tomorrow is our permanent address

The notion of cancer as an affliction that belongs paradigmatically to the twentieth century is reminiscent, as Susan Sontag argued so powerfully in her book Illness as Metaphor, of another disease once considered emblematic of another era: tuberculosis in the nineteenth century. Both diseases, as Sontag pointedly noted, were similarly “obscene—in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.” Both drain vitality; both stretch out the encounter with death; in both cases, dying, even more than death, defines the illness.

But despite such parallels, tuberculosis belongs to another century. TB (or consumption) was Victorian romanticism brought to its pathological extreme—febrile, unrelenting, breathless, and obsessive. It was a disease of poets: John Keats involuting silently toward death in a small room overlooking the Spanish Steps in Rome, or Byron, an obsessive romantic, who fantasized about dying of the disease to impress his mistresses. “Death and disease are often beautiful, like . . . the hectic glow of consumption,” Thoreau wrote in 1852. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, this “hectic glow” releases a feverish creative force in its victims—a clarifying, edifying, cathartic force that, too, appears to be charged with the essence of its era.

Cancer, in contrast, is riddled with more contemporary images. The cancer cell is a desperate individualist, “in every possible sense, a nonconformist,” as the surgeon-writer Sherwin Nuland wrote. The word metastasis, used to describe the migration of cancer from one site to another, is a curious mix of meta and stasis—“beyond stillness” in Latin—an unmoored, partially unstable state that captures the peculiar instability of modernity. If consumption once killed its victims by pathological evisceration (the tuberculosis bacillus gradually hollows out the lung), then cancer asphyxiates us by filling bodies with too many cells; it is consumption in its alternate meaning—the pathology of excess. Cancer is an expansionist disease; it invades through tissues, sets up colonies in hostile landscapes, seeking “sanctuary” in one organ and then immigrating to another. It lives desperately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively—at times, as if teaching us how to survive. To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are.

This image—of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary contemporary doppelgänger—is so haunting because it is at least partly true. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism.

guede_mazaka

By his tenth birthday, Clint's hands are more callous than finger. He's the best shot anyone has ever seen, and the best banjo player in the state. Two roads diverge on an Iowa highway overpass, and Clint, being a stubborn little fuck, takes both.

He actually kind of liked Star Spangled Man, back when he was doing recruitment performances, but of course it was always a little embarrassing too. He's sort of grateful nobody's dug that one up and tried to do some kind of mix with it, because sometimes when DJs see him at a club they'll do a riff on the Star Spangled Banner (though in Steve's humble opinion nobody will ever top Jimi Hendrix's cover).

At any rate, this one night he's out at a bar where a woman is doing an unplugged set, just her and a guitar, which should be kind of hokey but she's really good. For her last song she says, "My grandfather had this song on a record, and he used to play it for me as a kid," and then she opens with something that sounds awfully familiar.

Steve stares at her, because that's the song. Who's strong and brave, here to save the American Way?

But it's slow, and sad, and not all the lyrics are the same -- because the song was about him but more about this mythical hero who would do it all, and --

She's left out the line. The song was always just a lot of questions about who will fight for America or save America or give his all in battle, but in the original, there was an answer: The Star Spangled Man.

And she's left the answer out. So it's not an anthem to raise money for a war or get enlistment numbers up. It's a cry out for help. Who'll rise and fall, give their all for America?

(She's left out a lot of other stuff too, about the goose-stepping goons and the Krauts and all that guff, which is just as well.)

"Don't you think they've got a point, though?" Dustin asks. His voice is carefully casual but when Mark glances up at him his expression is nothing but. "Don't you think you're getting a bit… overwhelmed?"

Mark blinks. "Excuse me?"

"You're running yourself ragged, Mark, me and Chris both think so-"

"It's Chris and I," says Mark.

"What?"

"It's 'Chris and I both think so', not me and Chris," Mark tells him. "And thank you, but I think I've got this under control." 

Dustin doesn't pursue the matter, but out of the corner of his eye Mark can see Dustin still looking at him long after Mark has turned back to his code. On some level Dustin has a point, but it's not something that Mark can let himself concede. It boils down to one thing – to Yinsen in his last moments, face preternaturally peaceful, reaching for Mark and saying, don't waste your life. And Eduardo, Eduardo saying, I didn't sleep, Mark, perpetually under fire from all sides without a modicum of the respect that Mark and Iron Man have enjoyed.

There are stakes here that Mark himself is only beginning to realise the magnitude of. And his response – his only possible response – must be to press on.