“This is as serious as it gets,” the doctor told him. “Your carcinoembryonic antigen level is sky-high. That means the tumor’s proteins are—”
“I know what it means.”
“If you’d just started treatment months ago—this is the kind of aggressive cancer that…”
“It kills the shit out of you,” said Tony. “I get it.” He told the doctor he was going to go home to New Haven and would decide what to do then, but he never got in touch with the medical oncologist. It was incredible how little evolution cancer treatment had gone through in the last two decades. All the pie-in-the-sky dream treatments, all the promised advances, they’d amounted to little more than a marketing campaign. He could survive anthrax threats, a megafire, Vic Love’s private internment camp, but cancer would have his number. Chemo, he’d long ago decided, was a no go. Gail’s experience had not only obliterated her physically but it had turned them against each other as her despair and pain took her over. When she was gone, he’d felt guilt: glad as he was that it killed her so quickly. Now that it was his turn, he wasn’t going to join a Slapdish support group; he wasn’t going to revert to irrational fanaticism about various diets and herbal treatments (as Gail had briefly done) or brag about dying with grace and peace, but he would control the terms of his ultimate surrender. He was going to suffocate to death painfully and try to stay shut the fuck up about it as best he could.
He sent Hasan and the others an email tendering his resignation without explanation and departed for New Haven the next night. He had a dozen missed calls and texts by the time he touched down—from Hasan, Dahms, Rathbone, Tufariello—but he never returned any of them.
He spent the first days of the new year setting up arrangements for palliative care. He still felt relatively mobile and healthy, but he knew that would quickly degrade. As much as possible, he wanted to stay out of the hospital and in his own home. He called Catherine and told her he needed her to come to New Haven. He gave Holly a date and said he’d appreciate it if she left Dean and Hannah at home. His oldest daughter was curious, but she didn’t sound worried.
He then got a call from Marty Rathbone that he considered not answering, but this was Marty’s third try of the day, and to be fair, they had been friends and collaborators for nearly twenty years.
“Everyone wants to know why you quit, you surly fuck.”
“You can’t tell anyone until after I tell my girls,” said Tony, examining through his bedroom window the white oak that centered the yard. In the heat, it wasn’t doing too well. “I have metastatic cancer in my lungs, liver, colon, abdominal cavity, and hip. Me and Obama, right? Lucky us. So it’s not looking like I’ll actually see how all this wackiness turns out.”
Rathbone was silent on the other end of the line for a while. “Fuck me, Tone. I’m sorry, man.”
“Don’t be.” And he hung up. The last thing Tony wanted was the parade of visitors, the well-wishers, the phonies who couldn’t hide in their eyes how glad they were that this hadn’t happened to them. Rathbone called him right back.
“Before you shoot it down, I’m supposed to let you know, there’s an editor from one of the big houses who wants to talk to you. This might be the right time.”
“Who? Wants to talk about what?”
“Nothing’s official yet, but I have a deal for my book already. Everyone’s cashing in on this thing. You know, there’s a woman who survived the Morris shooting and she sold her memoir for a high six figures?”
“Not interested.”
“I figured you’d say that, but can I give the guy your number anyway?”
The editor, Mel Son Park, was a good deal more convincing than Rathbone. He talked about the responsibility of creating a first draft of history and invited Tony to come hear him out over lunch.
The day he took the train in, Manhattan was clogged with protestors on their way to a rally. People carried signs and streamed down sidewalks in the frigid New York winter. They were on their way to Times Square to RALLY FOR TRUE JUSTICE, as many of their posterboards read. They had a potpourri of issues, basically most of what Tracy Aamanzaihou had wanted in ERASE that the Republicans and moderate Dems had taken out with a scalpel. Tony kept a toboggan cap low over his eyes lest anyone in the crowd should recognize him.
PenguinSchusterCollins was handily the world’s largest publisher, and Park’s choice of lunchtime venue, Manhattan’s brand-new Robin Room, reflected that market share, with menu prices that would make a Russian oligarch blanch. Tony was taking the meeting because he could admit to himself writing a memoir had always intrigued him. He thought for sure he’d get around to it after One Last Chance debuted and the buzz of mainstream attention burned bright. That book had been a polemic, though, not a reflection on his life. He did yearn to tell his story. He suspected most everyone felt this way. In the face of the impossible eternity that awaited, people wanted to take their futile shots at being remembered.
“What has just occurred,” said Park, a perfectly groomed, exquisitely dressed man in a pair of high-end AR glasses, “could end up being one of the most consequential turning points in American—and global—history, and I’ve taken it upon myself to go out and find as many first-person accounts of that moment as I can. The public is voracious for books about the climate crisis.” He had black hair sweeping back stylishly, a Patek Philippe platinum solar watch on his wrist, and a meticulous, powerful way of massaging the air with his hands as he explained himself.
“We don’t know how long anything lasts in publishing, but you’ve been a central figure of this fight for at least two decades. You have the insider’s account of the climate bill—what did you call yourselves? The committee to unfuck the world?—not to mention your detention during the Love administration.”
“Just wait till you hear about going to rescue my daughter in the middle of the LA megafire.”
Park’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m demanding you tell me that story right now.”
By the time he finished, lunch had come and gone, and Park sat back with his arms crossed.
“Tony, to say nothing of the VR option that will inevitably come from this, I can say right now, we’ll offer you at least a million dollars for this book.”
“It’s not the money that’s holding me back, trust me.”
He explained his diagnosis, and he was grateful that Park was transparently looking for a way around it. Even as Tony explained the severity, Park did not offer so much as a sympathetic tilt of his head let alone a bromide about how sorry he was. He nodded and stared at a waiter’s flawless white shirt as the man perched over the table next to them to deliver lunchtime mimosas to a couple of rich ladies.
“We could probably go as high as one-point-five,” he said.
“Mr. Park, it’s not the money. Believe me, one of my daughters—I’m glad the money’s going to be there for her—but it’s the time I have left. I’ve never been a quick writer.”
“All we need is for you to meet with a ghostwriter,” he said. “They’ll craft the book. You just tell your stories.”
“Ah, right. I see.”
“Does that not work?”
Tony hugged his arms, felt his tumor-invaded abdomen rise and fall. “It worries me that might be how my grandchildren will know me. Through the lens of this person I’ve only just met.”
Park stared at him strangely. Even though they’d just eaten, Park looked hungry. Ravenous even.