10:04

by Ben Lerner

There was one other story I knew I would tip in, a story I’d only recently heard from Alex’s stepfather. “I’m not sure how this will fit, exactly, but the protagonist had—will have had—a relationship when he was younger that I think will form an important part of his history and relate to his inclination toward fabrication. He’s in college and falls in love with this woman, Ashley, a couple of years his senior who, about six months after they first get together, comes back from the doctor in tears and tells him she’s been diagnosed with cancer.” “That young?” “It happens, right? Say they find it somehow during a routine examination. At first it looks like she’s going to drop out and go live with her family during treatment, but then she decides—in part because she’s in love with him, in part because her relationship with her parents is difficult—to undergo it there, at a hospital not far from campus. This is the first romantic relationship either has ever been in where one partner really has to care for the other, not just try to impress the other; it’s his first serious relationship away from home and it’s developing in the shadow of death. There’s no surgery, but then—worse—there’s radiation and chemo; he drives her to the hospital in her car for each treatment, dropping her off because, for whatever complex of reasons, she doesn’t want him there, asks that he respect the intimacy of her relationship to her oncologist, a woman with whom she feels close. He waits in the p...