Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (40 page)

Part of me will forever be in that waiting room. I have never left, even now, as I write this. It’s the biggest Hiroshima flash of my life. You know how memory kicks in.

At the other end of a very long hallway, too far even to shout or cry out, is a pair of double doors. Through these will soon come a doctor.

And then comes the rest.

The Cleveland Browns, you should know, aren’t the only losing team I’ve cheered on.

The Cleveland Indians haven’t won a World Series since fifteen years before I was born. In 1994 they had their best season in forty years, but there was no World Series to go to. It had been called off because of a strike.

The Cleveland Cavaliers have never won an NBA title. In the year still most cherished by fans, they heroically managed to make the playoffs and not immediately lose. This is still called “The Miracle of Richfield,” named for the remote village where the now-abandoned arena was built. The Cleveland Barons hockey team folded, was reborn, and then folded again. The Cleveland Crusaders just folded.

Losing is what Clevelanders learn to do well to survive. Losing, in truth, is something we’re good at. Tomorrow, next year. We tried, we played well, we go on. This, too, is an essential survival skill. Understood, it should be a source of great pride.

When the Cuyahoga River caught fire when I was a boy, it made the national news. What the world didn’t know was that the river burned often. The fire chief called it “routine” the next day. Not very long later, the mayor himself caught fire. A forgettable fellow named Ralph Perk went
whoooom,
or at least his hair did.

I got used to the idea that anything could suddenly go up in flames.

Not just in Cleveland, of course. It’s just life itself, really. Losing is what we do in this world.

Two out of three
Jeopardy!
players lose, game in and game out. More than that, even, since winners return and keep hogging the wins. And by the standards of life,
Jeopardy!
is actually kind.

One-third of humanity doesn’t even have clean water, the single most basic necessity. Nearly half of our kind will be born randomly into war or famine or poverty or some other great ill. This is rarely the fault of the infant.

Most people are good, with a deep need for fairness. So the world and the present can be painful to look at directly, assuming you’re lucky and aren’t forced to notice every day. We can hide, we can rationalize, we can look away and go on with whatever. We can scream our denials with anger or smiles, with whispers or cries. We can build complex ideas to create explanations and demand our own permanence. This is a good deal of work, but it gives us a past we can live with and a future to live in.

And even so: We didn’t ask to be here, and we don’t ask to leave. While we’re here no one shows us the controls. We don’t stay very long in the end.

Heaven and Earth are not humane. Life is terminal, whatever we do.

But newborns don’t ask why they’re laughing or crying. A newborn just
is.

And when they’re happy, that’s
it.
They’re alive, glad for the moment, glad for air or the hug or the glimmer of light. Glad for the warm human heartbeat nearby.

Joy is in every moment of waking in life. So is grief. We can embrace both and still choose well.

Jane was awake on this morning. She was
alive.
So she sang.

She was glad for the day.

This is still my one favorite moment on Earth.

I am still awake in the waiting room. Right this minute.

I will never again hope for any One-True-Eternal-Soulmate™. I don’t want more anymore. I don’t want plans for the future. I swear off false permanence. I only want to see my best friend well. I want her to live a long time before we die. I will trade everything I’ve ever learned, had, or done, just for one extra day for Jane.

I am trying to find joy. Even now.

In this very moment, even now as I write this, I believe I will fail.

On the day that it happens, I glance up. In the distance, the double doors move. I stop breathing.

Jane’s surgeon emerges slowly, taking a breath.
He looks tired,
I think.

He sees me now, standing to meet him.

But I’m too far away to address in hushed tones and kind calmness. I am too far away to console.

So instead he just stops.

He
stops.

Is he afraid to face me?
I think.
How would I give someone the news?

He stops in the spot where he’s standing. A tenth of a second. A
Jeopardy!
buzzer fraction. Considering his expression. Choosing his words and his posture.

He stops, and his arms start to rise.

Oh, no,
I think.
Here comes consolation.

He stops, and his arms start to rise.

Here come soft murmurs. Here comes grief counseling. Here comes empty space.

He stops, and his arms keep on rising.

What’s that?
I wonder.
That’s not a hug. It’s not solace. What is it?

His arms start to rise, and keep rising, until they’re straight up in the air.

It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing.

A touchdown.

It’s a
touchdown.

He’s signaling. A touchdown.

A winning touchdown. Like a victory.

Like we’ve finally won at the end.

He’s sharing the good news, down the hall, right this instant. From a distance. Not wasting a second.

Jane’s doctor is signaling victory. His arms are rising up in the air.

We won.

And now I’m running, excited. I am running to hug him. I need to hear words. I need to see eyes and smiles. I need to see Jane. I can scarcely believe it.

Jane’s doctor is standing, his arms going straight up in the air.

I shake his hand and I grab him and hug him and I think pretty soon I am crying.

No galoshes.

I am dancing.

Days later, I’m driving home from the hospital. Rainy and gray, water stacked at the curbside going
whissssssh
in my wheels. Smell of ozone and sound of windshield wipers
wubbity-wubbity-wubbity.

Jane’s half-asleep, leaning back, at my side.

She has fragile bits still that can’t be jostled, so I’m focused, alive in this moment. Careful with the brake, just as Dad taught me once. Avoiding every bump in the road.

We pass a certain drugstore. I start to sing, quietly to myself:

It’s a Giant Drug Store

But they don’t sell Giant Drugs…

I glance over. And Jane is smiling.

Sing Hallelujah, come on, get happy…

CHAPTER
20

THE IMPORTANCE OF MEMORY IN RECOVERY

Also, A Brief Look at Estonian Revolutionary Movements

T
he next several months involved doctors, procedures, exams, and much indiscreet poking and probing. There were tubes that took draining and drains that took tapping and taps with new tubing. Fluids and goos went inside and out at all hours. I’d give lots more details, but you would remember them, and you’d probably rather not know.

But Jane was alive every day and still is. She is fine. She is
great.

She had long days in bed and long nights uncomfortably not, in such number that they blurred even at the time.

But these were not difficult days. Only long ones. There was no chemo and no radiation. There were no experimental drugs, harsh side effects, or recurrences. Jane was lucky as hell.

Jane’s tumor was a type that can look truly horrible in all the tests but that turns out to be no big deal after all.

It was small. They got it all. They really did.

All we needed now was time.

When Jane was back on her feet, we went out to a park by the beach for a walk. And without meaning to consciously, we found ourselves approaching a fifteen-foot religious statue, meant to honor Saint Monica. Instead it looks more like an erect human penis.

This was not far from the spot where I’d once said the wedding vows, the spot that fell over the cliff. Jane knew how much this patch of dirt (or at least its vicinity) had once meant.

This wasn’t planned. We were just walking, and arrived at this spot, which we noticed. So for a moment we weren’t quite sure what to do or to say.

So we just did a happy little not-dead-yet dance—which in this case looked like a little sidestepping Bob Fosse sort of thing, as if performed by arthritic pandas who’d just had their first beer.

And then we walked away, holding hands.

Incidentally, if you were surprised by the end of the previous chapter, well, good. I was pretty thrown by it myself when it happened. I wanted you to feel it exactly as I did, so I kept the verb tenses ambiguous about Jane’s future existence (life does that to all of us, anyway), and implied doom (which we all face) through other means. I wanted you to feel every ounce of joy and surprise when that touchdown thing happened. It was just a small gesture from the doctor, but it’s my favorite slow-motion highlight ever, better than anything I ever saw with Dad. So I hope you’ll forgive me. And maybe even cheer like something’s unspooling.

Either way, there are some pretty cool twists still coming, and nobody else gets cancer that I know of. Honest.

Plus, I hid a dollar between pages 320 and 321. But you have to read straight through. It’s only there if you don’t flip ahead.

OK. Now, that was a complete lie. I thought I’d write something
actually
deceptive, so the difference was clear.

Still, I bet you still have a slight urge to flip ahead, looking for the dollar.

It would be really cool if completely impossible things happened like that.

“Hi, is this Bob? This is Susanne from
Jeopardy!
”

I had overslept and was still lying in bed, half-groggy, not familiar with sleeping in my own apartment of late. I looked at the clock radio, which had arrived years earlier as one of the Johnny Gilbert some-contestants-receive prizes during the Berlin Random Noun Airlift. It was just after 10:00 a.m. on some December weekday.

“Hi, Susanne! How are you?” I replied cheerily. I sat up, squinting and sniffing and squirming awake. I was trying not to let on I was only half-conscious.

I had no idea why Susanne was calling. It had been years, after all. But the day before, a new contestant wrangler named Tony had called, telling me Susanne would be calling me at home. This was puzzling. My only theory was that they were looking for new players and might ask if I knew anyone who would be good for the show.

This theory was not even close.

The actual reason was memorable enough that the following is very near, I promise, to Susanne’s exact words:

“Fine. Listen—we’re having a special tournament in a few months. We’re inviting fifteen of the best players from the show’s history to compete at Radio City Music Hall. We’ll fly everybody in, first class, and put you up at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. We’re calling it the Masters Tournament. Oh—and the grand prize is a million dollars.”