I knew immediately what it was. I knew I had at last seen the enemy.
I followed that tendril. It soon became more than a single tendril. It seemed to spread around all sides of the tunnel, as if I were walking into a snake pit. Soon I could no longer avoid stepping on it.
I became aware then of the capillaries feeding blood to it, fresh, oxygenated blood, the Frisbee-shaped cells pushing their way through translucent tubes to feed the monster.
For monster it was.
I reached a place then where the air sac and tunnel architecture became disturbed and irregular. It looked as if some beast had torn at it. Mucus oozed over ripped edges.
Individual cancer cells, oh, how innocuous they seemed, just lying there. They reminded me of the dried blowfish you find in a cheap seaside tourist shop. They looked almost like toys. Lymphocytes slithered slowly, launching pointless attacks on the loose cells, the cells that wanted to spread throughout the rest of Birgid’s lungs and body.
As I watched I would see them sometimes rise on the eternal breeze, be blown a few feet (micrometers, in reality.) I saw a cell explode under pressure from a lymphocyte. But there were a million more.
I traveled across the ravaged landscape and felt the pulse of a great artery shaking my biot legs, causing the pictures in my head to wobble.
The tumor was wrapped around that artery, and now, suddenly, looking up through strangely open space, I saw it.
“What do you see, Dr. McLure? What do you see?” Donna pressed.
I had stopped narrating. I don’t know how long I was silent. They told me later it was minutes. It might have been hours for all I knew.
“What do you see, Doctor?”
I never answered. I couldn’t answer. I’m a scientist, not a philosopher. There are no words truly to describe what I saw there, looming above me, huge and implacable. Science does a poor job of conveying deep truths. Our vocabularies are dry and passionless.
So I couldn’t answer, because only one word, one ancient and unscientific word could begin to describe the monster that was murdering my wife: evil.
“Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.”
That’s from Don Quixote, the mad knight-errant who mistook windmills for giants.
I was a mad knight that day. I saw the giant and it was no windmill. I attacked it with tiny blades and droplets of acid and I carried the radioactive seeds and shoved them into the tumor.
I watched cancer cells burn and die.
Like Quixote, I attacked. But unlike the great poet knight, I was not mad. I could not deceive myself that I had won.
My creation was small enough to reach the tumor, and too small to kill it. Maybe six months earlier. Maybe if I’d been quicker. Maybe if I’d insisted she go to the doctor months earlier.
Maybe.
A man can torture himself to madness with maybes.
FIVE
I had Birgid’s mother come to take care of her and the kids.
I ran away. I flew to a beach in Mexico and drank tequila. I drank until I passed out. When I woke, I was back in my hotel. Someone had taken my clothes away, and almost the first thing I remembered, just as the blinding pain hit my head, was that I had soiled myself.
A nurse appeared and mutely handed me a pair of vitamin pills and two ibuprofen. I gulped them down with two bottles of water.
Then I fell back onto the bed.
“Who are you?” I slurred.
“Consuela,” she answered. She spoke good but heavily accented English, for which I was grateful. My head was in no shape to form Spanish words.
“Who … Where did … Who sent you here?”