My Oncologist
After being told I had a year to live, I decided one evening to visit my oncologist’s private residence in Pacific Heights. It is a very nice neighborhood. Homes like state capitol buildings clad in armor of Italian cypress. When I arrived at my oncologist’s address, a stream of people in costume was filing inside.
I asked one of the drivers parked out front what was going on.
“Biggest party of the year, man,” he said. “Rich-ass folks from all over the country come out every year for this one.”
I remembered there was an old suit of armor in the lobby of the Queen Anne Bed & Breakfast a few blocks away, so I walked over there and asked them how much. The two men at the front desk laughed at first, unaware they were in the presence of someone who only recently had considered donning a ghillie suit of discarded Lyft scooters, reusable totes, and faded Pride flags then, over several days, slowly closing in on my oncologist, moving only when the wind moved, slipping past a phalanx of gardeners, until I reached his porch and quietly choked him out as he puffed an evening cigar.
But things change.
A costume party presented new, but not impossible challenges, I thought, as I waded through a crowd of sheiks, Cleopatras, and deep-sea divers, in a suit of armor that cost me a Tissot chronograph. Then I saw him. There in the middle of the great room was my oncologist. He was dressed as Kaiser Wilhelm surrounded by a smattering of renaissance women, pirates, and someone in a kangaroo costume, who was helping a woman in a swimsuit and sash perform a keg stand. When I arrived, my oncologist was finishing up his explanation of shark hunting before snorting cocaine off a rare Nez Perce canoe paddle. “It all comes down to one thing,” he concluded. “You must stun the brain.”
Pirates and renaissance women nodding their heads in agreement.
“Not that any of it really matters,” he continued as he lit a fresh cigar off his old one. “Our time is over.”
My oncologist took a long drag off his cigar and sighed, the smoke spilling out over the small gathering around him like cumulus washing over the Andes.
“Whose time is it then if not ours?” asked one of the pirates.
“Oh, well, it’s the Orientals’ time now,” said my oncologist, who apparently was a casual racist. “Just like it used to be the Brits and the Dutch. I don’t know who before that. Maybe the Vikings or the Visigoths. It doesn’t matter now because you can’t get away with anything. America is likely very well fucked. The pioneering spirit is dead. Look around. Not here of course, but in your day to day. People are bored like they’re going through the motions except maybe in times of war. We need more wars. War is what forces people to really focus on what matters. Anyway, you can see it on their faces. Overall, people’s expectations have lowered. Why have people’s expectations lowered? The deterioration of the service industry for one, but that’s always the first to go. Ask anyone. Every morning our parents had milk delivered to their doorsteps. People pumped gas while wearing uniforms and singing in unison. Does that mean we’re dying out as a culture? Probably. We cured cholera. We can’t cure shit now. What I’m saying is this is a dying culture, but it’s probably not as bad as the French. The French are probably a lot worse. They’re irrelevant and, frankly, they smell. Who cares about wine and cheese and socialism? Nobody cares. Maybe a few people do, but they’re doing it ironically, or just pretending that they live in those times when those words meant something. My wife likes going to France for the holidays, but I don’t care. It’s a good country to play tennis in, I suppose, but it’s a dead culture, like Italy or maybe Norway. I went fishing in Norway once, but everyone looked depressed like they knew their time had passed and their opinions no longer counted. Do you know what I’m saying? We need to stop institutions from becoming fake ideas about life that are somehow widely accepted as true. People are dying as we speak. There’s only one time a century to be in the right place where things are going on and people are alive and that place right now is Southeast Asia. I have a place being built in Singapore as we speak.”
My oncologist paused to snort something off his knuckle. “By the way, you try any of this flake?”
One of the pirates snorted some off the paddle and then my oncologist pointed the paddle at me.
“What about you, Sir Lancelot?”
I shook my helmet no.
My oncologist shrugged. “Miss Iowa?”
The woman in the swimsuit and sash nodded upside down as beer spilled into her nose.
That’s when my oncologist was called away by staff to the front door. No one else knew, but I knew what was being delivered. I followed my oncologist from a distance and watched as he approached the bike courier who handed him a manila envelope marked “Urgent.” My oncologist rolled his eyes and opened the envelope to read the 3×5 card inside.
What I had written on the card was, “Hi, you will die in one year. See you then.”
My oncologist shook his head, starting to smile, but then squinting carefully at the card as his smile faded. After a while he took a few slow, shallow breaths, then stuffed the card into his gray military jacket and returned to the party.
A feast of roast squab, punch romaine, salmon mousse, and foie gras was followed by multiple pirates snorting coke off Miss Iowa’s freckled butt cheeks, while she lightly spanked the oncologist with the broadside of my sword. But his demeanor had changed. He had stopped snorting cocaine and looked as if he was no longer finding joy in the small things. Not long after that I found myself in a Rolls-Royce narrowly missing another Rolls-Royce at high speeds as a half-naked Ottoman princess jammed her tongue in my ear.
“We almost died,” she said, laughing. The other car swerved into a hedge, throwing the kangaroo and Miss Iowa headlong into a vegetable garden, followed by laughter. My oncologist pumped the brakes and lit another cigar off the current cigar he was smoking, but since he had received the card, he had yet to smile or speak about Singapore. He looked pale and preoccupied.
Back at the house the Ottoman princess made eggs for everyone that was still awake. Only one pirate was up at this point. A low fire in the fireplace. The sky beginning to turn a lighter shade of pink.
“It’s important, I think, never to lose sight of the fact that everyone that’s on Earth right now will eventually not be alive anymore,” said my oncologist, finally breaking his silence. “Mountains and some sea turtles will still be alive, but Chloë Grace Moretz and everyone in Peoria, Illinois, will not be,” he said, gazing absently at his jackboots, half-heartedly playing with one of Miss Iowa’s freckly breasts. “Everyone is equal in this way.”
The kangaroo nodded gravely. “What are your dreams?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said my oncologist, who looked newly resigned to his fate. “Maybe live half the year in Singapore with my wife and the other half in the Alps with Miss Iowa.”
Miss Iowa laughed into a couch cushion as the kangaroo somehow lit up a cigarette and leaned back.
“In my dreams, I sometimes sort of shoot them in the head,” said the kangaroo. “You see, in my dreams, I repel down from a high cliff in the moonlight and lop off the arms of people who have done probably very bad things to other people and deserve this sort of thing. In my dreams, I am naked and holding a hog’s head up to the sky and drinking its blood, letting the blood fall onto my face and I am screaming or laughing, and I’m surrounded by others who are screaming and laughing, too.”
“Glen, you might want to cool it on the blow,” said my oncologist.
“Has anyone noticed everyone here is white?” asked the Ottoman princess, who was now eating eggs straight from the pan. “Our whiteness is a form of racism.”
“Being white is racist?” asked Miss Iowa, still speaking into the cushion.
“I’m not sure yet, but I think that maybe it is,” said the Ottoman princess. “More research needs to be done.”
The lone pirate passively nodded as the others solemnly passed around bottles of champagne.
“Lancelot, what do you think?” my oncologist asked me.
“About racism?” I asked.
“About death.”
“I’m not sure yet.”
After all, it had only been a few days since I’d heard about my own impending death. I remembered the way my oncologist told me. It was a Thursday afternoon. He delivered the news while standing in a doorway, a burrito in one hand. The way he talked about it somehow felt removed from my current trajectory into oblivion. The way a mildly serious realtor might discuss checking the pipes to see if they’re galvanized steel before buying. Almost routine.
“The loss of personal consciousness,” my oncologist said, as if answering himself. “The thing that you feel most strongly about yourself, that it will somehow disappear and no longer endure in time and space.” My oncologist threw another log on the fire. “Epicurus said death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.”
After watching my oncologist finally trudge upstairs to his bedroom somewhere above us, I went outside and made my way home. In the calendar on my kitchen counter, I looked one year out and wrote in the box marked Sunday: “See oncologist.”
Trevor J. Houser is the author of Pacific (2021) and The Prumont Method (2023). His third novel, The Geography of Saying Goodbye, comes out in December. A finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, he lives in Seattle with his wife and two children and works in advertising.
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