Can You Hear Me Now?

The following piece is entirely true. I wrote it in a manic fury of feeling after saying goodbye to my good friend Ryan who I loved so much and who died way too goddamn young. I hope you enjoy it.

He wants to talk to God, but what would he even say? He knows better than to ask for anything. It’s not about that. Wanting anything. Understanding maybe. Comfort. He is in love with living and he knows that it’s a short affair, this going about in a body, walking the Earth, thinking, and loving, and hoping, and fearing, all thanks to a million cellular systems functioning underneath it all. Untold checks and balances in his ancient hardware that keep him upright. Move the blood. Grind the food. Suck the air.

Cancer is a sonofabitch. It doesn’t know it though. Can’t. Anymore than the earthquake in Turkey that killed all those people. Ripped the land like paper and brought buildings down on children while they slept. That little girl whose arm was peeking out of the gray rubble. A little brown hand in a pink sleeve, her weeping father unwilling to let go. His heart broke for that man because he has a daughter too. She’s nine. Does ballet. Plays violin. Reads so well and has the most perfect laugh that makes her whole body move like the humor has to dance its way out. That little girl in Turkey was probably no different. Her father lying in the rubble of his life, plaster dust caking his skin where the tears fell, unwilling to rise because why would you after that? What would be the point? He wants to look at that man and say, “Yeah, you’re right. I got no argument.” The only difference with cancer is that the building doesn’t come down around you. There is nothing for the world to see. Shattered DNA that made copies of itself. Again and again, a thousand agains while watching TV. Drinking coffee. Taking a shit. Everyone feels a little ill sometimes. Of course it’s nothing. When his friend Ryan finally went to the doctor it’d been a few weeks. He thought it was probably just an infection. Assumed they’d give him antibiotics.

When he calls his friend it’s only because his wife saw the Instagram post. “Ryan’s sick,” she’d said. Ryan’s girlfriend was the one who put it online, as a way to explain to a few hundred people at once that Ryan was fine. He was back home. He didn’t even know Ryan had been in the hospital. Friends who live a thousand miles away can be sneaky like that. So he dials and leaves it on speaker so his wife can hear. They sit on the deck because it’s a gorgeous summer evening. So their daughter doesn’t hear. Ryan answers and he sounds fine. Positive. More annoyed than anything. Kidney failure. At forty two years old. How the fuck does that even happen? “Who knows,” Ryan says, “Just bad luck.” He is going to need a transplant, but his dad had already stepped up. Had said, “Here son, have mine.” He tries to match Ryan’s positivity, to reassure him. He tells him that this will be nothing more than a hiccup in his life when all is said and done. You’ll get the surgery, take the pills, and in a few years, you’ll look back on it as just another pain in the ass thing, one of life’s frustrating little games it makes you play. A series of steps like a waltz mapped on the floor in black shoe prints, but of course you’ll come out the other side, and you’ll get back to living. Maybe take a trip. Somewhere exotic just to say fuck you to the illness that tried to break the rules and take you early. Ryan agrees. A bump in the road. 

A priest might tell him to kneel, press his palms together. Should he interlace his fingers, or should the tips point skyward like a little antennae? He thinks of the little antenna on old cell phones. The plastic ones you’d pull out by three measly inches and tell yourself that somehow doing so improved the signal. Can you hear me now? Would the priest suggest speaking aloud? Is that part of it? Or could God hear his every thought? The priest would say that yes, God can hear your thoughts, and he would then wonder why prayer was necessary if that’s the case. If God already knew his every worry. His every sorrow. God would know how much he loved his wife and his daughter and how he was so goddamn grateful for every minute of his life. Sorry. I shouldn’t swear. Habit, but you know that, because you hear my every thought. You’re God after all. He’d look at the church and wonder what it was all for then. The priest and the stained glass and the candles and the collection plate. Oh.

It’s autumn when Ryan texts him back, “Can you call me?” This can’t be good, he thinks. But Ryan is still positive. Has that annoyed tone of voice, explaining that they found cancer the way one might explain that it’s not just the radiator, but a cracked block. Ryan says they can try chemo first, but they might need to remove his bladder. It’s not that big of a deal. Living without a bladder. I mean, no one would choose it, but the doctors say that if they do it, they take all the cancer with, and then when his scan comes back clean he can get that new kidney and he’ll be back on the road. Take that vacation. Maybe go around the world. He’s worried for his friend, but he doesn’t let his voice betray that truth. Doesn’t let Ryan know that the little voice in his head is shaking him, saying, “This is bad. Really bad. He might die.” So he laughs, cracks jokes, says he’s sorry his friend has to go through all this bullshit. Sorry, I shouldn’t swear. His daughter is in the room. You never know who is listening. Tell you what though, we’re driving to Arizona this winter to see the family, and we’ll add in a couple of extra days so we can swing through Austin. It’s been too long. His wife hates the drive, but she agrees. Says we need to go. Just in case.

He sends an email to the local temple. They don’t let just anybody come to their Saturday morning service. Jewish people have to be careful. There are maniacs in the world who would hurt them. In the email he explains that he isn’t Jewish, but he is seeking God, or whatever, and something about Judaism feels right. He pictures tattered scrolls and that guy in the movie Pi who does numerology with Hebrew numbers. It’s old, so it must be good. Can he come watch? Take it for a test drive? Is that weird? The woman who replies says she’ll ask the rabbi. He never hears from her again. Maybe they want him to ask three times? Isn’t that the thing? Or was that just some nonsense he learned watching Sex and the City? They don’t want recruits. Keeps it familial. Exclusive. Endangered.

The world gets wrapped in lights. He wishes it would snow. It doesn’t. When he puts the trash bag full of wrapping paper in the bin outside, he doesn’t even need to wear a coat. His daughter is on the floor in her pajamas. His parents watch her from the couch. Stepdad is eighty now. Still in good health except for the blood pressure, but the medicine seems to work for that. He didn’t want to bring down the mood, but it’s hard to keep it in. He spoke to Ryan’s girlfriend a few days before. It’s not looking good. Even after cutting out his bladder and taking his prostate and about twenty or so lymph nodes for good measure, something was wrong. Ryan hadn’t had a bowel movement in weeks. He was swollen and in pain. The MRI showed a tumor in his colon. A big one. They can’t remove it because it’s on a major blood vessel. They have to take his whole colon or Ryan is going to die. He told Ryan’s girlfriend he could get on a plane and come down, if she thinks that will help. If it will raise his spirit. She says it’s a good idea and so on Christmas morning after breakfast and presents while his parents sip mulled wine he explains why he is acting a little off. In case they noticed. In case the thoughts banging around in his head were visible on his face. In case he’d been whispering his anxieties.

The catholic church is only a few blocks away. They have mass every day at eight-thirty. He goes to sleep at night believing that he’ll wake up and go, but he silences his alarm every time. If only going to church were as easy as going to the gym. He always makes time for that. Arranges his days around it. Lifting weights. Doing jiu jitsu. Being in his body. The pain of failure when he can’t lift the bar one more time or when a higher belt has him in some undignified and inescapable position, ready to snap his arm. He never feels so good as when he leaves the gym. A little bit stronger. Reaction carved into his muscle. He’s in the best shape of his life at forty-two. Can lift more. Can out wrestle guys in their twenties. Finally grew a proper ass. But he’s afraid of how church will feel. He’s afraid that the priest will read from the bible and that in his own mind he’ll be searching it for flaws. That the intelligence God gave him will prevent him from believing in God. That his knowledge of history will call a point of order, silently reminding him that the Council of Nicea in 325 CE decided what was Christian canon, because up until that point, different churches professed different truths of Christ as a way to attract more customers. He knows he doesn’t believe. Not in the stories. But he hopes it doesn’t matter. That’s not what he wants. He wants to sit in a pew and to feel like he is holding hands with every human who came before him, as if by hearing old songs and chants he will be able to play a game of electricity that will plug him into the first people and make of him an available circuit for those who will come after. He wants to feel something holy. Some hint that we are more than flesh and bone. He needs, dammit God, how he needs to feel the faint breath of divinity.

It’s Ryan’s father who calls. Tells him that he needs to up his timeline. The doctors say it will be days, not weeks. They can’t even move him to hospice. He says he can get on a plane right away, spend a few days bedside. In his head he is imagining conversations with Ryan and in them his friend’s voice is weak, his face sunken. They’ll talk about old times. How they tried to start a custom moped business. How they bought guns because they thought the world would end. “Remember that trip to California? Five cent coffee at Wall Drug in South Dakota and sleeping on the ground wherever we ended every night, our dogs curled up next to us to keep us warm? We got steak and eggs for breakfast every chance we got. Somehow the best were at that little joint in southern Oregon.” He wonders if Ryan would let him record these last conversations. Turn them into a podcast. Something beautiful about life and death. Ryan’s father interjects. Silences the picture show with real live words. “You need to be prepared. I know you said you could stay for a few days, but Ryan is non communicative. He’s out most of the time. You need to prepare to come, and say goodbye.” Oh. OK. Fuck. OK. I’ll get a ticket. Whatever ticket. I’ll be there tomorrow.

He does the math backwards. They board a half hour before take-off. Time for security. The shuttle ride in. An hour and a half from driveway to airport. On the highway he tries not to think. Not to imagine the room with his friend in a bed and the words he will have to say. He doesn’t want to write it in advance because then the speaking will feel like a script, so he listens to music. Explosions in the Sky. He tries to think about other things. There are no other things. His first flight takes him to DC. Going east to go west. From DC to Austin he sits between a mother and daughter. They don’t ask to trade. When he arrives it’s too late to visit the hospital, so he eats dinner. Takes a ride. Drives past his old house. It’s painted a different color now. Going nowhere specific he shakes his head at all the new construction. The mixed use housing that crowds out the city’s charm. Smothers it like a hand clapped over a sleeping mouth. Cedar rides the air and he breathes it in. At least that’s still the same. And for a moment he pretends it’s ten years ago. Pretends he is young.

At eight a.m. he meets Ryan’s father in the hotel lobby. He drinks coffee as they catch up. Talk about the comings and goings of life. Then they talk about Ryan. His disease and his secrecy. Ryan’s father says that it’s been bad for a while. So many surgeries. So many pieces cut away to get ahead of the cancer. Ryan didn’t want to tell his friends and always made it seem like things were going to be OK in phone calls and texts. But Ryan had always told his dad the truth. Sometimes sobbing. Sometimes raging. Not wanting to go under the knife one more time. Not wanting any more plastic parts. “I have a pistol, I can end this right now.” Ryan’s father had to hear those words from his own son’s mouth. He nods, thinking that he couldn’t blame his friend. Knowing what he knows now. Knowing where every next compromise would lead. He thinks of his own pistol. His own wife and child. What would he do in that same situation? Metastasizing death rising like dough deep in his gut, sneaking from organ to organ. He likes to think he would read the writing on the wall. Have one last beautiful month and then sneak away that final night to someplace quiet. Goodbye letters in envelopes. A treasure map for the police so they could collect the corpse. But the doctor would offer hope. A chance. A you-never-know that could send his imagination to painting a future he might one day walk in. Ryan shook that hand. He knows why.

Baylor hospital in Round Rock. Floor four. It’s colder than it should be. Ryan’s dad says to be prepared. In the room the lights are off. A bead of daylight seeps in beneath the fully drawn shade. The silent TV casts a flicker of jumping color onto Ryan where he lays. He smiles. Says hello. Ryan doesn’t smile back but his face reads with recognition. He leans over the bed rail to give Ryan a hug and Ryan does his best to sit forward. To accept the hug and return it in kind. My God, he’s so thin. But it’s him. It’s Ryan. His face. His voice. His eyes. All weary. Exhausted. Starved. Dying. He needs to say something so he asks him how the drugs are. “They don’t slap like they used to.” He laughs, happy that his friend still has his humor. But then the seriousness of what he’s said and Ryan’s own lack of a chuckle or nod shear the joke to its frame. It was no joke at all. He crouches next to the bed and tells Ryan to get up, says, “Come on, let’s go get a cup of coffee.” Ryan laughs. “I wish. I can’t even walk.” He takes Ryan’s hand in his and tells him that he’ll carry him. He stays crouched. Keeps Ryan’s hand. Talks about the old times. The mopeds they ripped apart and rebuilt. The roadtrip to California. Building the cabin in Indiana. To each story Ryan can only say, “I remember that,” or “Oh yeah, we did,” and then he groans a little because lying there hurts. Breathing hurts. The swelling in his legs and testicles, fuck, it all hurts.

Ryan hiccups, and that makes him close his eyes and moan. The next hiccup and the next hiccup have him shifting, trying to find the position that will convince them to stop. Nothing Ryan swallows will stay down, so drinking water won’t help. Everything he sips he has to spit into a waiting bag. Ryan moves onto his side and he says, “It hurts,” so he rubs Ryan’s back. Says to let him know if it’s too hard. Ryan lays with his eyes closed letting his back be rubbed. When the hiccups fade Ryan struggles his way to sitting again but one of the many pumps begins to beep. The digital readout says the IV line is blocked so he follows the thin plastic tube to where it merges with another, and that tube merges with another and then another. A superhighway of plastic that ends in Ryan’s right bicep under a square of tape. He lifts and straightens the tubes, but the machine continues to beep. A nurse finally comes and silences the box. When they’re alone again, he reads the letter his wife wrote. Hugs Ryan again. Says that one is from her. Crouching again, and with Ryan’s hand in his, he asks how his mind is. “A mess.” How about your heart? “Numb.”

Ryan has tried to keep his friends from this room because if they come then it’s over. His hospital bed becomes a death bed. Telling his father and girlfriend, “Not now, not today,” has been a tactic to cheat time. But they’re inviting the friends now. Not waiting for Ryan to say OK. He knows this. He knows that Ryan hasn’t conceded. So he is afraid to speak of death. He doesn’t want to be the one to call the game. But this will be his only chance. He squeezes Ryan’s hand and tells him that we all die. Every single person who came before has already died and every single person to come after will die too. Ryan looks at him with his eyes that are still his though they now sit in a face showing too much bone, and he lifts a finger to touch the tears that are welling as he says, “I don’t want to die.” He says he knows. He doesn’t want him to die either. He says to Ryan that he is more than his body, that within him there is light, and love, and consciousness, and that he doesn’t know what the collection of those things is called but that he believes, he really does, that that thing will go on and do what it does in whatever way it is meant to. He doesn’t use words like soul, or heaven, or God, because those words are so specific, so haughty with their air of certainty, of knowing, so he uses the loosest words he can, assembles them like a child’s raft of popsicle sticks so he will have a vessel with which to pass a feeling, one man to another, one friend to another, as death lounges on the far side of the room, not eager, not cruel, but punctual, and without ears to hear any argument.

As a boy he ate the communion wafer. Knelt next to his Irish grandfather who insisted on a full rosary every night. In college he stood tall and said there was no God and only fools could possibly believe otherwise. Fools and cowards. In his twenties he tried once a week to bring himself to the edge of living and dying with alcohol because he was certain nothing mattered, least of all himself. Jesus died at thirty-three. His daughter was born when he was that same age. He rose again. Found new life. A reason for everything that would come next. But he’d set fire to all the meaning his parents tried to give him. Danced in its ashes. Revelled in needing nothing only to be brought to his knees by a three year old girl in a plastic rainboots who by splashing in puddles and picking flowers showed him just how stupid he was. Her perfect hand in his, they’d walk their land and he would tell her the names of trees. It was all he had to give her.

He steps out when the doctor comes. Sits at the end of the hall. Waits for instructions. When all sides of Ryan’s family are present and assembled, they have a loudly quiet conversation by the elevators. Ryan’s father explains that the doctor needs to move Ryan into hospice, but only on paper. That way, they can increase his pain medication. And further, so they won’t Narcan him if he goes into cardiac or respiratory arrest. Doing so would immediately send Ryan into opiate withdrawals, which would be devastating to his body. The window for friends is closing. He feels not unwelcome but out of place, so with Ryan’s father’s blessing he goes down the hall one more time. Slips into that dark room. Tells Ryan he has to get going. Ryan’s eyes are open, but they have so little energy behind them. He looks into those tired eyes that look out from a mind so eager to go on living, and he tells Ryan that he loves him. So much. “I love you too,” Ryan says. He hugs Ryan again, kissing him on the forehead more than once, squeezing Ryan’s weak body and making note of exactly where and how hard Ryan’s arms are squeezing back. He tries so hard not to cry, not for himself but for Ryan, but he fails and tears batter his eyeballs with salt until he stops resisting and lets them flow. He holds Ryan’s hand and says again that he loves him. Ryan asks if he will be coming back. He lies and says he doesn’t know. He hates himself for that lie. Unthought. Unplanned. Cowardice so immediate and instinctual. In the hall he hugs Ryan’s girlfriend. Thanks her for loving his friend so well. By the elevator he finds Ryan’s father and stepmother again, and despite the deep breaths he took to steady himself, he weeps when they see him. They hold him. They hold each other.

In the parking lot the sun warms his body and he feels guilty with every step. He can leave the building but Ryan never will. Sitting down in the rental car feels like a betrayal. Like leaving a best friend behind on a battlefield. He calls his wife and as soon as she asks him how it went, he sobs. Wails. Her digital voice tries to comfort him. Promises there was nothing more he could have done. When he has control over his breathing he tells her it was one of the most beautiful moments of his life. 

Driving away he plays music because he wants to celebrate life. To rebel against death’s impeccable silence. Singing feels like prayer. And in that southbound moment, plunging towards the winter sun as the highway lifted him up and over the city floor, it dawns on him that we cannot help but talk to God. That we live within a constantly unfolding miracle and that every expression of our joy or our love or our fear or our grief is a relay back to the source of everything, and that these feelings of ours are not apiece but like water and ice, only shifts in phase, different modes of one primary element, and so he drives with golden light in his eyes singing loud and knowing, knowing, that everything is exactly right. Even when it feels so wrong. So unjust. There is a greater perfection underlying. In the structure and its arc. It’s easy to forget when we witness through human eyes. 

He gasses up the car and returns it. Takes off his shoes and belt and then puts them back on again. Finds a seat in the terminal and waits. He isn’t there long before he hears it. The sound of crying. Restrained and choking. Muffled by a body curled up to contain it. Behind the ticket counter and on the floor, a man sits with his head in his arms, weeping into the space between his knees. He goes to him, crouches before him and asks very quietly if the man is OK. The arms part and red bleary eyes find his own. The man says, “I just found out my momma died.” He hugs the man. The man hugs him back.

He wanted to talk to God. You never know who’s listening.