A Lesion of the Liver

Yesterday, while doing a sonogram to get to the bottom of my sudden abdominal pain, they discovered a lesion on my liver.
"Just one?"
"Well, it could be several. It's hard to tell on the sono. I'd like to schedule an MRI for tomorrow."
"How about today?"
"It's not an emergency, because the blood tests show only a minor elevation in liver enzymes, but if you want it—"
"—I want it."

I went into the backyard to pick weeds. It had rained a few days earlier, so they came out easily. Rip. I love the feeling of pulling something out by its roots. Finding the sturdiest point on the stem, wrapping my fist around it, the slight give, and the sensation of each unique root. Some roots are one long tap root - you can feel those slide out a long length of earth. It feels like you are cleansing the soil of a long-seeded ill. Others are shallow, hairy root clusters. You tear them out like hair from a scalp. Or like pulling the tab up on a cold, really gassy soda can. Rrrrrip. Ahhhh.

Sometimes, the root is too strong, the ground around it dry and tense. This happens with the bigger stalks, the ones with thorny leaves and a pretty yellow dandelion growing up top. The stalk tears and the plant's juices splatter my hand and mix with the dirt and seep into the invisible cuts on my knuckles and stings. Take that, bitch. This really pisses me off, so I toss the plant and dig my fingers into the ground, working my fingers around the first few roots I come to and tug. It's not a satisfying rip, but at least it's gone. The fucker.

I don't miss my mom very often anymore. It's been five years. I miss her when I need a recipe, or to know who sang "Free Ride." Now there's the Internet for those things. But I missed her like hell then. Pulling those weeds, a lesion on my liver, probably nothing, but I wanted to tell her most of all. My fiancé is appropriately worried. I tell him not to be, that liver lesions are common and usually benign. Still, he holds me a little tighter and gets quiet more frequently. I told my dad, after he stopped filling me in on his work day, and afterwards, he regaled me with his medical history. This is not to say he doesn't care—this is just how he cares. He relates. I told my brother. Then we both changed the subject.

Still, after telling the three people who love me most in this world, I kept wanting to call one more. I posted it on Facebook. I told my coworkers. I responded to worried questions and well wishes. And still, I wanted to tell one more. One more person. One more who would care as much as I did that there was something potentially dangerous in my body—one who would be devastated if I died.

Not that I thought I would. It's just that we get only so many people like that, and I want my one more back.

Form Follows Function Follows Form Follows...

A novel in short stories? What the fuck was I thinking?

Input phase

Now that my freelancing gig is over, I have more time to write. So that means I'm not writing.
I am, however, working the stories out in my head when I fall asleep. And then I forget what solutions I came up with. Hi ho. If it was the right solution, it will come back as I'm writing.

If I ever write again.

My conditions for getting into a serious rhythm with this book, which is now due in 6-1/2 months:

Find another job that lets me make enough money to pay all my bills, grocery shop regularly, take my dog for her annual senior wellness exam, furnish my house, buy a wedding dress and cake and caterer, and fix my radiator.

Accomplish all of the above.

Then, let the writing commence!

Until then, I will be working the stories out in my head, growing ever more distant from the trauma itself until I will have no better expertise for recollecting it than anyone else would.

Gargggghhhh.

The End

At the Guardian, James Lasdun unpacks Chekhov.

. . . the unpredictable shapes of his stories (ask yourself, as you read them, where they might be going: it’s almost always impossible to guess, and yet when you get there it feels inevitable and entirely natural), the endings that “solve” nothing in the conventional sense but do indeed finalise the “correct presentation” of the problem—all this is premised, not on some simple ambition to strike a new note, but on a new way of looking at reality that required new methods to express it. . .

I've noticed a trend in my stories. The narrative, driven more or less by the internal processes of the protagonist, almost always winds up derailed by an event that occurs outside of their making, forcing them to deal with it in the finale. A middle-aged woman breaking it off with her young lover is nearly killed by a passing ship in the last scene; a girl unknowingly stuck in the anger phase of grief is in a violent fight with her support group on the beach, when a Flamenco dancer appears out of nowhere and walks into the waves.

They are neither inevitable nor entirely natural, so much as they are the intersections of universes. Still, teachers have referred to them as unorganic. But when I try to rewrite them as simpler endings generated by the main character's own intense emotions, it feels totally inauthentic and against my worldview. As a child, I reacted and responded and adapted to the chaos around me - I had little direction, just dreams. As an adult, I'm aimless, waiting for tragedy and trouble to give me something to do.

So isn't it just my artistic vision that my stories end this way? Is it really fear of staying with the character's intense, climaxing emotions - as I was quick to suggest to my teachers; or is it simply the way my world turns?

Is it necessarily a weak choice to bring in a deus ex machina to simulate the trauma life throws at you while you were in the midst of some completely different crisis - a crisis that now suddenly seems so pathetically impotent? What if it just happens naturally, as I follow a story on the page?

Is not my work, too, premised "not on some simple ambition to strike a new note, but on a new way of looking at reality that required new methods to express it"?

Chew chew chew. Finding myself as an artist, trusting myself as an artist. Chew chew chew.

Affirmation

I'm so close to actually sitting down and incorporating the changes I've been thinking about, I can hardly stand it.

Try To Make A Change

So I haven't touched the book since the beginning of the month, and my resolution was to work on it a little every day. Done in October.

Take inventory.

Have:
1 story near its final form
1 story that needs major reconstructive surgery
1 story that needs life support
1 story that needs a ventilator
1 story that needs a face
1 story whose death I refuse to call, even though it's not responding anymore

Need:
to establish the mother before she dies
to hire a better writer to write this book for me

I tried to work on my closest-to-fine story this morning, but it took me an hour and a half just to read through it to the part that needs to change. When I got to that part, a plane hit a building here in town. My fiancé came home from work and made me a bagel. 1) Open mouth, 2) accept food, 3) chew and swallow. Repeat.

I have to quit for today. I have work I am supposed to do so I can get paid. Besides, editing and proofing is easier today than creating people out of thin air. Or RE-creating them in all their perfect, hellish beauty.

Here's one more attempt:

She found a crab claw on the beach when my brother and I were kids. She would use her fingers to make it talk like a puppet.
She'd make it say, like Señor Wences from the old kids' show, "Joo want to talk to my crab?"

At first we wouldn't want to, but then we'd laugh and laugh and forget whatever we were angry about: that dad wasn't picking us up that weekend, that everyone at our new school called us "loners," or that the new jerk she was seeing sat on the couch watching "The Judge" all afternoon and made us miss our cartoons.

She was funniest when everything was miserable.
"S'alright?" we'd ask.
"S'alright," went the claw.

Don't Bother

I once found my mother dead. You have to be careful when telling people this, but in those first hundred days, I freely shared it with anyone within earshot. Check-out girl, person in an elevator, customer service representatives. (Lots and lots of customer service representatives.)

Five years later, it’s something that has been so deeply absorbed that I now say it out loud just to remember that it’s there. This happened. The experts refer to this as a process of assimilation, adding that it can take several years to assimilate something like that – even a lifetime. Butwe're all assimilating something or other: what’s the difference between finding your mother murdered and enduring a childhood of unflagging emotional abuse? Finding the love of your life in bed with someone else and surviving a plane wreck? I have a friend who still winces when people move too quickly near him. He was beaten savagely as a kid. Who but him bears the standard of his horrors?

Then there’s the guilt of context: Rwanda, the Congo, Somalia, Bosnia, the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition. Jesus, just being alive in the 14^th century sucked worse for even the wealthiest, most syphilitic aristocrat than it ever has for me and my one lousy dead parent. Even if I was the one who found her like that.

So why tell this story, at all? Am I that narcissistic? Well, why not - everyone else is in this Internet Age. The noble answer is: I’m a writer and have a duty to report on the extraordinary in life. The psychological answer is: If I don’t, it is going to eat its way out of my head like some squealing H.R. Giger monster.

I was always like this. I wrote an autobiography at 12 called If God Could See Me Now. It was three pages long. (Three pages is a lot for someone who’s enjoyed only about 7 years of thoughts more sophisticated than those of a Fox Terrier.)

It dealt mostly with the feelings of isolation and abandonment that succeeded my parents’ screwy, long, and turbulent divorce. I still think it’s one hell of a good title, only it would be re-imagined by some Focus On The Family-style proselyte with a junior-high understanding of matters spiritual and intellectual, and packaged as “Inspirational” reading for the Costco and Sam’s Club set. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Costco and Sam’s Club set. I hope one day to be purchased in such a fine establishment, tossed in a basket with some recalled designer jeans and a 4-month supply of frozen weiners.

The answer to my inner critic is: It’s not Elie Wiesel’s Night, but it matters.

When I tell people “my mother was murdered,” they often have the same reaction. They stand silent, nodding, waiting for the next bit of information. Grateful for what they’ve already received. Someone once suggested people are just trying to absorb my story, which I find funny and stupid. Absorb it? It happened. Just listen to me. I’m telling you. What’s required of you?

But in these five years, I have learned that by telling a stranger, a friend, a neighbor – pretty much anyone but a sociopathic personality or a therapist trained in maintaining boundaries – I bring them into it. It becomes interactive.

As the executrix of my mother’s estate (an awfully funny word for a condo about to go into foreclosure and several unpaid bills), I had to make many phone calls to customer service representatives. I relished these calls. These antagonists of society! -- refusing to reverse your overdraft fees, remove a charge from your cellphone bill, lower your suddenly jacked-up APRs, and, too often, speak to you without a script and without that confounded robotic voice.

“Hi, Becca, I’m calling on behalf of my mother, who was killed last week by her boyfriend. I have her account number here, and of course I can fax you a death certificate if you need one before talking to me. I just need to get a list of all of her balances for the probate. Hello? Hello, are you there?”

We’d end up having a conversation for half an hour about someone she knew who died. Everyone has a death they’re holding onto. One guy, at Countrywide of all places, confessed his 3-year-old nephew had drowned in a swimming pool some time ago. I cried with him. He couldn’t hold the forbearance, but he got me a direct line to the supervisor who could. There are no direct lines at Countrywide – at least, there weren’t then – so I’d had to explain the entire story to three different people every time I called. Giving me the extension number was a huge gift.

Another woman – I can’t recall from where – lost a mother to breast cancer. I told her that her story was worse. Maybe it was. Maybe half the people who buy my book will have worse stories than this one. Sometimes I feel guilty for being somewhat well adjusted. It doesn’t make good television, as they say. I can’t promise to fall apart in front of you for your entertainment. I can’t even tell you anything about death that someone hasn’t before, and better.

I can tell you this: you have to go into her house to look for photographs, music, and clothes for the service. A man is inside, wearing a paper jumpsuit. He is still wiping the fingerprint powder and purple splatters of Luminol off of the floor, the ceiling fan blades, the kitchen cabinets. The sink is full of steak knives. “I guess it wasn’t one of these,” he tells you. And you watch his face immediately pale. “The mattress is in the van,” he says quickly. You accept his apology and thank him. You thank him three times.