The play went on in its perfect way. Allie’s friend Danielle stood in the putative wings with watch and script, raising her hand high when they needed to pick up the pace, lowering it when they needed to slow. Frank had gone for a walk along the beach and had seen something, either the crash of the jet into the water or an atomic bomb going off, or maybe they were the same thing, and he described it in a mounting frenzy, heading for the line “What a light!” at which point, in the stage directions, the first firework is supposed to go off, as if called into being by Frank’s exclamation. (Let there be—, Genesis and Apocalypse rolled into one; like sex with Howard, it’s over almost before it begins.) This was the tricky part. Thanks to Danielle, it was 9:45, but of course they couldn’t know precisely when the first firework would be lit. Sean gestured and gibbered magnificently—His flashing eyes! His floating hair!—and came up to the line invoking the Light, then on a hunch veered off and improvised for a minute, a stoned word-salad that fit the script pretty well (go Sean!), then circled back around and hit his mark, “What a light!”
Well, nothing in this fallen world, after all, is perfect. Fortunately, Frank’s words never directly refer to the detonations, so there’s a bit of leeway, and eighty-two seconds later (by Danielle’s stopwatch), just as Sean was saying, “—and to hear a sound so shrieking that it ain’t even a sound at all but goes beyond that into the inside of the center of each ear,” there was a whistle and a pencil-line of orange light ascending from the lakeshore below, followed by a crack and a bloom. Which in this fallen world is pretty fucking good. The rest of Frank’s monologue is more and more frenzied, and through it all the City of Ithaca and the fireworks company did a fantastic job with the sound and light effects, Thanks guys, you’re the best! The End!
There was a celebration afterward at a pizza bar, and they all agreed that the performance had been fucking awesome, indescribable, so-and-so should have been there, what a . . . ! wasn’t it a . . . ? They drank and gorged and loved each other, and Saskia drove back to the old farm in a state of bliss like nothing she had ever experienced. She would do nearly anything to experience it again.
The next day, Quentin drove over from an internship in Boston to celebrate Saskia’s birthday on the 4th. That evening, the 3rd, Lauren told both of them, with an air so serene it was like a blank wall, that she was dying of cancer.
• • •
Saskia hates to think about this period. She’s never been able to put her feelings about it in any order. She was fucking furious. (OK, she supposes if she had to order it, that would be the first.) Lauren had known for eighteen months. She was first diagnosed at stage II, which if treated, has a 93 percent survival rate after five years and a 75 percent survival rate after ten. You can bet your ass Saskia looked up the data on this. Lauren told Bill after six months, but swore him to secrecy, and this hapless feckless boob who couldn’t keep from blurting out the ends of movies he’d already seen, or providing his bank account and social security number to robocalls with Russian accents, somehow managed to spend a year watching Lauren fail to beat it, and not say one single goddamn word to Saskia, with whom he sat down to break bread every day.
And how was Lauren trying to beat it? With herbal infusions, sesame oil massages, yoga, crystals, a gluten-free diet, low-temperature cooking, meditation, levitation, spontaneous combustion, vomiting pea soup, rotating her head completely around, etc. Saskia hadn’t noticed anything because Lauren was always following some sort of regime that mixed and matched this crap. A woman has a right to make decisions about her own body, of course. So thank you, Mom! Saskia was fucking furious and felt guilty about it. (Can she be horrifically selfish just for a second? It made sense for Lauren to wait for an opportunity when Quentin was also around, since he and Saskia were the closest to her, but did she really have to break the news on the eve of Saskia’s birthday? Really, after eighteen months, right then, thus ruining Saskia’s birthday for the rest of her life?)
Lumpectomy, radiation, a little chemo, hormone therapy: that was the treatment recommended by the oncologist back when Lauren had every chance to save her life. But those were “Western.” And everything Western is evil, like nuclear weapons and double-blind medical trials. All her peacefulness and gentleness, without changing a molecule, turned back into passiveness and vagueness, a fastidious aversion to grappling with the real world, a refusal to be “impure”—yes! That was her word! Pure food, pure energy, pure thoughts. As if Saskia’s father hadn’t abundantly shown how far you could sink into selfish cruelty through this pursuit of “purity.” Though, come to think of it, Lauren had never agreed with Saskia about the damage Thomas had done, and a woman is entitled to her own stupid opinions, so Saskia is a selfish bitch, we’ve already established that. Lauren even said that she wouldn’t bring “poisons” into the house (dry-ice tendrils of chemo wafting off her sweater, dilatory high-energy photons, etc)
