January 10, 2017

PodCastle 450: Bonsai

* Author : Shaenon K. Garrity

* Narrator : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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PodCastle 450: Bonsai is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG

Bonsai

by Shaenon K. Garrity

Uterine cancer, the doctor is saying, and the world ends. Stage Four. That means advanced. It means bad. Your arms and legs and throat go numb. All you can hear is his question, looping: when was your last exam? You can’t remember. Not that it matters now.

In cases like yours we require inpatient treatment. It may take anywhere from several months to. Static. To when? To forever. To death. You’ve never left the U.S. or finished Ulysses. You haven’t done enough of anything, really. You shove back the thoughts.

“Because the cancer is still localized,” the doctor is saying, “green therapy may be possible.”

You don’t remember packing for the hospital, but you must have, because there are the suitcases. You remember signing papers, a lot of papers. And the sickly-pink hospital smell. A nurse puts you in a wheelchair, ignoring your insistence that you can walk (you can hear the high-pitched whine in your voice, you’re already turning into a peevish invalid), and wheels you into an elevator.

At the top floor, the elevator doors open, and everything is different. It’s the smell. Like wet moss and freshly cut grass. Like your trip to the California redwoods when you were nine. Like a cedar chest. The corridors are the same bland medicinal colors as the rest of the hospital, with the same unconvincingly cheerful paintings of farmhouses and flowers, but the air smells alive.

Speeding past one room, you get a whiff of a different smell. It’s green, but not alive; it’s the smell of the damp pit where the neighbors tossed their lawnmower clippings when you were a kid. At the beginning of the summer, it smelled good back there, but then the grass piled up and rotted and the sticky smell of fermentation filled the August air. You turn to peer into the room, but you’ve already rolled on.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. You’ve seen survivors on talk shows, glowing with health, talking about it. Sometimes it never takes in the first place, and sometimes it takes but something goes wrong.

Don’t think about that. Think about the faces of the survivors. Their energy, the warm green blush still on their cheeks.

The nurse backs you into what must be your room. For a few seconds the sunlight blinds you. It’s hothouse warm in here, thanks to the skylights that open the entire ceiling to the sun. You see a bed, a table, railings to the tiny bathroom. No plants. In primetime dramas, these rooms are always full of plants. The nurse wheels a TV in.

Now you’re alone. Classical music plays over a speaker. You don’t know what kind, you don’t know anything about classical music. Violin and piano. There are no light switches on the walls. You read about that in one of the pamphlets the doctor loaded you up with. Non-natural light interferes somehow. A lot of things can interfere. It’s a delicate process.

A woman comes in. She’s very old and very small. It takes decades to master the technique, according to the pamphlets. Gently she removes your clothing, whisking your shirt over your head, unfastening your bra, pulling your socks off. The last thing she does is remove your earrings and drop them in a cup, plink plink. You lie on the bed and she runs her gloved fingers over you, pressing here and there with quick jabs.

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