship, my
time? What makes an interaction valuable, meaningful?
If nothing else, the scale I've built is a democratic one. As I toss this one up into
the clouds and that one down the pit, I'm aware of being harsh, but not unfair. It's
like suddenly I've got x-ray vision. In normal life bad character hides beneath attractive conventions just as good character gets lost in the false glitter of rank and class, or in personal animosities. But under my electric sun, they're both equally exposed, illuminated not just from above but from within.
I am at a loss as to how to bring this awareness back to "real" life. It is like returning to a world that is both finer and not nearly as fine as I had once imagined it to be. On the other hand, I am now also fortified by the understanding that goodness exists in unexpected places, too, in the irreducible crevices of human existence. In Mac, who cradles my whole fuzzy white skull in his big black hand. In the woman for whose demise I once prayed. And in Mary Ann, third grade teacher from Lincoln, who has the unworldly generosity to console me.

Day 28
Speaking of Mary Ann, she is there today. It is the last time I will see her. She is
with yet a third friend. She has so many, but I'm no longer surprised at this. We talk
about everything from what her family likes to eat to the brain surgery that looms
before her.
Specifically, she is complaining (tenderly, always tenderly) about people who bring her casseroles.
"My guys are strictly meat and potatoes," she says. "They won't touch a casserole."
And I'm thinking, why haven't my friends brought me casseroles? Why do I have
such snooty, cerebral friends? But I stop myself, knowing it is perverse to envy Mary
Ann. Perhaps if my tumor spreads, my friends will bring casseroles, too. (More likely,
it'll be takeout from Bread & Circus.)
The mind tests those waters. It asks: Who do you see holding your hand? What
would bring comfort in those final months and days and hours? You compile your list,
in no particular order: light; vision; the garden; a sister; the high school boyfriend who
confesses he will always love you; a kind nurse; morphine. It does not do well to
imagine these things too closely, to cast your mind this far. And yet, you keep putting
yourself there. You keep bringing forth the things you could not bear to part with:
lover, son, parents, assaulting yourself repeatedly with fresh grief, as if such grief came
in limited quantities and could, eventually, run dry.
In fact, what you struggle to do is to acclimate; to shift and reorganize and shut
down the universe so that, in this absolute relative space, the unbearable becomes
bearable. It's an artificial universe, to be sure, a twilight world that exists between
life and death. But it is perhaps not significantly more artificial than other universes
we construct for ourselves.
"So, the idea with the radiation is to get the tumor into remission," I hear myself
say. What else is there to say?
"That's the idea" says Mary Ann, and I notice that her mind, too, has found the
tiny slot of hope and squeezed itself into that.