You’ve Always Been the Caretaker

October 2022. We were making up after a long argument when I gave my girlfriend a tight hug and we heard a noise like a car backfiring.

“What was that?” she said.

“I think I broke your ribs,” I said. I’ve had a broken rib, I broke my friend Bob’s ribs, doesn’t make me an expert.

The X-ray showed a density in her lung. Next she had a CAT scan with contrast. (Never say “dye.”) After that came the pulmonologist, then radiology. Bronchoscopy. They sent her home on my birthday, still coughing up what they called a normal amount of blood. Needle biopsy and pneumothorax, a fancy way to say her lung collapsed. They kept her in the hospital on suction for two days. Then it was time for oncology. And chemotherapy and immunotherapy and thoracic surgery were still in her future, waiting.

Medical stories should not be suspenseful. She lived.

But our former lives, hers, mine, the one we had together, were demolished. One thing her cancer did was I had to stop being such an egomaniac and grow up a little. I’m no great shakes as a grown-up. I’m not impressed. A little less ego, maybe. I have lost interest in my inner life, in fact much or most of the time I would prefer not to have any thoughts or feelings, just get in the harness and pull the sleigh. C. Fred Alford writes, “It is easy to have thoughts; the trick is to know how to put them together, what is called thinking as linking, without being overwhelmed with terror or despair … emotions that feel as if the self is going to fall to pieces or explode.” I don’t know that trick. I do have a constant dim awareness of what I am feeling, and even that dimness is so bright it’s almost blinding. Fine. That’s fine. A little less ego, but still plenty of maniac. Turns out it takes a maniac to get the job done.

“The Siberian reindeer is the gamest animal in the world,” writes Harry de Windt in From Paris to New York by Land. “I have seen them working incessantly day after day, growing weaker hour by hour, and yet bravely struggling on until the poor little beasts would fall to the ground from sheer exhaustion, never to rise again.” It takes a Siberian reindeer to get the job done.

It takes the man with the hammer to get the job done. At a party a long time ago, I told a mathematician from the Netherlands that I had gassed out on a long run and hit the wall. “You need the man with the hammer,” he said. Perfect. From then on, if my commitment started to flag, I told myself: I call on the man with the hammer. Next level: I am the man with the hammer. Final appeal: I am the hammer.

After many years, I saw that mathematician again, and thanked him, and told him how much I owed him. He said: “Your story makes me feel happy, but that cannot be what I said. I think what I said must have been ‘If you are American, you hit the wall, but if you are Dutch, you meet the man with the hammer.’ ”

I don’t care if it’s right or wrong. I just have to get her to Lung Center B on time.

***

Demolished, and something new is built on the ruins. I am grateful. But I have to say: I liked the earlier version better.

Everyone has problems. These are some of mine. You may already know what Epictetus said about life on earth: Listen, if you don’t like it, then get out. There’s the door.

When I say “demolished,” I want to be clear that I loved her doctors, even if they had to bomb the village in order to save it. No, I’m talking about the wreckage of our former life, about people who were my friends who turned into ghosts, the ones who just couldn’t take it. Look, I get it, man. I couldn’t take it, either. I just took it anyway.

I said to one of her doctors, “Believe it or not, I feel like some of her friends envy her the spotlight. Well, they can have the spotlight, and they can have her cancer, too. Do you know what I’m talking about?” and the doctor said, “Extremely common.”

And I, John, saw these things, and heard them.

***

I don’t know why we called him Wink. I never saw him wink. I rarely saw him smile.

Wink was a hellfire guitar slinger. The night I met him, he was working the door at Tewligans. He looked at my license and asked me my birthday, and I said, “The thirty-fifth of Delfember.” We became friends, if friends is the word for being subjected to Wink’s excoriating diatribes.

Wink recruited me for his Stones cover band, which he called sometimes the Dead Flowers and other times the Satanic Majesties, to play a show the night of Thunder Over Louisville in the run-up to the Kentucky Derby. We were redneck boozehounds and we did not get along at practice, but Pete and Mike and Little Mary and Bunny and Hannah and Tall Christian played great, and Wink was outstanding as ever, and I did my Pythia of Delphi act, drinking a forty of King Cobra shirtless in tight black vinyl pants. “The Rolling Stooges,” Wink said.

The neighbors called the cops, but when the cops showed up, they said, “Sounds good. Go get us a couple beers.”

Fifteen years later, I was back in town to attend the Kentucky State Fair. A girl tried to sell me a goat. “She likes you,” she said.

I ate sausage and biscuits and gravy, and then I drove to where I’d heard Wink was tending bar. He was surprised to see me, and even more surprised when, after my second beer, I said, “I think that’ll do.” He walked with me to my rental car and smoked a cigarette, scowling. Then he said, “This is so stupid. I’m never going to see you again.” He gave me a hug, shocking me, and he clomped away.

And it was true: I never saw Wink again. He died. Turned out he had lung cancer, and everybody back home knew it. Not me, though. I must have been the only person he’d had a conversation with in years who didn’t treat him like a cancer patient. I’m glad I could help him, even though he hurt me. He had a job to do: looking out for number zero.

***

It takes the man with the jackhammer to get the job done.

The city is demolishing an apartment building on my street. They’ve sawn it in half, like a pretty girl wearing a dress with spangles and sequins in a magic show.

From the edge of the river, outside the fenced-off demolition zone, you can see into the apartments, like a diorama, like an ant farm. There are all kinds of hairy dangling ends of wires and gray fibers.

It makes me think of Scanners, the 1981 David Cronenberg science-fiction movie in which Cameron Vale hears voices, lives in torment, and cannot function in society. He suffers from involuntary telepathy. His wires are hanging out. Other people near him, Cronenberg’s script tells us, “are all alive directly in Vale’s brain. Their presence increases until there is no room for any mind of Vale’s own: he is a scrambled composite of everyone else in the room.”

Alfred Bester’s 1953 novel The Demolished Man is another telepathy-as-exposure story. Turns out it’s hard to plot a murder when everybody has ESP and can read your mind, when your wires are poking out, when everybody can see into your apartment.

I missed the cutoff date for science fiction’s techno-optimist heroic competence fantasies: Arthur C. Clarke’s 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust, say, about engineers dealing with a lunar tourist vehicle crash. That’s the sort of book Barry N. Malzberg derided as The Rammers of Arcturus in his 1975 antinovel Galaxies. Pretty funny, too, right up until it’s time to ram Arcturus. But when it is time to ram Arcturus, I don’t need Cassandra’s stylish paranoia and despair. What I need is a ram. I need the competent action heroes of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a heap of Taxol, and an antiprogrammed cell death protein 1 monoclonal antibody, and the galaxy’s greatest thoracic surgeon in her knee-high leather boots—Doctor Belinda Epsilon, warrior priestess of the Arcturan Pulmonary Brigade!—and an Atrium Express Mini 500 Mobile Dry Seal Drain, and then we’ll need an antitumor necrosis factor-alpha monoclonal antibody, and can I get a double vodka on the rocks, stat.

***

The street is blocked off. There’ll be no through traffic for another year, that’s my guess. The cops in their yellow hi-vis safety parkas directing traffic think two years at a minimum. Despite the gargantuan orange detour signs, if you stand on the corner for five minutes you’ll see three or four cars drive into the demolition zone, right up to the fence across the road, and stop and stare before doing a three-point turn. We call that the genius parade.

The building has to come down. It was found to have dangerous fundamental structural flaws. Never had a chance. I know how it feels.

Hammer of Arcturus, it was a happy day when my blood froze your handle to my palm. You did not fail my father, do not fail me now. Save her, and I will pay you in my blood, legal tender for all debts, public and private.

You don’t fool me, God, You bloodthirsty freak. I know what You want.

J. D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection The Correspondence was published in 2017. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, n+1, and elsewhere, including The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.