Blowback(2)

What do you say? There is nothing you can say. You sit there and look at him, and you try not to let him see how much your hands are trembling.

“It may not be malignant,” this white Dr. White said. “It could be an adenoma-a benign tumor. We'll have to do a sputum cytology.”

So I coughed up phlegm for him into a sterile container, and he said he would get it over to the pathology lab at San Francisco General right away, but that we could not reasonably expect a report until Tuesday sometime. Meanwhile, I was not supposed to worry and I was not, for God's sake, supposed to smoke any more cigarettes.

Close the barn door, I had thought, the horse is gone. But I had not had a cigarette since then.

And now it was Sunday, Sunday morning coming down, and tomorrow it would be Monday and then it would be Tuesday. And when it was Thursday and I already knew the results of the sputum test, I would be fifty years old. Happy birthday, happy half-century, you have lung cancer.

Jesus, Jesus.

I had wanted to tell Eberhardt on the phone just now; I had wanted to tell someone since Friday. But just as there had been nothing to say to White, there was nothing to say to Eb, not yet. He would only work himself up into a lather-he was a good friend-and there was no sense in that. There was no sense in worrying myself, just as the doctor advised. It would not help matters, it would not change matters. The lesion on my lung was malignant or it was not malignant. I had cancer or I did not have cancer. Simple.

From the beginning it had all been simple, I thought. You start smoking because all the other kids on the block have taken it up and you don't want to be considered a sissy. Then you start to enjoy it, it's a harmless little vice; you like the way a cigarette tastes after a hard day or with a beer or after making love. Later, you listen to all the warnings put out by the Surgeon General's Office, and you shrug, and with stupid blind faith you think that it's not as bad as they make it seem. That it can't do any damage to you. But what you don't think about until maybe it's too late is that you have been burning up an average of two packs a day for thirty-five of your fifty years, which works out to more than half a million butts, to more than ten million lungfuls of tobacco smoke-and maybe the human body is just not equipped to handle that kind of overload.

Simple. Simple to give the things up when you find out about the lesion growing on your lung. Simple to sit here with your morning coffee, coughing, spitting up phlegm, and tell yourself there's no point in worrying, you either have cancer or you don't, and if you're lucky the lesion won't be malignant and everything will work out after all.

What isn't simple is fighting off the craving for a cigarette, just one, just one more cigarette because it always tasted so damned good with that morning coffee.

I got to my feet again: all I seemed to be doing this morning was standing and sitting down. Well, I had to get out of there, that was all, before I became claustrophobic; I had to get my mind off cigarettes and off Tuesday. Go somewhere, do something. Bowling, maybe, some sort of physical activity The phone bell went off a second time.

Now who the hell? I thought. The hell with it, there was nobody I wanted to talk to. But I was not one of those people who could let the telephone ring without responding. Too many years of conditioning. The telephone was an integral part of my job and always had been. Reluctantly I went in and answered it.

A voice, vaguely familiar, said my first name. I frowned, and there was one of those awkward pauses where you try to place someone by his voice and can't quite manage it. I said finally, “Yes?”

“This is Harry Burroughs, buddy.”

“Well, Christ,” I said.

Harry Burroughs was a guy I had met in the Pacific theater during the early years of the war, when I was in Military Intelligence and he was attached to a combat supply unit. We had gotten to be friends, had done a good deal of drinking and carousing together, and had come back stateside on the same ship in 1946. Since we were both from California, we had stayed in touch over the years; he owned and operated a small fishing camp up in the Sierra Nevada, on Eden Lake in the southern Mother Lode.

He said the same thing I was thinking, “Been a long time. Too long.”

“Four years at least. You in town, Harry?”

“No, I'm calling from The Pines.” That was a small village not far from Eden Lake. “Listen, buddy, you couldn't get away for a few days, could you? Come up and do a little fishing and kick over old times?”

I hesitated. “Well-I don't know.”

“Be good to see you,” he said. “And the bass are big and hungry this year.”

I've got a lesion on my left lung, I thought. I might have lung cancer. I said, “Maybe I can swing it next week. I'm not sure yet.”