Coffee Shop News

ORPHANS

I could not sleep. I was scared that I would die if I slept. And I didn’t want my sons to become orphans—partial orphans—as they slept. So I stayed awake and waited for dawn. Then, at 3 A.M., the phone rang.

“It’s me,” my wife said. “I don’t care what you say. I’ll be home in sixteen hours.”

“Thank you,” I said.



COFFEE-SHOP NEWS

While I waited for the results of the MRI, I asked my brother-in-law to watch the boys again because I didn’t want to get bad news in front of them.

Alone and haunted, I wandered the mall, tried on clothes, and waited for my cell phone to ring.

Two hours later, I wanted to murder everything, so I drove south to a coffee joint, a spotless place called Dirty Joe’s. Yes, I was silly enough to think that I’d be calmer with a caffeinated drink.

As I sat outside in a wooden chair and sipped my coffee, I cursed the vague, rumbling, ringing noise in my ear. And yet when my cell phone rang I again held it to my deaf ear.

“Hello. Hello,” I said and wondered if it was a prank call, then remembered and switched the phone to my left ear.

“Hello,” my doctor said. “Are you there?”

“Yes,” I said. “So what’s going on?”

“There are irregularities in your head.”

“My head’s always been irregular.”

“It’s good to have a sense of humor,” the doctor said. “You have a small tumor that is called a meningioma. They grow in the meninges membranes that lie between your brain and your skull.”

“Shit,” I said. “I have cancer.”

“Well,” he said. “These kinds of tumors are usually non-cancerous. And they grow very slowly, so in six months or so we’ll do another MRI. Don’t worry. You’re going to be O.K.”

“What about my hearing?” I asked.

“We don’t know what is causing the hearing loss, but you should start a course of prednisone, a steroid, just to go with the odds. Your deafness might lessen if left alone, but we’ve had success with the steroids in bringing back hearing. There are side effects, like insomnia, weight gain, night sweats, and depression.”

“Oh, boy,” I said. “Those side effects might make up most of my personality already. Will the ’roids also make me quick to pass judgment? And I’ve always wished I had a dozen more skin tags and moles.”

The doctor chuckled. “You’re a funny man.”

I wanted to throw my phone into a wall, but I said goodbye instead and glared at the tumorless people and their pretty tumorless heads.


Sherman Alexie

from his new book WAR DANCES
Posted over on The New Yorker