All the Ways the World Can End Page 6

  “Jesus, I’m so so sorry,” Mom gushed. She dropped all of her bags and charged toward the bed, cupping Dad’s face in her hands. Without sanitizing first.

  “Jesus is fine. But can you please wash your hands?” I said. My voice was low and menacing. She nodded and went to the antibacterial squirter by the door. Then she came back and took his palm in hers, kissing it over and over again. She put her lips on his forehead.

  “Feels cooler now,” she said.

  “Of course he is now,” I snarled. It actually felt great to have the real estate in my head for anger. Mom clung to me in a drippy hug. She was rambling into my hair.

  “You did so great, Lenny. I can’t believe this. I’m so sorry. It’s crazy, you know? I don’t know what happened. My phone was off while we were in session and then when I went to turn it back on the battery was dead. I stopped at the phone store because I thought—I don’t know what I was thinking. And then I went home because I didn’t see there were any messages, and then…”

  She went to a phone store. While Dad was convulsing. While he arched back in violent spasms.

  “Do you want to tell me about it? I mean, I got the lowdown from Ganesh, but I’d love to hear your thoughts,” Mom said, trying to connect with me eye to eye. I wasn’t in the mood for reconciliation, though.

  “Nah.” I ducked under her gaze. “If you’re going to be here for a little bit, I’m gonna get a snack,” I said, bolting for the door.

  “Plenty of doughnuts!” I heard her call after me.

  I had to find Dr. Ganesh before he left. He wasn’t at the Island of Unanswerable Questions. There were five phones ringing and lots of empty chairs.

  I ran to the nearest bank of elevators, grateful to get an empty one. I didn’t trust elevator ventilation and I’d read staggering reports by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on infections caused by hospital stays (also known as HAI—healthcare-associated infections). Whenever possible, I pressed the elevator buttons with my elbow and then held my breath until the doors opened again.

  My fantasy was that Dr. Ganesh and I would catch each other’s eye through the lobby’s revolving door and do some fabulous dance montage. The hospital entrance was actually a pretty dreamy location. It had flower arrangements that were the size of toddlers and there were three walls of water emptying into a small wishing well. I never knew why people spent so much money on hospital décor instead of funding platelet research or coming up with a kinder alternative to the colostomy bag. But at this moment, I did appreciate the rainforest atmosphere. Especially the bamboo thatched hut that had an espresso machine coughing out steam. The noise compelled me to look over and see Dr. Ganesh, just as he was putting the lid on his coffee and reaching for a granola bar from the barrels of refreshments.

  I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I figured I could start by paying for his snack. I tried to thread myself up through the line at the cash register. “Excuse me, pardon me. I’m not cutting, I swear, I’m just—”

  “Ow! Do you mind?!”

  In my defense, I wasn’t moving that fast. And I didn’t mean to push. But I must’ve stepped on the edge of this old man’s orthotic shoe. Age had taken away his elasticity, so instead of bending partway or bracing himself, he just toppled over into the yogurt case and put his elbow through the foil top of a Greek blueberry 2 percent fat. Horrible packaging concept.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t see you. I didn’t know you were there. My dad’s on the tenth floor.” There was no reason to pull out the dad-dying-pity-me card. This man was obviously sludging through hell too. He had the yellowish face of somebody who’d been up days and nights without fresh air. Marking time just by the ticker tape on the bottom of a fuzzy bedside TV.

  I stood there dumbly while the woman behind me rushed forward to help the old man back up because:

  a) I’m a thoughtless asshead, and

  b) I didn’t have any sanitizer on me so the thought of touching this person’s desiccated skin was petrifying.

  “What were you doing?” he asked. Even his checkered fanny pack looked tired.

  “I know,” I said, which wasn’t an answer. His elbow had a dollop of yogurt clinging to it. I handed him a fistful of napkins and said, “Blueberry’s in high demand, huh?”

  He didn’t find that funny. I couldn’t blame him. I put down a ten-dollar bill next to the cash register and said, “Please let me pay for him.” Nobody in the line behind me was charmed by that gesture. Even the cellophane-wrapped apples looked disgusted with me.

  Bolting out of the espresso hut, I scanned the tropical landscape for Dr. Ganesh. He was waiting for me by the milk and sugar-substitute counter. Or, not exactly waiting for me. More like stirring milk into his coffee. I reached into my bag and had to decide between a swipe of lip gloss and the Groucho glasses I’d taken from the Jolly Roger. Groucho won. The nose was hot and dented now, but I needed the glasses on for bravery.

  “Hello, my name is Eleanor, I’m a Scorpio, and my hobbies include watercolor painting and destroying whatever hope is left for the infirm. And you are…?”

  Dr. Ganesh laughed and nodded his head. “I think this is a lot of eyebrows.” He pointed at my face.

  “Yeah, sometimes it’s easier to say things when I’m somebody else. Can I get a what what?” I put out my fist and waited for him to bump it. He indulged me, then put the lid on his coffee cup and waited for me to either say something or let him go home.

  “Right. I just wanted to say first of all thank you so much for being calming and brilliant. And thank you for getting my dad a bed and staying late and talking to me about nanotechnology, which is funny—not haha funny but more like what in the what? funny—because I’ve been reading up on some of the incredible work that’s being done with genetic sequencing, which is … well, incredible. And also, I wonder how it affects our treatment protocols for these global pandemics. Which—I don’t know who gets to classify something as a pandemic, maybe that’s the president or the surgeon general, but I would call cancer a pandemic, wouldn’t you?”

  Dr. Ganesh wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked confused and worn out.

  “Actually, scratch that,” I said. “Can I just give you a hug?”

  “Um … I suppose so.” He put down his coffee and opened his arms. His tracksuit smelled like cedary spices and a little like rubbing alcohol too. I’d never been this close to a man before, besides my dad and Julian. Unless I counted D.J. Trekorelli, who pushed me into a corner at the middle school winter carnival two years ago and told me he had feelings. I’d tried kissing him but it tasted like a salt lick so I told him I was bisexual and he ran.

  As I sucked in a deep whiff of Dr. Ganesh’s scent, I could feel all my neurons sending out a shimmery bat signal—Alert! Man touch!

  He pulled away and I stared at the floor determinedly.

  “I will catch you later, Ey-leah-nor,” I heard him say before the revolving doors swept him away.

  I wasn’t ready to go upstairs and deal with Mom yet, so I stood in line at the café—calmly this time—and purchased a bagel, coffee, and a balloon that read IT’S A BOY! (Maybe it could make Dad laugh whenever he woke up from his opioid haze.) I sat by the wishing well and did some more research on my phone about Nivolumab and Varlilumab. Both of them were getting some really impressive results, but the test groups were pretty small. I wondered how to get Dad into the next trial before it closed. The whole application process was confusing. It was like buying concert tickets. They opened up the trial online and then the first fourteen patients to be sick or lucky enough to sign up at that exact moment got to have a dance party with a famous IV.

  It also reminded me of that time when Dad and I got up at three a.m. to try to see this asteroid that was maybe going to light up the whole sky but also might hit the Earth. It was freezing down at the dog park and Dad stepped in some calcified dog poop and I knew he wanted to just go home and get back in bed but he waited with me and my binoculars
until sunrise. We never saw anything extraordinary besides a cloud that we agreed looked like George Washington’s profile. Which was a cold, sad relief.

  It was important to get some perspective, so I picked up a handful of horrifying pamphlets in the lobby. According to the glossy foldouts, there were new pandemics and medical mysteries every day and I was standing at the forefront of human innovation. I knew it wasn’t nice to waste trees, but I lifted a dozen of those brochures-to-worldwide-healing and decided to start a scrapbook of rare diseases for Dr. Ganesh. At first glance, my favorites were something called Jumping Frenchmen of Maine disease and maple syrup urine disease. Not that I was a connoisseur of scrapbooking, but this could keep me mildly distracted while I waited for Dad to wake up and actively snubbed Mom.

  When I came back into the room, she was still glued to Dad’s bedside, stroking his head and telling him about some roadwork being done on the New York Thruway. Dad’s cheeks looked so limp and pale I stopped short. But the oxygen mask assured me he was alive.

  “And here comes the greatest daughter on Earth, Lenny the Lioness,” Mom announced. “Wasn’t she amazing?” she cooed at Dad. “I really didn’t mean to leave you both for so long, but damn this kid of ours knows how to rise to the challenge, huh? Is there anything she can’t do?”

  I sat on the vinyl recliner in the corner and started tearing out pictures for my scrapbook. “There are many things I cannot do,” I said. “And please stop talking about me in the third person when I’m right here. It’s annoying.”

  “Fair enough,” Mom said in a small voice. She went back to her monologue for Dad, this time about the latest primary elections and the plumbing at the courthouse and really twenty different starts to a story that kept on veering into new tangents and tributaries.

  At some point in the evening, Mariel brought us starchy cotton blankets and pillows that felt like they were stuffed with scraps of cardboard. Saffi checked Dad’s vitals around eleven thirty and said his fever was now down to 102.5.

  “Nice work,” Saffi said to Dad, though his eyes were still glued shut. Even if he continued to look like a husk, at least we were moving in the right direction. Or a less dire one.

  Soon after, I heard Mom’s raucous snore. She was folded in half on her chair, her head nestled into the two inches of hospital bedding next to Dad’s forearm. It looked like the most uncomfortable position possible, but I didn’t dare wake her. It was actually the first time in the past twelve hours that I had felt something close to love or pity for her.

  I pulled one of Mariel’s blankets over my head on the recliner. Before trying to close my eyes, too, I had some more investigating to do on my phone. This time I was looking into who exactly was Radhakrishnan Ganesh, M.D., Ph.D. The man, the myth, the crusader for truth and possibility.

  The name “Ganesh” came up in a thousand different profiles. Apparently, it was one of the most popular Indian names and it came from the Hindu deity Ganesha. All the images of Ganesha were of very feminine-looking elephants dancing—cuddly and fierce at the same time. I was surprised Ganesha was always referred to as a “he.” Then again, the strongest men I knew—Dad and Julian—were definitely graceful too. The best definition I found was: Ganesha is known as the Remover of All Obstacles and Deva of New Beginnings. Ganesha’s head symbolizes the Atman or soul, and his body signifies Maya or earthly existence. His trunk represents OM, which is the utterance of cosmic reality. Ganesha is the muse for arts, sciences, intellect, and wisdom.

  Having grown up in a mostly atheistic home, I loved how vividly Ganesha’s stories were written and illustrated. Also, I had always been infatuated with Dumbo, and one of my fantasies was to go to Mozambique and work at a national park that took care of endangered elephants. The more I read about Ganesha’s cosmic trunk, the more I knew we were going to make it through this night.

  I needed to find more info about my Ganesh, though. I finally narrowed down the results and found a few pictures of him on a soccer field. Another of him looking through a microscope. There was a paper he’d coauthored with five other doctors on advances in nanotechnology and the moral implications of accessibility. Some lab in Iowa listed him as a resident intern.

  There were no records or pictures of Dr. Radhakrishnan Ganesh with a girlfriend. Which I knew shouldn’t have meant anything to me, but I was glad no one could see my goofy grin under the blanket canopy.

  I stayed up for another two hours, reading and studying. By the time the next nurse came in to check Dad’s vitals at two a.m., I had:

  a) Memorized all the major Hindu deities and their powers.

  b) Fostered a small family of Asian elephants now being nurtured in an Oregon preserve. (I had three weeks to figure out how to explain the charge before it showed up on my “emergency only” credit card.)

  c) Accepted the fact that I was smitten.

  Totalitarian Dystopia

  With a totalitarian dystopia, we wouldn’t actually all die, but we’d want to. Spies used to wear sunglasses or hats or at least tiptoe. But now, everything is under surveillance.

  Just a few of the scariest moments

  1928: Olmstead v. United States. Supreme Court basically okays wiretapping of bootleggers.

  1952: President Truman creates the National Security Agency (NSA) to protect/spy on the nation.

  2001: Congress passes the Patriot Act.

  2002: The Department of Homeland Security is established.

  2008: Congress passes the FISA Amendments Act, which authorizes mass surveillance programs (and abuses).

  2013: Japanese smart toilet gets hacked.

  2015: Cousin Alan gets me a DIY drone for Hanukkah.

  Chapter 7

  BELIEVING

  Like Wendy Wackerling had warned us just one day before, once I started believing, miracles happened. The next morning, I woke up to a completely different scene. A nursing attendant was opening the blinds and had turned on some classical music through the TV on the wall.

  “Now, let’s keep it that way, ya hear?” she said, swishing out of the room.

  “What way?” I asked. “What happened?”

  Dad was sitting up, eyes open. His skin had new colors and definition. He looked exhausted and had that damn oxygen mask on, but he scribbled on an unused napkin, Something you want to tell me? nodding his head at my gift-shop balloon. I told him that he had freaked the hell out of me, Nixon was president again, and there was a therapy donkey doing rounds in the afternoon.

  Dad said, “Hee haw!” from under his mask and it sounded so weird that I started laughing and couldn’t stop. Not even because it was hilarious, but because it was the first communication we’d had since he’d been shaking and writhing and I hadn’t known if we’d ever talk again.

  Mom took Dad’s joke as a sign that she could finally go to the bathroom and pee. After my laughing fit, I told Dad I should head down to the lounge and call Julian to give him the full report because he’d called about twenty times but only left the same terse “Call me.”

  I had to admit it was rare and pretty thrilling to know something that Julian didn’t already know. He usually had all the answers.

  “It was so crazy,” I started. “I mean, I don’t want to really go into it, but remember when we saw that mouse snared on a glue trap next to the ficus in the diner? And we were like, ‘Ew, we’re never eating here again.’ But then of course we ate there again. But that’s not really the point. The point is, I kept thinking that my dad was that mouse. It was like he was caught in his own body, and I could see that he was trying to get out, but he also wasn’t really conscious. It was horrible with a side of terrifying.”

  “Holy shiz. I’m so sorry,” said Julian. I let him tell me how great and brave I was for a while. I didn’t want to talk any more even though I knew he’d appreciate the rotating Island staff and Mom’s grand entrance. I just wanted to be done with this unidentifiable infection and go home.

  Julian read my silence, of course. “You guys getting d
ischarged soon?” he asked.

  “Good question,” I said. “I sure hope so. But he’s hooked up to oxygen and none of the doctors have come to check up on him today.” Then I remembered I had some news Julian would love. “But there is a silverish lining…”

  I told him how I’d initiated physical contact with the Remover of All Obstacles and that we’d chatted for a long time about personal stuff. “He’s deeply passionate about his work. And has some dark family issues, of course. We really got into it,” I said.

  “Nice job, Len!” Julian did seem honestly excited. Though I noted that Len sounded childish to me. I preferred Ey-leah-nor now.

  “He’s really incredible,” I told him. “And young and vibrant and humble. He has a great sense of humor. Did I mention he plays soccer? Or did. But now he’s super busy curing cancer.” I knew I was exaggerating, but it felt so good to be stretching my brain. The only other people in the lounge were a stooped man who looked a little like Elvis in his later years and a guy who must’ve been his son in a sweater vest, opening up take-out containers filled with pierogies. They didn’t seem to care or notice that I was revealing a new breakthrough in cancer treatment. Elvis actually seemed to be deeply engrossed in the rerun of Friends playing on the mounted TV.

  “So Ganesh is getting my dad into this drug trial that’s been having phenomenal results. I’ll send you some links. Basically, it’s a monoclonal antibody that binds to individual molecules.”

  Julian was silent. I knew he wasn’t following and it only emboldened me. “This is revolutionary stuff. So far, it’s proven amazingly effective. It arms the immune system in this symbiotic way. It’s huge. Do you want me to send you some articles about it? This is only being done at a few hospitals.”