“You haven’t examined it,” I said. “You haven’t taken blood. You haven’t run any scans…”
“Mr. Magnet, I can stick needles in Kablankey all day if you like. I can even give it a CT scan if you like, but…Look, I don’t mean to be offensive when I say this, but the first thing I noticed when I came into the room was the smell of…you. Of your clothing. Which—you smell like smoke. You’re a smoker, correct? You smoke indoors, near the cure?”
“I do, but…”
“Curios, I don’t know if you know about their respiratory system, but they process the air they breathe more…deeply. They have hollow bones, just like a bird’s, you see, and the air they inhale, it circulates through their bones, Mr. Magnet. All of their bones. That includes their skull. They inhale,” he said, inhaling deeply, “and the air fills their bones, and then they don’t so much exhale as inhale again, at which point the air in their bones is pushed out. So the carcinogens, you see, they…linger longer, and they pass unobstructed through more of the body than they would in the body of, well, just about any other creature. Eight years of regular exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke—even just a couple or three years of exposure…”
“The manual doesn’t even mention cancer,” I said.
“No,” he said. “No, it doesn’t. And very few Curios live long enough to get cancer, so you’ve probably never heard of such a thing, but cancer—any creature with a heart can develop cancer. Nearly any living thing can. Plants can develop cancer, Mr. Magnet. And I do understand how you might feel tricked or confused, here. You’re very close with Kablankey—”
“I’m not a child,” I told him. “I’m not a crazy person. Cut the delicate manager voice. I’m telling you I want my cure examined properly, and if it has cancer, I want you to operate on it.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. One step at a time. Let me walk you through your options. Bloodwork I can do, but it’ll take days til we get results back. Maybe in that time you’ll have—”
“What about scans?”
“If you really want me to run a CT scan, I can do that as well, of course, and the results are immediate—I just have to interpret the pictures we get—but it’s very expensive, it’s nine hundred dollars, and we’d have to inject Kablankey with a dye, which, even sedated…it’s not pleasant. For the cure. Drawing blood’s just a prick, and we catch the drops on a slide, and that’s very bad, they hate that, all animals hate it, but cures…And the dye injection is worse. Lasts. So you have the option to put your cure through all that pain and fear and suffering only to find out that what I’ve already told you is true, that it has cancer, you do—you have that option. But then what happens? Nothing. Nothing is what happens. Even if the cancer is far less advanced, and far more localized than everything my education would lead me to believe, which, I admit, is a very, very slim possibility—it might, for example, just have cancer inside its head—there is no treatment or operation that is at all likely to save Kablankey. Furthermore, I have never performed surgery on a cure, and have never heard of a veterinarian who has. As I said earlier, I don’t know of a single vet in this county or any of those adjacent who’s ever even treated a Curio.”
I asked him how soon he could do the scan, and whether Blank could wear the mask inside the machine.
“Now” and “If you still feel that’s a necessity” were his answers. “But,” he said, “it’s clear to me that my bedside manner has rubbed you wrong, so before I go ahead and set anything up, I’m going to leave this room, and give you some time to cool down and reconsider. I really hope you will. Take all the time you need.”
“Fuck you,” I thought, and just then I heard a tiny, off-key trumpeting. I looked down at Blank. It eyebrow-flexed and held out its mask. It had blown its nose into its mask. It had taken its mask off and blown its nose. There was green on the white part—blood on the white part—green blood, wet on the white of the mask, which was off Blank’s head, was in Blank’s hand, was being held high like the head of an enemy, the head of a monster Blank had slain for our pleasure, our glory, our entertainment. Eyebrow-flex eyebrow-flex.
“That discharge is green, alright,” Kleinstadt said. “And it is very opaque. That is cancer, Mr. Magnet. I hate to have to insist on such a sad fact, but I feel as though I must.”
I touched my own face, the skin of my face. My mask was in my other hand.
“How long has Blank—”
“A few minutes,” said Kleinstadt. “Ever since you took your luchador mask off. Right around the time you told me that you weren’t crazy. That you weren’t a child. It’s truly an adorable cure, Mr. Magnet. And you’re right—I’ve never seen one like it.”
He left the exam room.
All my anger went with him, which took me by surprise. No sooner had the door closed than I heard my grinding throat emit a sub-moronic choking sound, felt my eyes welling. I wiped at them, swallowed. Blank was in pain but as yet unafraid. Kleinstadt had said so, and it seemed I believed him. I had no good reason not to believe him. And though a part of me (obviously) wanted to cry—for Blank, in front of Blank, and perhaps toward the cause of “making my peace” or “saying my goodbyes”—I hadn’t cried in Blank’s presence in a great many years, and I feared that if I cried I would make Blank afraid, that it would suffer dread along with its meaningless pain, perhaps even connect the two, the dread and the pain, and thus grant the pain meaning, and so make the pain worse, which I understand, reader, might sound a little off to you, for people like to think they prefer their pain meaningful, readers in particular, especially those readers not currently in pain, but people are people, and people are mistaken, readers are mistaken, misguided by empathy, spun around, confused. They believe they’d like to be more like the characters they love, yet they love only those characters they’re already like; they love those characters only for being like them. And despite what they may think when they aren’t in pain, people always prefer their own pain to be meaningless; they prefer only others’ pain to be meaningful. They think they want machines that behave as though alive, but what they want are living beings that behave like machines.
I swallowed and inhaled, swallowed and exhaled. My muscles slackened. My tear ducts shut.
Blank wasn’t fooled, or was only partly fooled. In any case it didn’t painsing—didn’t fearsing. It had come across the counter to me, thrown aside the mask. It started humming the cancan, then stood on its hands, and upside-down cancanned for three or four measures before it lost balance and fell on its belly. When it got back up, it wiped at its brow, Allen-throat-cleared twice, eyebrow-flexed, and started to hum the cancan again. I wanted it to stop. I didn’t want it to dance more. It was too tired to dance more, too sick to dance more. I put out my hand and it boarded my palm and climbed up my arm, climbed past its sleeve, continuing to hum til it got to my shoulder. Once there, it awkwardly lay on its side, its neck sharply angled, head bent toward its body, and pushed its ear to my carotid, the pounding pulse within which slowed, and soon I saw I didn’t have to make any decisions except the decision not to make the cure suffer getting stuck full of needles, which decision, apparently, I’d already made—I’d made it in passing, it had made itself—and I lifted Kablankey off my shoulder and put it in its sleeve, but it didn’t want to be there, wouldn’t let me close the sleeve, blocked the zipper’s slider with a hand, and started climbing out, climbed up my arm again, onto my shoulder. “Anks,” it said softly.