PLATH
I should destroy this. There’s no such thing as secure data. Once a thing is written it will somehow escape. But I can’t. I never knew my father wrote anything about himself.
Mr. Stern recovered this from a laptop my father once used. A long time ago, now. Or seems a long time ago to me.
This was his story. Mine, too, though at the time I understood almost nothing of what was happening. But this is how … well, it’s at least part of how everything began.
My father, Grey McLure. Burnofsky. Lear. Even Caligula. It’s all here. And I could trash can it all, wipe it clean. Except that these are my father’s words, and he’s talking about my mother and my brother. And he’s talking about me. And I find now that every word is infinitely precious.
Soon secrecy won’t matter. Soon very little will matter. But love will matter as long as anything. And I loved my dad.
I am Plath. My enemies have come to fear that name, and I revel in their dread.
But once I was just Sadie. Sadie, who loved her dad.
ONE
I am not a brave man.
I am not well armored against fear. Fear now rules my world, or perhaps I should say fears plural, unless you believe that all fears are only one fear, the big one, the fear of death.
I don’t believe that. To me, fear is granular. Fear is specific. Each fear has its own smell and taste, its own picture and face.
The great fear for me now is not death. The great fear is madness. The death of a creature smaller than the periods on this page can drag me down, helpless, like being sucked into a whirlpool.
I fear that madness. I fear it so badly that I shake from it as I write this.
The things I have seen. The things I have seen. And touched, though not with my own hands.
We live in a series of comforting illusions, beginning with the illusion that we are a human; a singular, separate, and discrete object called a human. We say, “That’s a man, or that’s a woman,” and we mean only the parts that are undeniably human, and not any of the bits and pieces that live on or in that human.
We are not, any of us, a singular object. We are an ecosystem. We are a Brazilian rain forest of life.
Some of us may understand this intellectually; we may hear the statistics about how we have more bacterial cells within us than strictly human cells. We may even make a disgusted face when we hear that fact. But that kind of fact? A bit of math? A line of data? That’s nothing to give a sane man sweaty nightmares. That’s nothing to twist his every notion of reality.
There are facts, and there is truth, and the two are not always quite the same. Facts are dry. The truth is sometimes soaked in blood.
My wife is dying. Her name is Birgid. Mine is Grey. Grey McLure.
Our son, Stone, is trying to play the stoic, and maybe he really is able to master his emotions, I don’t know. I’ve never been a great father to him. I don’t know him as well as I should. What is he now, thirteen? Hah, I’m not sure unless I do the math. Yes, thirteen. I should know that.
I’m closer in some ways to my daughter, Sadie. She’s only twelve, on the verge of becoming a woman, an old soul, a smart, perceptive girl who watches her mother waste away and demands to know why.
Why is this happening?
Sadie is angry, looking for someone to blame.
Both kids are old enough to understand about cancer, but their understanding is almost poetic. Cancer as demon. Cancer as foe. But they have not seen what I have seen. They have not touched it. They have not walked on the surface of that tumor. They have not seen the capillaries turning to the tumor like flowers turning to the sun.
The capillaries welcome the tumor, did you know that? My wife’s own body, her own blood vessels, feed the monster within. Like slaves rushing to a murderous master. It’s an act of self-destruction, cancer is. It is the body’s own mindless suicide.
And you may think you grasp that, but like my children, you see it only in the abstract. It’s an idea to you. It’s a dry fact. But it is not yet truth for you.
Walk on the surface of a tumor and then …
I created the technology. I created it, you see, but I am not a brave man and never wanted to use it. I thought it was a job I could outsource. I thought there was time.
My great work. My brilliant work. It opened up a whole new world for me. A world of madness and terror and red, red truth.
“The Armstrongs won’t budge on biological,” Karl Burnofsky said. We were in his kitchen. Burnofsky had a daughter named Carla, a little older than Sadie, younger than Stone, I think. Carla—a terrible name for a little girl, I thought. Karl was brilliant, a true genius. But not very imaginative when it came to things like naming children.
His wife had left him long ago, and he’d raised Carla in his own fashion: a grubby apartment that stank of cigarettes and whiskey. He could afford better; he worked for Armstrong Fancy Gifts, and they paid him well. He just didn’t care.
So his kitchen was a dimly lit maple table like something one’s grandparents might own, and greasy drapes filtering gray light from the air shaft outside, and dishes in the sink and a trash can overflowing with Starbucks cups and takeout containers. The whole place smelled of ashes, trash, and good whiskey.
Despite (or perhaps because of) his bad habits, Burnofsky was all loose skin over jagged bones. Not an ounce of fat. His daughter was pretty without being beautiful and had striking blue eyes. Her father’s eyes, I suppose, though his were bleached-out and bleary. It was impossible to imagine a young Burnofsky. He was probably my age but looked twenty years older. We’d known each other for years, worked together at times.