Chapter 4 Hitchens Stays On in Houston
The synchrotron
The machine that was about to engulf him weighed nearly 200 tons.
On Monday morning Christopher, Blue, and I went by cab to the MD Anderson Proton Therapy Center. With its sleek surfaces and its tubular atrium, the place felt like the future – or like the very slightly dated future of the cinematic crystal ball. You thought of Kubrick’s 2001; and the synchrotron itself shared the heavy curves of the Enforcement Droid (ED 209) in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. This was also a future of padded footsteps and discreet whispers and inflexibly hopeful smiles…
‘Are you claustrophobic, Hitch? I suppose they must’ve asked you that.’
‘They did, and I’m not. Well, I was claustrophobic in North Carolina, but there I was trussed and hooded.’
‘Also smothered and drowned.’ In the spring of 2008 Christopher arranged to be waterboarded (by veterans of the Special Forces. See below). ‘And those geezers weren’t doing it for your health.’
‘True, Little Keith,’ he said, and without hesitation he readied himself for bombardment, removing the top half of his hospital smock. Christopher was always a rejectionist when it came to the beach or the swimming pool, and I realised that I hadn’t seen him stripped to the waist for over thirty years – that time he danced topless, rather solemnly, at an incredibly drunken party in about 1975. Slimmed down by illness, his torso looked quite unchanged. The flesh was pale and marked by target crosses, true, but it touched me to see that the great tree-shaped thatch of shag on his chest*1 had largely survived the assault on his body hair, though parts of it had been ‘shaved off for various hospital incisions’. He climbed on to the shelf or platform and the technician slid him in like someone closing a kitchen drawer…This technician would remain in touch (through a video link), but Christopher would otherwise be incommunicado for around an hour. I turned to Blue.
‘Well?’ I said as I reached for my Golden Virginia.
She hesitated, she frowned, she shrugged, she stood.
On our way out we paused in an alcove near the main entrance: this was the relatively sepulchral area reserved for framed photos and thankyou letters, plus engravings and plaques, sent by the Chosen – i.e., ex-patients. Without you we, every morning when I, each time my husband smiles he. This was meant to be encouraging: here were the sweepstake winners, the survivors, the saved, and in the MD Anderson promotional videos you could see them jogging and mountaineering and windsurfing and of course euphorically gambolling and snuggling with their families. I reviewed these beaming faces and their rapt descriptions of family treats and feasts with, I realised, an impatience that was moving slowly towards animus. Was there a quantity theory of cure – as the statistics certainly led you to believe? If so, then here were the spoilers, here were the roadhogs and me-firsters who squandered the good luck that so rightfully belonged to my friend.
The two of us went outside and lit up. Indifferent to alcohol, Blue was still passionately interested in tobacco. Old smoking campaigners, we stared in silence at the ups and downs of the Tumortown roofscape…
In the twenty-first century the average metropolitan hospital already does an excellent imitation of an airport, the signposted access roads, the medium-rise car parks (SHORT STAY, LONG STAY), the configured terminals and the buses shuttling between them. In Houston you very soon submit to the notion that the hospital was imitating not an airport but a city – and with equally startling success. The hospital is the size of Houston, no, it actually is Houston, with its administrative centres, its gardens and malls, all the way out to the rest homes and recuperation dorms in its infinitely proliferating windblown suburbs.
…Escorted by Blue, Christopher smirkingly emerged. I asked him, ‘Did it hurt?’
‘Did what hurt? I couldn’t even feel it,’ he said. ‘So I just had a restorative doze and then it was over.’
With some panache Christopher presented his care team with a bottle of champagne, and ‘hopped’, as he would later write, ‘almost nimbly into a taxi’.
‘The pain comes later. Or so we’re told,’ said Blue as we drove on to our next appointment.
In another district, another ward of the city, staked out on another flat surface, Christopher was being introduced to another oncologist.
‘Forgive me if I don’t stand up.’
‘Oh, don’t worry!…Our idea, now, is to catch the tumour off its guard. We suspect it’s getting complacent. We’ve held off with the chemo for a while, so if we…’
As the three of us got ready to move on, Hitch said,
‘More chemo. Fuck. You know, doctors take these things personally, so they personalise the tumours.’
And there was at least some solace in the fact that Christopher’s tumour was considered both slow-witted and self-satisfied. But why personalise it, I thought – this thing of death, why grant it life?
‘I wonder’, he said, ‘if they give the tumours names – you know, nicknames, pet names. Like Flip or Rover.’
…Much, much later the same day (long after dusk), in a shadowy warren of curtained cubicles, Christopher settled himself down on yet another flat white surface while a compassionate Filipina, breathing her soft breath, hooked him up to the two sacs of transparent fluid that ponderously dangled overhead – one containing nutrients, the other containing poisons…I had claimed the last watch: Blue, I hoped, was already asleep at the Lone Star, and her husband, too, was half curling up and murmuring about aches and pains – gut, shoulder…
All day I’d been casting
