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Excerpt from mail sent 1998:
I wasn't rock-steady Monday morning--I was perhaps still worrying about impending layoffs. And I'd just seen that movie about a school bus disastrously skidding off an icy road. So when I heard about David Loftesness and Veronica Boutelle getting into a car accident as they were driving back from Lake Tahoe the night before, I was shaken up. Dave and V. were okay, but Jimmy didn't mention that early on as he was telling me about it. Not early enough to keep me from getting rattled. Monday afternoon, I went for a walk, and felt better. Later that day, I saw Dave, and he looked so tired; suddenly, I felt brittle. What if he'd been going a little faster, relative to that semi?
So by Monday evening, my mood was strained. When the phone rang, I let it ring. I was sitting on the floor, staring at nothing in particular. I was worn out. My answering machine picked up. At the sound of the tone, I heard Piaw leaving a message: Danielle Berry was going to be in town.
Ms. Berry is, of course, the designer of M.U.L.E., one of the bestest classic computer games ever. I had met her once--she's a game design honcho over at MPath, where Piaw works; I was introduced to her as I stopped by MPath's offices on my way to the Channel Islands to go sailing. A few months ago, she was diagnosed as having lung cancer; with a good chance of it being lethal.
So I wasn't so surprised when Piaw told my answering machine that Danielle was going to be at UCSF getting some tumors taken out of her brain. He was going to visit her on Wednesday night. Did I want to go with him? "No, please," I thought. This was a "No, please" in a speech balloon. This was the "No, please" as said by Cerebus the cartoon Aardvark when, after pulling an all-nighter of research, finds out that his enemies have outflanked him and he's looking forward to a hellishly difficult day. I was wrung out. There was nothing left. Why didn't the world ease off for a while? I looked down. My hand was clutching the towel I'd draped over my shoulders. My knuckles were white.
I didn't pick up the phone. I went to bed. Before I could talk to anyone, I needed to get some sleep. The radio wasn't helping. The DJ Toby, normally my ally against adversity, was playing with my head. She played a blues song about a lady leaving the singer alone. I worried about Danielle. Another song about a woman leaving. I worried. With the next song, I knew for sure that Toby was out to get me: I recognized the first few notes of "Sick Girl." I sat up. It wasn't until the song made it into the chorus that I remembered that the name of the song was really "Sick Boy," the Social Distortion standard. I lay back down. Toby wasn't out to get me. I guess I finally fell asleep a few hours later.
Tuesday, I talked briefly to Piaw on the phone. I'd go with him to see Danielle if he figured it was appropriate. He was terse, seemed grumpy. We arranged a time. Tuesday night was my Japanese class. My Japanese teacher, finding out that I lived in her neighborhood, offered me a ride home. Over the course of the ride, I got something of a private tutoring session. By the time I got home, my head was starting to buzz with various Japanese expressions I could no longer remember the meaning of. What was "higashi"? What was "kaze o hiku"? Why couldn't I stop thinking about them? I lay awake, my head twitching from side to side. I wrapped myself up, mummy-like, in my quilts--the restraints and the heat combined to make the twitching drift away into overheated sleepiness. This only took a few hours.
Wednesday evening, Piaw and I went to visit Danielle Berry in the UCSF hospital. I hadn't really known what to expect; I hadn't asked Piaw if he knew; instead I had put my efforts into imagining the 15 million worst possible cases. None of these turned out to be true. Danielle was alive, was reasonably cheery, wasn't obviously in pain, had no open head wounds. Two of Danielle's friends were already there--Brian Moriarty and Eric. Danielle threw Piaw a questioning glance when she saw me. I didn't blame her a bit. Post-surgery isn't the best condition for making a good impression on a new person.
There was a calendar on the wall, one of those with one page per day. Someone had written, in ball-point pen, a message for this day: "Feast day of our LADY of LOURDES". I stared at this for a while, my mind spinning. It seemed only fair that if I tore this page off of the calendar, we could jump ahead to the next day and I could skip the next few hours. I sat down, listened to these friends talk and joke amongst themselves; eventually I calmed down a bit. When Brian and Eric took off, I helped Piaw to fill in the time with idle chatter; I suppose that's why he wanted me along. By this time, Danielle and I had exchanged looks: "What are you doing here?" "Hell if I know, lady." She had relaxed a bit after that; I relaxed as she did.
There was conversation. Susan, another friend of Danielle's, visited. I didn't say much, but I'd calmed down. I learned a few things about Gamma Knives, computer games, and Danielle's children. I got independent confirmation of the sad lot of programmers in Little Rock, Arkansas. Eventually, I joined in the conversation. I even had a good time, not getting too distracted by the oozing holes in Danielle's head where the screws had butted up against her skull to keep her head still during her procedure.
I don't really remember much of the conversation, as most of it was about people I didn't know. At one point, it came out that I worked on cellular phone software. Maybe people were asking me about myself, trying to figure out what I was doing there. Someone asked what I used a celphone for. I said, "Are you kidding? I wouldn't use one of those things. They give you brain cancer!"
Then I remembered I was in a cancer sufferer's hospital room. Fortunately, she laughed, putting me back at ease. That was pretty classy.
[Danielle died a few months after I wrote this.]