PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

    The good thing about having to go to the Manukau Super Clinic, as far as Daniel Stowers was concerned, was that the McCafe lay at the halfway point on the trip from home, right where he had to change buses.  Espresso has a way of making everything OK, even a trip to the doctor.

    At least, that was what he liked to tell himself. It was mostly posturing. The truth was that nothing really made a trip to the doctor OK. Behind the mundane actions of showering, dressing, walking to the bus stop and counting out change to make the fare, there was that low-level worry, that indistinct concern, which gnawed away at his sense of peace; Under the stark routine he had plodded through that morning a subtle murmuring unease nestled into a dark, quiet corner to grow like mould. Another test, another vague result; a vain scrabbling for something that was going to explain away the persistent and disquieting symptoms that had been troubling him for years, leaving his overactive imagination to spin yarns that would leave The Lord Of The Rings in the shade for nuanced detail. No - as much as he hated to admit it, coffee had its limitations.

"Can I get two extra shots in that?" Daniel asked the McCafe barista. 'Melina' (according to her crooked name tag) arched an eyebrow and gave him a slightly chary glance, which was as much of a reply as one hoped for from retail staff in Manukau. He paid for the drink and then made his way across the cafe to the sliding doors at the far side, and through to one of the outside tables to enjoy something of the cool breeze. Tucked under his arm was the Herald, but only the front section - he had no interest in sport or business or (mercy!) fashion, and only wanted to make sure the world hadn't blown up since he'd last checked.

    He delivered his tray to the table, lay the paper beside it, and then let his backpack slip off his shoulder and placed it one of the spare chairs to the side. Before he sat down he had a quick rummage through his bag, fleetingly concerned that he'd left something necessary for the clinic visit at home. Appointment letter, check; current medications (all three of them), check; Altoids, check - all systems go.

    Unhurriedly stirring the sprinkled chocolate into his cappuccino, Daniel glanced over the front-page headlines leaving the larger part of his brain that had no interest in which politician got a free meal from who play around the edges of the matter of his health.

    His mind didn't exactly play fair at times like this. It behaved like the children on the McDonald's playground just over the fence from where he sat, going where it shouldn't and then refusing to come back when commanded to do so. His mind flung up a PowerPoint collage of people in his life who'd died, literally wasting away before his eyes with a disease that little by little chipped away at each of them until all there was left to do was bury a stranger. The culprit? The big 'C'. His grandmother, his Uncle Warren, his friends Carol and Peter; as far as he was concerned there was nothing scarier (in the way that monsters and lava and violent storms are scary to children) than cancer.

    Daniel sipped at his coffee and kept pretending to read. He turned a page, then another. He didn't know if he had cancer but he didn't know that he didn't, and with his luck, he just knew that there just had to be something nasty behind all his symptoms. Nana, Uncle Warren, Carol, Peter - why should I get away? he thought. The last few tests had come back clear, but what did that mean? His grandmother had complained for years that 'something wasn't quite right' and doctors assured her it was all in her head. Then one day they opened her up, realized the extent of her illness, stitched her back together and told her to say goodbye to her family. She'd lasted only months after that. Behind all their medical training, Daniel suspected, doctors played the guessing game as much as the rest of us. And that unnerved him.

    He tried to read an article that contained some new pictures from Mars. The pictures delighted and thrilled the boy in him. But in the background the worry began to escalate. It was like water coming to the boil - a simmering ripple that would give way to a steaming burble, and end up a violent percolation, spitting stinging beads that threatened to wound and scar.  Remember Nana's last few days? Remember Uncle Warren - how thin and gaunt he looked? Peter lost so much weight that his eyes bugged out and he looked like a character on the Simpsons. And you didn't even have the guts to visit Carol near the end. Some friend you turned out to be.

    Daniel cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. He took a mouthful of coffee. He turned a page. But the questions continued, the tack changing. What will it be like for you? Will it hurt, or will the drugs keep you drooling into your bib unawares? Who will be too afraid to visit you in the last few days?  And worse, Are you even ready to die?

  No - no he wasn't. And he knew it as he knew nothing else. He sighed, slumped his shoulders and gave up pretending to read the paper. The questions had stopped, but only to leave a deafening and defeating silence that underscored the reality that he had no answers. For a moment - he wasn't sure how long - he drifted away in a foggy vapor of uncertainty and angst; a heavy, cloying mist that made breathing an effort. It wasn't a desperate and panicky struggling for air that the mist brought on. It was more a tiredness, a sense of deep exhaustion. Breathing just didn't seem worth the effort.

    This was nothing new. And of course the mist wasn't real, not in the way that the coffee cup and the paper and the table were real. It was more like a wakeful dream that he knew would lack either a happy ending or a meaningful interpretation, a feeble existential crisis that he trusted, after all its promise, would fail to fire on all cylinders; there would be no startling revelation at the end of this fun ride. There never was. Sartre, had he been a ringside onlooker, would have shaken his head sadly and tutted in disappointment.

    Daniel eventually sailed out of the murky cloud that his eidetic dream had opened with but reality was still conspicuously absent. The pleasant outside cafe seating about him had faded away and what replaced it was probably in part inspired by the article on Mars; red, craggy walls of a yawning arroyo raced up toward a mockingly distant sky that would not be within reach to the ablest climber. With the light petering out so high up on the walls, a web like net of gloomy shadows thickened on its way down and became an unyielding pitch-blackness beneath him. If he wasn't at the bottom of the gorge, he wasn't far off. Maybe on a ragged outcrop a few feet from the dusty floor - it was too murky down there to see. A howling wind whipped choking red dust through the canyon, aptly finishing off the deep loneliness of the vision.

    Suddenly coming back to himself, he saw that the coffee was finished, and a glance at his phone informed him that he had just four minutes to get back to the bus stop. He stood up, shouldered his backpack, pocketed his cell phone, and left the cup and tray to be cleared by the 'friendly' staff. (Hell, at least he was doing his part to ensure they were gainfully employed.)

    Daniel hurried up to the bus stop, managing to jam an earphone bud in each ear as he went so that Elvis Costello could help keep his unruly mind on track (and out of the playground) for the rest of the journey. The first few bars cheered him a little.

    Music, after all, has a way of making everything seem OK, even a trip to the doctor.