Fireflies - By David Morrell Page 0,3

created (without ever mentioning the name of the character), he’d struggled to neither waver nor faint at the funeral, while he glanced dizzily toward the urn containing the ashes of his son—and the picture of his robust son in his prime.

4

“I’m a storyteller,” he’d read at ten in the morning on Tuesday, June 30, 1987. “It’s all I basically know how to do. For the first time in my life, I hate to do it, though. Nonetheless I’m going to tell you a story.

“Sometimes life kicks you in the teeth with an irony that a self-respecting fiction writer would be ashamed to invent.

“So it was that last November I began a new novel with a scene in which the main character seeks peace in a Zen Buddhist monastery in Bangkok where he meditates upon the four truths of Buddha.

“Life is suffering.

“That is the first of the Buddha’s truths. It was also my first sentence.

“Life is suffering.

“As I finished typing those words at three-forty-five on a beautiful Thursday afternoon in autumn, I turned to glance out my study window and frowned at the sight of my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, staggering across our front lawn. He was doubled over, his left hand pressed against his right chest. I rushed to meet him as he stumbled into the house.

“ ‘I can’t breathe,’ he said. ‘The pain. There’s something wrong with my chest.’

“No doubt I broke several traffic laws, speeding to our family doctor. Really, I don’t remember. A lengthy exam made it seem that Matt had pleurisy, an inflammation of the lining of the lung. Antibiotics were prescribed. The pain went away.

“But as the Buddha says, life is suffering. During Christmas vacation, the pain came back, not in his chest this time but in his back. An X ray revealed that Matt had a tumor the size of two fists.

“And so the horror began.

“Matt had bone cancer, specifically a type known as Ewing’s sarcoma. We hadn’t detected it sooner because Ewing’s is sneaky. The pain comes and goes. Often it isn’t at the site of the tumor but rather at various other sites responding to presssure from the tumor. For a brief time, the explanation for the pain seemed to be that Matt had hunched over too long in marathon guitar-practice sessions.

“Ewing’s is an uncommon form of cancer, but when it develops, it’s usually in an arm or a leg. In this case, the uncommon cancer had chosen an uncommon spot, the underside of Matt’s right sixth rib. Even so, Ewing’s had been known to respond to chemotherapy. His chances of surviving were judged to be eighty percent.

“In January, he rapidly learned to familiarize himself with the names of arcane-sounding drugs. Vincristine. Methotrexate. Adriamycin.

“Cytoxan. The last part of that chemical’s name—not its spelling but the way it’s pronounced—says everything. Toxin. These substances were poisons intended to kill the tumor, but unavoidably they hurt healthy tissue as well.

“By early February, Matt’s long curly hair, grown in imitation of his rock music heroes, had begun to fall out in huge disturbing clumps that littered his bed and clogged the drain when he took his morning shower. It’s a measure of Matt’s spirit that he decided to cut this ugly process short by having a party in which his friends ceremonially shaved him bald. Some of them still have his locks. His eyebrows and eyelashes were less easy to deal with. He let them fall out on their own. He never tried to disguise his hairless condition. No wig for him. He displayed his baldness boldly for all the world to see and sometimes stare at and on occasion ridicule.

“It’s a further measure of Matt’s spirit that the weakness, disorientation, and vomiting produced by his medications never slackened his determination to persist at school. A straight A student soon was making grades that a few months before would have embarrassed him.

“But he hung in there.

“Chemotherapy was infused through an intravenous line, a tube surgically implanted beneath the skin of his left chest. You couldn’t see it. But you could feel it. And for sure, every day, Matt was terribly aware the tube was present. The chemicals didn’t take long to be administered, an hour for each, but their damaging side effects to the bladder required a prolonged irrigation of saline solution to flush the chemicals from his system. Thus the beginning stages of Matt’s treatment forced him to stay in the hospital for three days every three weeks and to recuperate at home for another three