This Is It

“You finally came over to me. I’ve been waiting to talk to you for months now.”

I looked at the man, not recognizing his face. He was round and hairy. His belly was hard as I leaned against him, trying not to grimace as the stench of his breath lingered in my nostrils. He seemed sweet. He opened his phone briefly to check the score on a football game, revealing his background: an elderly man and woman standing together beside a green garden wall covered in ivy.

“Well, I’m glad I could catch you today,” I replied.

“You’re always busy, but it’s okay. You’re very popular.”

I smiled at him. I try to stay busy. As much as customers like to hate on the well worn whore, a busy whore is a wanted one. They see me whisked away by one customer after another, and they wonder what I have that so many men want me? It’s not necessarily looks–not that I’m hard to look at, but most of the dancers at the club are pretty. It also isn’t simply hand jobs: there are plenty of dancers who will get you off, but customers turn them down regularly. It has to be something else. That ineffable something.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Patrick. You’re Selena, right?”

“I am. Nice to meet you, Patrick,” I stroked his chest, “How has your day been?”

“Not very good. I had radiation treatment earlier, for my cancer, and I haven’t been feeling great.”

He turned away and began coughing. He shook as phlegm rattled around in his chest. I waited. I felt my own immune system triggered into sympathetic defense. Clearly you can’t catch cancer, and I didn’t think he had Covid or anything contagious, but I still felt an irrational fear as I sat in his lap that there was some piece of death he could give me just from proximity. I know most immune systems kick into hyperdrive when we perceive someone around us as being ill. It’s our animal instincts acting without us consciously steering. His eyes watered as the coughs settled and eventually stopped. He brushed away a few tears.

“I’m not sick, I promise. It’s just a cancer thing.”

“I get it, no worries.”

“I just get like this sometimes, especially after treatments. I don’t do chemo, because of this,” he pointed to his full head of hair, “I don’t want to lose my hair.”

“Makes sense. My aunt lost her hair with the chemo.”

Clinging onto a piece of worldly pride is natural when life decides to strip you down to your most essential bits. I was transported for a moment to the hospital room where I sat with my aunt after her stem cell replacement treatment. Her face twitched and grimaced as she blew into a little plastic device with a hollow plastic ball inside that measured her breath strength. The goal was to blow hard enough to make the ball hover for as long as possible. When she’d been healthy, it wouldn’t have taken much to keep the ball levitating for at least ten seconds, but now she wheezed into the tube and the ball hopped up for less than a millisecond. She glared at it, angry.

This petty little task should not have been the most difficult struggle for her to undertake. She had traveled the world, lived in South Korea shortly after the war ended; given birth twice and raised two adult children; survived divorcing the love of her life; gotten a degree in nursing and saved the lives of other people facing death. And yet her greatest nemesis would be a little plastic ball that refused to hover, no matter how hard she tried.

“Did she die?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“How long ago?”

“A year ago.”

“From the cancer?”

“From complications related to the cancer, but not exactly the cancer.”

I didn’t want to talk about this at all. Especially not at work. Especially not in the process of trying to sell him a dance worth only a couple hundred dollars. I knew the feeling would linger even after the conversation. But I also didn’t know how not to talk about it. Nobody wants to talk about cancer, and yet when you have it, it’s the thing ruling your body and by extension your mind: this teetering on the precipice of death and staring it in the eye, whether or not you want to.

“What happened?”

“She fell and hit her head, which caused a hematoma–a brain bleed. And then she fell into a coma, and somehow caught pneumonia. Her lungs filled up with fluid, and then she couldn’t breathe for herself without a machine. She didn’t want us to keep her alive like that, so we pulled the plug.”

I hadn’t said it out loud to anyone in a while. It filled the air, dampening the club music thumping on in the background.

“What kind of cancer was it?”

“Bone and blood. Multiple myeloma.”

“They say I have about a 50/50 chance of making it,” he coughed, “which isn’t bad, I guess.”

He turned again, letting the coughs run their course.

“What kind is it?”

“Skin cancer. I’m getting melanomas removed soon, here,” he gestured to his ribcage,” and here,” he gestured to his lower abdomen.

I couldn’t help thinking that I was sitting in the lap of a dying man. Of course, we’re all dying. To live is to one day die. But it’s different when death is sitting beside you, wrapped around the neck of someone as you stare into their eyes. Sometimes halitosis is just bad hygiene, but sometimes it’s an underlying bit of the end creeping in on someone’s breath.

“How old was she?” he asked.

“She was sixty.”

“That’s young. I’m fifty-one. My parents died of cancer too.”

“How old were they?”

“My dad died when he was eighty, my mom was eighty-nine, almost ninety when she passed.”

“That’s pretty old. I’m glad they lived long lives.”

“You want to see them?” he asked.

I nodded, and he retrieved his cell phone, pulling up the picture from earlier. He looked just like his parents with his sloped shoulders and bulbous features. It was sweet that he kept them on his lock screen, but it also spoke to a loneliness I sensed, but didn’t know for sure. I didn’t know if he had anyone, but I didn’t think he did. He hadn’t spoken of friends or a wife or any kids.

My aunt had died with an entire team of friends and family attentive and grieving, but we couldn’t be beside her at the end. Covid put an end to dying surrounded by loved ones, even in states without strict procedures in place. My cousins had gotten thirty minutes at her bedside before they were ushered out, and in the end, only the nurse was present when she died—present only to note time of death and to wheel her cadaver to wherever hospitals keep the dead. But she wasn’t conscious when the end came. She couldn’t open her eyes or speak. Maybe she didn’t know she was alone. The nurse gave us forty-five minutes, the duration of a free Zoom call, twice a week, to talk to her via an unattended iPad. They would prop the iPad up in front of her, so that we could see her face–obscured by a ventilator and a web of tubes connected to various catheters giving her this and that. I watched her chest fill with a sudden lurch as the machine forced the breath into her little body.

It was the picture of loneliness, and yet it wasn’t what she had meant when she wrote in her diary that she felt so alone. My cousins had gone through her belongings, her home suddenly empty and yet so full of all the same things as before. They hadn’t expected to find diaries, but she’d filled more than one, and they were full of emotions she could not share with anyone else. We all die alone. Nobody shares the exact same symptoms simultaneously, or is given the exact same timeline.

I hadn’t been the one she’d wanted at her bedside as she made her arduous transition from helplessness to shaky recovery. Yes, she had made it to remission, but at what cost? The hair on her head was gone, and yet for some wicked reason her body hair remained. Her pubes especially clung on, like some cruel joke. She’d lost four inches of height. Her body was compressed down into a little black-spotted husk. Her skin itched and flaked and burned simultaneously. She woke up covered in hair and skin she had shed during her tumultuous sleep. And everything tasted like metal. Not even syrup and waffles retained any remnant of the joy they once promised.

We had been given a temporary apartment near the hospital where she could remain isolated, and yet away from the persistent beeping and alarms of the cancer ward. I’d gone to the apartment ahead of her like my mother had told me to, armed with an array of cleaning products, and went to town making sure everything was disinfected for her stay. I scrubbed the cabinets and countertops, the tub and all the doorknobs. I vacuumed the rugs and mopped the floors. We couldn’t afford for her to be exposed to anything. She had no immune system. I had to be the protection her body did not have. It was arduous, but mechanical. She didn’t look at me with much love or affection. I don’t think she had the capacity to feign what she didn’t feel, especially at that moment. When life strips everything away, there’s no point in putting on airs. I was the workhorse tilling the soil, useful in a dispassionate way.

One night I found her in bed, curled into a little ball, crying. I didn’t know what to do. My family isn’t very affectionate or touchy. She and I particularly didn’t have that kind of relationship. I stood awkwardly in the doorway, unsure of what she wanted. Unsure of what I felt comfortable doing.

“I just wish my kids were here,” she whispered, still turned away from me.

“I know.”

“You are my kid, but–”

“I get it.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know.”

“I just never thought it would be this hard.”

I approached the side of the bed, and sat on the edge.

“I could hold you?” I proposed.

“Okay.”

I curled up beside her. We had never cuddled before, that I could remember, especially not since I became an adult. I felt the world between us, and I know she could too, but I was better than nothing. I was there.

My manager passed by and stopped to shake hands with Patrick.

“It’s been a while! Always nice to see you,” he said.

“Nice seeing you too,” Patrick replied politely.

He put away his phone and returned his attention to me.

“I used to be here all the time, before Covid, and the cancer. Are the prices the same?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“The upstairs one is $200?”

“$210, so yeah, essentially.”

“Is that one okay?”

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”

He enjoyed himself. I watched him jerk off at the end. If I’m one of his final meals, why not let him finish? There’s nothing worse than pity, but it was what I felt. I wanted to make him feel good–as good as he could feel, given the circumstances. When he came, his skin was slick with sweat. I notice his complexion turning gray. He wiped his forehead and excused himself. I waited while he went to the restroom to clean himself up. When he returned, he was trembling.

“I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’m not feeling well. Thank you.”

I watched him rush out. Maybe I would see him again. Maybe this was it.