Then suddenly you drop the trigger. You drop it because your hand is shaking so violently. Everyone’s eyes fall to the device. The senator snatches after it, and Emii bolts from the table, but her legs freeze midstride.
There is a thunderous crack, a deafening jet-engine howl, and a sensation of swelling, of expansion, of hyper-acceleration, of being rent apart. It is so oddly long and painless, like the acceleration of a roller coaster the moment after it crests the first hump and begins its descent. So that’s what comes to you: riding the tallest roller coaster at King’s Island when Joe Biggs took you that one summer, and he never gave you the chance to chicken out. And then at last, a fleeting glimpse of all these infinite and eternal ciphers, watched by the burning eyes of angels, and roaring into vivid, unyielding creation.
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2037–2038
Tony missed Kate Morris’s funeral, so he missed his daughter’s eulogy for her friend. Two days before he was supposed to fly to Oregon, a pain in his stomach kept him from even packing a bag and left him in bed for a day. He had to watch Holly deliver her eulogy on TV, her skin zitty and eyes puffy with post-baby sleeplessness. She spoke with clarity and beauty. She was perfect. He called her afterward to tell her so and that he was pissed he’d gotten food poisoning and couldn’t make it. For the next three months, however, he continued to experience cramps, constipation, and nausea, and treated it by guzzling Pepto. He kept explaining it away until one morning he went to flush and saw the toilet water filled with blood. By then he more or less already knew what was going on. His primary care physician, possibly the only man he knew more cantankerous than himself, scolded him for forgoing a colonoscopy for seven years.
“Or computational pathology. An algorithm would have caught this.”
“I was indisposed for part of that,” said Tony. “The preventative care wasn’t tiptop in black-site prison.”
“You should file a lawsuit,” the doc suggested.
“I did.”
“In the meantime, you need a gastroenterologist immediately.”
A week later, it was confirmed: A tumor in his colon. The biopsy came back, and no surprise, it was cancerous. The good news was that it wasn’t that big, stage III, not stage IV, so they’d resect it, and there was a chance that would be that.
In a way, he was almost relieved that it had finally happened. During Gail’s diagnosis and rapid deterioration, he’d become so familiar with cancer, overreading, overstudying, making sure the doctors were trying everything in the arsenal, that his own cancer felt like a homecoming. That was the calling card of the emperor of all maladies: It simply had no quit. Given enough time it would come for everyone.
He did not tell Holly or Catherine. The resection was a simple procedure, and his surgical oncologist seemed confident, so by late May with the Dow Jones imploding and unemployment surging, Tony had the surgery. He lay in the hospital bed, watching as the anesthesiologist fixed a syringe into the IV, delivering the cloudy propofol, a liquid as milk-white as the lunule of a thumbnail. He knew this would be followed by a paralytic and a general anesthetic, but before he could reflect much, the oxygen mask was lowering over his face and then he was awake again and sore as hell in the gut. They’d gone in laparoscopically, three incisions, including the belly button and, according to the surgeon, taken out twenty inches of his colon, along with a tumor that measured 3.1 by 2.8 centimeters. He spent three more days in the hospital, but he was defecating and passing gas very soon after and the soreness in his abdomen diminished. He took a driverless home. He slid behind his desk to tackle his hundreds of missed calls and emails. Ash Hasan and Marty Rathbone had been contacting him nonstop for several days. “I’d rather just be put out of my misery than call these two back,” he told his dog, Jamie.
“Tony?” cried Rathbone. “Where the hell have you been? We’ve got the opportunity of a lifetime here.”
He knew that witless moron Warren Hamby had bestowed Rathbone with the dubious honor of Treasury secretary, mostly because of the paper he and Marty had written in ’24 that predicted exactly what was happening as housing prices collapsed. Rathbone explained that the new president was convening a task force to draft emergency legislation: bank rescue, coastal rescue, climate rescue all in one.
“Why should I be interested in helping out the government that disappeared me into an extrajudicial cell for seventeen fucking months? Not sure if you heard, Rathbone, but I’m suing those cunts.”
But Hasan called him next and laid out the stakes.
“This isn’t just about your expertise, Tony,” Hasan told him from his screen, bouncing his son, Forrest, on his leg. “You’re viewed by many as the foremost authority on the matter. Your very presence, I’m hazarding to guess, will help calm fears, markets, and panic. I would sooner trade the rest of the team for your presence if that’s what it takes.”
He knew he’d agree, given how unpleasant it would be to watch others screw the pooch via cable news clowns, but first he had a follow-up with his surgeon.
In the waiting room, he was treated to memories of all the same rooms from Gail’s ordeal, the TV in the corner with its programming about how bell peppers have antioxidants and more Vitamin C than an orange or why it’s helpful to exercise between chemotherapy treatments. All the worried people waiting, everyone wondering who had it worse.
“I’m sorry to say, Tony, the news is not what we wanted. It’s not dreadful, but it’s definitely not what we wanted.” The surgeon’s office was a warm, light-filled space with a view of lush trees outside the window. Tony marveled at how many people had gotten shitty news in this very same setting.
“We took out twenty-six lymph nodes, and ten of them were cancerous, which is, I probably don’t need to tell you this, but that’s a bad prognostic indicator. It’s not a death sentence—not at all—so I want you to stay positive. But I also know you’re a no-bullshit kinda guy and the no-bullshit prognosis here is that we need to start you on chemotherapy as soon as possible. I’m going to refer you to a medical oncologist…”
The surgeon went on for a while after that, but Tony wasn’t listening. Patients responded in different ways to the violence of chemo, but it had been absolute hell on Gail. She’d come home after getting the tamoxifen pumped into her, be okay for about twelve hours, and then spend the next day vomiting into a bucket because she was too exhausted to even get out of bed. Her hair fell out, and she was in such agony, unable to even watch TV, the nausea and pain were so bad. The worst part, she once said, was that when she did feel well enough to eat, nothing tasted right. She’d bite into a peach and it would taste like sheet metal. She couldn’t enjoy the brief moments when she didn’t want to vomit everything up. As the surgeon droned on, he realized he’d already made up his mind about what he was going to do.
“I have an important trip coming up,” he said. “This’ll have to wait until I get back.”
The surgeon looked deeply vexed to hear this. “Tony, that’s a really bad, really dangerous idea. Chemo treatment will reduce the chances of metastasis significantly.”
“It’s not something I can put off,” he said, standing to leave. “I’ll call the oncologist as soon as I get back. Shouldn’t be more than a couple weeks.”
He called his daughters to tell them where he was going. Catherine sounded strangely awed by everything that was happening. Too young to recall ’08, and she’d treated the pandemic like an inconvenience to her social life, this was her first go-around at global crisis as an adult. She was still down in Florida working for Corey, trying to rescue the family business. Catherine, sounding too much like her uncle, said, “I’m hoping, Dad, that you’re going into these conferences with an eye as to how it affects the small businessperson?”