INTRODUCTION
Maureen McHugh
In late winter of 2005, I walked into a hospital waiting room. I said hello to the receptionist and without bothering to go to the desk, said my last name and that I was the 11:00. Around a corner of a little alcove to a doorway was a magazine rack, one of two in the office. Because the door led back to the labs and all the testing gear for echo cardiograms, CT scans, all the elaborate ways to examine the lungs and hearts and lord knows what else, patients would often get to the door and realize that they were still carrying their magazine. So all the good magazines tended to end up there. But since the magazine rack wasn’t particularly visible from the door, most patients tended not to notice it when they came in.
I’d been here several times for bunches of different tests. I was here now for a CT scan. I’d drink a contrast drink (a liter and then wait for, if I remember, half an hour) and then have my scan. Then I’d have a light lunch, and after that I’d have chemo in the afternoon. I had my bag of chemo distractions—books, a notebook a magazine. Most days when I was going out in public I wore a wig. I carefully drew in eyebrows, and used eyeliner so that behind my glasses you registered something like eyelashes. You would not have noticed anything about me unless you knew me, and then you probably would have wondered why I looked so much better, so much more put together, than I usually do. But on chemo days, I was going to sit in the infusion center for four hours and I was going to be comfortable. I just wore a scarf over my obviously bald head.
The receptionist didn’t need me at the desk because she had to get the contrast started anyway, and I’d hand her my insurance card then. People griped about the contrast drink and it wasn’t great. Sort of like a weird diet/lemonade/energy drink. But it was no big deal.
I scored some trash magazines and turned around and every person sitting in the waiting room instantly averted their eyes. Most of the people in the waiting room were getting a test so their doctor could make a diagnosis. I obviously already had my diagnosis. They had been staring at me, a native of this strange place, so familiar with the rituals of the hospital, so marked by chemotherapy. I was their nightmare. A walking momento mori. I had cancer.
I had Hodgkins Lymphoma. Stage III Nodular sclerosis, type A, which is to say that I had no night sweats or itching and my disease was not classified as “bulky.” Cancer of the lymph nodes. (It is a highly treatable cancer, and has a 75% cure rate. In three months, I will have been cancer free for five years, and officially not in remission, but cured.) I had read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor years before. I recognized that in literature, cancer is often a metaphor for a creeping inner spiritual rot, or any sort of curse. It is a punishment. It is an example of the capriciousness of fate. I had found that cancer in my life was much less metaphorical. What I had not been prepared for was to be turned into a walking metaphor myself. That with my eyebrowless, eyelashless face, in its boiled egg nakedness, I would become, like cancer, a metaphor for death.
What Jay Lake writes is a way to deal with life. With his own cancer diagnosis he has written something of a memoir. This isn’t a memoir of Jay’s actual life, although there are parallels with it. The protagonist is a writer who when he wrote had the same writing habits as Jay. But Jay’s daughter is fine. Like many of the significant moments of life, say, the birth of a child or a parent’s aging, life-threatening illness makes us consider what is going to happen. There’s a cancer culture. It emphasizes support groups, optimism, and names sick people “cancer survivors.” People pray or visualize chemo destroying their cancer cells. They practice good thinking. Maybe some of them remain completely and determinedly certain that they will be fine.
For the rest of us, there are considerations. What if the disease doesn’t respond to treatment? What if it doesn’t come back? How far will I go? How much pain will I endure? What will this do to the people I love? There aren’t a lot of opportunities to air these scenarios. No one wants to talk about it. No one wants to think about it, certainly not the friends who are so determinedly being a support group. Certainly not the people in the waiting room where I was waiting before my CT scan, many of whom were thinking over and over, “don’t let it be cancer.”
Jay has made sympathetic magic. He has imagined a life devastated by cancer, in not one, but several ways. He has written into the darkness. People always say to young writers, “write what you know.” But the truth is that we write about the big things in our lives that we don’t know. We write to figure out what things mean. What shape they have. This is, like the P.E.T. scan described, a way of measuring cancer. It doesn’t measure millimeters of tumor, but it does attempt to measure the emotional scope of disease. It is a kind of rehearsal for a play no one wants to star in. It is an exorcism. And like all magics and exorcisms, it is rooted deeply in metaphor.
There are places, journeys, that can’t be directly described. This is a map of one of them.