Benediction Read online

  I’d just opened my AARP magazine when Queen Guy called my name.

  “Mr. Schmidt?”

  I followed him across the hall to an examining room. “I’m Soren, Dr. Kim’s nurse-assistant,” he said, pulling fresh paper over the examining table. His lips pursed and it appeared he was looking disdainfully at my shoes. “On second thought, don’t disrobe; don’t worry about sitting up here. I think you’re just in for a treatment consult, correct?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He pointed a bony finger to one of two chairs, the smaller one with the thinner padding. “Sit there. Doctor’ll be right in.”

  Soren rushed out, his unbuttoned white lab coat flying. The walls were covered with full-color diagrams of prostates and penises. Invariably, the cartoonish man they were parts of, if they showed him at all, was an older, fatter, bald white guy with droopy eyes and a resigned expression.

  All Prostate Cancer Man’s extra weight was concentrated around his abs. I certainly didn’t know anyone who fit that description, and what the fuck was wrong with Presidio’s marketing program, anyway? I turned to the window to check out the neighborhood, to find my Chinese boy, when the door clicked shut.

  “How are you this morning, Mr. Schmidt?”

  The last time I’d seen Dr. Kim was when he handed me that paper bag full of tissue snips he’d gotten from shooting that speargun at my ass.

  “I’m fine, I guess, for someone who has—how do I answer that question?” His eyes told me that was what every man said so they could move on to whatever came next.

  “Have a seat; let’s go over the options, here.” All business, but at least he smiled.

  I sat in the lesser-padded chair just like Soren wanted. Dr. Kim laid out my file on the small chipped table between us. As I watched him thoughtfully pull out the pages he was going to talk about, his youth struck me.

  “So, like I told you on the phone, we found adenocarcinoma in nine of the samples we took at biopsy.” He pointed to numbers on a green chart. “We rank the aggressiveness of the cancer cells on something called the Gleason scale, one being the least aggressive cell and five being the most.”

  I raised an eyebrow, then squinted to see this mass of data and medical terminology, all about my insides. “So what’s my number?” I asked.

  “Just getting to that,” he said. “You’re a seven, OK? But it’s more complicated. The Gleason is really the sum of two scores. In your case it’s a three plus a four, which means that most of the cancer cells were grade three, which is close to an average. For aggressiveness. The second most common kind of cancer cell we found was grade four, which is more aggressive and, well, somewhat of a concern for me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He put his pen down, clasped his hands on top of the table and grinned at me like I was a five-year-old. Something bad was coming. “Treatment modalities,” he said, “give us a few different options with prostate cancer—although the path is much narrower for a man your age, and I’ll get to that in a second.”

  I looked up at the illustration of sad and flabby Mr. Prostate Cancer Man and frowned. “I’ve already read about this on the Internet.”

  “A dangerous place to go.” His eyes got wide. “I don’t let my children use the computer.” So he had kids. I wondered if they also had Jewish-sounding first names, like their father, Irving.

  He explained the prostatectomy procedure, where they’d remove the cancerous gland from my body and, hopefully, that would be that and I’d be cured.

  That was option one.

  Option two was radiation. “Two months or so of external-beam radiation, five times a week, targeted to kill all the cancer cells in the prostate,” he said. His tone became more serious, as if he was about to confide a state secret: “We have very good data that say this treatment is effective for up to fifteen years, but beyond that we really don’t know.”

  “And with prostatectomy, well, the damn thing’s just gone, so there’s no…recurrence?” I had my suspicions about where he was going with this.

  “That’s the theory, yes—and usually that’s right, unless there’s a metastasis—a spreading of the cancer. Which is unlikely if the disease is confined to the prostate itself.”

  “And mine? Is it confined to the prostate itself?” It was hot inside my shirt; cold drips of armpit sweat hit my ribs.

  Dr. Kim opened up another file—he was nothing if not well prepared. “I have more numbers to show you about that, but first I’d like to finish with the treatment possibilities.”

  Hidden under his hand was a chart where someone had made circles around specific numbers with a red pen. “There’s a second radiation option: seed implants. Brachytherapy is what it’s called. Got a brochure on that,” he said, while searching both files. “We don’t do that here, but our affiliate up in Sacramento does. Basically, the surgeon implants radioactive seeds into the prostate to kill the cancer that way.”

  I thought back to the biopsy and imagined the seed implant speargun as a large, Day-Glo orange apparatus branded with radiation hazard stickers, with the implant team covered head to toe in white protective clothing, small, rectangular eye slits in their face masks.

  All this was probably routine but couldn’t be especially pleasant for Dr. Kim. He doubtless gave this speech several times a week, and it must have been a struggle to always appear compassionate and not think about what was for lunch.

  “Any questions so far?” He was good with eye contact, too. In fact, even though I wasn’t exactly a rice queen—Chinese Gymnast Boy notwith-standing—there was a sexiness about Dr. Kim that intrigued me. I wondered whether it would have been the same had my tests for cancer come up negative. Out of the corner of my eye I detected the outward curve of well-formed quadriceps under his black wool slacks.

  “I’m all ears, and it’s a lot to digest, but like I said, I was reading up on the Net.”

  “Pipe up if you have any. So those are the basic choices you have, prostatectomy or radiation. Now this other chart—”

  “Wait. I do have a question. What about watchful waiting? I read this was the slowest-growing cancer and all that.”

  He’d skipped the treatment I’d already decided on.

  This was distressing.

  Dr. Kim chuckled. Here I was, just diagnosed with cancer, and my doctor was laughing.

  “Watchful waiting is out of the question for a man your age with the Gleason scores you have. We’d only recommend that for an older person with much less aggressive cancer, someone who was old enough to likely die from other causes.”

  End of story.

  “Now, this chart—”

  “But wait.” My voice cracked. “I have this neighbor in the Castro who’s been watchful waiting for, like, ten years, and nothing’s happened!”

  “And how old is he?” Dr. Kim no longer smiled.

  “I’d guess seventies; it’s hard to tell. Retired but not, well, decrepit.”

  I shifted in my seat. He smiled again, this time forced.

  “The sad fact is, for almost all men that age, their life expectancy isn’t much more than ten years. So unless you’ve got something else that’s going to kill you in the next decade, I suggest you listen to what I have to say.”

  Was this a thinly veiled homophobic comment having something to do with HIV, or was he just pissed?

  “Now, about this chart—can I talk about it now?” The smile was back.

  “Please.”

  He talked about Partin Tables, which had more numbers, conveniently circled, about the probability of this and that, and as his mouth moved earnestly, I got to thinking about the park again, the swaying treetops visible from the examining room, and the curious black statues that perched on rocks there—which today were just large reminders of a generic prostate shape.

  I tuned back in to hear Dr. Kim say that with my statistics there was a good probability that the cancer was still inside my prostate and had not spread outward to the seminal vesicles or lymp
h nodes.

  “But the truth is, Mr. Schmidt, we won’t really know until we’ve done the post-op pathology workup,” he said.

  He probably assumed that I bought his rationale that submitting to the radical prostatectomy and becoming a randomly peeing, limp and useless sliver of my former self was a good idea.

  I had other plans.

  6

  For much of a typical winter, San Francisco suffered through rainstorms, one after another rolling in off the Pacific, sometimes backed up all the way to Japan. Most days started and ended cold, wet and dreary. The occasional sunny day in between was glorious beyond belief. Those were the days we lived for.

  Today was not one of those days. I was on my way to New York for a conference that had been canceled at the end of September because no attendees would fly, and I was very happy to have this temporary diversion from the cancer.

  It also made avoidance simpler and provided a good excuse not to discuss the options Dr. Kim had presented to me with Jake. I still hadn’t broached the subject—at all—with Karen. Quite simply, it was easier to pretend there wasn’t a problem.

  San Francisco International Airport, never a truly pleasant place, had become a nightmare after September 11. As I sat on a choice leather barstool with padded arms in Shannon’s Pub in Terminal C, I got a clear view of the throngs waiting impatiently outside security. Actually, I was watching for colleagues, though none of them knew about my long-term AA membership. I felt incredibly guilty—no, sinful—being in this airport bar. The Slog was one thing—a momentary slip on a really bad day—Shannon’s, however, was quite another.

  So far my beverage was coffee, difficult since it tasted so bad. The bartender, whose name badge identified her as Christine, looked at me funny when I ordered it, her eyes focused across the concourse at the Peet’s directly opposite. Her look shouted, “Dumb shit, nobody ever orders coffee in a bar; look over there, or are you fucking blind?”—but she’d poured it anyway.

  An hour later I’d had two more cups of their awful coffee tempered with two double shots of bourbon poured in. I left Christine twenty dollars as the final boarding call for my flight was announced. Fuck it. Safe Harbor was going to pay for the drinks and the tip and just about everything else I could dream up.

  * * *

  California in winter is, in general, colored in greens and blues and the complementary muddy hues sandy to black. The East, on the other hand, was dark, gray, depressing and fearsome. It had its appeal. It was the very picture of decline, and the millions who walked the streets of New York shared in this knowledge, it seemed to me, a conspiracy just under the level of consciousness, never spoken about but understood by everyone.

  Californians had the illusion that everything could still be all right. New Yorkers winked, with a nod and a slap on the back, and then howled in private behind the brick.

  Lately on New York trips I’d been staying at the Archer, up in midtown a few blocks from Rockefeller Center. Safe Harbor liked this place because it was comparatively cheap. It pleased me because it was designed in a minimalist style with slightly less attitude than the Royalton or the Mercer.

  A hot shower and strong coffee were the only things on my mind as the taxi inched its way across town. The Dramamine and the whiskey from the flight kept me groggy. Oddly, I didn’t feel a craving for more booze.

  It still surprised me that AA had put that lie—about the hunger—over on me. I’d write their headquarters and demand a refund of all the dollars put in their collection basket in all the meetings I’d ever attended.

  The cab was now on the Archer’s block, and a stunning, Euro-looking male model wearing an elegantly deconstructed long black trench coat waited for us on the curb.

  “Evening, sir,” he said as he opened the door for me and looked, not at me, but at something past my head, whatever it was across the street that was more interesting than my face.

  “Hi. Geez, it’s cold. Maybe a little snow later?” I’d read the weather report on my laptop, and the flight attendant had predicted precipitation when we landed, but I thought I should say something to this unbelievably gorgeous creature and play dumb.

  Because you just never know.

  He grabbed my bag from the driver and ignored my question. The guy at the desk turned out to be the same man I’d met there before, a Mediterranean-type New Yorker with curly black hair. Hard to tell if he was Jewish or Italian or Greek or Spanish or some combination of the above. Flirting with him was delightful, and I hoped it wasn’t my imagination that he usually flirted back.

  Not today. The mood was hushed and somber. There were no other customers in the lobby, and no other hotel employees.

  “Seems quiet here tonight.” I handed over my credit card. His eyes were fixed on his ancient green-tinted computer screen.

  Outside, I could hear the taxi whistles and the car horns and somebody wearing cleats tapping along the pavement. There was a bit of Spanish here, a sentence in Farsi there—sounds I’d come to know of as background New York.

  “Since September…you know, a real drop-off in guest nights.” He swiped the card, then finally looked at me with those big, sad brown eyes. “Nobody wants to come to New York right now. They laid off half the staff.”

  His name was Severino. It was right there on an Archer Hotel name tag, probably always had been and I’d just never seen it.

  “Need help with that bag?” I could sense Euro Guy model-man lurking behind me near the elevator.

  “I think I’m OK, really.” He handed me the key card.

  Was that a wink or was I hallucinating again?

  “Mr. Schmidt—wait—there’s some messages for you here; I almost forgot.” Severino reached into the mail slot and pulled out several of those irritatingly pink “While You Were Out” slips.

  The bottom dropped out of my stomach. Without even looking at them, I knew Paul Sutcliffe must be in town—no one else would be stupid enough to leave multiple messages when they knew damn well I was on a plane and couldn’t answer anyway.

  * * *

  Safe Harbor, being the modern, progressive organization it was, required employees to get in-service training each year. For those of us in the executive ranks, this usually took the form of a conference of some sort. As long as it had an impressive-sounding name it would be approved by our human resources department, no matter how bogus it actually turned out to be.

  The American Software Marketing Association had one such yearly conference, complete with cocktail parties, panel discussions, a small exhibit floor, an awards dinner and even more to sleepwalk through. Paul Sutcliffe and I were both members of ASMA, so it only made sense he’d be here, too.

  Paul didn’t like boutique lodging, so he stayed at the Marriott. It was reasonable to assume he wouldn’t just show up and knock on my door. I surmised they had more smoking rooms and their room service was better, or perhaps offered larger French fry portions with their club sandwiches. Or maybe it was the attraction of that gauzy, hotel-edited porn where there’s lots of moaning but no visible penetration—I could easily envision a fat, naked and smoking Paul jacking off to a squealing blonde double-D.

  His basic premise was that as head of consumer marketing, and since most of Safe Harbor’s business was in the consumer realm, that was the company’s important and legitimate marketing function. Corporate—in other words, my job—was make-work. I was there merely to look good when anyone questioned the often-unusual structure of software startups. To Paul, my position was hardly necessary unless one wanted or needed to emulate the Dark Ages.

  If you repeated something often enough, people started to believe it was true, no matter the extent of the lie. Paul was particularly treacherous in this way. He could really push my buttons, which infuriated me. He knew I’d be curious about all the pink message slips. I’d have to call him back no matter what my plans were.

  I tried the Marriott number itself rather than his cell, hoping perhaps he wasn’t there masturbating. He answ
ered on the second ring.

  “Hello,” he said, quietly. I wondered whether he’d been asleep. I hoped so.

  “It’s Ben. Got your messages; just in a little while ago.”

  “How you doin’, Benny?” he said. Now I hated him. The only person who ever called me Benny was my paternal grandmother, and she’d been rewarded with a fatal heart attack when I was six.

  “Fine. What did you need?” I tried my best to fake accommodation so he couldn’t put this conversation into the evidence file I knew he was compiling. It made me sound busy, like I had important things to do.

  “ASMA’s program doesn’t start until the morning, so I thought maybe we could have dinner—you know some good places up here; Mallard mentioned it.”

  Shit. I hadn’t thought of any dinner excuses pre-call. He totally blindsided me.

  “That is, unless you have other plans…,” he continued.

  “There’s a great Italian place up on Sixth near Fifty-seventh Street. I forget the name but we can walk up there.”

  Silence.

  “Whaddya know,” he said finally. “What time?”

  * * *

  Bistro Artes midtown was innovative enough for me to feel I could eat their food but also mainstream enough so a clueless tourist would feel comfortable, which made it perfect for Paul. He was not experimental. He was not the kind who jumped, hoping a net would appear, though he’d insist he was.

  I’d made an agreement with myself the first day at Safe Harbor that I’d really, sincerely try to get along with my coworkers, even if they were despicable. Most of the time there was no extracurricular activity involved, except for travel, which frequently put me in other cities with bored and nervous colleagues who liked to get drunk.

  I wasn’t very hungry, and just being at the same table with Paul pretty much killed any normal appetite. Of course, there was the cancer and the imminent treatment decision, lurking behind a closet door in my head that swung open now and then to reveal its frightening contents.