Going Going Gone

Sarah Bradley

Claudia has seen worse, as far as places like this. Miserable places, places where people trade their clothes for bleached white gowns and recline in metal tubes in the hope that, if they’re lucky, million-dollar machines will find the needle in the haystack, the anomalies causing their fragile human bodies to break down. Luck, like everything else, is relative here. No one wants to be here today, or any other day, in this waiting room, but while some are visibly worse off than others, no one is sobbing or twitching or drooling or pissing themselves. All of which Claudia has seen, or pretended not to see. So many things can and do go wrong inside a body, a host of mute inexplicable rebellions taking place in this room at this very moment, but at least no one here is in obvious distress.
          Claudia keeps her eyes on the television, where an attractive young couple is trying to buy a house in Costa Rica. She used to watch this show all the time, though not exactly by choice. Many years ago, in what feels like another life, her roommate Heather was obsessed with it. Heather who used to leave the chewed-up crescents of her fingernails on the coffee table, who ate green beans straight from the can. Claudia has to admit there is something tremendously comforting to be found in the show’s familiar rhythms. In this manufactured world there is always a right answer, always a good option. A compromise to be made, a scintilla of friction, but the outcome is never truly in doubt. There are no problems without solutions, no questions without answers. Within the span of thirty minutes, including commercials, you are guaranteed a happy ending: a beach view, a piña colada, the sun sinking into the ocean like a radioactive cherry, going going gone. The end of a perfect day, the promise of another to come. The couple is always happy with their choice. Sure, there were moments of agonizing uncertainty, but in the end they know they made the right decision. They can’t imagine their lives any other way.
          In the last three months Claudia has lost twenty-two pounds, and no one knows why. Well, technically that’s not true; Claudia knows why. Claudia has lost twenty-two pounds because she can’t eat, because she is always in pain now, a winching churning hollow knotty evil kind of pain in the pit of her stomach that never goes away. The pain is the thing no one understands, the thing that can’t be explained. The pain is the reason Claudia is here—that and her bloodwork, which is concerning, though no one has used the other C-word. Not yet. Claudia’s husband Seth is here for moral support. Seth has been at all of Claudia’s appointments for the last three months, and there have been so many appointments. Gastroenterologists, hematologists, radiologists. Seth comes to every ologist, and he thinks this is helping. Claudia lets him think so. He needs something to do.
          The show cuts to a commercial for an antidepressant. Across from Claudia and Seth sit two women, one middle-aged and one elderly. From their resemblance to each other and their body language, their unstudied unselfconscious closeness, their relationship is clear. The daughter is filling out paperwork on a clipboard. “Do you know why we’re here today, mother?” she asks. Patient and calm, like she’s talking to an especially stupid child. The mother is furious, fuming, you can feel the anger coming off her in vicious hateful waves. “Because of deception,” she says. “No, mother,” says the daughter, and sighs. She yanks at her hair, which is long and brown and pulled back into a sleek ponytail. “We’re here because you fell and hit your head. And you couldn’t tell the doctor how that happened.” The mother says she wants to talk to the doctor. Claudia looks away.
          The pain started in April, and now it is July. The pain started when Seth came back from his work trip and said they needed to talk. That was when Claudia felt it beginning, the needling pain like an icepick in her gut. Seth said he was leaving, and while Seth has not left, while leaving is no longer on the table, the pain has not gone away. Sometimes Claudia wonders if Seth thinks she is weaponizing her pain, using it to bind him to her. She suspects he does think this and resents her for it, though he would never say so and perhaps doesn’t even know he feels this way himself. But on her worst days, the truth is Claudia would let Seth go in a heartbeat if it meant the pain would go with him. Claudia would give up almost anything in her life to go back to normal, to the days before the pain. She has given up so much already: red meat, dairy, wheat, caffeine, alcohol, FODMAPs (though she’s still not entirely sure what FODMAPs are). What else would Claudia give up, in order to reenter the world as a living person instead of one who is merely staying alive? Her sense of smell, easy. A pinkie toe, sure. A finger? Ask her in a month. Worse than the pain is what the pain has taken from her. The small pleasures and dissatisfactions of an ordinary life, the hope of anything beyond simply getting through this day, and the next.
          Beside her Claudia can feel Seth squirming in his seat. They’ve been waiting for some time now, perhaps twenty or thirty minutes. Not unusual for places like this, but Seth has never been good at waiting. Seth isn’t good at being in positions where he doesn’t know what to do, where there’s nothing he can do. Seth wants always to keep moving forward, to turn his attention to the next thing. Claudia has long known this about her husband, but in the early days of their relationship she saw this quality, like all his flaws, as an adorable quirk, an easily forgivable peccadillo. She never imagined it would become a problem it would fall to her to manage. She has to remind herself not to be unkind. This is difficult for him too, she knows it is. Watching her suffer. But Claudia doesn’t feel capable of holding space for Seth’s pain when she is doubled over by her own. “I’m gonna go check,” Seth says, already springing to his feet. Claudia watches him get back in line, watches him shift his weight from one foot to the other until she can’t look anymore.
          On the other side of the waiting room, near the television, a nurse in pink scrubs sits next to a woman in a wheelchair. The nurse is also filling out paperwork on a clipboard. “Surgeries,” she says. “Well, I had my lady parts removed,” says the woman in the wheelchair. There are tubes coming out of her nose, her skin translucent as rice paper. Her body looks like a balloon that is trying hard not to burst. “When was that, ma’am?” the nurse asks. “Oh, three, four years ago. Maybe longer.” The nurse frowns, tapping her pen against the clipboard.
          There’s no point in thinking about the other beginning, the one that came before the pain. Before Claudia’s life ran away from her. No point in thinking about the things they said, the plans they made. She knew they should wait and see, but Seth thought that was just superstition. Seth couldn’t help himself, had to share the good news. And of course Claudia was right, because then it was over, dissolved into nothing, and how could a life just dissolve like that? Was it even a life if no life was lived? It felt like her own life had been bled of all its color, days felt like months, and months felt like years, and then suddenly it was Christmas, Seth’s parents coming to stay with them. No one knew what to say. “You’ll get through this,” Seth’s mother told her. “It will make you stronger.” But Claudia no longer believes that old cliche. Life takes and takes, and it doesn’t make you any stronger. Instead you feel weaker and weaker, more depleted every day.
          “They’re running a little behind,” Seth says as he drops into the seat beside her. “But she said you’re up next, it shouldn’t be long.” He puts his hand on Claudia’s knee and squeezes gently before he pulls away.
          What’s funny is Claudia doesn’t blame Seth for what happened on his work trip. For “slipping,” as he put it, like he just happened to step on a patch of ice and land in his coworker’s vagina. Okay, maybe she blames him a little. But she sees how it could happen. Claudia knows her husband. Wanting always to keep moving forward, to turn his attention to the next thing. Even before the pain, Claudia had become a problem he couldn’t fix, and it made Seth feel powerless. Worse than that, it wasn’t any fun. When was the last time they laughed together, made each other collapse in fits of giggles like they used to at least once a day? When was the last time one of them reached for the other in bed once the lights were out, instead of turning away?
          When Seth came back from Minneapolis and told her everything, he said it wasn’t about Emma, that wasn’t why he was leaving. And Claudia believed him. She had met Emma at happy hours, at work functions. She had seen the chemistry between them, the attraction on display. It didn’t bother her, or hadn’t bothered her much. Even now, Claudia knows Emma was the symptom, not the cause. In her head Claudia still sees the alternate timeline playing out, the one where everything went according to plan. A new life, harder and more rewarding than either of them could have imagined, a world built to accommodate no more than three. Emma a running joke between them, the silly coworker with the hopeless crush. In the film spool running constantly behind Claudia’s eyes, they laugh about Emma, and then they forget all about her. Their life is too full of too many other things. Their life isn’t suspended in the tension between hope and fear, between wanting a diagnosis and dreading what will follow. Claudia knows it can’t go on this way forever. She will get better or she will get worse, and either one will be a kind of answer. But she may not like the answer she gets.
          Last night Claudia heard Seth crying in the kitchen, when he thought she was asleep. Sleep is difficult for Claudia, because of the pain. It builds and builds throughout the day and finally when she lies down in bed and closes her eyes there is nowhere for the pain to go, and so she becomes the pain, her entire body is pain, all through the night. Claudia heard Seth crying and she wanted to get up and go to him, the person she still, after and in spite of everything, loves most in this world. Everything inside her was telling her to go, and yet she could not move.
          The door swings open, and a woman in blue scrubs steps into the waiting room. Every face turns toward this woman, painfully alert: the mother and daughter, the nurse and the woman in the wheelchair, the man in the Kangol hat chewing a toothpick in the corner. They all want to be chosen, they all want to hear their own precious name or that of the person in their charge. They all want to believe that soon they will be able to leave this miserable place and never come back. That soon their ordeal will end.
          “Claudia Norton?” the woman calls out, loud and clear, and Claudia stands up. She looks at her husband because she can feel him looking at her. Seth reaches out and catches her hand. “Do you want me to go with you?” he asks. Every time Seth asks this, and every time Claudia says no, she’ll be fine. What else could she say? Yes, please come with me. I need you, please don’t leave me. Please, I don’t understand any of this and I’m so scared, I don’t understand what’s happening to my body. I don’t understand what’s happened to us. Claudia could say these things, and she would mean them. But she won’t, she’s not a child. Besides, she’s not even sure Seth is allowed to go back there with her. In this new life there is no rule book, she’s never sure what is and isn’t allowed. She doesn’t want to make a scene.
          “It’s okay, I’ll be fine,” Claudia says. The woman at the door clears her throat, glancing at her clipboard, and Claudia pulls her hand away. Everyone is watching. She says she’ll be right back, and Seth says he’ll be here. “Good luck,” he says, and then, “I love you,” but Claudia is already gone.

Sarah Bradley‘s work appears in River Styx, Tahoma Literary Review, Flash Frog, Nimrod, Cutleaf, and Phoebe, among others. A Best of the Net nominee and a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, she has attended workshops with American Short Fiction and One Story. She lives in Austin, Texas, where she’s working on a story collection and a novel. Find more of her writing at http://www.sarahvbradley.com and follow her on Instagram @sarahbooradley.

Next Up: Invite Only by Hemmy So