Chapter 29

Today has been a lazy day. Still, it has taken me until 3:15PM to get around to writing. I’ve made dinner, helped clean up, helped grandma with a letter to her friends and family, a letter updating everyone, telling everyone how she is doing, what the doctors told her, etc. She failed to mention the experimental procedure, though. She didn’t want to get everyone’s hopes up. I think more, if she put it in a letter, that would make it more concrete -- like she would have to go through with it. She’s afraid of the treatment, because it involves massive amounts of chemotherapy that is to be washed over the cancer, then drained off, then done over until it either stops the cancer or, better, shrinks it. The problem with this therapy, other than it being chemo, which alone scares mom, is that there is a very good chance it will kill her. Still, better some chance than none.

It’s been interesting seeing the changes grandma has had to make. To fight the cancer, she’s essentially become a vegetarian, because meat contains too many things that help feed the cancer or make it worse. So now she eats mostly fruits and vegetables. She’s also drinking an extremely expensive herbal tea called Essiac Tea, which is supposed to boost her immune system. So between her and being around my friend Tony who, I just learned, is now a vegetarian, I’ve all but become a vegetarian myself this week. When we got a pizza with Tony, we had to get a four-cheese pizza with nothing but mushrooms. It was so good, though, I’m glad we did. I’m sure we wouldn’t have chosen that particular kind of pizza otherwise.

I tried being a vegetarian once, when I was interested in someone who happened to be a vegetarian. She looked at me less than approvingly when she saw I was eating meat one time, so I decided not to eat meat around her any more. Eventually, I just stopped. I didn’t miss it too much, though I do love chicken. Fortunately, she was one of those vegetarians who will eat seafood, so I was saved there. I could probably give up red meat permanently again, but I’d have a hard time giving up chicken again, let alone seafood.

I can see Jackie as a vegetarian. Not a vegan or anything radical like that. I’d see her as doing it more for health reasons than for animal rights or anything like that. She is, after all, a biologist, and has no problem with animal testing or research. She’s too much of a humanitarian to think animals are more important than humans. And she’s rational enough to know that anything they find using animal testing can also be used to help animals too. Veterinary medicine has made as many advances because of animal testing as human medicine. Possibly more, for obvious reasons. Something that works on a dog or a cat will definitely work on a dog or a cat, but not necessarily on a human.

This is one of the reasons she broke up with Michel. He refused to become a vegetarian, or even come close. She had to make something extra for him. This made making meals more difficult, because it is easy to create a vegetarian meal, but not if you have to include meat with it. What do you make with spinach lasagna? If you make meat, you end up only making a few random vegetables, which can get old.

I would probably get along with Jackie much better than Michel. Still, I don’t want to get involved with someone like her. I suppose, since I am writing this, that I could make her an ideal match who won’t cheat on me -- but if I did, I wouldn’t be true to her as a character. Jackie has to exist as the person she is. Otherwise, I’m manipulating her character. She should be absent from my control as much as possible.

So I turned Jackie’s offer down. She looked disappointed, but quickly smiled when Michel returned. I asked Michel if he knew exactly where his novel was going.

“I have a pretty good idea,” he said, “but like with any writing project, I sometimes feel like I’ve run up against a barrier I can’t quite get across.”

“What you maybe need to do is meet your characters. Talk to them, see what they really want.”

“How do you propose I do that?” Michel asked.

“You could either do a mock interview, or you could come with me to the café, and we could meet them there.”

Jackie sat forward on the black vinyl couch, her feet set apart on the worn faded-red-pattered mock-Persian rug. “Are you some kind of nut?”

“No,” I said. “What’s wrong with suggesting Michel go meet his characters?”

“Because they’re his characters. They didn’t exist until he made them up.”

“Of course not,” I said. “But think about what you just said. ‘They didn’t exist until he made them up.’ Well, he has made them up, and now they do exist.”

“But they’re fictional!”

“As are your lives,” I said, then turned to Michel, who seemed confused, like he wanted to believe me, but felt he had to side with reason, represented by Jackie. “Michel, if you want to go, come on. This isn’t an objective world you’re living in. It’s very subjective. It is a rational world, but not one with a hint of objectivity.” I was, of course, talking about the one from which I am writing, which, I will admit, is not a truly objective world (the world is; the people, not so much), per se, but one which can best be understood through science. His can only be understood through art, and critical reason. But these were things I could not tell Michel as we sat by the light of his computer screen glowing pale in his living room. Jackie still looked like she could not believe what I was saying. How could she realize she existed only in Foucault’s “non-place of language?” And the people I proposed Michel come with me to meet were even more so, being creations of a character created by me. Plato would have been appalled.