Elena texts him while he is in chemo, sweet gesture
across the country, Are you chemoing, dad? for the hour
he is hooked to toxins. I got a job. What are you reading?
Still Proust, he says, until the end of my life, that’s the plan.
Sounds boring. I want to read the last page of the last volume,
surrounded by friends, and then die. I don’t like you to talk
about death. Nobody does. Caroline won’t listen to him,
but he knows, the way only he can know, what’s coming.
How does it feel, dad? It hits me like a body blow, someone
throws a punch at my gut and then the toxins explode like stars
across the darkness of my body. It might be beautiful,
some kind of efflorescence, expansion of the universe toward what
conclusion? No one knows. And expanding into what? Beyond
the boundaries of my body, the universe itself keeps going, takes
me with it on immortal cancer cells. They live forever, we don’t.
Dad, I’m reading A Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish.
It’s a beautiful book, another immortality, how odd that words
might be so, these texts between us quick and lost as spoken words
we never quite remember as they’re said. On auto-correct,
the ordinary becomes absurd, you mean auto-connecticut?
Yes, exactly. Pretty funny, dad. Is Caroline coming to pick you up?
She comes but they miss their connection, he mellowing in the sun,
she searching the hospital frantic that he might have suffered
an accident. As it often does, the cancer breaks them in two,
her anger, his guilt, toxins tending their deadened desire.
