Helsinki White

2

On Thursday morning, I had the biopsy. Jari used his superpowers as a highly respected neurologist and had the test results ramrodded through. I got an appointment with the surgeon who would remove my tumor the very next day. He was going to tell me whether I would live or die.

I insisted that Kate come with me and listen while the surgeon gave me the prognosis. I wanted her to have no doubts that, if the news was bad, I hadn’t soft-pedaled it to spare her. It was January twenty-eighth, a bitter minus eighteen outside. The city sheathed in ice, snow banked up high by plows along every roadway.

I found, to my surprise, that I was calm. The possibility of death didn’t frighten me as I thought it might. However, Kate’s nerves were a shambles. She shook, could barely speak. Waiting outside the surgeon’s office, she gripped the arms of the chair so hard that her knuckles turned bloodless white.

The surgeon was businesslike. The news was good. I had a meningioma, about three by four centimeters, in my frontal lobe. He embellished on what Jari had told me about meningiomas.

It might have been growing there for as long as fifteen years. It had probably been affecting my memory, concentration, cognition, and possibly my behavior all this time, without me noticing because it happened so slowly, and of course, I had nothing to compare it to. As brain tumors go, he said, I was lucky. I had an outstanding chance of survival, and a very good chance of going on to lead a normal life afterward. As Jari said, there would be no follow-up treatments. He would cut it out, and that would be it. I’d go back to my life as if it never happened. He asked about the frequency and duration of the headaches. I told him constant and described the severity. “You have an excellent headache,” he said, and smiled. His idea of a joke.

Then he moved on to unpleasantries.

After surgery, I might feel worse than I did then, but only for a short time. The intrusion would cause my brain to swell. I might possibly suffer dizziness, lack of coordination and motor difficulties, confusion, seizures, difficulty speaking, personality changes that could be quite severe, behavior that might baffle and even shock others. I might require therapy, but these effects should lessen over a time period he couldn’t predict. Could be days, could be months. If an effect lasted more than a year, though, I could assume it was permanent.

“On the other hand,” he said, “in two weeks it might be like this never happened at all. Any questions?”

Neither Kate nor I could think of any. The fear in Kate’s eyes, though, told me she had a question, but he couldn’t answer it. Would I really live through the operation, and if I did, what would I be like afterward?

“OK, then,” he said, and opened his calendar. “How does Tuesday, February the ninth, work for you?”

“Just dandy,” I said.

Twelve days and counting until they opened up my skull. I wasn’t afraid until then. I had only thought about the possibility of dying. The surgeon’s suggestion that I might be permanently damaged, either physically or mentally or both, turned into an invalid, scared the shit out of me. I tried not to think about it, stayed zonked on tranquilizers and painkillers. I spent a lot of time lying on the couch, listened to music, watched movies, read, kept Anu tucked under my arm. My thumb was her favorite toy.

Kate tried to be brave. She would have waited on me hand and foot if I let her. She made my favorite foods, came home one day with muikun mati-roe from whitefish the size of my finger, that carries a price tag commensurate with the arduous work of cleaning the eggs out of those tiny fish, and to my mind better than beluga caviar-and a bottle of good Russian vodka to go with it, reindeer inner fillet for the main course, and we had a homemade cake for dessert.

There can be no normality in a home if a family member is gravely ill, but we did the best we could, and we managed moments of happiness, shared laughter, comfortable silences. As difficult as it is to have a newborn, Anu eased our burden. She kept us busy, kept our spirits up. I thought she looked like Kate. Kate thought she looked like me. I hoped, despite our dysfunctional relationship, that my parents would come to see their grandchild. Mom called to congratulate us. Dad didn’t even come to the phone.

Kate was unable to make love because of recent childbirth, but she used an American expression I was unfamiliar with: “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” I didn’t ask what it meant, and remain uncertain of the relationship between the skinning of cats and oral sex, but I drifted off to sleep every night sated. Often, during the night, I heard Kate weeping. And at other times as well. When she was cooking, vacuuming, at moments she thought I couldn’t hear her.

A few days before my surgery, Kate came home with a gift for me. A kitten. She’d gotten him at the animal shelter. I don’t know what inspired Kate to give him to me. I had a cat once before, named Katt-Swedish for “cat”-and kept him for several years until I came home one day and found him dead. He tried to eat a rubber band and choked to death. I was truly fond of Katt, and his death hurt me. I named this kitten Katt as well, in memoriam.

He fell in love with me at first pet, wouldn’t leave me alone for a second. He followed me to the bathroom and scratched at the door until I came out. When I sat or lay on the bed or couch, he climbed up, sat on my shoulder, kneaded his claws in my skin, and purred, used my neck and the side of my head for a scratching post. I let him. I looked like I’d been attacked and mauled by a pack of small but vicious animals. Anu loved him, too. The feel of his fur, tugging on its tail and ears. Katt took it all in good stride.

In that time before my surgery, Kate showered me in love, affection and kindness. Fear lurked behind it all. She radiated it. I wished I knew a way to calm her, to offer her some kind of re-assurance and quell her dread, but I didn’t.