"CANCER"
by Kurt Nimmo


I'm in Florida.

My mother is in a house five miles away and she has a  tumor
in her brain and she is dying very slowly.

I  park  my  father's  BMW  in the parking lot at a shopping
center.  I sit  there  looking  out  the  window at the palm
trees, at the blue sky with its puffy white clouds, and then
I light a cigarette and get out of the car.

It's hot outside.  I walk over to the stores.

I throw down the cigarette.

I go in the drugstore.  I don't know why I go  in  the  drug
store  but I do and the airconditioning is on high and it is
suddenly cold like  a  freezer  and  there are these seniors
walking around buying things like umbrellas and prescription
drugs.

I think: My mother is only 56 and she is dying from cancer.

I walk over to where they have the magazines.  I pick  up  a
magazine.   I don't know what magazine it is because I don't
look at the cover.  I  simply  turn the pages and think that
it's too cold and that everything is weird and distant and I
can't feel anything, no emotion, nothing, I think that  this
must  be  what it's like to be dead.  I'm in a place where I
don't know anybody and I'm dead.

I'd taken a valium  from  my  father's prescription before I
left.  I can't feel it.  I'd drank about  half  a  fifth  of
good  expensive  scotch  earlier  in  the  day.   It's three
o'clock in the afternoon  and  I'm  not drunk.  I'm high but
not drunk.  I flip the pages of the magazine and I focus  on
a  photograph  of  a  woman--she is one of those female body
builders with obscene muscles and  dark brown skin.  I think
this is strange because she has  this  beautiful  head  with
curly  blond  hair  and nice features but it's all ruined by
the ridiculous almost male looking muscled body.

I put the magazine back.

I walk around the store for a minute.  I don't know what I'm
doing.  I'm not thinking about anything in particular.

Occasionally I flash on my mother in bed.  Her head's shaved
from the operation.  She can't walk.  She's in this bed with
wheels on it in the back bedroom of my father's house.  Once
a day a woman  from  the  hospice  organization comes in and
does things--the things my mother did before the cancer  and
the  operation.   I  sleep  in  the  room with my mother.  I
listen to her talk nonsense, a kind of baby talk.  Cancer is
slowly eating away her  brain  and  she  talks like a little
girl, or a senile old woman.  About  fifty  percent  of  the
time  she  does not know who I am.  Sometimes she thinks I'm
her brother.

I drive along until I reach a toll bridge.  I slow, reach in
my pocket, and find some  coins.  There is a uniformed woman
inside a small toll booth.  She  has  on  sunglasses  and  I
can't  tell  if  she is looking at me or not.  She turns her
head a little as I give her two quarters.  She has dark hair
and thin  lips.   Then  I  put  the  BMW  in  first gear and
continue across the toll bridge.

I pass the cream-colored building where Burt Reynolds has  a
condo.   My father had pointed it out a few days before.  We
were driving down along the  Gulf.  The hospice woman was at
the house with my mother.  As we drove  past  I  looked  for
Burt  Reynolds but I didn't see him.  I saw a few old people
walking around but not Burt Reynolds.

Now I pull up at the county  park and get out of the car and
walk over to the beach.  I stand there  in  my  shoes,  long
pants,  and  short  sleeved shirt.  It's hot.  It's like the
sun has something against me,  against everybody.  I look at
the water, at the sun, at the people  walking  and  swimming
and doing nothing at three o'clock in the afternoon on a day
in  the  middle  of  the  week.  I cross over to where water
meets sand and I start walking  south.  I watch my feet sink
into the wet sand as I walk and I think that  Florida  is  a
horri  ble,  terrible place--the weather, the sun, the water
does not make life any less meaningless and inequitable.

I notice a woman in a bikini.

It's a hot pink color and the sun makes it look like it's on
fire.  I stop, move  away  from  the  water, sit down in the
warm sand and look at the woman  in  the  hot  pink  bathing
suit.   She seems unaware that I am staring at her.  Usually
I'm careful not to stare  at  people  but today I don't care
about anything.  I stare at her for a  long  time.   I  like
looking  at  her  short brown hair, the slender and graceful
length of her  neck,  the  rich  brownness  of her skin, the
longness of her legs, the narrowness of her  hips,  and  the
cool  whiteness  at  the  bottom of her feet as she flattens
herself out on a green  and  yellow beach towel and lets the
sun lay on her.

Finally I get up, brush the sand off my pants, head back  to
the car.

On my way back to the car I see a dead fish.

It  is big and partially rotted and it lays there in the sun
with its fish mouth open and  its fish eyes clouded over and
slightly sunken.

Death always looks about the same.

I drive up the highway, past Burt Reynolds' condo, over  the
long  bridge, and back to my father's house.  I park his BMW
in the garage.  I sit  in  the  car  for a long time, in the
darkness of the garage, and I don't think about much of  any
thing.  I don't concentrate on any one thing for very long.

Inside  the  house  I can hear my father's grandfather clock
ticking  and  the  murmur  of   the  TV.   He'd  bought  the
grandfather clock for my mother three  years  before.   When
they'd  first detected the cancer.  Now it counts the hours,
minutes, and seconds.

My father is watching TV in the other room.

Kurt, he says.  Is that you?

Yeah, I say.  It's me.  Has  Mary gone?  Mary is the hospice
woman.

Yeah, he answers.  She's gone...

His voice trails off, lost in the sound of  the  movie  he's
watching on HBO.  I hear guns, screams, the urgent and angry
sound of machinery.

I  go to the liquor cabinet and bring down the good scotch--
it's almost gone.  Later my father will go to the drug store
and buy another  quart.   When  he  does  I  will  go in the
bedroom and tap out three yellow valiums in my  hand  and  I
will  take  them  and the pills will do nothing.  Or nothing
that I can  ascertain  through  the  heavy near-blindness of
imported alcohol.

Maybe the valium will make me calm...

I find two ice cubes and put them  in  the  glass  with  the
scotch.   I  lightly  swish the scotch around to get it cold
and then I walk  out  in  the  backyard  where it is hot and
unbearable and something maybe like a privatized segment  of
hell.

I close my eyes and listen to the gulls.


Kurt Nimmo