A Word for This
by Maria McLeod 

When I’m shown the Elekta, a machine that will shoot photon rays at me Mondays through Fridays for a month straight, I want not to cry. A radiology tech named Jay shows me how I will position myself, face up, on the “bed,” arms held over my head, in a customized cradle for my upper body. I can’t help but think of a dog, lying supine, legs spread, in the I-give-it-up-to-you pose. He points to the shelves next to him lined with blue molds, the “cradles,” for all those women, mostly women, arriving to be radiated.

 

I’m ten weeks healed from surgery, the scars in my right breast still red, slightly puckered, cancer forever evident. The Elekta features a giant arm projecting out from a rotating disk, able to pivot around my body, to project beams of ionizing radiation from any angle, a form of concentrated light forced through a narrow passage and diced into segments, pulsing at me rapid fire, energy designed to penetrate my flesh and undo my DNA, thread by thread, dividing the chromosomes of a helix gone haywire, halting the accelerated division of lurking cancerous cells, my healthy cells caught in the crossfire.

 

Above me, embedded in the ceiling, is a lit triptych of palm trees. I think of the advice given to young women of a bygone era on the verge of losing their virginity, Close your eyes and think of England. In this case, I will close my eyes and think of a beach in Mexico where I finally came to rest after having survived a death-defying bus ride through the Sierra Madres from Oaxaca to the Yucatan. Something had gone wrong with the bus’s undercarriage unbeknownst to driver and passengers. Except for me. I knew. I had smelled the brake fluid, a scent I recognized because the old Ford I’d driven back in college had a leak. I always had a flask of brake fluid handy to refill the reservoir when it dipped below the full line. I asked my boyfriend, “What’s Spanish for brakes, ‘fresas?’” He shook his head, “Nope, that’s strawberries,” but he didn’t know the answer either. I wanted to alert the driver, but my Spanish was so poor and my translating dictionary was with my luggage under the bus where a fire was soon to begin near the tire under my seat.

 

I stare at the enormous Elekta, listening to Jay tell me about what’s coming and how my breast will be burned in the process, the skin of one half my chest darkened, like a tan that never fades, and, after a time, my breast will shrink and, finally, grow firm. This is when my eyes well up and spill over. All I can think is I don’t know a good word for this. Instead, I say, “sorry, sorry” and pinch the bridge of my nose and wait for the tears to stop. Jay hands me a tissue and a bottle of water and tells me I don’t need to apologize. He gives me a moment. My husband, the boyfriend I married two years after traveling together in Mexico, puts an arm around me.

 

The word for brakes, it comes to me now, is “frenos.” It strikes me odd, my ability to so easily recall what, all those years ago, I was desperate to make surface. Every once in a while I’d peer out the bus window to see those who’d fallen before us, the wrecks of cars and buses having veered over the edge. We made it down the mountain side, but when the bus came to a halt, dazed passengers disembarked to witness the driver’s scramble to put out the fire. “Fuego debajo, fuego debajo,” he cried, seizing a fire extinguisher. The brakes, having worn through, had caused such friction, such heat, the wheel had caught on fire. I don’t know if I could have stopped what was coming. We could have died on the ride; we could have easily careened off the road as we cut across the switchbacks, but we didn’t.

 

After the fire was put out and the brakes were repaired and the wheel replaced, we were invited back on the bus to reach our final destination. At first, I refused to re-board. The bus seemed cursed. The trip seemed cursed. My boyfriend, now husband, told me there wasn’t a choice; there wasn’t another bus coming. The brake fluid had leaked out; somewhere along the mountain road, there was a stream of it, I imagined, marking our path. I could not stop what was coming. And now my breast would burn, my healthy lung would be exposed, my radiated ribs could become fragile and fracture. Years from now, my treatment could birth another cancer, a host of potential, awful side effects. I could not apply the brakes. I couldn’t stop what was coming, not when it was already here.