What Remains (16 page)

I live another life at ABC, or more accurately, in other places. But I have been deskbound now for months, and I discover it doesn’t work. I grow frustrated with the day-to-dayness of the evening news, the three-minute stories. One day blurs into the next. A pool of producers, warm bodies plucked at random to download video from satellite feeds, fill in the black holes in pieces sent from the field. I spend hours on the phone doing interviews: lawyers, policy wonks, experts from the Brookings Institute or the Heritage Foundation. There are presidential elections this year, and we recite stump speeches by heart during the day to amuse ourselves. It’s a true day job, producing the news: low-end research and no travel. We are out the door as soon as Peter Jennings says, “Good night.”

Then
World News Tonight
decides to do a ten-part series called
Listening to America.
The senior producers, or maybe the marketing department people, think we need more human-interest stories. The kind that appeal to the average American, ideally with a sympathetic underdog and a bully. I attach myself to a story in Montana about the American buffalo—an iconic symbol of the Wild West—being shot down in cold blood by greedy cattle ranchers.

I meet a camera crew in Bozeman and read the research on the three-hour drive to Yellowstone. The bison carry a virus called brucellosis that can be fatal for cattle, though it’s almost impossible for them to become infected, and there are no documented cases of their dying from it. It’s what’s known as a stock story: an animal is deemed a nuisance, one group wants to kill it, one group is outraged—there is always a news show willing to cover it. The ranchers are organized, and they persuade the state livestock department to cull the bison herd without a dead cow in sight—preemptive slaughter.

It isn’t hard to kill a buffalo. You walk right up to it and shoot it in the head. If there are others nearby, they might look up, but then they go back to grazing, so you can clip a bunch of them in a few minutes. I get footage of park officials in brown uniforms, Smokey Bear patches on their sleeves, shooting buffalo at point-blank range. It is excellent video for the evening news.

There is a small group of locals fighting the ranchers to stop the slaughter, and they are holding a town hall meeting one evening. I take the crew to film, and it dissolves into a shouting match between the groups. I interview a few ranchers and an official from the state livestock department. The next morning we shoot b-roll footage of elk and bison grazing, tourists on snowmobiles, and Old Faithful erupting. I’ve got it, basically, and I’m scheduled to fly back to New York, but I stall. I’m in no hurry to get back. I dread it, actually.

At breakfast I overhear a story about a hermit living in Idaho, a real one—brilliant, with questionable hygiene. “He lives in a cabin in the woods, in Last Chance, just over the border,” the waitress tells me. I convince myself this guy could be a story, so I call the news desk and sell them on it. They let me check it out.

Last Chance is small, a bar and motel on the western boundary of the park, known primarily for its fly-fishing. My cameraman and I pull off at the motel advertising “reasonable rates ’n’ COLOR TV” and ask at the A-Bar next door about the hermit. “Dave,” the bartender says. The men on barstools eye us and then nod toward a stack of books by the door.
Passion Below Zero: Essays from Last Chance, Idaho,
by David Hays.

“He lives up the road—just keep going in that direction,” the bartender says, pointing to his right. “There’s a dirt road that turns off. He’s at the end of it.” I buy a book, grab a business card, and we head down the road in our rented blue Taurus until we see a cabin wedged among overgrown bushes. We pull up to the outhouse just as the sun is setting and get out of the car. The house looks deserted, but a man yells from the porch, “Can I help you?”

“Hi, we’re from ABC News,” I say, and show him my ID. “We’re doing a story on the bison in Yellowstone.” I hold up a copy of his book, and he smiles slightly.

“Oh, I saw the car and thought you were feds,” Dave says, then waves his arm to motion us up.

“They were here last week asking lots of questions. They were looking for the Unabomber.” Dave’s remote cabin has a computer but no plumbing or heat. Books on technology and Eastern philosophy are stacked floor to ceiling. For a moment I think,
I’ve found him. It really is the Unabomber!
Visions of Peabody Awards dance through my head.

“So what exactly is it that you do out here?” I ask.

“Right now, I’m teaching myself Mandarin Chinese,” he says. He shows us the books in Chinese and copies of
The Island Park Bugle,
the small newspaper he publishes. He writes the editorials under the name “Seldom Seen,” and his book is a compilation of them. He signs my book before we leave.
Thank you, D. Hays
.

We decide Dave’s not sending bombs through the mail, and we drive back out to the highway. I call the news desk from the A-Bar and tell them there isn’t much of a story. The next day, I go home. Back to the news desk, back to hurricanes, and back to taking in satellite feeds. I start studying for the GMAT and collecting admissions forms for graduate school.

Carolyn calls me one afternoon in July. “What are you doing?” she asks in her secret-agent voice, low and loaded with plot.

“Working, why?”

“Come down right now.” They are just back from the Fourth of July on the Vineyard. She has a story for me, too good for the phone.

Carolyn moved into John’s loft in Tribeca a few months ago. It’s the ultimate bachelor pad, with bad furniture, bad lighting, ill-placed bathrooms, and small closets. When John bought it, it was industrial space, so he hired an architect to design it: a kitchen, two baths, and one bedroom. A couple hundred thousand dollars later, it looked like industrial space with a bedroom at one end, an office at the other, and mismatched furniture from his mother’s house scattered in between. We gave it nicknames: Home Depot, the Warehouse.

I take the No. 9 subway train to Franklin Street, then walk a block to North Moore, and she buzzes me in the outside door. Seven floors up in the cramped elevator and then left down the hall. The door is open for me.

“Well?” I take a banana from a bowl on the table. She’s lying on the couch, grinning, and I sit down on the floor facing her.

She sticks out her left hand. “Look!”

“Wow,” I say. It catches me off guard.
She’s here for good now,
I think, and I’m thrilled. But I have a flash, too, of unease. I take a bite from my banana and swallow it. “Wow.”

“Stop saying ‘Wow’! You’re scaring me. He gave it to me this weekend.”

“Were you surprised?”

“Yes!”

The ring is nice, a band of diamonds and sapphires, but not something she’d pick out for herself.

“It’s a copy of a ring his mother wore. He said she called it her ‘swimming ring.’”

She didn’t say yes or no, she tells me. They just understood it would happen. She loves him, but she isn’t in a hurry to be his wife. “Don’t tell anyone,” she says. And I don’t, not even Anthony. She would like to stay secretly engaged forever, I think.

Graduate school was my idea, though Anthony is thrilled. I know it’s crazy, but we don’t say that. I want something away from everyone I know, a place where I am just a student, a place away from cancer. To Anthony, I think it is a relief.

We are not ones to speak about death—as it relates to him, anyway. He never hints at his own death; he never admits he might die. Nothing is to be put
on hold,
which of course implies
on hold until after
. Instead we speak of futures that won’t exist. With all of the earnestness of a gambler putting down a bet. We pretend to be two people who have every right to talk casually of places, for instance, where we might move someday, of projects we might start, of career moves we might make.

When I think about graduate school, I have in mind dreamy afternoon literature classes at Princeton, but Anthony is more practical. He pushes me toward NYU, the Stern School of Business. He doesn’t say it, but I suspect he thinks an MBA will be useful for a future I might have without him. He is careful, in any event, to make sure I will be okay.

So I apply to Stern’s Executive MBA program. My admissions interview goes well and my GMAT scores are respectable. I’m accepted for the fall.

I love school. The routine, the weekend classes, the study groups after work. School is my own thing—my escape. There are four men and a woman in my study group, all with their eyes on promotions and boardrooms. We meet once a week, sometimes twice. They know nothing about me except that I am a journalist, I have a last name they recognize, and I don’t quite fit the profile of business school student.

They have families—children, wives, and husbands who need them. Sometimes if someone is sick, we cancel study group. Two people travel occasionally on business. And sometimes I am away, spending nights in a hospital.

“Right here,” Dr. Rosenberg says, pointing to the X-ray. I point to an area that looks shadowy.
Here?
And he nods at me seriously. He points out the scar tissue and the blood vessels. To me it all looks the same. Tumors are small and make shadows on the film, and the doctors somehow know whether the shadow is scar tissue or blood vessel or nothing at all. Anthony and I check our schedules, and we plan the surgery for the following week.

We are hopeful. We are still saying things like
cancer-free.
It will be the second operation in six months, but Anthony recovers easily. It is nothing, we say. Hardly anyone even knows we go to Washington.

After this surgery, the doctors put two hoses in his chest, attach the hoses to clear plastic buckets, the buckets to the wall. It means days of lying in bed hooked up to the wall. Anthony can’t stand it. “Hey, Nut, get me my gym bag. It’s in the locker.”

Before
Nut,
I was
Peanut,
and before
Peanut,
I was
Bear.
I remember when I became
Peanut
. Anthony was standing in the living room waiting for me at Sea Song. “The Peanut’s here!” he yelled out when I walked in, and it stuck. We get strange looks from the doctors whenever he asks me about something.
Nut, what do you think?

“Nut, get my gym bag,” he’s telling me now with a look on his face I know well. He swings out of bed in his T-shirt and shorts. “Grab the buckets and see if they fit.”

“Sure,” I say, as if he’s asking me for a tissue or to turn up the volume on the television. I put the buckets in the bag.

“Can you zip it?”

“Um, yeah.”

He pulls his jeans on, grinning. “Hurry up!” He throws the bag over his shoulder and tucks the yellow-plastic tubes under his shirt, and we are off. The two of us walk nonchalantly down the hall past the nurses. “We’re just going down to the second floor,” he tells them. “Stretching my legs.” He doesn’t look like he’s just walking down the hall, but they don’t question us. He is the darling of the NIH. They are all rooting for him. The doctors all want a patient like Anthony. He isn’t content to be the Very Satisfactory patient; he wants to be Excellent. So if they are looking for him to be up and walking on the second day, he makes it the first. If they expect recovery in five days, he does it in four. He is thrilling to watch. He is unstoppable, the unseeded player taking the tournament by storm. It is a shame there are only the few of us to see, because his accomplishments are stunning.

We drive to Hamburger Hamlet with the gym bag of hoses and sit at the bar eating hamburgers and fries, watching the football game on a big screen.

After the second time we sneak out, Dr. Michael Cooper pops his head in the room. “Carole, can I talk to you for a sec?”

“Sure,” I say. He is a young doctor and one of our favorites.

“Listen, I saw you leaving. I’m not going to say I think it’s a good idea. It’s not. But if you’re going to go out, you need to take these with you.” He gives me a pair of clamps that look like long, thin scissors with flat ends. The ones they use in surgery to close off the arteries so patients don’t bleed to death.

“I shouldn’t be abetting, but this is important.” He is all business. “If the tubes get weak they let air in, and if air is going in instead of coming out, that’s not good. If a tube rips or falls out or gets loose and disconnects from the bucket, that’s not good either.” He has a firm grip on the clamps and squeezes them together to demonstrate. “You’ve got to clamp it immediately.”

“You mean within a minute?” I ask him.

“I mean immediately.”

I practice clamping so I will be ready if a tube pops out, and Anthony times me. “Okay, Nut. Go!” I grab the clamps from my bag and squeeze down on the yellow tube the way Dr. Cooper showed me. Anthony keeps timing me, like a fire drill. He grabs his chest suddenly at the bar of Hamburger Hamlet. “I’m taking in air!” he shouts, and then laughs while I fumble for the clamps. The bartender eyes us cautiously. By the second day of this I can get both tubes clamped in four seconds flat.