The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care

by Anne Boyer

Pull your pubic hair out in clumps from the root and send it in unmarked envelopes to technocrats. Leave your armpit hair at the Superfund site you once lived near, your nose hairs for any human resources officer who denies you leave.

Self-manage, the boss that is everyone says: work harder, stay positive, draw on eyebrows, cover your head with a wig or colorful scarf, insert teardrop- or half-a-globe-shaped silicone under your scarred skin and graft on prosthetic nipples or tattoo trompe-l’oeil ones in pubescent pink or have flaps of fat removed from your back or belly and joined to your chest, exercise when tired, eat when repulsed by food, go to yoga, do not mention death, take an Ativan, behave normally, think of the future, cooperate with the doctors, attend “look good feel better” for your free high-quality makeup kit,8 run a 5K, whether-or-not-to-wear-a-wig-during-sex is a question the book says to ask your husband, “one family member at a time” says the sign on the way to the infusion room, the pink ribbon on the for-sale sign of the mansion.

A man I met once at a bar has decided to devote himself to my care, and his enthusiasm for my vulnerability is so great that I have to block his number from my phone. My friends and I sometimes joke about cancer chasers, or cancer daddies with CDs full of slow jams, the gifts showing up at the door, the outbreaks of attracted chivalry, the curious attempts at seduction. One friend suggests that whatever libidinal appeal cancer possesses has to do with the disease’s nontransmissibility. Cancer’s attraction is that it is a disease of probability rather than communicability, she tells me, and every person with cancer can be understood as someone who has cancer so you won’t have to.

In pain, the spatial becomes temporal, as in pain is the experience of a location that exists only as desperation for its end.