the void
by Michael Nagle
Kirk Read, Genevieve weighs her options, analog collage, vintage papers and vinyl letters on 8.5x11 watercolor paper. Courtesy of the artist.
The void
Michael Nagle | OCT 2024 | Issue 38
The steroids force you awake. You are sick. You are vomiting with no warning. You are forced awake. It’s all darkness and black outside because it’s nighttime. You’re supposed to be asleep. Nighttime is when people sleep. You are forced awake into the night when other people are sleeping and you are awake and you are sick and you are vomiting and you are forced to experience it. You have taken so much psych damage that you can’t relate to healthy people anymore. You watch your mind make binaries of the sick and the healthy and something in you thinks the construction of binaries is dangerous but you also think that you really just can’t relate to healthy people anymore. You don’t get it when healthy people complain about their lives because they complain about so little. People complain when they get six hours of sleep when you get zero on the steroids. People complain when they have been sick for four days and you have been sick for eight months. You don’t get it. You try to tell people “I’m sick and I’m not sleeping and I’m not getting better” and it’s not so much that people don’t understand that bothers you, it’s that people don’t understand that they don’t understand. You’ve always felt alone in this life, you’re neurodivergent in a way that you’ve never understood, you’ve met about one person with a brain shaped like yours this lifetime, and he is your dead father.
*
At some point you realize it: in your imagination you see a recurring image of sticking a revolver in your mouth and shooting yourself dead through your brain.
At first you tried to share this widely among your close friends because it seemed like the healthy thing to do. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and all.
But your friends can’t hold it. It sends them spiraling into their own feelings. People do all kinds of confusing things — offer you permission to take your own life (as if it mattered), tell you about their partner’s mental health episodes (as if it mattered), all kinds of things that sound like they relate, but don’t.
You’re confused because you’re already in mortal danger. No one worries when you tell people your cells have the gun.
Eventually you learn to keep the image to yourself.
*
But then you’re in the Void and it’s all revolver, all the time.
The imagery doesn’t just intrude.
It colonizes.
*
You have exactly one Witness, and you call him one night when you are deep in the Void, and you can’t remember the call because all you could really do is whimper. You whimper for what must be three hours. You keep the Witness up until 3 am his time. He is honest with you when you ask if he is getting tired but you understand on a deep level that he is not bothered by the call. He is bothered by the situation, but he is not bothered by you. He knows you need the reassurance so he tells you whenever you need to hear it.
He says if he falls asleep you can just call him back.
You know he means it.
*
You’re in the Void, and you’re whimpering, and you make The Witness promise to remember that this is happening, that the psych damage is too much, that you would like to die, that the psych damage has gotten too hard, that you are splitting into two people like that TV show Severance, that you’re going to come out of the Void in three days, and you will stop being The Suffering One, and you will become The One Who Loves Life, the one who betrays you again and again, and you are past your breaking point because you are now in fact breaking into two disconnected people, and this you needs to stop, you don’t know what stop means, you have scoured for options, you are pretty sure stopping is going to kill you, kill both of you inhabiting the same diseased body, but also continuing like this is going to kill you, it’s all going to kill you, that’s just what your life has become, but The One Who Loves Life is suffocating you with a smile, telling everyone how poignant life is, listening to you like a parent pretending to hear their child, you’re trying to tell him as clearly as you can that you literally can not do this anymore, he actively listens at you with a face taut with the stretchmarks of performed care and then he drops you off at the abuse center again when the time rolls around again, because it’s what makes his life work, it’s what lets him keep living the life he loves so much, all you get is placation masquerading as presence, as if you hadn’t said a thing, and you, your inner suffering self, and you, your outer strategizing self, are no longer on the same team, the spectre of survival has cleaved you apart, and so you make the Witness promise that when you lose consciousness and change from The Suffering One to The One Who Loves Life, he will remember this plea for inner you: you don’t know what you need, but you know you need this to stop.
*
The Witness loves you. His voice is a gentle tendril of mercy.
“Maybe you’re ready to stop soon.”
He says it so softly. It’s like deer skin grazing your face.
This might be breaking his heart, but so is watching you suffer.
So he finds a way to intone his voice with nothing but compassion.
“Maybe you’re getting ready to be done.”
It scares you, his words. In this year of facing your mortality, the same lesson etches itself deeper and deeper, again and again into your soul, everytime as if it was the first time. Death is real. That’s the lesson. Every time it scares you. When the year began and your inner world was constant images of being hunted, by dispassionate killers wearing flannel toting shotguns, by wolves with a smile and a snarl, the breath steaming off their too-close face. And again now. Every time you get one step closer to dying, you have to relearn the lesson. Your denial of death is an infinite sprawl of numbness, splayed across every cubic inch of your gray matter. It’s denial all the way down.
The Witness is offering you love and mercy. “Aren’t you supposed to be encouraging me to fight?” some distant, faraway part of you thinks. Maybe The One Who Loves Life is roused across the vast neural chasm between the two of you. You don’t know whose thought it is.
The Void is turning itself into an endless world of medical menace. The overwhelming sense of annihilation is taking you apart. Your once intact self now has fault lines scribbled all over it.
You barely remember the three hour conversation with The Witness. All you know is that you couldn’t have held onto the cord of life without him.
*
Dearest Suffering One,
I want you to know that yes, I did hear you.
Yes, I did feel you.
And I am so sorry I couldn’t do more for you.
I am sorry I couldn’t protect you from the soulbreak of chemotherapy, I truly am.
I couldn’t see a better way forward for us. For you, for me, for all of us.
I know that what frustrated you was to feel so sick for “stability.” That this would have been different if the cancer was receding. “Stability,” an infinite spectre of impending doom that can only be staved with the worst of methods.
I am going to tell you a secret of our future: we will get a lucky break in a few months.
Your oncologist will agree to surgery for our main tumor. Both of us will be astonished as to how much better we feel without a tumor blocking our colon.
We’ll be able to live off of oxycodone afterwards.
I will, in a hail mary, email our oncologist frantically before the surgery, knowing we can’t go back to the chemo path we were on, and in a stunning turn of events, he will approve us for an HAI pump.
It will be a new form of chemotherapy on top of the old. We’ll lose our gallbladder. We’ll FaceTime in with the new surgeon — wife of the already-signed up colorectal cancer surgeon — because by the time the approval gets to her there is less than a week. There she is, not going through her hierarchy of scheduling admins and nurse practitioners. It’s just her, in scrubs, in a face mask, perhaps FaceTiming from the operating room, squeezing you in because she got forwarded the message overnight and knows we have to make the call now. You’ll ask her if this is what she would do in our shoes. She says it is. The conversation has no medical niceties, no ‘risk and rewards’ precautions. It is a clear connection in the typically anonymous medical institution. I decide we can trust her.
The surgery will be rough. I’ll feel naive for that. I will try to leave the hospital too soon, only to frantically realize our pain levels aren’t managed, and in extreme pain ignore our approved discharge for home and plant myself firm in the hospital for another unauthorized day. After four hospital nights, we’ll be released home, and then we’ll see drops of crimson all over our floor, misunderstanding them as spilt food, then as drops of urine, completely confused until the knowledge finally dawns that scars can burst open, a thing I never knew, and that is what is suddenly unfolding before us. It will be five days of constant discharge everywhere, daily laundry, cleaning out every local CVS for their supply of waterproof Tegaderm medical dressing. We will soak our bed through, along with the towels we need to sleep on night after night.
Surgery will be a living mess for two weeks.
But then one day the discharge stops.
And the need to take oxycodone stops.
The liver pump will be strange — more steroids and more sleeplessness — but it will make progress on the cancer that the old chemo couldn’t.
You’ll get to travel again, answering the question if you will ever see the Bay Area again in this life. You will.
Things will soften. We will get a break.
That break is not now, not from the place you are in right now. This message isn’t from your present. It’s from our future.
We will become cyborg, complete with vertical and abdominal scars, our first surgery in this life is a big one.
But we will find a new hope for life, both you and me.
The Void will always linger inside of us. We will find company in the stories of other cancer patients, in refugee stories. We will have understood a new shade of dark in the human experience.
But we will find a way to go on.
Somehow breathing.
Somehow breathing.
Somehow breathing.
Yours —
The One Who Loves Life
And Loves You
Michael Nagle is a queer, Sri Lankan-American writer living in his hometown of Los Angeles, where he’s undergoing treatment for metastatic colon cancer. He is deeply interested in writing as a vector for raw, messy, vulnerability that slips under our collective defenses and wakes us up to the more beautiful lives we know in our hearts is possible. And doing this with humor, joy, and wit. Portland, OR and Cambridge, MA both feel like second homes and if he had a choice he would take rebirth as a well-pampered cat.
Kirk Read is the author of How I Learned to Snap, which was an American Library Association Honor Book. He is active in the Northwest collage scene and his work was recently featured in Contemporary Collage Magazine. He is working on a novel and a book of essays about adventures in public health nursing. He lives in Portland, Oregon among cats, dahlias and whatever he and Ed drag home from the Goodwill Bins.