He let this roll around his brain, too, and again wondered if the thought was rolling over, under, around, or through the tumor itself. “Can I live with a tumor?” he asked.
The doctor let out a sigh. She hadn’t meant to and stopped herself mid-breath, so it came out as an “ahh” and sounded more like a noise of agreement than sorrow. Then she said, “No.”
“No,” Jared repeated.
“No,” the doctor said.
She delivered this news as a matter of fact, as if she were reporting the temperature and humidity, but Jared could see her eyes welling up, and he felt sorry for her. Empathy was central to his nature, or at least he thought it was. He couldn’t be sure of anything now.
***
The high-grade glioblastoma multiforme tumor liked Jared Stone’s brain. It liked it a lot. In fact, it found it delicious.
Like most living things, the tumor had no idea how it had come into being. Much as a baby emerges from the womb and finds its mother’s nipple, the glioblastoma simply woke up one day eating its way through the gray matter in Jared’s frontal lobe and knew that it was pleased to be there.
To the tumor, this was a normal existence. It’s what tumors did: they consumed their hosts’ memories until they both—the host and the tumor—ceased to be. As the glioblastoma imbibed the seemingly endless expanse of neurons, subsumed the very essence of its host’s mind, it would, over time, become more Jared than Jared. That’s when it would be game over. But the tumor didn’t know that. It only knew it had to keep eating, that Jared’s memories tasted wonderful, that they were things to be savored.
On the morning of Jared’s visit to the doctor, the Thursday Jared learned he had a brain tumor, the glioblastoma was watching the memory of Jared’s older daughter, Jackie, enter the world.
Deirdre, Jared’s wife and Jackie’s mother, was lying on an operating room table, her head and shoulders on one side of a blue sheet, a surgeon and nurses hovering over her body on the other, their work obstructed from the glioblastoma’s view. The tumor took in every detail. The sparkling white sheen of the floor and walls; the odors of blood and disinfectant mixing together in a way that suggested something of great importance was afoot; the sounds of beeping equipment and inhaling and exhaling respirators. The tumor absorbed the sights, smells, and sounds as if it were experiencing them itself, which, in a manner of speaking, it was. To the tumor, the memory of the event was no different than when Jared had lived it.
From the flavor and construction of this particular memory, the glioblastoma knew that Deirdre was having an emergency C-section, that the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. Jared, and now the tumor, was sick with anxiety.
Jared, seated by Deirdre’s head, hunched forward and held her hand, offering a series of bromides. It’s going to be okay and The doctor said this sort of thing happens all the time. Jared tried to make each statement heartfelt, but the tumor knew that its host didn’t believe his own words. It knew because the tumor didn’t believe them either.
Deirdre was crying. More than anything, the glioblastoma wanted to stop her from crying.
And then, new crying.
Different crying.
Crying replete with all the mysteries of the universe.
At first, the crying was centered over Deirdre’s body, but the sound quickly traveled farther away, and Jared—and now the tumor—had a moment of panic.
The anesthesiologist, who the tumor hadn’t even noticed sitting next to Jared, must have sensed Jared’s unease.
“It’s okay,” she said. “They’re just cleaning her up and giving the Apgar test.”
“Apgar test?” Jared asked.
“They give the baby a once-over to make sure everything is in the right place. It’s routine.”
A moment later, a nurse in mint-green scrubs, a mask covering all but her eyes, showed the baby to Deirdre, and then handed her to Jared.
“Congratulations,” she said. The tumor could see that beneath the mask the nurse was beaming. It wondered how she could muster such sincere emotion for something she did every day.
“Well, hello, Jacquelyn,” Jared began. “You are so small.” The tumor could sense the muscles in Jared’s arms and neck tense; it savored the fear that Jared felt, fear that he would somehow manage to drop this newborn human.
“I want to see,” Deirdre said. Jared got down on one knee and held the baby in Deirdre’s field of vision. Then Jared did something the tumor didn’t understand at all: he began to sing.
The song was so soft at first that the glioblastoma was certain no one else, not even Deirdre, could hear it. It was a private lullaby for his new daughter. But the tumor could hear it and thought it was beautiful: Willie Nelson and Ray Charles’s “Seven Spanish Angels.” The title popped into the tumor’s head, or would have if the tumor had had a head, which it did not. But the experience was just the same.