Illustration key:

1. Note the left leg is shorter. Sitting at the Right Hand is hard on a body.
2. Billy Mays would show up 2,000 years too late for Pilate.
3. Pilate would ultimately lose the suit against the exercise regimen that bears his name (but you should see his core).
4. Mel Gibson could never get it straight: Calvary or Cavalry?

   
   (There will be days when you have nothing more to offer than the stubborn remains of a failed Catholicism, an obsession with pants, and a grudging admiration for TV admen (the goddamn persistence). Fine, offer it and come back tomorrow.)

Fast forward faster. Past the marionette months of drain bags and catheter tubes and spiking fevers with an affinity for threes (a.m., one oh).

Your arms look overly naked, your unadorned body a stranger now that there’s nothing sticking out of it. Nothing to collect from or inject into. You still get these momentary panics thinking you missed a dose. 

You are, by all outward indications, better now. You’re dancing with your daughter. You can pick her up again. You try not to do the math, the percentage of her life for which you couldn’t hold her. You’d thought better would feel different. You’ll learn later that the body easily outpaces the mind.

The music: I Don’t Want to Die in the Hospital. Her choice.

She’s about to turn three and giddy with desperation. She hurls herself at you, adamant, determined that this here and now is how we’ll remember two: playful, alive, a tiny and shimmering fierceness. She’ll shake free memories of when your arms didn’t feel so foreign, when your muscles fell just so and you smelled like safety.

You have a rash. Probably nothing, they say, but atypical presentation is a hook, not a balm.

You’re probably fine, usually.

You feel your side, your scar, for the hardness that indicates a fluid collection, which in turn, tells you that the “I haven’t seen this in 30 years of medicine” is back. You do this discreetly, you think. You underestimate her. You miss it when the smile slides from her face, shatters. You stifle a sneeze.

She’s clinging now, limp. The weight of sadness: 24 pounds.

You convince yourself you have MS, that there’s a telltale MS rash. This is what happens when you leave the brain in charge.  

You spin faster, bathe her in the sun that slices through the blinds. Show her she can glow without you. She already knows. It’s not what she wants. (It’s you you’re trying to convince.)

***

The physician’s assistant pulls up a stool. You checked (while your daughter slept on your chest)—there’s no MS rash. But there really is a rash spread across your lower back. You run down your health history for the PA and choke, like every other time, on tumor. You explain (apologize?) that it wasn’t actually cancer. She reaches over and slams a STOP button.

You didn’t know this existed.

She puts her pen down.

She lets you breathe and notice it.

She says, “You know about being sick.”

Your shoulders drop from your ears. Your eyes water. Your face opens, soft in a way you thought no longer possible, from a time before you knew anything like shame. You think of your mom and yourself at age three. The word for this moment, you believe, is safety.

All this time, you’d never considered sick. Only: these are things happening to my body.

There is a you that still sits in the silence of that moment, chilled feet dangling from a johnny in front of a PA whose name you forgot before it even left her mouth. You’ll learn to climb back there, occupy the angle and awkwardness of your frigid elbows, and recall the mercy of the strange and disentangled.

The river was perfect that day. Mattresses floated with disregard. Futons sank, deservedly so. To be a bed and a couch is already too much, and either way, not a boat. Mattresses, however. Who doesn’t want to float with disregard?

(Clarification. There are no metaphors here, only this: allow for lovers on that bridge, old ones especially. How much time do you think you have?)

I’m nine on the family trip to the West Coast, when my aunt confiscates the dead crawfish from the restaurant, wraps it in a cloth napkin.

A rule: You can take the napkin if it’s for a dead fish.

Outside, set the fish into a stream. When it’s not resuscitated, watch your kid heart do something that feels a lot like falling. This is new. Keep it between you and the fish.

Years later, two feet of snow for the next six hundred miles. Your mom, still young, calls from a hospital bed. “I’ll be ok,” she says. “I haven’t been to Europe yet.” Says it three times, like Peter. Or Paul. Whoever. As if she didn’t know what was coming and soon. You too, but some things you can’t let yourself know.

A rule: Allow for early departures.

A dead fish crawls through your brain. Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island shills luxury Cordobas, Corinthian leather. What did the Corinthians, recipients of countless epistles from Paul, have to do with Chrysler?

Good. Stay here: things you can churn on, resolve or pretend to. When it feels like falling, think harder.

A rule: This is how I wrap my dead.

“The clocks in here, they’re a joke?”

“You’re back.

“I left?”

“For real? Yeah, couple times.”

“I needed a second opinion?”

“I’ll let you in on something: you’ll always find someone to tell you what you want.”

“What do I want?”

***

“Let’s try it again. I say, Lesion. You say, Huh? I say, What I mean is cancer. You say, Oh. Huh. Got it?”

“Sorry, Doc. I’m here for the kidney or the appendix?”

“Appendix. The kidney hasn’t happened yet.”

***

“What about the reimbursables?”

“Mm hmm.”

“The aquatic situation.”

“Deep breath in, William.”

“What am I losing this time?”

“Ready?”

“What time is it?”

“It’s ok, honey. I’m sorry to wake you.”

“Ow ow ow ow.”

“Sorry for the pinch.”

“But not for taking my blood.”

“You have no idea how much blood you don’t need.”