Chapter 6 — What the Doctors Said

— Daniel —The first thing Dr. Harmon said, after the scans, after the tests, after the second opinion and the third, was: I'm so sorry, Daniel.The second thing she said was Glioblastoma, Grade IV, and then a number of other words that he heard but that didn't seem to belong to the same conversation he was currently having with his own life.He sat in the chair across from her desk and looked at a framed photograph on the wall — a mountain, somewhere with snow — and thought it was a strange thing to have in a room where you delivered this kind of news. Like the mountain was supposed to comfort you. Like altitude was the answer."Aggressive treatment," Dr. Harmon was saying. "Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy. It won't cure it, but it can—""How long," he said. "Without treatment."She looked at him. "That's not a road I'd recommend.""How long." He kept his voice even.She was quiet for a long moment. "Six to nine months. Possibly twelve. With treatment, potentially—""I heard you."He sat with it. The mountain on the wall looked back at him. Outside in the hallway, someone was laughing at something."I'm going to need a few days," he said."Of course. Take as much—""Not to decide. Just to—" He stopped. There wasn't a word for what he needed. "Just. A few days."* * *He drove to the coast that evening and sat on a beach until the sun went down.He thought about his parents. About Caroline, who called every Sunday and who would fall apart in the particular quiet way that people who never fall apart fall apart. He thought about calling her and couldn't figure out which words would work.He thought about his work. Seventy-three photographs, out of seventy-three thousand. He thought about the old man in Lisbon and his dog and the bakery and twenty years of sitting on that same step.He thought: I have been moving my whole adult life. I have been looking for something through a lens and not finding it. I have been careful not to stay anywhere long enough to have to leave.And then he thought: I am thirty years old and I have six to nine months and I am sitting on a beach alone.He decided, that night, that he would not do treatment. Not because he wasn't afraid — he was, in a way that sat in his chest like a stone — but because the treatment would buy him months at the cost of living them inside hospitals, and he had spent his whole life in transit, and he would rather be in motion than in a ward.He decided he would tell no one. Not his parents — they would insist on treatment, would hover, would make his dying into a project. Not Caroline — she would do the same. He would manage the information the way he managed everything: quietly, on his own terms.He would find a city. A new one. He would live in it for as long as he had. He would take photographs. He would be present for once in his life, in a single place, paying attention.He moved to this city eight weeks later.* * *He had not planned on Birch & Brew. He had not planned on Tuesdays. He had not planned on a woman in a cardigan who nearly knocked his coffee out of his hand and apologised with an embarrassed sincerity that made something in his chest ache.He had not planned on Maya Collins.He tells himself, on the nights when he lies awake cataloguing his symptoms — the headaches, the occasional blurred vision, the exhaustion that comes in waves — that he will stop seeing her. That every Tuesday is the last Tuesday.And then Tuesday comes, and there she is, and she says something too honest and too real, and she holds the red umbrella against a clear sky out of habit, and he thinks: one more week.One more week.He knows, with the part of him that is still rational, that this is not kindness. That he is borrowing time that isn't his, spending it on someone who doesn't know what she's signing up for.But he cannot make himself stop. He sits in the coffee shop and she laughs at something and the stone in his chest loosens slightly and he thinks: this. This is what I came here for. This is what I've been trying to photograph for years.He has not told her. He doesn't know how to.He doesn't know if he ever will.