The Hard Way Back to Heaven. Karl Dehmelt

ground. His eyes are taking the floor apart and putting it back together, tile by tile. The Cheshire cat of fear perches directly under him, grinning at her with its cold, iris-absent eyes. Fear and Hurt stare at her from that big, dumb animal.

      Michael finally speaks. “I don’t want to be on a ventilator.”

      Lauren shakes her head, and the cat is gone. “What?”

      Michael’s eyes are the shots of a flare gun on a distant shore. “I’m going to go the medicinal route.”

      Lauren digs her nails into the plastic of her chair. There’s the man she fought with, loved, argued with, and made love with for 18 years. The father of her child, the man she gave herself to utterly and wholly. He’s electing to deny the opportunity of surgery and instead use drugs to fight the illness. Cancer? The mouth of the Cheshire cat grins at her with death on its lips like a balm.

      “What possibility is there that it could be cancer?” Lauren asks Fost.

      “Lauren,” Michael interjects, wiping his face with his hands. “It’s not cancer. They’d be able to see it.”

      Fost selects his words carefully, a tailor mending at gunpoint.

      “We cannot rule out that it might be cancer, but we’re almost positive that it’s MAI. If you choose the drugs, we’ll monitor your treatment, if you choose the surgery, we remove the bleb, and we eventually remove part of the lung.”

      Michael and Lauren’s eyes talk.

      Why? her hazels ask.

      Everything will be ok, Michael’s blues reply.

      “The medication, then?” Fost takes the pen from the top of his clipboard.

      Michael turns to him like a soldier approaching the front of a phalanx.

      “Yes.”

      Silence leaks into the room, a clear and odorless liquid clogging their lungs.

      “Alright.” Fost says, pushing his chair over to the granite desk in the corner.