cautiously, ready to turn the music off at once if it went too close to the bone for him.
However, it did not. He leaned back, listening in wonderment to the unearthly sound of the aria—or no, not really unearthly, on the contrary. Unlike Bach, it was earthly, of this world. So much of this world that it almost hurt. The pain of farewell, he suddenly realized. A look at the world in full awareness of its transience. How old would Handel have been when he composed this miracle? Better not to know.
And the man allowed himself so much time! And it all was so simple, so clear!
His mind went to the last production he had staged in the town of K. Of course, he could reassure himself, if he wanted to, by reflecting that the reviews hadn’t been as devastating as he had feared. He remembered sitting in the tiered seats at the premiere. Dying inside as he watched the actors scrambling and shouting onstage, doing their tricks ... He saw the elaborate, colorful stage set. The expensive lighting concept (a special floodlight with a daylight effect had been bought especially). All too much. Too far-fetched. Too complicated.
Was that it? That far-fetched, complicated factor? Was that his cancer?
Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma ... And then that doctor had explained the disease to him: reluctantly rocking back and forth in his swivel chair, a plastic ruler in his hand—had he really been holding a ruler? Had he really drawn images in the air of funny little marbles as he told Alexander something about the T-cells that would slowly kill him?
The absurd thing was that they were defense cells. Part of his immune system, designed to reject foreign tissue, but now, so far as Alexander understood it, themselves turning into giant hostile cells.
Even the night before his diagnosis, after he had lain awake for hours, with the rattle of the old man’s ventilator getting on his nerves as it implacably made its way past his earplugs, even that night, somewhere around 3:00, when he had asked himself all the questions, gone throughall the possibilities, after he finally got out of bed, went into the corridor, and tried in vain to locate the problem on the anatomical chart there—even after all that he had finally thought: never mind what it was, never mind where it was, they’d cut it out and he would fight, he had thought, fight for his life, and at the word “fight” he had instinctively seen himself running around Humboldthain Park in Berlin, he’d be running for his life, he had thought, running the disease out of himself, until there was nothing left of him but his core, his essence, no room left at all between his skin and his sinews for any kind of hostile tissue ...
There was nothing to cut out, nothing to locate. It came from himself, from his immune system. No, it was his immune system. It was him. He himself was the disease.
The voice in his ear rose and fell a couple of times. Hopped, clucked. Laughed...
He took off the sleep mask. Looked to see if anyone had seen his face flushing. But no one was interested in him. The fat man hung about with gold chains (fat, but all the same a man who had managed not to get cancer) was staring at his screen. The wan mother was trying to get some sleep. Only the child was looking at him with bright, cola-colored eyes.
Mexico, the airport. A blast of warm air. As he sets foot in the city—in the country, on the continent—he notices in passing that it doesn’t smell like the nitrate fertilizers in his grandmother’s conservatory.
A taxi ride. The cabby drives like a scalded pig, perched in his seat at an angle, half hanging out of the open window. A roller-coaster ride. Alexander leans back. The car races down avenidas with multiple lanes, the driver swings the wheel around, drives in a circle with squealing tires, has gone wrong somewhere, threads his way through narrow gaps, the traffic outside is noisy, he turns sharply right, then the street narrows, people on the sidewalks left and
However, it did not. He leaned back, listening in wonderment to the unearthly sound of the aria—or no, not really unearthly, on the contrary. Unlike Bach, it was earthly, of this world. So much of this world that it almost hurt. The pain of farewell, he suddenly realized. A look at the world in full awareness of its transience. How old would Handel have been when he composed this miracle? Better not to know.
And the man allowed himself so much time! And it all was so simple, so clear!
His mind went to the last production he had staged in the town of K. Of course, he could reassure himself, if he wanted to, by reflecting that the reviews hadn’t been as devastating as he had feared. He remembered sitting in the tiered seats at the premiere. Dying inside as he watched the actors scrambling and shouting onstage, doing their tricks ... He saw the elaborate, colorful stage set. The expensive lighting concept (a special floodlight with a daylight effect had been bought especially). All too much. Too far-fetched. Too complicated.
Was that it? That far-fetched, complicated factor? Was that his cancer?
Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma ... And then that doctor had explained the disease to him: reluctantly rocking back and forth in his swivel chair, a plastic ruler in his hand—had he really been holding a ruler? Had he really drawn images in the air of funny little marbles as he told Alexander something about the T-cells that would slowly kill him?
The absurd thing was that they were defense cells. Part of his immune system, designed to reject foreign tissue, but now, so far as Alexander understood it, themselves turning into giant hostile cells.
Even the night before his diagnosis, after he had lain awake for hours, with the rattle of the old man’s ventilator getting on his nerves as it implacably made its way past his earplugs, even that night, somewhere around 3:00, when he had asked himself all the questions, gone throughall the possibilities, after he finally got out of bed, went into the corridor, and tried in vain to locate the problem on the anatomical chart there—even after all that he had finally thought: never mind what it was, never mind where it was, they’d cut it out and he would fight, he had thought, fight for his life, and at the word “fight” he had instinctively seen himself running around Humboldthain Park in Berlin, he’d be running for his life, he had thought, running the disease out of himself, until there was nothing left of him but his core, his essence, no room left at all between his skin and his sinews for any kind of hostile tissue ...
There was nothing to cut out, nothing to locate. It came from himself, from his immune system. No, it was his immune system. It was him. He himself was the disease.
The voice in his ear rose and fell a couple of times. Hopped, clucked. Laughed...
He took off the sleep mask. Looked to see if anyone had seen his face flushing. But no one was interested in him. The fat man hung about with gold chains (fat, but all the same a man who had managed not to get cancer) was staring at his screen. The wan mother was trying to get some sleep. Only the child was looking at him with bright, cola-colored eyes.
Mexico, the airport. A blast of warm air. As he sets foot in the city—in the country, on the continent—he notices in passing that it doesn’t smell like the nitrate fertilizers in his grandmother’s conservatory.
A taxi ride. The cabby drives like a scalded pig, perched in his seat at an angle, half hanging out of the open window. A roller-coaster ride. Alexander leans back. The car races down avenidas with multiple lanes, the driver swings the wheel around, drives in a circle with squealing tires, has gone wrong somewhere, threads his way through narrow gaps, the traffic outside is noisy, he turns sharply right, then the street narrows, people on the sidewalks left and
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