All the Ways the World Can End Page 7

  “Sure.” Julian’s voice was dull. Now I was getting annoyed that he wasn’t as excited as I was. I knew Julian was a born cynic but I thought he could at least phone in some peppy responses. “Plus everyone in the drug trial gets a free elephant ride,” I added to see if he was even listening.

  “What?” he asked, confused.

  “Never mind.” It was a private joke with me and myself. I’d try it out on Dr. Ganesh the next time I saw him. Which I really hoped was soon. I couldn’t take another twenty-four hours without his fist bumps of optimism.

  After getting off the phone, I strode up to the nurses’ island and said in my sweetest voice, “Excuse me, do you have a schedule for the doctors on this floor, please?” I didn’t recognize any of the staff since the morning shift had started, so I just chose the warmest-looking woman with clean scrubs and a smiley-face button on her chest.

  “A what?” She didn’t look like her smiley-face button at all.

  “A schedule, like who comes in when? My dad is in room 428.”

  “Okay, so are you asking who is his doctor?”

  “Sort of. I mean, I know who his doctor is. It’s Dr. Lowenstein. But he’s in Toronto, so he has this attending resident, Dr. Ganesh, and I didn’t know if he’d be in today or if we can contact him.”

  “I don’t know a Dr. Ganesh.” She spun around in her chair to get some consensus from the other nurses. “Is there a Ganesh?”

  The back and forth was crazy-making.

  “Ganesh?”

  “Ganesh.”

  “I think it’s Ganesh.”

  “He’s the Indian guy, right?”

  “Is he Indian?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  Smiley-face-with-no-smile turned back to me and said, “I don’t know exactly who he is, but it sounds like this Dr. Ganesh does work here.”

  “Thank you,” I said through flared nostrils. “That’s very … helpful.”

  By noon, I was ready to rip Dad’s oxygen mask off for him. His temperature was hovering around one hundred and he was perfectly lucid but very soggy. He just wanted to be able to stand up untethered and maybe get a new gown. Mom and I had asked five different attendants when the doctors were making their rounds and got a series of shrugs. I knew they could see us wearing holes into the linoleum floor. There were little cameras perched in multiple corners of Dad’s room. The Island of Unanswerable Questions was probably tracking our every gas bubble.

  I was really tempted to call or text Dr. Ganesh directly, but I didn’t want to bug him if it was his day off. I started texting, When can I see you again? then chickened out. Instead I added five new pages to his rare-disease book:

  • Abetalipoproteinemia, which was some inherited thing where people couldn’t absorb fat and then couldn’t walk or think. I just thought it had an incredible amount of vowels.

  • Hartnup disease, which I really summarized as a glorified rash, and

  • Blue rubber bleb nevus syndrome, which was a lot like horrible ulcers.

  I wanted to make sure Dr. Ganesh didn’t think I was making fun of these diseases, so I also included a page about the National Organization for Rare Disorders and a few of their success stories.

  The hero of the day was a guy named Washington who couldn’t have been much older than me. He walked with a swaggery kind of limp and was singing under his breath to the same beat. Washington was in charge of delivering meals. He came in at 2:30 with a turkey club and rice pudding, even though my dad couldn’t eat anything with a mask covering his nose and mouth.

  “Mmmm,” Washington said, looking at Dad. “How’re you going to eat this?”

  “Thank you,” I answered.

  “We’ve been trying to get this thing off all day,” chimed in Mom.

  “Luke, I am your father,” hissed Dad in his best Darth Vader impersonation through the mask. Washington thought that was awesome. He had a sweet, hiccupy laugh and he high-fived us all. An hour later, Washington stopped back in to say that he’d put in an order to get rid of the mask. Two hours later, another nurse tried to tell us that Lowenstein was still in Toronto and he was the only one who could okay that kind of order. But then I marched out to the hall and saw Washington talking with Smiley-No-Smiles and the mask came off at 4:25 p.m.

  The first thing Dad did was rasp, “Long live Washington!” Then he drank five cups of lukewarm apple juice and told Mom, “Lenny was amazing.”

  “I heard,” she said, pulling me to her chest. It was sort of a sideways hug and my neck was jammed into her throat, but Dad looked very pleased with our forced affection. I stayed there as long as I could before saying, “Okay, that’s enough. I’m not pointing fingers, but we all smell like ass.”

  Mom agreed. She also said if it was okay with Dad, she’d love to get some fresh air and stop at a drugstore for deodorant. I was on board for that. I hadn’t been outside for over twenty-four hours. The sky was already sifting into a pinkish sunset, but it looked so much wider and loftier than ever before. Mom and I peeled off in different directions at the drugstore and I spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at lip plumpers and counting all the different ways to spell barbecue in the potato-chip section. I heard Mom yelp, “I’m heading back, Len!” at some point, then decided to stroll even more slowly through the aisles.

  When I got to the cash register, the girl ringing me up looked like she was maybe fourteen. Her name tag read HI! LET ME HELP MAKE THIS AN AWESOME DAY! SHEENA.

  She had matching stripes of acne on each cheek and eyelashes shellacked into shutters. When she reached over to bag my items, I saw she was pregnant and had the name Luis tattooed onto the side of her neck. Her big belly and even bigger scowl made me feel guilty. I’d never had a job besides babysitting and I was buying three different kinds of gum, some frog stickers, and four bottles of hand sanitizer with my parents’ earnings.

  “Congratulationskeepthechange,” I whispered while putting my leftover dimes on the counter, grabbing my stuff, and hustling out.

  Mom was already back by Dad’s side with smoothies in every color of the rainbow. Dad was able to take three sips of Spirulina Splendor before claiming he was full. I polished off something that tasted like sandpaper and toothpaste, just because I was starving and the turkey club was gone. I never actually saw Mom ingest of any of it, but she did reach into her drugstore bag, pull out a flowered shower cap, and start strutting around the room as if she were on a runway.

  “I don’t know if you really want to take a shower here,” I said.

  “No, it’s for Emma,” Mom answered. “I forgot to send her costume. Did you hear what she’s going as?” I just shook my head because I couldn’t believe Mom was focusing on Emma’s costume party when a few hours ago I thought we were planning for Dad’s funeral. “It’s trickle-down economics. So her friend has a Maggie Thatcher wig and I’m sending her—”

  “Stop it!” I snapped. “Just stop! How horrible does this have to get before you take it seriously? We don’t even know what’s going on and you’re busy at phone stores and buying shower caps like it’s happy hour.” Wrong metaphor, but Mom got the gist.

  “You could’ve called Pippi,” she mumbled. “I told you she always has her phone on in case of emergency.”

  “You’re right, Mom. I could’ve.” I snorted for effect. “Next time Dad is writhing for air and the nurses are calling code whatever I’ll be sure to pick up the phone and chat with my BFF, Pippi. That’d be a lot more comforting than trying to depend on you!”

  Mom looked like I’d just smacked her across the face. Which I wish I had the nerve to do but I never would. Dad took one of my hands and one of Mom’s and gave us both a tight squeeze.

  “We’re okay,” he said. “We really are.”

  I couldn’t look at him or Mom. They both felt too unreliable to me.

  “Please,” Dad said to both of us. Or maybe he was talking to the nurses’ spy cameras so they would stop looking at us imploding.

  “I’m
sorry,” Mom said softly. “I know this was really hard on you both and I … yeah, I’m sorry.”

  “S’okay. Me too,” I mumbled, then excused myself for an evening constitutional around the tenth floor. Unintentionally, I started retracing the steps I’d taken with Dr. Ganesh the night before. In the rest of the world, this stretch of time was called “Saturday night.” I wondered what that meant to Radhakrishnan Ganesh, M.D. Was he at a dimly lit café with a long-legged blonde, laughing over tapas? Or holing up in the public library, his hand scratching the back of his neck as he tried to analyze new data in T-cell infiltration? The scenario I liked best was him in a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment with lots of windows overlooking Prospect Park. The Ramones playing in the background as he sipped a beer, stirred a pot of homemade spaghetti sauce, and practiced handstands.

  That’s what my dad used to do.

  It almost looked like Dad was stirring spaghetti when I got back to his room. His eyes were shut again, but his arms were floating a little bit up and down and in circles.

  “He keeps trying to get that mask off, even though it’s not there,” Mom explained quietly. I’d hoped she would be sleeping, too, but she had her reading glasses on and was going over legal briefs by the light of her phone in her chair. “I ordered you a cot,” she added, nodding at the rollaway mattress shoved between the foot of Dad’s bed and the window.

  “Thanks,” I said. Then I gargled some of Dad’s mouthwash to trick my body into thinking it was time for sleep, even though I knew I’d be staring at the walls and counting heart-monitor beeps for another few hours at least.

  * * *

  Of course, because of the Law of Unfair Physics, as soon as I went to get coffee Sunday morning, the doctors did their rounds. Dr. Ganesh came by to check in on my dad and Mom reported that the first thing he said was, “Where is Ey-leah-nor?”

  I didn’t know if I believed her, but it didn’t stop me from involuntarily bouncing a little. Then I rushed out of Dad’s room and sniffed the halls for Dr. Ganesh’s sandalwood scent. I heard his laughter coming from the west lounge, so I waited until the swinging doors opened and then tried not to pounce.

  “Can I get a what what?” I hollered.

  Stunned silence from Dr. Ganesh. He was surrounded by a circle of what looked to be graduate students, and I had interrupted him midthought. One young woman pulled off her paper mask and cap, shook out her raven tresses, and said, “Sorry, can you please repeat that, Dr. Ganesh?” while she frowned in my direction. Her lips stayed in that shimmery pout as she turned back to the good doctor. She was the kind of girl who could do whatever she wanted with a Saturday night.

  Dr. Ganesh answered her and then asked the group about the patients they’d just seen. When the comments were done, he turned to me and said, “As it happens, this is the lovely young daughter of Patient C, whom we visited before.”

  Lovely. Young. Daughter.

  I didn’t know whether “lovely” was thrilling enough to cancel out “young” and I appreciated Dad’s privacy being protected, but Patient C sounded so coldly clinical.

  “No autographs please,” I said. There were a few snickers behind him. “But seriously, I’m the treasurer and CEO of the Dr. Ganesh fan club. You guys are super lucky to be studying with him. I’m thinking of med school now just so I can do that too. He’s like Salk and Sabin and he has the best tracksuits of anyone I know.”

  Dr. Ganesh shook his head. A few of the students whispered behind him. I wanted to clarify that it was a joke, or maybe a joke disguised as the truth, or the other way around. I also really wanted to give him the rare-disease book that I’d stayed up coloring. But this meeting already felt like it was adjourned. So I dug a crumpled bag of M&M’s from my sweatshirt pocket and shoved it toward him. I’d gotten it that morning at the gift shop.

  “What’s this?” he asked, as if he’d just gotten the Nobel Prize in Medicine. “For me?!”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said as coolly as possible. “I’m sort of allergic to chocolate and you can share it with the group. Or not.”

  “Thank you so very much,” Dr. Ganesh said, looking deep into my soul. Before he turned away, I detected a wink. It could have been a hallucination, but I inscribed it into my memory for safekeeping anyway. “Let us continue with radiology, shall we?” he said, pressing the hall doors open with his thin hip. “I see you again soon, what what!” he called over his shoulder as he led his team of disciples away.

  Which was vague enough to leave me agape. I didn’t know if soon meant in the next few minutes or hours or days. I just knew it meant a future was possible. For me and my dad. Of course, I still hadn’t found out when we would get to spring him free from this joint, so I retreated to room 428 to see what I could see.

  Only Dad was gone.

  “It’s all good,” Mom said, rushing over to intercept my freak-out. Apparently, while I was making a fool of myself in the hallway, Dr. Lowenstein had called from a two-second break in his Very Important Conference. He told Dad that he’d been monitoring the situation from up north (via drone?) and that Dad’s high fever and infection were serious but “not unheard of.” I hated when adults threw out phrases like that because it was so grammatically obnoxious and the words meant exactly nothing except that somewhere, sometime, somehow this had happened before.

  Lowenstein also had phoned in an order for a bunch of invasive and time-consuming tests for Dad—MRI, CT scan, colonoscopy. Basically an all-day pass for the hospital camera crew to take action shots of Dad’s mangled interior.

  “Wait. Why so many new tests?” I asked. “What exactly is going on?”

  Mom unleashed a whole stream of thoughts in no particular or cohesive order: “Modern medicine is this incredible amazing thing where we can replace organs and literally transplant an entire face onto another person’s face, but there’s also the day-to-day discomforts and uncertainties and it’s not permanent, but what is really permanent, right? So we deal with this now and try to see what will help the most in the long run. Listen, nobody said this would be a cakewalk. First of all, nobody uses the term cakewalk anymore, and it’s a good thing because I think it comes from the minstrel shows of the eighteen hundreds and people threw cakes at the best act. Point being, we’re doing everything we can, this is a highly treatable form, and we’re aggressively treating it. You and I both need a hot shower, so let’s go home and then once these scans are done and reviewed, Dad will come home too.”

  I couldn’t argue with her. Mostly because she was pulling out etymology, face transplants, and Buddhism in the same breath. Also because the thought of a hot shower sent shivers of joy to my armpits and it looked like Dad and Dr. Ganesh were going to be busy for a while. So I followed my mom down the hall to the bank of elevators and let one carry me down, down, down. Trusting in the unseen forces of gravity, modern medicine, and elephants marching toward new beginnings.

  Water Pollution

  From the Natural Resources Defense Council: “Dirty water is the world’s biggest health risk.”

  The United Nations said 95 percent of the world’s cities dump sewage into their water. America is one of the few places that supposedly has clean drinking water. But thanks to things like fracking, factory farms, and sewage overflows, there are more than 300 pollutants in U.S. tap water—including arsenic.

  Bottoms up!

  A Few Reasons Why We’re Drinking Arsenic

  Chapter 8

  WOLFBALL

  I was so slimy from two days of slathering my hands in antibacterial goo that when I got home I charged straight into the shower without even taking off my clothes. I knew I had to throw that outfit out anyway. I loved those green corduroys and it was one of my favorite hoodies, but I couldn’t imagine how many times I’d have to wash them to feel like they were actually clean.

  When I got downstairs, Mom was dressed in jeans and a new proud-mom-of-a-state-college-freshperson T-shirt, lining up plastic sandwich baggies on the kitchen counter and filling the
m with walnuts.

  “Isn’t a hot shower revolutionary sometimes?” she said without looking up. For each walnut she dropped into a bag, another went into her mouth. “I looked up cakewalk by the way,” she went on. “Check this out.” She showed me a video on her phone of someone in blackface doing a dance with lots of frantic-looking footwork. “Whoever won got the cake,” she said.

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “Oh, and what do you think about Julian coming over here for a sleepover while I head back to the hospital? You guys can see an early movie, get some pizza. By the time you come home from school tomorrow, Dad will be here too.”

  “Wait, what?” I loved the idea of not going back to the hospital, but I hated the thought of sitting in pre-calculus, daydreaming about all the cameras fishing through my dad’s insides. “Are you sure?”

  “Abso-tootin-lutely,” said Mom. “Already called in a personal day for tomorrow, took my omega-3s, and I’m ready to rock.” Mom did some crazy roundhouse-kick combo at me. Then she held up her phone. “I’ll have it on my person at all times. Fully charged. If I remember to put the app on, you can watch me.” (Mom refused to learn how video calls worked.)

  The phone started vibrating, on cue. Emma’s name and face lit up the screen.

  “Ooh! Em’s calling! I should take this so I can update her,” Mom said, looking to me for approval. She bit her lip as if I’d caught her being naughty.

  “Finish talking to me first, please,” I said, seizing the phone and rejecting Emma’s call. Then I put on my sternest voice to grill her.

  “Are you going to stay with Dad until all his tests are done?”

  Mom nodded.

  “You’re going to call me as soon as the test results come back.”

  She made a check mark in the air.

  “And you have a couple of things to get in writing: a) instructions on how we should treat Dad’s port site at home and b) a schedule of the doctors on call.”