In Bed with Bobby

On walking each other home

I am in bed with Bobby, on the left side near the back wall. I am sitting up, and he is reclining on a pile of pillows of various shapes and sizes, the result of our attempts to approximate comfort. Everybody Loves Raymond is playing on the large TV mounted on the wall opposite the bed, though I’m not sure either of us is really watching. I’m holding my phone in my left hand, using my thumb to painstakingly text a man who is far too eager to be my boyfriend after only three weeks of dating, one of which I’ve spent here in Puerto Rico. The A/C is on, and I’m wearing the sweatshirt I brought for the plane ride even though the sun is bright and warm through the window by the bed. Outside it’s a normal day in Vieques. Honeymooners are on the beaches, expats are getting drunk in the bars on the boardwalk, locals are fishing and gardening and sitting on their porches. It feels almost like a luxury to lounge indoors watching shitty TV, smoking pot and staring at my phone for hours on end. I’d feel guilty for wasting the Caribbean weather, but I get a free pass because Bobby is dying.

Although he isn’t dying, just yet. Right now, he’s half-asleep, moaning softly every few breaths. I’m using my right hand to lightly scratch the top of his head, opening and closing my fingers like a jellyfish. His scalp is gossamer beneath my fingers and I worry I must be chafing it, but he complains any time I stop, so I keep going. My arm gets tired, but I keep going, dispensing this measly consolation to a man who has asked me for a miracle. He’s asked for other things, which I’ve done: I’ve rolled him about three dozen joints, set up some new channels on the TV, fixed the wifi and his phone. But today he’s asked if I can help him get better, and I haven’t done that and won’t be able to. He’s dying, we all know it, but I guess he’s holding out hope or just isn’t ready to talk about it like that.

When he had his first tumor removed five years ago, he liked to joke that that was how I came into the world, propagating from his abdomen like a lump of cancer cells. Doctors marveled at me, scientists wanted to study me, but I hopped off the operating table and skipped town before they had the chance. I prided myself on not being shocked by his gallows humor, though I wonder in retrospect if that particular joke was a step too close to the truth. We can’t have spent more than six months together, all told, so how is it that we came to this place, where our closeness is the punchline to a joke about his tumor? 

We met just as the first clusters of defective cells were beginning to form in his gut, lurking and multiplying in the dark where no one would see them for years. I came to Vieques on a college trip the year I turned 21. He was 55, born just two years before my father, but a little worse for wear after decades of fighting. He’d fought the U.S. Navy, and he lectured about the island’s history of expropriation and military violence when my professors brought us to meet him. He’d been fighting the bureaucrats responsible for the historical museum he managed and the colonial fort that housed it. And with all his heart, he was fighting still for the survival of the small radio station he ran from the fort’s ground floor, interviewing the community and broadcasting calypso classics all the way to San Tomás and Santa Cruz. 

He called himself a patriot on that sunny first day, the fresh sea air floating through the windows behind him and ruffling his long, gray-streaked hair, and he told us he considered it his duty as such to hold his government accountable for the acts it committed in his name. I was stunned, shaken awake by the revolutionary notion that I could love my country and thereby demand better of it, that patriotism was not reserved for the compliant. I had found a teacher, and as I stood on the sun-warmed brick of the fort wall, peering out across the sea at the faint mass of the main island ten miles away, I knew I’d be back. I turned my life upside down more than once to come back to him, and in time I understood that I turned his life, too. 

His wife, a woman from the main island, had come to Vieques, like him, to join the protests against the Navy. “We never had kids,” he told me, “we were committed to the struggle.” I didn’t meet her until my second trip down, and she didn’t start recognizing me until the third or fourth. Even then, she’d just call me la nena, “the little girl,” and although I knew she might be forgetting my name, I liked the one she’d chosen for me. She would snap at Bobby for correcting my poor Spanish grammar, which I throttled from my germanic tongue in an accent that, to her, must have sounded much like his. 

We both struggled to describe our connection to the people around us in terms that fit. We were closer than friends, we had more in common. It didn’t feel like visiting a friend, that walk up the steep driveway to his deck where he’d stand waiting for me, grinning in the sun with a lit joint while Peter Tosh blasted from the kitchen. It felt like coming home. I took to calling him my godfather when I mentioned him to acquaintances in the States, letting that be a shorthand for our closeness without all the context. More than once, he introduced me as his nieta postiza, his fake granddaughter, though he was hardly old enough to be a grandfather to me. Entiendo, a friend of his told me after one such introduction, la familia que la vida nos regala. The family that life gives us.

I came down whenever I could afford to, first with a grant for an undergraduate thesis, and later in the name of doctoral research, to visit the archive that was conveniently also housed in Bobby’s fort. He would float in and out of my workspace all day, babbling relentlessly at me in Spanish and English, never letting me work in peace, helping me delay the realization that I didn’t want a PhD. I pretended to be annoyed for a few years, until his diagnosis and the torment of chemotherapy forced me to acknowledge that someday he’d stop annoying me for good. From then on, I volleyed his impishness back to him, our rallies devolving until they became a shared language of our own, shot through with silliness and esoteric Seinfeld references. His wife had never met anyone who could keep up with him, she said, and I divulged that I was Jewish by way of explanation, though I knew it was deeper than that.

I’ve often felt like we were cut from the same tree, like I was some appendage of his that had detached in the bardo, fallen to Earth, and sprouted a generation later and four states away. I found my way back, his long lost playmate, his Super Girl, his Wonder Woman. I don’t feel like a hero now. I’m practically ignoring him, not that he’s giving me much to ignore. I’ve tried to be more present, to breathe in when he breathes out, transmuting his pain with my breath like the monks do. It didn’t work, though, so now I just stick with scratching his head.

Every so often he groans loudly with frustration, and it’s time to help him get up and rearrange the pillows, or retrieve his phone which has fallen between the bed and the side table, or make him warm saltwater to gargle. I hope it isn’t the saltwater, which he spits out into a plastic quart container he keeps calling “the spittoon.” The misnomer I find funny—I can’t imagine him chewing tobacco, he despises cigarettes—but rinsing the “spittoon” in the bathroom sink grosses me out so bad I gag. It’s the only thing so far that’s really gotten to me, out of all his bodily upsets, and I know it will only get worse. I remember from my grandmother’s death how preoccupied everyone was with her swallowing, how the decline of that one simple reflex in our throat heralds finality. The rest of us may have days or even weeks left, but once we can’t swallow anymore, it’s the end of the road. What awaits in that final contraction, when the portal that admits our communion with the world creaks to a close?

When Bobby settles back down, I can hardly get to my side of the bed before he’s asking me to please scratch his head again. He smiles at me sheepishly, like he knows he’s being a baby, but I’m grateful for this request, for this small thing I can actually give him. It feels pathetic in the face of everything, this expansion and contraction of my right hand against his metastasis. Every part of him feels fainter, like a dimmer switch is slowly and brutally going down on us. His hair has thinned into a feathery cloud, and it hovers around him like a dandelion seed head, like one strong gust will carry it out the window and into the world, where it will sprout into a thousand little Bobbys. Each one will run around talking the ears off anyone who crosses his path, grinning the maniacal grin of a man who takes nothing seriously and everything to heart.

I hadn’t expected him to be this far gone. We’d planned a visit, not a goodbye, but this is how it goes sometimes with cancer, I guess—years of vague, meandering menace and now this sudden drop into a place where the sickness is bigger than him somehow, like something inside of him has mutinied and there’s no going back. I knew when I walked in the door five days ago and saw him on the bed, a handsome skeleton after a lifetime of chubbiness. He eats soggy Cheerios and takes sips of watered-down Ensure, which he keeps reminding me is what they ate during the hunger strike he staged when he served time in a federal prison for his activism against the Navy. It’s hard to imagine him in a prison cell, and I wonder if he still visits that place in his nightmares.

Bobby’s wife has been calling him el nene, “the baby.” She’s puttering in the kitchen, making fresh juice with oranges and beets and carrots that she’ll bring in with a snack like we’re little kids on a playdate. He wants coffee, but he’s not allowed. She wants him to be comfortable, which is what I want, too, because I love him. It feels wrong that she has to do this, has to watch him hurt so much and make choices for him, and I almost make myself sick thinking about having to do the same for someone else one day. They’ve been in love for forty years, and this is happily ever after.

On the wood panel wall by the porch door is a large black and white portrait of them from the 80s, leaning into each other and looking softly up at the camera. Tucked into the frame, over the glass, is a smaller photo, this one in color, of them embracing in the dining room in front of a wall of framed protest art, their home a testament to their activism. I take a picture on my phone for safekeeping and poke around looking for more. Later, Bobby’s wife brings me a folder of old photos, and I go through them, making copies for myself: Bobby in the 60s with his brothers in front of their house in Boston, Bobby in a tallis and kippah for his bar mitzvah portrait, Bobby with dark brown hair on the beach. He looks just like himself in every one.

At the bottom of the stack is a photo of them together, crouching in the driveway, petting a cat by their front porch steps. There is always a gaggle of cats around, which Bobby’s wife happily feeds and chatters at, although they only claim one of them, a timid tortie called Susie, as a pet. Susie has only ever glared at me from the shadows behind the kitchen until this morning, when she jumps up onto the bed and freezes mid-step to hold my gaze for a moment before cozying up to Bobby, who has raised his hand to pet her. I know she’s still wary of me, but we’ve found common ground, united for now by our need to take care.

How does it feel to be here, in bed with Bobby who is dying? Months and years later, I will look back on this moment with an inarticulable horror, my mouth agape at the wordless nightmare of seeing a friend in so much pain and being unable to help. But right now, in this moment, I am close enough to see that I am helping, that we’ve been helping each other in our own way ever since we met, and that this is just how we’re helping each other today. We are the family that life has given, and this what family is for. 

In bed with Bobby, I don’t feel horror at his pain or sadness at his departure. I feel the cool air from the A/C floating over us, the tender light of the afternoon sun going down, little Susie’s snores and Bobby’s sighs rustling the air. “Hey, Bobby,” I say, “my arm is falling asleep,” and he grunts his acknowledgment. I take my hand away from his head, but as soon as I do, I realize that I don’t want to stop touching him, that the fragile warmth of his skin against my fingertips has been soothing me, too. I move my arm toward him, palm facing upward in the space between us, and he puts his hand in mine.