Good morning from the West Coast, where I write to you from my kitchen, eating a very healthy breakfast of chicken nuggets and sriracha. I have so enjoyed all of your posts this month. (I work at an office with a fairly robust firewall, so I know you all have contributed something really good when I can't actually view it at work. That's double the fun.) I thought long and hard about whether I would post this piece. Sometimes it's difficult for me to know whether the things I write are for myself or for others, but at some point in the last two months I emailed this piece to a friend who is a consummate writer, and she emailed me back (kids these days!) to encourage me to share this with a public slightly larger than just her; the February Blog seems like a pretty natural locale/audience. If, after reading this, you're tempted to pick up the phone or shoot me an email, that's great! I just hope that the conversation that ensues is about your new boyfriend or my pretend dog because, really, I promise, everything related to this story has turned out just fine.
With love,
Caroline
***
The Free Market Value of Life
"I'm worried my mom is going to
die," I say. The time is 5:06pm, and my father, brother, and I have
been here since noon.
"We are all
always worried our moms are going to die," this person says. This response isn’t very compelling in part because this person isn't
real. He is in my head, and he is a composite of at least four or five
people I have known and loved. I can hear at least two of my ex-boyfriends’ and best friends’
voices in his response. Mostly, this response isn’t very compelling because he
knows my mom isn’t just any mom. She’s my
mom, and she’s also in the top 2% of moms. She is a mom who sambas in the
kitchen, has been known to discuss the female orgasm with my friends, and always
sneezes in threes. She is a mom who cites Freud in everyday interactions, can
ask for butter in five languages, and laughs so hard sometimes that she cries.
"I know, but I'm
actually acutely worried right now, in this precise moment, that my mom is
going to die imminently. Hasn't she been in the operating room too long?"
Has she? Hasn't she?
How would I know? The surgical team told us at
8am that surgery would begin at 10am and would last four hours, so either they
were wrong or I was too focused on the bagel I was eating at the time to pay
proper attention. It felt okay to eat a bagel because that’s a right you earn
when your mom is specifically taken to a hospital called Mount Sinai around
Christmastime. Mostly, though, it felt okay to eat a bagel because we were so
confident at the time. At the 8am pre-op, my dad invoked Woody Allen: the two
most beautiful words in the English language, we agreed, are “it’s benign.” But
I am trained in the Oxford comma, the art of
scrambling eggs, the pluperfect, and armchair anthropology, never in neurosurgery. I think incessantly about worst-case
scenarios. I am a closet pessimist who wonders whether the holidays are meant for dying on operating tables and
drinking to excess instead of for building snowmen and admiring mistletoe.
"Okay, let's say
hypothetically that she dies. Then what happens?" This person has a rather
annoying tendency to speak logic to me because he knows that I can play along. He knows that logic is easier than emotion when your mom has a brain
tumor. This time, I resist it.
"Then I die, too."
"No."
"Then I stop caring about whether or not
I die."
"That's not it either."
"Then living gets harder."
"Yes, that part's true. And what happens
when living gets harder?"
"I have less incentive to do it."
"Maybe so. But what happens to the
free market value of things when they're harder to attain?"
"Are you fucking kidding me with this
'market value' bullshit?"
"I'm not. I'm serious. You're the one who
started with 'incentives' anyway. What happens when resources become
scarce?"
I refuse to answer. I
cross my arms and obsess about the incomprehensibly bleak future without my mom. I glance at the
Montenegrin family that sits on the couch kitty-corner to us that is eating
something that smells like a meat-stuffed pizza. I pick through The Daily News. My brother and I chat
briefly about Twitter’s IPO. I do everything I can to avoid the question the
person in my head has posed. I wait to respond for what feels like ten minutes
but is actually only six, which I know because I check the clock on my phone.
The phone's battery is almost drained, which I knew would happen but I didn't
bring my charger with me anyway because the only
people I care to have reach me are in the room with me. At least, I thought
that that was true, but this person’s voice in my head makes me question
whether there aren’t four or five other people I wouldn’t mind having in here
with me.
"I'm being
serious. This is economics 101."
"I practically
failed Economics 101. And Neuroscience 101, as luck would have it." I
expect him to make a corny joke, something along the lines of how leaky my
cerebral cortex is, but maybe he knows now isn’t the time for brain humor.
"Caroline, what
happens to the value of scarce resources?"
"It increases, I
guess." In my head I shrug, although in real life I strip down to the
tank top I wear beneath my sweater. I almost declare to
my dad and brother that, at age twenty-six, I’m having a menopausal moment in
late December, but that’s the kind of joke my mom would make. A lot of the
jokes I make are jokes my mom would make.
"Yes! It increases.
It becomes more precious. And that's what will happen to your capacity to live
once you've seen its fragility. Do you understand?"
I understand that I
want to throttle this person. I understand that when the chief surgeon
interrupts our reverie -- to tell us that everything was fine, she'll be okay,
she's on her way to a full recovery -- the scope of the verbs he
uses (simple past, simple future, and simple present) indicates that
we categorize things by when they happened and what the outcomes were. This
is mostly a clear-cut way to categorize events. Yet there is another way to
categorize moments. I can distill moments into the extremes of times I lived so well that I
teased death and sunk so low that I neglected life. In the exercise of inventorying and
reverse-engineering these moments, there is only one consistent truth: these extremes
are defined by their scarcity. Scarcity, the free market dictates, imbues
value.
I start to tell
the person this thought, but of course there is no one there. There is only the
noise of my breathing, the taste of snot running into my mouth, and the quiver
of my slowing heartbeat. The time is 5:17pm.
No comments:
Post a Comment