Israel’s been sitting and naming his cancers, knowing them more intimately than he knows his own kinder, Hanna suspects. While he should be heading home, he reclines, swivels, tilts renal papillæ aching kidneyways to the left in his chair, hunches to count his cancers on his cancerous fingers with cancerous numbers kept orally in the black, deep into the carcinogenically latestage early evening, then thinking, maybe my cancers should have the honor themselves, their own cancers, too, and those cancers’ cancers, it’s only proper — and, soon enough, quarter after advanced, surgically halved, and with Maintenance spilling their own diagnoses in all the languages of Queens far dark down the hall, everything would seem cancer, cancerous, carcinogenic: his chair, his computer never unpacked, still in its box on the floor, and the quarky, panging computer things inside the computer still in its box on the floor, too, and his fountainpen and the dark though washable ink that it looks like cancer anyway, and the door’s a cancer door, his desk a cancer desk, he’s thinking the elemental material of the universe is cancer and that the fundamental quality of the universe is how cancerous it is: how the planets are nothing but tumors, mere carcinosarcomatic growths, verrucous hunks of whirlwinding storm, resistant to all terraformed, their surfaces ringed by heavy clouds of melanoma as malignant as hell; and how space, the orbital push and pull of everything it’s really only this cancerous tissue that’s always thickening and thinning into itself then perpetually expanding out then falling in cancerously until death and everything, it just dies. And then the cancers themselves come to death. And then death itself dies. And then what, he’s still late.
And still sitting, slumped, wasted, waistexhaled all unbuttoned notch expansion, slippers off without socks and in an even more comfortable chair at the head of the table, his, looking down the seats and settings at his kinder, his friends and guests, his new employee, the mensch’s girlfriend or wife unknown be thy name, and laughing at whatever his wife’s laughing lipstick at if only because she’s laughing at it and healthily, strong — the lipstick that says I’m still red and angry, but this is how I want to look to love you with company curious — Israel looks down at his plate and considers the chicken and he knows, don’t ask him how he just knows, that this chicken has cancer, that his chicken died of cancer and died for him from cancer, expressly, painlessly quick. He cuts his cancer with his cancerous cutlery (presents and the plates, too, and all of it from relatives who’d died how, give you one guess), then chews his cancer with his cancerous teeth, swallows his cancer, washes it all down with a glass of cancer from his cancerous glass, wipes his cancerous mouth with cancer metastasized as a napkin, its darkening starch, and then swallows again cancerously feeling the swallowed cancer, the throat cancer, mingle carcinogenically with the stomach cancer its gastric adenocarcinomatic manifesting intestinally and beyond, making for an even stronger, an even more weakening, more carcinogenic cancer cancering all and then turns more to the left, leaning, reclining as if appearing to rest but really in pain says to his Hanna: Hanna, it’s all so delicious and thank you, then across the table to his right and further down toward the kinder to the Feigenbaums there, Mister Feigenbaum now nursing with napkin and ice his head, the wound incurred through the oven, would he sue — him shifting uncomfortably in his seat with the urge to loose himself, sick — Misses Feigenbaum, whatever her name is, maybe Faye, he forgets, make sure she gives you the recipe: chicken, slaughtered and shipped, still feathered a little, frozen in the freezer, defrosted in the fridge, giblets removed for their own preparation (don’t forget to preheat), delicious offal reciped to a malignant perfection; motherchosen last day the seasons stained out of the book, made with prunes, raisins, all sorts of fruity sweetnesses — and cancerous, has to be, these secretions expressed from the bake of its carcass, whose last breast has been excised for the removal of its diseased bones from his plate to his wife’s, and how he sops the seep up with a hunk of the challah he’d bought, those two loaves as if the salted halves of the heart, the kidneys, the lungs, the gizzardy liver, how they all must be bad for you, too.
The drawer was opened and never shut and hung like her mouth.
A door hangs open on its hinges, Hanna shuts it, wipes clear its glass with a cuff.
The screenedin porch’s door’s open as well.
Everything open she needs to shut, she won’t stand for open, which makes her feel slightly ill, mistaken. It’s the pregnancy, her fat with a scapegoat. Let us grow bloated and blame.
