Like coming Home a memory by J. Benjamin

Dr. so and so leaned back in his chair and suggested yet another round of chemo. Yet another fiesta of mocking fatigue and politely diligent nausea. Dr. so and so seemed only obliged to suggest the torment of 14 days of chemo. No, my father shook his bald and lumpy head slowly, sadly, no I don't think so. Chemo. The word is searing puke in my mouth. Chemotherapy, that's what kills me, oh yeah, this is very therapeutical. We stand to leave; I shake the doctor’s hand like he just sold me a sedan or something. Pleasure doin business with ya Doc. Fumbling at the door, dad looks so tired climbing into the car.

Faded from hundreds of downpours, soaked then dried, bleeding and curled at the edges the proclamation "House of Faith" can still be read above the entrance to my mother’s door, nearly six years since it was tacked there. The push pin holding it against the wood has rusted and shed a red-brown tear down the length of the index card. Like Martin Luther’s 95 theses the three words were a public declaration, a personal reminder, and an affront to the whole appalling business of cancer. An incantation against the very notion that 4th stage melanoma can and will kill you.

Hushed rooms, bowed heads, souls like mustangs, straining toward Him...God, we prayed, we give praise for the healing that is taking place in Randy's body. We praise you Lord God, for the destruction of the malignant cells and the uplifting of the Spirit of this family. Cancer, we reject you, we do not acknowledge your right to this mans body...

Laying of Hands, localized radiation therapy, prayer chains, 100 mil. oxycontin, ya know they call that stuff hillbilly heroin, they speak in tongues- the blind unravelings of an unlearned language, the cadence of the chants somehow both deeply calming and unnerving, chemo, it spread, the woods are lovely dark and deep, it spread again, secret prayers, The Lord works in mysterious ways, promises, bargains, deals, threats, oh if these walls could talk.

...and so Lord God we lift this man up that we might see the fruition of his healing in your time and glory. In His name we pray. Amen.

Beneath the day to day horror of battling the Big Casino a personal war of faith, grief and madness was being waged in hours of numb listless thought and the bleak desert of sleep fickle nights. We had to display our faith and shelter it, coddle it, keep it warm and alive. We had too say it aloud, say it again, and hope to high heaven we believed it. Debris from our war lay strewn about and strategically placed. Cards and Clusters of prescription bottles, inspirational messages smeared in lipstick, charity checks from strangers, heartbreakingly hopeful quotes and of course that defiant title above our front door House of Faith.
But it wasn't, not completely.

Dr. what's-his-name told dad to drink the whole two gallons before 9pm. Dad grimaced and tried for an earnest chuckle, saying it tasted like shit that someone had taken a shit on. The clear juice was some kind of groovy conductive fluid for his scheduled positron emission topography scan (PET). He would lie on a table and watch the monitor light up with his eager cancer like Times Square from orbit.

'God,' I began, unable to contain my mutiny a moment longer. 'If my father isn't healed I don't know what I will do. Please God, for he last time...' But even now I suspect I am talking to myself. The house was empty of movement and noises save for my own steady, labored breathing. Outside, pure July chirped and beamed. My thoughts raced out to God, crawling over each other, like hunger maddened swine; unstoppable, desperate and terrified. The afternoon sun illuminated the delicate dance of dust between the pine bows. I paced like an animal. I shouted curses, hoping to cull God out from under his rock. I expected to feel something of his presence, a shudder at my betrayal, but now more than ever there was nothing. My heart knocked in my ears.
Nothing. No regret, no pain, no wrath, no hope.
Then in a whimper the core expression of my helplessness;
pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease...

Faith shivered like a small animal trying to chew its leg free from an indifferent reality. And with one final scream, a scream that was all of me, that shook my everything, I cried out my last desperate prayer.
PLEASE!!!

Five years.
Siem Reap- Cambodia. Siem Reap is really a grimy grid with few lines of any importance, the primary of which leads to Angkor Wat, the UNESCO spectacle that attracts hundreds of thousands annually. The streets are a scuffle of dirty feet and ambitious mega hotels gleam and glower over drifts of plastic rubbish. This evening takes its sweet time in pinks and purples. Marching through the length of French Colonial park are towering trees, nearly black against the half light of dusk. The sunset gleamed on the outer crust of leaves but withered into shadow in the heart of the under story. Something sizable splattered on the ground in front of me. Then again beside me, speckling me with chunky opaque liquid. I looked up to see two-perhaps three thousand bats. Big bats. Another dose of guano came pouring down. As the sun sinks into the rice paddies the enormous bats, thrashed, chattered and yawned a hundred feet above me. I stood back at the corner where a bent old man was selling birds from frothing, feather frenzied cages. Families and luck seekers purchase malnourished finches, cup them in their hands, whisper a prayer and triumphantly toss the little bundle up to take wing to freedom. But the pathetic creature arched like any tossed stone and stared meekly from the ground. Luck of the draw. Some finches take wing and bring their emancipators prayer to heaven. Some die terrified in the hands of the hopeful. The man with the four stacked cages quickly shuffles over, retrieved the little bird from the sidewalk and stuffs it back into the cage with the rest.
Hundreds of bats whirled in manic circles shrieking at the still slumbering, shitting and throwing macabre phantoms against a graying sky and a handful of shy stars.
From the din of traffic behind me a sweet, fragrant finger drew itself across my awareness. A woman kneels on an island of swept concrete. Clasp in her upraised hands are three freshly lit incense sticks. The road has been laid down around a giant sagging tree, the traffic is a flicker of red and white on each side. Under the tree sits a weathered stone image of the Buddha. His contours are rounded and polished by rain and decades of loving caresses. Or chipped and eroded by the minor but mounting menaces of time. The woman with the incense prayed and wept while traffic flashed around her. Her shoes lay in the road. Headlights played in her hair and across her face. I watched as she poured out her spirit, smelling the lazy tendrils of her supplication. Something turned over in my chest. I wiped my balmy palms and waited for a break in traffic, not really knowing what I was doing or where and who I was. I was a creature following the deep resonation of a tone that we have heeded and have tried to tame and name ever after. My hands found my shoes and left them in the road. Headlamps played in my hair and across my face. My knees to the well tended cement, welcome but unyielding. And my eyes found the terrifyingly peaceful face of the Buddha, who was not the just the Buddha but a commitment to stone that fierce and often confounded exaltation of the spirit. He was chiseled from rock, just like me. But he rung with the reverberations of a million prayers, both answered and not. My naked, humble spirit startled me.
Five years.
Again I was on my knees, again at some unnamable precipice. The woman I had watched in devotion placed a cold, brittle hand on my shoulder and handed me three burning joss sticks. I held them as I had watched her hold them, between flattened, joined palms, against my forehead. Words, resistance, ideas and forms gathered briefly at my waiting lips and then drained into the road, leaving me empty and weightless. A tear broke free and rolled smoothly down my cheek.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you
Like coming home, like everything good. Like the pleasure only a naked, grateful heart can know.
Thank you.