I came out to the mountain simply to climb it, or perhaps claim it. It is
a simple undertaking once the body has betrayed you with a cancer to decide to
punish it, or perhaps rehabilitate it, either way the body metaphorically a
prison for the soul.
The cancer claimed both slight and more significant bits of me. It
claimed the hair on my head, which was starting to recede already anyway.
My energy was swallowed up, certainly. I lay about exhausted for
months, anemic, down to the porcelain skin, bones shunting through its surface.
I thought about
placing a revolver’s snout inside my mouth and pulling trigger backward.
But even for that I was too weak, too depleted.
So I considered what other steps I might take. If the impulse was
straight suicide, there were always medications to devour. I even
considered the prospect of going the opposite direct ion and allowing the
cancer its way with me, ceasing medications and treatment altogether,
swallowing the pain back like a bitter pill until my eyes lay open no more.
But none of that seemed fit, as odd a phrasing as that might be.
I had a conversation with God instead. It went like this.
“You hoary old s.o.b.”
“Don’t bring mother Mary into this,” God replied with a voice far less
ponderous than I would have expected.
“Make this go away,” I said.
“You make it go away,” God said. “I gave you free will.”
This
stymied me. He seemed rather detached from the situation, yet still
seemed to know me intimately. It was like talking with a casual lover,
which in a spiritual way perhaps God is, at least at times.
In this fantastic chatter in my head came the recognition that perhaps I could
claim myself a goal that would extend the purpose of my life a little longer.
Given that I felt it had no real purpose at that time except to serve as
a vessel for the aches and pains of cancer, it involved a stronger sense of
faith than I had previously exerted.
The image of the mountain came to me in a dream one night. It was simply
this: my body took on its elevation in the dream, its snowy aspect,
moonlight pelting it like grains of sugar on a silver spoon.
I was larger than the cancer after all, I deduced from this, and so made plans.
Making plans strengthened me. I began to journal what all I would
need in order to make my conquest of the mountain. I had little money yet
I dragged myself to heights of enterprise, sitting at my desktop computer and
scouring the web for outdoor merchandise for sale cheap. I had hours at
my disposal, grimacing at the upright posture in my chair but grateful still
for a mission.
The mission arrived with a certain fruition when I returned to the doctor and
he pronounced me dead. “Six months max,” he said. “Enjoy yourself
in the meantime.”
It seemed a perverse pronouncement but I was more than already twisted into a
certain perversity of my own. So I bound myself up in my winter gear, my
mountain gear, and set off by train to my destiny.
I
was shivering throughout the ride and the train’s lolling back and forth in its
click-clack percussion didn’t settle me down any. I experienced the same
searing pains I had known in the comfort of my own bed and in many ways wished
simply to return there. But I would not. So I remained in the back
of my particular car, the other riders maintaining a respectful distance as if
my physical agony manifested itself in a radioactive glow.
When I arrived at the mountain I looked up at its vastness. It too was a
body, albeit not quite so human, but with similar architectonic features.
“This hurts me more than it hurts you,” I said, digging my pick into its skin.
It did not shriek or wail, but simply let off a few crumbs of earth as if
silently ignoring me.
I ascended, my booths with their own teeth sinking into those said same crumbs,
devouring the mountain footstep by footstep, my own body groaning against the
exertion, with the exertion, the gesture simultaneously lacerating and
liberating.
I arrived at a certain elevation, uncertain just how high, only that my body
was clamoring for motion to cease, ice rolling down between nostril and upper
lip, eyes tearing with the sting of wind.
I lay back on a
flat rock and the sun flayed me with cold. It was a remote sun, the sun
of God as I thought of it. I chuckled to myself at the play on words.
The chuckling sent me into gasps and I hacked as I lay there. My
pick climbed out of my hand and tinkled down the mountainside, down to earth
below. I concentrated hard and imagined all my cancer contained within
its handle and the weight of the blade, the sharpness of the blade, cutting it
straight out of me and disposing of it miles below, or what seemed so many
miles, even though it may have only been a few torturous feet.
“Here I am, God,” I said. “Take me now.”
“You’re already taken,” God said, assuming the voice and aspect of the doctor
who had pronounced me gone.
“By who?” I asked, the words seeming to fall out of my mouth with the
delicacy of ancient teeth dissolving from the gums. There was no answer,
no voice, except the howling of the wind around me, which soon became a howling
of my own.
Bio: Michael Fontana’s work has appeared in a variety of electronic
and print publications. He works at a community mental health center in
northwest Arkansas.
