MD came out the other side of his catastrophe with the firm belief that cancer was his teacher. Cancer had urged him to accept (or die trying) earthly life for the dream it was—fleeting, as they say, tho such a perception seemed impossible to achieve (if one could call it an achievement) for anyone but saints, idiots & visionaries. Yet since the diagnosis, he strove to live in that blissful, acquiescent state, that unreachable cliché of presence in the moment, yes, in this moment, not moments past or moments to come. This moment was all he had. In this moment, he was alive & cancer-free. In this moment, from a cemetery, he conjured his wife, beckoning. In this moment, he could see his children crying, laughing, sleeping. In this moment, he had more money than he could spend in a hundred lifetimes.
By the time a too-close bird ended his train of thought, the actor’s tour was almost done. It wouldn’t have been complete without Marilyn.
The plaque on the drawer of the cinerarium bore only her name, and the year of birth & death. Thirty-six years-old at the age of blessure. . A long time ago, a businessman bought the space right above her. He told his wife to make sure they buried him facedown, in the missionary position — just for the kamikaze cosmo-comic eterno-skeleto-fuck jokey thrill of it — an inspired wish that his widow evidently wryly carried out. Then bogeyman Madoff swindled her and she had to auction off the spectral fuckpad penthouse, she got five million for it (if memory served) & buried him elsewhere — exhumation in flagrante postmortem delicto. It was common pop-cult knowledge that’s where Hef was going, years ago he bought the crib beneath Monroe, so he could properly stick his candle in the wind. Karma was a funny thing: Norma Jean was molested as a child, & she’d be molested in the afterlife. It was ironic too that Dorothy Stratten always wanted to hang at the Playboy Mansion; now, Marilyn and Hef would be partying, with Dorothy just outside the gate, for all eternity.
The Wheel of Karma kept on turning.
MD understood those people who thought burial was for squares, for whom cremation was the magic word — to be sprinkled here & there, over the ground or into the wind & water of a place one loved. He understood the feelings of those who were stingy/proprietary about recycling theirs or loved ones’ organs, even those who thought there might be bad voodoo in signing the donor’s form on the back of a driver’s license. He understood how a person could feel in their untransplanted heart that mutilation — that posthumously violent, nonconsensual blessure—regardless of the alleviation of the suffering of the living, just wasn’t the way to go.
He didn’t care about any of that now. They could scoop his eyes & pluck his corneas, whittle his kidneys, grand theft his thorax, fry up his liver, & harvest his skin on a special edition of Piers Morgan. They could tear off cock&balls at the root and laminate them for teaching hospitals. They could feed him to the dogs & piss on him, because by then his soul would be in another dream.
He was over it.
CLEAN [Gwen]
Ctrl + Z
Tea
with Michael Douglas was heaven.
Gwen was on Cloud 9, she’d had a crush on him forever. Telma wore her new Marc Jacobs dress and was so excited that getting a part on Glee was hardly discussed, even though she couldn’t believe his wife was actually guest-starring. OMG! It was all so adorable, watching her daughter interact with the legendary star, & Gwen thought he couldn’t have been more charming. Sylvester Stallone, Tilda Swinton & L.A. Reid were in different parts of the sunlit room having tea. It was beyond beyond.
When Telma got her diagnosis, a few people told Gwen that cancer was a gift. She wanted to strangle them, but now she understood.
. .
A few days later, she got a call from an attorney who said he represented St. Ambrose. He wanted to talk; when Gwen pressed what for, he said it was a matter best discussed in person.
Century City was walkable from the house. The request for a rendezvous was strange and slightly mysterious. On the stroll over, she had fleeting, preposterous fantasies of why she’d been summoned. She had a feeling it was a good thing.
That feeling changed when Dr. Bessowichte entered the conference room. After a cold, rabbity greeting — no shake of her hand — his wan smile withdrew, skittering under a rock. “Dr. B” (St. Ambrose happened to be the patron saint of bees & beekeepers, and schoolchildren too) had been with them from the beginning, right there in the trenches. He was the ex officio tsar of Telma’s Troopers, whose equanimity & genius for decision-making sustained them through all manner of bloody, crazy-making stratagems, artifices & bombardments of the cancer wars. In Gwen’s eyes, he was the single person most responsible for having saved her daughter’s life. He never retreated, not once. He was part of their family.
Something awful had happened… it came to her head that he was going to announce that he was sick, that he was going to die. But why wouldn’t he call or just come to the house? Why wouldn’t his wife Ruth have called? They could have asked her over to their house — they were all that close, it was that kind of bond.
Why would a lawyer call with that kind of news?
Nothing she came up with in a handful of seconds made any sense.
“What is it?” said Gwen. She was trembling now. “What’s wrong?”
A sudden, monstrous shift within, as she thought the unthinkable.
“It’s Telma… is it Telma? Did the cancer come back?”
But if it did, why are we here in Century City, why aren’t we at the hospital, why aren’t————
An attorney began to speak (there were 3 in the room), but Gwen stopped the world by imploring Dr. B with a beggar’s brutalized eyes.
“No — no! Nothing like that,” said the doc.
The eldest lawyer spoke up.
“Thank you for coming.”
What? He’s thanking me? Why he is———
“I won’t sugarcoat it, Mrs. Ballendyne”—Mrs. Ballendyne? Huh? — “this isn’t going to be one of your best hours. And it’s certainly not — not one of the hospital’s finest. Dr. Bessowichte will be the first to tell you that.”
Though it wasn’t a cue for him to speak, the restless doctor squirmed & broke free of the muzzle.
“I wanted to come to the house, Gwen. I wanted to tell you at the house but they said no, that wasn’t a good idea — the hospital forbade me. I didn’t want to listen.” He sighed, and repeated, “I didn’t want to listen.”
Gwen felt like she was watching a play.
“What is it, Donald, what’s happened?”
He didn’t seem to hear her.
“They tied my hands, Gwen—”
“What are you saying?”
“It has been a nightmare. Not just for me, but the other doctors on the team. On Telma’s team…”