No One Here Is Well

(Originally published in “trnsfr”)

By Robert Hinderliter

Dear Benjamin,

This letter is long overdue, and though I wish it brought cheerful news, it does not. No one here is well.

I have had a two-month headache accompanied by fits of dizziness; these sudden, terrible moments when I do not understand where I am in relation to my surroundings. “Spatial disorientation,” the doctor clarified, and typed the phrase into his computer. I paid him fifty dollars and he entered my symptoms into a Google search. I sat on the cold examination table and watched him scroll through a Wikipedia article on brain tumors.

Mother has dementia. She recently developed shingles, and she scrapes at the sores on her face and screams that Beth has poisoned her. Father’s remains, resting in an urn on the mantle above Mother’s bed, have been mysteriously decreasing in volume. Beth and I worry that this is somehow Mother’s doing.

You remember Beth, don’t you? You met her just once, I think, before she and I were married. She has asthma, triggered by allergies. She takes four different allergy pills, a nebulizer, a steroid inhaler, and a nasal spray, and still sometimes she wakes in the night unable to breathe. I sit up and watch helplessly as she fumbles on the bedside table for her inhaler, eyes wide with fear.

My son Kevin—yes, I have a son now—has been vomiting. Nothing he eats will stay down. He is a brave boy and doesn’t want to miss school, but he gets so weak and sore from the heaving that he has been home for two weeks. When he jumps up from the couch or the table, Beth and I run after him to the bathroom and rub his back while he retches. The doctors say they need to run more tests.

The dog is very old and has stomach cancer. She drags her skeletal frame to the door when visitors come by, and they immediately say, “Does that dog have cancer?” They can tell just by looking at her.

People do not ask me if I have cancer because I do not have cancer. I am sure that I do not. My doctor has recommended a brain scan, but it would be pointless. I do not have a tumor nestled in my brain. There is no small nugget of renegade cells tucked in the gray folds, slowly growing, striving to be as plump as an onion.

Benjamin, I do not mean for this news to burden you. You surely have enough troubles of your own. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about you lately, about our time growing up together. It seems so long ago now that I’ve begun to wonder if those days ever truly existed. I worry that maybe what I thought were my memories are really just fantasies I’ve created, lies I’ve told myself and cling to desperately like a drowning man. I don’t see how the world I live in today could possibly be the same world I remember from then.

But there was a time, wasn’t there, when the years stretched out in front of us with endless promise? When we ran around your backyard, hiding in the corn and poking goats with sticks and feeling like ancient heroes born again? Weren’t there days when everyone was healthy and strong and we knew as sure as we knew anything that none of us would ever die?

I just need you to confirm for me that those days did in fact exist, that this world and that world are the same. Just a sentence from you is all I’m asking. Even one word of confirmation would mean more to me now than any consolation you could offer, though it’s been so long that even one word is more than I have the right to ask. It’s probably too late, anyway, as this address I have for you is years old, and you’ve surely long since moved away. But please, Benjamin, if you do get this, your reply would mean more to me than you could know.

Your friend, always,

Roger