T4.N1.

Beth Sherman

When we’re not watching the zoo birds remotely, my father and I play Scrabble. He’s better than me. The nurses like him, so they help. “Qui is a word,” says Sherry, the one from Guadeloupe, watching the way the Q trembles between his fingers. “It means who in French.”

     Machines hooked up to his body beep and whoosh. Voices blare over the loudspeaker. The hospital is always noisy, maybe to counteract the quiet of the grave. 

     “French doesn’t count,” I say.

     Sherry frowns. I know. What difference does it make? Dying is a tedious business. Endless blood draws, tests, MRIs. Whoo whoo whoo. It sounds like an owl trapped in a tree.

     But my father is a stickler.  

     “French doesn’t count,” he agrees. “We have to stick to the rules.”   

When I was young, we played a Checkers’ variation called Fox and Geese. I was always the four red geese, and he was the lone black fox. The geese had to corner the fox while the fox needed to make it past the geese. Your classic predator/prey game. It was years later that I realized in traditional Checkers, one person could jump over the squares and capture the other person’s piece. 

     We’d play at the kitchen table while my mother rattled pots and sang off-key. Sometimes, she’d fix us a snack of Swiss cheese dipped in honey. “Why can’t the fox just eat the damn geese?” she’d say. 

She refuses to come to the hospital, so I ghost her – ignoring emails, texts, and the voice messages choking the machine.

     “I don’t want to remember him sick,” she explains, when I finally pick up.

     They’ve been divorced for 23 years. The last time they saw each other was my high school graduation.

     “He doesn’t look that bad,” I lie. “It’s good for him to have company. Takes his mind off the pain. Can’t you come once?” I ask my mother. “I could use some help.  It’s the right thing to do.”

     I hear her breathing on the other end of the phone. 

     “Have I ever done the right thing?”

When the oncology resident stops by, I take out my phone and record every word. Helicobacter pylori. CA19-9. Carcinogenic Antigen. Endoscopic Cholangiopancreatography. T4. N1. MI. He’s speaking a foreign language I don’t want to learn.

     “Points on Scrabble tiles,” my father says. His eyes are closed but he hears everything. 

     The oncology resident is a few years older than me, doing a surgical rotation at the hospital. Originally from Kansas. With cornflower blue eyes and a goatee.

     “I think he lurfs you,” my father says. 

     The morphine is kicking in. His voice is underwater.

     “Mmmmmm.”

     “Does that mean you’ll doat him?”

     I feed my father more ice chips. “We’ll see.”

When I sleep with the oncology resident, I wonder if my father will get better care. Maybe now he’ll qualify for the trial he supposedly can’t get into because the disease is too advanced. Close up, the oncology resident has unruly nose hair and large pores.

     “Aren’t you going to ask me?” he says after, as I’m lying in bed with a cigarette and he’s waving away the smoke as if it matters.

     “Ask you what?” I say, feigning innocence.

     I want the trial suggestion to come from him, not me.

     “Why I became an oncologist. How I can stand to see so much suffering every day?”

     I flick ashes onto his high thread count sheets. 

     “It never crossed my mind.”

When placing the Scrabble tiles in the right spot becomes too much for my father, I set them on the board.  

     “Qua is a word,” he says weakly. 

     “A made-up word,” I counter, not because I believe that, but because I’m used to sparring with him whenever we play games. 

     Sherry, who’s spent the last 10 minutes behind a curtain, changing my father’s diaper, looks it up on her phone.

     “In the capacity of, as being,” she reads aloud.

     My father shifts his head on the pillow, regards us with sunken eyes. “Awful big meaning for such a little word.” 

When I can’t stand to watch him dying anymore, I leave the hospital and drive to the Eden Roc Hotel. Striding confidently through the lobby like I belong there, I head to the Ocean Social restaurant, where I order calamari, steak with truffle whiskey sauce, and popcorn cheesecake. Everything tastes like sand. I charge the meal to Room 311, the date of my birthday, sip a $125 glass of cognac. Scrabble words loop through my mind: qin, qi, qat, qis, qat. What a clumsy letter is q. As the sun droops into the ocean, I picture my father in his hospital bed, stalking the elusive qua. 

     When I return, visiting hours are over, and I sit in the waiting room staring at the parking lot, where a streetlight blinks. Off. On. Off. 

© Variant Literature Inc 2023