Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (9 page)

—

When I came back from visiting my family at Christmas, Tina’s message was on the answering machine. I hadn’t even taken my coat off, just dumped a suitcase on the floor as the kids ran past and I punched the play button. The voice was so faint I had to play it back three times to decipher parts of it, and then another two times to make sure it was Tina’s voice at all; and finally one last time to convince myself that this was real, this was happening, this was how one part of my life was going to play out.

Carrie, it’s Tina. Something really, really bad has happened. Cal’s in the hospital, he got sick the day after Christmas. He has brain cancer. I’m taking him home tonight, I’ll call you later.

I had seen them three days before. Everything was fine then.

Click.

—

This was what was supposed to happen: me and Tina and Cal had been
talking off and on for years about buying land, starting a commune, maybe here in Maine or up in Nova Scotia, someplace where we and a few of our friends could live together as we got older. The getting older part hadn’t started yet, of course, not in earnest. Tina and I were the same age, forty-two, Cal had ten years on us, and most of our friends fell into the same demographic, skewing a few years older or younger but with the same dazed, weathered look of people whose party-barge ran aground while they were sleeping, and who now found themselves wandering about onshore, looking for fellow survivors, bits of sea-wrack to salvage, anyone got some smoke? Boisterously or apologetically middle-aged, their appetites—for sex, drugs, booze, music, magic, general larking about—tempered by time but not diminished, not extinguished, no not yet.

Yet.

I wrote a story about these people, I have written a lot of stories about them. In the stories things happen. People get sick but magic saves them, or else the world ends but then everyone dies anyway, which makes it easier, not so much to clean up. But no matter what happens in the stories, when they were finished, I could call them, Cal and Tina, on the phone and we could have dinner, they could smoke pot and I could drink red wine and we could watch a movie, something about King Arthur or pirates, something with Uma Thurman or Johnny Depp in it. Then we’d go home and the next day we’d talk on the phone and make plans for next time.

Then this happened.

—

I never found out exactly what kind of brain cancer it was. Cal and Tina were not the sort of people who remembered and reported details from the oncology reports. I was going to find out what kind, only it all came down so fast, it was like a freak storm, spring snow, thunder in December; and pretty soon it was obvious that knowing what kind wouldn’t make any difference.

It was lung cancer that metastasized to the brain. Cal had been having headaches for the last few weeks, but figured it was pressure from work—he was designing sets for an independent film, an adaptation of an early Stephen King story scheduled to begin shooting in Bangor right after New Year’s
.
The day after Christmas, Cal felt so nauseated he could do nothing but lie down with a towel covering his eyes; it finally got so bad Tina took him to the ER, fearing it was food poisoning. The ER doctor thought it might be meningitis, and ordered a CAT scan. The CAT scan showed it wasn’t meningitis but a constellation of small black stars, the largest slowly going nova, engulfing his optic nerve.

Tina didn’t bring him home that night. They were at the hospital
for two more days. I spent that time in bed, too stunned to do anything
but down valerian capsules and Nyquil, trying to be anything but awake. Robert took care of the kids. As I slept I realized I had been dreaming this for the past year or more, recurring dreams with an urgency attached to my finding Cal, to seeing him as soon as I could
.
After waking from these dreams I called him and Tina, making arrangements to get together, dinners at their place where Cal made enchiladas with tomatillo sauce, dinners where Tina and my daughter sat in a corner whispering while Cal told me stories about his years with the Merry Pranksters in San Francisco, his stint as one of the first people to deal LSD, flying coast-to-coast with vials and blotters of Owsley acid, selling to rock bands and socialites and university professors. He told me about his years in Nepal, where he’d seen the corpse of a young man burning on a pyre on the rock-strewn road outside Katmandu. He and his first wife lived ten miles outside the city; they would walk back and forth every day, buying and trading rugs, temple bells, cakes of hashish, statues of demons and gods, prayer wheels. Later they moved back to Austin, where Cal sold antiquities and cocaine to private collectors and rock bands. That was where he’d met Tina. She was twenty-three and working at a radio station. He was thirty-three and called the station incessantly, to request “Tupelo Honey.” Three months later they got married and moved to live on a wooden sailboat in Maine.

“I’m having a hard time adjusting to this,” he whispered when I
finally saw him, when Tina finally brought him home from the hospital
in Bangor
.
There were tears in his eyes. He wore what he always wore, an extravagantly embroidered shirt and bell-bottoms, wool or denim depending on the time of year, wool now, a week after Christmas.
His hands were on his knees, the skin asphalt-grey and stretched so that
as I lay my hand on his I could feel bone and vein and muscle beneath, sharp as the tines of a rake. “Those doctors, they looked at me. Fifty-two, no kids, a man, cigarettes. They said all they could do was check me in. They said I should just check in and stay there till I die.”

I grabbed his shoulders and hugged him. “I’m right here. We’re all going to be here. We’ll all help.”

Tina told me later that she had already made the arrangements with the hospice in Ellsworth, for nurses to come check him daily. Cal
would not go back to the hospital
.
They had no health insurance
.
There would be no chemo or radiation treatments, no second opinion.
They would try other things. I told her about someone I knew, a nutritionist who worked with cancer patients. Tina had heard of an alternative treatment made from Venus Fly Trap. It was only available in Germany; when Cal felt better they were going to Germany to try it.

“He doesn’t want to do anything,” Tina whispered when Cal went to the bathroom. He was throwing up a lot, from the tumor’s
pressure on the optic nerve. It was like being seasick twenty-four hours
a day. “I can’t push him, it’s not my decision.” Her voice was breaking with anger. “It’s his life and he has to make his own decision.”

“What about some sort of operation?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that relieve the pressure, at least?”

She shook her head. “A long time ago a shaman told Cal never to let anyone cut him. He won’t have any surgery.”

So that was that. In the meantime, the phone rang nonstop and the machine picked up the messages, hours worth of messages: from other pagans, massage therapists, nurses, acupuncturists, carpenters, boatbuilders, filmmakers, lapsed Episcopalians from the Unitarian Church where Cal and Tina performed solstice rituals.

“I can help,” I said. I had cared for terminally ill people, and lived with my grandmothers when they were dying. “I know how to do this.”

“We’re going to need you, Carrie,” she said
.
“All of you. Probably very soon.”

It happened fast. For two weeks I helped out when I could, driving Cal to a dentist appointment, staying with him while Tina was at her job as an assistant to a documentary filmmaker. He couldn’t drive anymore.

“He can’t be left alone. He has seizures. Kenny and Lisa next door can come over if you have to leave.”

Outside it was snowing. For the last few years we’d had little or no snow, only ice storms. This winter it snowed, it seemed to snow every day. Sometimes I had to leave Cal because school was canceled and I had to go meet my kids; I’d call Kenny and Lisa and they would come and sit with him, keep the woodstove going, roll him joints and cigarettes. He had a medical prescription for marijuana, something that he and Tina were gleefully triumphant about. Marijuana, laetrile, apricot kernels. I wondered what would happen if I got stopped by the police, driving around with Cal next to me smoking a joint.

“Do you carry your doctor’s note with you?” I asked.

“Always.” He laughed but very quietly, so he wouldn’t start to cough. That was one of the things you had to get used to, laughing was like talking for Cal, he always laughed, stoned or not. Now he was so quiet.

During one snowstorm while he could still talk we sat and he saved my book. He always helped me, reading my books and telling me, usually too late, what I’d done wrong. He was an avid and acute reader, loved heroic fantasy and Arthurian epics. My own books were too dark for his taste but he read them because he loved me.

“The last one was really good, Carrie. But it’s sort of the same, isn’t it? You have the plucky heroine and her cynical best friend sidekick and the blood sacrifice.”

“And sex,” said Tina. “Don’t forget the sex.”

“And sex. But they’re always so young. You should write about grownups now, Carrie.”

I hadn’t written much for months. I was depressed, battling the black dog for the hundredth time. It was only in the weeks before Christmas that I’d started to feel better.

Still, in the past I’d always managed to write, even through the worst parts. But since last summer this novel felt dead. The voices in my head had gone silent, and more terrible than any despair or fear was the discovery, day after day, that they would no longer speak to me.

“I need you to help me with my book, Cal.
”
We were sitting in their living room, Tina putting on boots and parka and funny Laplander hat, getting ready to leave. “You too, Tina.”

She smiled. “Cal will be better than I am.”

All three of us knew this was something for Cal, something for him to look forward to: he loved talking about writing, about stories, about magicians and shamans and drugs.

I ran my hands through my hair
.
“I’m completely stalled. I’ll tell you the story, okay, Cal? I’ll tell you what I’ve done so far. All the elements are there but I don’t know what to do with them, I can’t see it anymore.”

He could see it. While the snow fell outside and the wind hammered the windows and Tina drove to an appointment in Skowhegan, I sat and told Cal my story, and he fixed it. He blinked a lot because his eyes hurt, but he laughed too, and paced back and forth like he used to. For a few hours we talked, me spinning my story and Cal smoothing it out. By the time the call came that school had been canceled, again, we had finished.

“You’re amazing.” I hugged him and we both laughed. “You’re a miracle worker
.
You saved my ass.”

“I’m really glad, Carrie.” He smiled, tired but happy. I helped him back into his chair.

“Robert’s been trying to help me too, he’s been trying but it’s different, he has a different point of view.”

Cal smiled again. “He doesn’t believe in it.”

“That’s right.” I hugged and kissed him goodbye. “Jesus, Cal, thank you. I’ll be back tomorrow—”

I could never say, to him or Tina, that I didn’t believe in it, either. But that night I dreamed I was in the city, in a vast apartment building that’s a frequent site for my dreams; and there I met all the characters from my books, the characters and the people they were based on, coming by to say hello like guests at a party, a few of them introducing their real-life counterparts to me. When I woke the structure of my novel was as clear to me as if I had been given a map.

So I’m not sure what I believe in anymore.

—

Cal and Tina believed in everything. Fairies, elves, spirits of earth air water fire; Tibetan gods, Minoan sea goddesses, totemic animals, reincarnation, Iroquois spirits. Their names for each other were Fox and Wolf; when they were married, nineteen years before, it was a marriage by capture, with Tina and her attendants dressed as sprites and Cal and his men like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Their house was a renovated barn filled with masks they’d made, columns and porticos and temples from sets Cal had built, Tina’s galaxies of scarves and capes and hats, posters from Grateful Dead shows they’d attended over the course of decades. Cal’s canvases covered the walls, and the gorgeous leather bags they made and sold, with Tina’s elaborate beadwork and braiding and Cal’s painting and leatherwork. There were papier-maché skeletons everywhere, crowned with paper roses; animal skulls on ribboned standards; grinning Day of the Dead figures holding chalices and hash pipes between bony fingers. The cats prowled among them, and slept beneath daturas drooping with waxy white blossoms, or alongside the marijuana plants growing in plastic pots by the big picture window, or in the tiny head-crunching loft above Cal and Tina’s bed.

That was where I slept. After the first two weeks there was a small group of us who took turns staying over, two or even three at a time, so we could spell each other during the night. I was usually there for two nights a week; Robert took care of the children.

Cal and Tina’s friend Loki often stayed over with me. Loki was unusually quiet, for a friend of theirs; wore chinos and polo shirts or, sometimes, a very old faded
Star Wars
T-shirt. He lived forty-five minutes away, in Rockland, where he worked as a paralegal. A few mornings a week before work he would drive over and take their laundry home with him, wash and dry it, and then return it that evening, sometimes staying overnight. I knew Loki from the elaborate solstice and equinoctial rituals Cal and Tina had staged over the years, where Loki wore an otter’s mask he had made, and his usual beige pants and topsiders.

When Loki and I stayed over we didn’t talk much. He was strong and serious but occasionally laughed unexpectedly; he was very fond of the cats. I wasn’t as useful as I wanted to be. I wasn’t a masseuse, like Luna, or strong, like Loki, although I had a strong stomach. I showed Loki how to give Cal morphine injections, after the hospice nurse taught me; then how to administer the morphine IV, morphine suppositories, morphine spikes, morphine pump.