Twilights

 

The sun has been worn down to a flat disk of copper, like a relic of an ancient civilization. That dull light that spins from the star is metallic and, one can almost believe, filigreed and intentional. We’re positioned between the coppersmith and his forge. To the east, the fires are mounting to the skies and plumes of ash roll into the morning fog. The sun comes up with a hissing sputter. The light is brazen and crepuscular.

I go up the hill to look at the house. 300,000 dollars too much and the carport is shared with the neighbors, making a bizarre continuous construction; the two houses like a very, very long double wide. 390,000 dollars with an old roof a 70’s brown carpeting to match the copper sun that hangs in the window. The mountains march right down into the backyard;  however, and when I leave, I see a pack of grey canines down under the shoulder of the road that are somewhere between foxes and coyotes. They came crawling out of an aqueduct that passed under the road, stopped to look up at me, the sky and the tangles of fruiting blackberry, and ran off.

It's hard to imagine that coyotes or foxes don’t have some kind of atavistic response to the firelight. They must know that it’s not really twilight all the time. But me, I just want to sleep all day and when I get up, I feel anxious, too alert.

I took my son to see the house. He hadn’t been napping, so I knew he’d sleep for the whole walk in the carrier. Initially, he’d cried and flailed his head, but when I cradled him and walked up the hill with deliberate, flipflop steps, he dozed off.

When I got to the house, I went up to look in the front windows. A battered washing machine and a utility sink in the converted garage. They should’ve left it a garage. But imagine it as a place to play or to work and it looks fine. The connected carport bothered me less. The neighbors had a bumper sticker “How Swede it is!” This superimposed on a Swedish flag. Scandinavians, even American Scandinavians probably keep to themselves. I remember the anecdote about the most popular television in Sweden (or maybe Norway) show being footage of a train passing through the country. No narrative, no music, no characters (other than the train). I imagine the neighbors—elderly—watching that nightly in their house, cozy, hyyge.

I went into the backyard. I figured that baby strapped to me would make my intentions clear or at least less minatory. Recently poured concrete. I could hear the realtor focusing in on that, as if a flat slab of concrete had any potential or meant anything more than being able to charge an extra 20,000 for backyard with slightly more order imposed on it. Another look in the windows, the bedrooms are small, wooden and frayed at the ends. Bare feet have stuck to these floors in weather less warm than in this late afternoon. Behind my reflection, the sun is like a lamp turned on inside with no apparatus, just a light, like the glare on a picture frame or the ghost of the flash in a pre-digital photo. There was a movement and I looked down, into the carrier. My son’s eyes are almost indifferent to color. They could be brown, blue, gray, green, but they have none of the haunting scowl so many babies affect. His eyes are lustrous and patient. They are open and easy to love, like the smiling babies on diaper packages.  

…

We were in Sacramento, on vacation, when the doctor called. She didn’t know what the lump is; neither did anyone else, so she’d made an appointment at UCSF. A rare thing to have gotten us in so early, so, at the end of the vacation, I drove my daughter the 300 miles home. Slept, dropped her off at my in-laws, and drove back 300 miles. I taught my class from the garage of my sister-in-law’s place in the morning and then drove to the Bay.

I was so anxious about being late, that we got into the city too early, let our guard down and went to 24^th Street to get burritos and coffee—the essence of the city to me, but I found I no longer knew the places for them. The server was nice at the taqueria, but I apologized to my wife for the burrito. The only thing I could taste was onion and unsalted tortilla. The coffee was dull and too strong, lulling and overstimulating, leaving us to miscalculate and race to our appointment, frantic before the doors of the hospital, running back and forth to the parking garage for things we’d forgotten.

I took it as a good sign that my daughter should be in the waiting room. It wasn’t her, but a girl wearing her pajamas, about her age and size with her same sleep-puffed face and tousled dirty blonde hair. My wife and I spoke to each other about her, using terms of endearment for our daughter but changing them slightly to fit this girl who was unaware of us as she played slowly by the fish tank, like she was the one under water and the fish were swimming around the chairs and magazines.  

The girl left and I quelled the returning anxiety by answering work emails from my phone. My wife bounced our sleeping son in the carrier. The room was quiet. One Russian mother called to her daughter who had a large hemangioma on her arm and seemed not to see the chairs placed in front of her, so close did she get to them before dramatically reeling back. Perhaps it’s a Russian trait, some kind of folk game.

While I held my phone and watched the girl step toward and away from the chairs, they called our son’s name, putting a long question mark after it. It was gratifying to hear it said aloud like that, a confirmation that we’d named him the right thing. Soon after we’d been processed, the doctor came into the small examination room. She gave our son a few palpitations, a few frisks, dandles, whatever. She commented on his size—big!—and then asked to see the lump. I appreciated that she admitted almost right away that she didn’t know what it was. It was like *touch*, *poke*, “Nope. I have no idea what that is.” She was aware that her knowledge had limits, a sign of being knowledgeable, strangely. But the others did the same. The next doctor invited in had curly hair and the air of being fun and communicative; someone you’d be glad to see at a conference or a crowded cafeteria. Maybe she reminded me of my friend Rebecca and I was projecting all these traits.   

The fun, Rebecca doctor was more animated and more intentional with her prodding. She gave blow by blow descriptions of what she was feeling, but couldn’t tell us anything new. “It’s squishy, but defined. It’s not hard but…It moves.” I was waiting for these descriptors to reach a critical mass of symptoms which would yield a diagnosis, but they just floated out, one by one, unattached, meaningless. “Consistent, lumpy, smallish…” It could’ve been charades of adjectives. She went out to get someone else.

A third doctor came in, and this one was the sage. She wore her lab coat loosely, like a scarf worn for panache. Her hair was salt and pepper and she wore a serious expression that had no need for pedantry. Without being told anything, she opened her hands like she like someone going to catch an easy pass. She laid them on my son’s back and closed her eyes. Nothing. She just shook her head.

How could this be so baffling?

“Should we get it biopsied?” One of the doctors asked. The others seemed to agree to this without inculpating themselves. There were no ‘yes’s, no ‘no’s. Just a miasma of suggestion. A few calls were placed down to the Mission Bay campus and, through connections, we got into the fine needle aspiration clinic at 4pm on Friday.

We left still feeling pretty hopeful. We talked about meeting Mikey or maybe getting something to eat later. The firelight hadn’t come down to the Bay and the late afternoon sky was open and blue between the cornices of Victorian gingerbread, the banks of a river. We drove down Divisidero, then to Hayes Valley, then around Potero, then the parking lot confines of Mission Bay and the UCSF buildings that no one who lives here ever has to pass by, new and out-of-the-way as they are.

“Do we take babies?” The receptionist asked another receptionist, who, in turn, came over to ask us to repeat why we were there. The temperature takers at the door swiveled around to see us, the anomaly. The ones with the baby. The first receptionist made a call. It was quick. He said no more into the receiver than “Do you have a kid?” and then “Yeah; OK.” He turned to us. “Yeah, they’re waiting for you. 2^nd floor.”

I can’t go much beyond this hospital and this floor because the narrative stalls there. The Trinty and Shasta forests caught on fire. The cinders exploded into the air, cooled to ash and muted the light. The Delta variant cases kept going up. Mandates came back. Everything crept back up to the edge of closing down and hovered there, just before quarantine. I still feel like I’m still standing in that second examination room because I haven’t really moved in time since then. Leaning against the wall, useless, worse than useless, in the way as the door opened and I had to move to avoid the pathologist. He had been sad to see us. I remembered this from when my daughter had to have her blood drawn; no one wants to do babies. I forgot how much you don’t want them to be hurt, that useless urge to protect them. We must’ve talked for half an hour before he tried to get the tissue he needed and got none or maybe next to none: not enough. The pathologist, who told us he had small kids of his own, who said one had something like this and he hadn’t even taken him in for it, had me hold alcohol pads while he tried to mark the lump with a blurring marker, marked and remarked as the lump floated under the surface of the skin. He tried again. My son with the lustrous, uncolored eyes cried his hiccupping baby cries and the needle pumped up and down. Enough gore to paint all five of the slides laid out. But it wasn’t enough. He looked through the microscope there in the room, wheeled the lens up and down and explained that he didn’t know what it was. There wasn’t enough tissue to really know. But, he’d take a look and get back to us or maybe I should call him. Yeah, in fact, call him.

I left a message days ago.

…

I completed my circuit around the house, passing through the carport, patting my son’s back. I stood there a moment, under the long, adjoining roof to take him out of the hazy light, hoping the enforced dimness would put him back to sleep. I looked down again and his eyes were closed, his forehead back against me. I kept patting and walked out into the red-golden light and down the driveway, back to the eucalyptus swale where I’d seen the fox-coyotes. On someone’s lawn, there was a fawn, still with the spots, browsing in the wildflowers. I stopped patting and watched her knobby walk into the forest. She must have way of knowing that the light won’t stay like this. All these animals, they must already be used to these things we just can’t accept.