“Really now. And is there a prize?” Mother asked.
“Pardon me?”
“No. Spare me the circus act, Herr Doctor. You tell me I have a disease only found in children and pets as if I’d won the lottery. It’s absurd!”
Mother’s impatience was palpable. She would grumble about the medical corps being comprised of sadists who flocked to medical school fascinated by stories of Mengele’s ghoulish experiments. To her the nurses were variations of Herta Oberhauser, a Nazi nurse who murdered her victims by injecting them with kerosene. Mother had played Herta in a controversial play in a small Montparnasse theatre and knew what she was talking about. I ignored these rants. After all, the sentiment was not a recent development. Mother had suffered from a phobia of hospitals for as long as I could remember, and made several efforts to cultivate in me a similar distrust of the medical profession. It was wiser, she thought, to follow the example of Great Aunt Edda when you were under the weather: have a little drink to ease the pain, and then another just for luck. I pointed out that strong spirits were hardly a cure for cancer and that she had to be a bit more understanding of the hospital staff. And I suppose she tried, even though she failed fantastically.
“Maybe I should have gone to the vet, Herr Doctor?”
“No, no, not at all, Mrs. Briem,” the doctor stammered. “Cell division in people your age is not very rapid, which means that the disease spreads more slowly.”
“Right. And so you will, of course, fix this before that happens.”
“Well,” the doctor began, breaking into a long speech about matters being slightly more complicated. There certainly were cases where doctors had managed to surgically remove sarcoma from connective tissue, but a very large team of specialists was needed for such an operation. Unfortunately, Icelandic hospitals had neither the equipment, nor the manpower for such an undertaking. The operation would have to take place in the United States, but since the procedure was still experimental, it would not fall under the Icelandic Health Care System. Mother would have to pay for it herself.
“There is, however, quite a good chance of getting sponsors for semi-profiled operations of this magnitude. Surgeons may waive their fees, research institutes invest in the operations in exchange for exclusive rights to acquired information.”
“Ok, alright,” I said, my hopes already up. “And how do we do this?”
“I can look into it, make a few inquiries. The fact that this is such a rare case should work in our favor.”
“I don’t understand where you’re going with this,” Mother said. “Do you think I’m some kind of guinea pig? We both know perfectly well that no one is going to pay for this operation. I’m not a celebrity. And what company will put up a fortune for an old hag from Iceland?”
I’d never heard Mother refer to herself as old, and certainly never as a hag, but this seemed to achieve the desired effect: the doctor was suddenly at a loss for words. He stared blankly at her and fiddled with his pen.
“See, I thought that a doctor’s job was to help patients,” Mother continued, “not to breed false hopes of some American Utopia.”
“If we pay for this ourselves,” I interjected, “. . . do you have any idea what that would add up to?”
The doctor cited some astronomical number that was beyond my comprehension. What I did comprehend was that, even if we sold the apartment, withdrew all my savings, sold every internal organ I could spare and the rest of me off into slavery, it wouldn’t even make a dent in the costs.
“It’s not worth it, Trooper. All this for a shot in the dark? No.”
“As I was saying, this is the most promising option you have,” the doctor mumbled, “but there are alternatives. One is to do nothing: your life expectancy is three to six months. Twelve with chemo. Another is to amputate. That could buy you five years, and with chemo before and after we could . . .”
“You’re not taking my leg.”
“Mother . . .”
“Out of the question. I’m sixty-three years old and I’ve had this leg all my life. Nothing changes that.”
“This is a matter of life and death.”
“Well, then I’ll just die!”
She leaned forward in her chair and burst into tears. It was unbearable.
“We’ll fight this,” I finally managed to say. “We’ll do everything we can.”
“Take off my leg? Pump me so full of chemicals that I won’t be able to eat? Just so that I can make it to seventy and invite the leftover, half-dead scarecrows to some pathetic birthday party at the Freemason’s Hall? I’m dying, Trooper. It was always a matter of time.”
She stood up and walked out of the room. The doctor handed me a calling card with an emergency number and told me to be in touch as soon as we decided on how we wanted to proceed. We took a taxi back home. Mother went straight to her bedroom and left me alone in the living room, surrounded by a silence impregnated with years of memories.
I had grown up in this apartment, left home and returned again well into my thirties with my tail between my legs to hide away once more in the attic. The inflation of my body over the past few months provided a strong argument for those who believe that obesity is a growing social problem. In the mornings I’d stand naked, gawking at myself in a full-length mirror. My bloated body resembled a fisherman wearing a flesh-toned parka over neoprene waders. I blamed glandular hyperactivity, but deep down I knew that the real culprits were the bakery across the street and the sherry-marathons Mother and I regularly indulged in. It had been four months since Zola left me to shack up with that French dentist and his lantern jaw. Since then my life had been devoid of substance. I lived in a world limited by the seams of my pajamas. The diminutive nature of this world was confined to even less significant acts like fly-tying and online car racing. In the evenings I’d come down and have a drink with Mother—her own home brew, which she claimed was better than any wine sold in the liquor store. Almost every aspect of my body and personality surrendered to the law of gravity. My face was bloated and the rest of me was somehow rubbery, as if I were one big tennis elbow, from head to toe. There was nothing to suggest, as I had claimed when I first moved in, that my stay in the attic was a temporary arrangement until I found a flat for myself. I came into Mother’s life like a stand-in for the company she craved, and we’d grown used to this little by little; spending our days drinking sherry and reading tarot cards while I continued to tell myself: Tomorrow I’ll get going, tomorrow I’ll get off my fat ass and start a new life.
But it wasn’t until that day, the day Mother was told that she was dying, that I faced reality. I walked around studying the apartment in a trance, lightheaded from the inevitability of impermanence. Each nook and cranny became a tunnel to the past. Freud in dust form. A biography of molecules. My life floated by and suddenly I was overcome by relief—this was not the end of everything, but a new beginning. Time itself, that mismatched resin of shapeless days and self-pity, became an unbroken, unwavering and crystal-clear image before my very eyes. From now on, each day would be a work of art and the brushstrokes governed by this one goal: to make Mother happy during the last days of her life.
I was filled with such exuberance that I laughed out loud, as if nothing had ever pleased me as much as Mother’s imminent death. I ate a pepperoni stick and poured sherry into a tall glass of Coca-Cola, surfed aimlessly on the Internet like a bar-hopping drunk