Swim - Chapter One

OK, even though this is called Never Finish, that's not technically true. I did finish something once: my Master's thesis. It was a novella entitled Swim. Now I'm turning it into a novel and I'll be posting it as I go.

Swim si the story of Kerry Matthews, a college sophmore who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Facing the possibility of death will force Kerry to reevaluate his life, relationships, and his place in the world.

In Chapter One, Kerry is diagnosed and must tell his family, even as he begins to wonder what this will mean for his future, or if he'll even have one.







Kerry Matthews stood in his parents’ bathroom and stared into the mirror, hand hovering over his crotch, over the cancerous left testicle his doctor had found that afternoon.

It wasn’t the usual mirror – the near wall sized, monstrosity with the phony gold edging that his mother Tabby loved so much and the row of oversized round bulbs lining the top and both sides. Lights that Kerry was convinced had never – not once – cast anything but the most unflattering shadows of him on the marble sink top and the hardwood floor. No, that mirror lay against the far wall of the bathroom, temporarily replaced by a simple, square, function-over-form medicine chest. Tabby was in the midst of one of her every-five-years-or-so remodeling jags, and the bathroom walls and counters were to be the first victims.

In his youth, Kerry had convinced himself that Tabby had installed the mirror when she did – just after his twelfth birthday – on purpose. Just in time to give him an entire puberty filled with first-thing-in-the-morning-full-frontal shots of whatever gross and geeky growth his body had seemingly spurted out overnight. It was, he figured, something of a time saver for her; doing in only seconds what it would have taken her the better part of four or five minutes to do with words. He was convinced she’d found a way to curse the mirror, to turn all that gold, glass, and light into one giant reminder of everything she found wrong with him. A physical manifestation of her holy trinity of daily admonishments:

Pull your pants up, stop slouching, and, for God’s sake, brush your hair out of your face.

And, of course, that had always been followed by some under her breath mutterings. A few choice words about genetics, the apple not falling far from the tree, and it being severely bruised when it did. Despite everyone’s insistence that Kerry looked just like her, Tabby had spent most of her son’s life working under the assumption that every defective detail of Kerry’s existence could be traced back along a direct DNA line straight to her husband, Stephen, passed on through cells and chromosomes and the messier fluids and substances she chose not to mention, not out loud at least.

Kerry wondered how long it would take her to establish a connection between his father and the cancer. He figured five minutes. Tops.

Kerry stared into the mirror, at a total loss for anything else to do. Right now, he was supposed to be washing up for dinner, making sure to put the hand towel back on the rack properly – folded neatly, fold facing to the right. Right now, it was Thursday, the next to last day of classes before Spring Break. He was supposed to be heading back to the dorm, figuring out exactly what to pack for his week long visit back home. Wondering if he’d run into his ex-girlfriend from high school, maybe, finally, lose that damn virginity. Planning out the essay on World War II he had due a week from Monday in History. Outlining his article for the Intro to Journalism elective he’d added on at the last minute. His own obituary, set sixty years in the future.

He wasn’t supposed to be thinking about moving up that timeline.

It didn’t make any sense to him. He didn’t feel anything. No pain. No telltale signs of the murderous damage his cells were inflicting on each other. He’d gone to see Dr. Estabul for a cough and a standard physical. He didn’t feel any different and he couldn’t, even when he turned and used that giant slab of glass and faux gold leaning against the wall, see anything either.

He could, when he turned, see the differences in the an he was now, and the just-turned-twelve boy he’d been back then. The freshman fifteen were readily apparent around his middle. A sophomore sixteen was slowly starting to thicken into place, just starting to cross over the border of his belt, encroaching on the space the waistband of his jeans should have occupied. The hairline Tabby had spent years pushing back up, out of his eyes, was now heading that way of its own accord, seemingly bending to her psychic will.

It struck Kerry then, the irony of it all. Life was nothing but visible. The evidence of growing, of all the pains of life, were wrinkled onto faces, buried beneath flabbily-expanding waistlines, doubled over in creaking, weakening joints. Reflected back in crystal clear, Windexed to within an inch of its life high-definition glass. Death, it seemed though, was invisible. Made it easier for it to sneak up on you, to Pearl Harbor you days before Spring Break, when you were supposed to be worrying about that essay, faking your own obit, and wondering if you’d ever get laid.

To his credit, Kerry had handled it well so far. He’d taken the news from Estabul without showing even a moment’s fear, listened calmly to his instructions – go home, call your family, I’ll make an appointment for this afternoon with the Urologist. Take someone with you, Kerry. Your mother, father, someone. You’ll need some help with all this.

A fatherly hand on the shoulder as the doctor sat on the edge of his desk in front of Kerry. “I won’t lie to you, son,” Estabul had said. “This won’t be easy. But you can beat it. Thirty years ago, a man in your condition? He might not have made it. But now… look at Lance Armstrong.” The doctor had smiled down at him.

Kerry had smiled, weakly, in return, seriously doubting anybody would be sporting yellow bracelets in his honor as they watched him climb the mountainous stages of the Tour de France.

“I’m no Urologist,” Estabul had rolled on, “but I know you’ll lose the testicle, certainly. But that’s a small price to pay, right? Lose the testicle, save the life.” Another meant to be reassuring smile. “You see, Kerry, in an odd way, you’ve really lucked out here. If you’re going to get cancer, this is the one to get.” The hand had dropped from Kerry’s shoulder then, but one finger had lingered, pointing at the younger man’s crotch. “With cancer, it’s not always about where it ends up,” Estabul said. “A lot of it has to do with where it starts.”

Standing alone in his parents’ bathroom, Kerry’s eyes blinked in the mirror. He knew all about the importance of where things started.

He’d listened, as attentively as the slow numbness spreading throughout him would allow, as Estabul had rattled off the basics of cancer. He left the office with terms like seminomas, nonseminomas, and inguinal orchiectomy swimming in the soup his brain had become. And he’d driven, slower than usual but smoothly, to his parents’ house. Kerry had enough experience with bad news to know that this was the type of thing that needed to be shared. The entire drive, he could feel it, practically bursting through the skin of his arms and hands, lustfully craving the air, the openness, the chance to spread and infect everyone Kerry chose to tell. Once he’d gotten to the house, he’d let himself in, made the calls from the phone in his father’s study. He called Stephen first, mostly because he knew he would be met with exactly what he heard coming across the line: a staticy voice mailbox with his father’s name on it. He hung up without leaving a message. Somehow this didn’t seem like voice mail material.

The call to Tabby was his one weak moment, the only less than ‘handling things with grace and nobility’ three minutes he’d had since Estabul had given him the diagnosis.

“Mom? I’m at the house. You need to come home now.”

“Kerry? I’m at work,” Tabby had said, the words coming in strained, thin, clipped sounds, less than a minute into the conversation. “I can’t just leave.”

“You need to come home,” Kerry had repeated. It was the only words he could actually force his lips to form. His mouth was resisting, as if to actually let those other words – CANCER TUMOR DYING – would make them any truer than they already were.. Those were words to be shared only in hushed whispers over the dining room table, hands clutched together, tissues at the ready, not to be sent sizzling across town on Verizon wires.

“Kerry, just tell me what’s going on. I’m sure whatever it is, it can wait-”

“Doctor Estabul found a tumor,” Kerry snapped off. “There’s things we need to do, other doctors we need to see. He made appointments for this afternoon and…” He’d paused then , the ‘and’ hanging there, dangling open-ended on the line. And we need to find out how bad it is. And we need to know if I’ going to make it.

And we need to be prepared if I don’t.

“Just come home.” He’d hung up without getting a response.

When Tabby had come home twenty-five minutes later, Kerry’d been sitting in the basement, on the cold concrete floor. The carpets were pulled up in preparation for the remodel – Tabby still couldn’t decided between re-carpeting and adding hardwood to the basements as well – and Kerry had deposited himself in the spot where Stephen’s chair usually sat. He’d hooked up his old Super Nintendo he’d gotten the same year the mirror arrived, to the TV and was pinging away at a game of Tetris. He looked calm, collected, focused on the game, spinning and twisting the pieces into line after solid line, but he was adrift on that floor, and ocean of cold, grey concrete surrounding him, waiting for the waves to overtake him, to swamp him, the undertow to pull him down, the riptide to flush his lungs with water and fade it all to black.

But the waves never came. Somehow that had made the waiting worse.

And then he and Tabby had done those ‘things’ they needed to do, met with the Urologist, scheduled the Inguinal Orchiectomy (which, as it turned out, was the removal of the offending testicle) for the following Monday, had a CT scan and a chest X-Ray and blood drawn and countless other tests for things like tumor markers, vascular or lymphatic invasion, and epididymitis. Things that Kerry didn’t understand and didn’t want to. Scheduled an appointment with a Dr. Patterson, an oncologist, for the next day. Headed home to break the news to Stephen.

Kerry had called his roommate, Ellis, let him know he was crashing at the house for the night, and no, he wasn’t sure he’d be back before break, and yeah, have a good time in Cancun. And then it was ‘how will we tell the rest of the family?’ and ‘will the insurance cover this?’ and countless other practical, needed to be addressed but so unim-fucking-portant right then things that Kerry had excused himself and gone to the bathroom to wash up.

And to wonder if he could just stay there. Forever. Just him and the mirrors and that damn cancerous nut.

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