Edmond Stevens

Jeter Batting Cleanup

Right after the midnight news, the Yankee’s cable channel provided a public service to the sleepless souls and shift workers of the city with a rebroadcast of that night’s game against the Blue Jays. Ben and I had already watched the real-time broadcast with Derek Jeter hitting home runs in the first and third innings, then A-Rod hooking a double into the gap to clear the bases in the fourth. Rivera rested in the bullpen and with an eight-run surplus.

Whether the Yankees or Knicks, the game was always a part of the routine of my visits to the city. What part of friendship is this, his wife would ask, puzzled how we could sit for hours with scarcely the exchange of a word, whether watching a game, or on the two-hour drive up to the Gunks to climb or mountain bike.

Silence doesn’t mean a lack of communication, Ben told Dyanne. We talk that way all the time.

When was that? Dyanne asked, I think I must have been away that week.

We talked an hour ago, I said. Ben wanted sushi to-go. I told him I was feeling more like Indian.

Now the tumors were back, returned like a brawler with all his brothers and in-laws to finish off a bar fight. With every line of chemo and clinical trial played out, there was even less to say, though the silence was more of a kindness these days.

Without discussion, it was understood we’d watch the replay, even the rah-rah of the pre-game, because sleep wasn’t much of an escape and I was afraid to stray too far from the room in case he might need something from the bathroom or a sudden run to the all-night pharmacy at York and Eighty-Sixth. Or, more troubling, I might have to wake Dyanne and confirm what the docs had been warning. Soon would come the time when we would no longer be able to provide the kind of final care that was inevitable. With the equine doses of steroids and Fentanyl patches keeping the pain at a bearable threshold, Ben’s primary knew that this final home time was a kind of parole to allow a simulation of some normalcy with his boys and wife before the inevitable tether to the drips, catheters, oxygen.

The replay from Toronto followed the original broadcast, not one pixel out of place. Though at one in the morning, it was odd to see the stadium roof open, the sky a wispy pearl of pre-twilight, but knowing they would pause in the visitor’s seventh to close the leaves of the dome as the squalls shouldered in off Lake Ontario. Once more, Jeter took Accardo to the loge in deep right off a two-and-one count in the first inning, and then again inside the left field foul pole on the first pitch of the third. Something about the replay felt like magical thinking, the idea that we could muscle back the hands of the clock and reverse a day, a month, a season to when the cancer hadn’t returned, the lesions had yet to corrode his liver, the tumor not yet pressing his diaphragm, each breath pushing back on a collapsing ceiling.

A few nights earlier, we watched Bridge on the River Kwai. It’s a movie I keep coming back to with the same fantastical expectation, hoping that this time Bill Holden will push the plunger, blow up the bridge, and vanish back into the jungle with Jack Hawkins and the Thai tribal girls. I continue to hold onto this speculation that there’s a secret hack to the timeline, a dropped stitch in the code, and so that the outcomes for Ben and Holden might be tilted with just the right nudge so that one cancer cell fails to gain purchase and just flushes out with the other bodily detritus. Then tonight we’d be ordering in lobster rolls, or fighting with the kids to take their showers. Or more likely I wouldn’t be here at all, another evening folded into the compilation of days and nights among the more familiar modulation of crickets, pond creatures, and the currents over the tops of the beeches from the traffic on the Merritt Parkway.

Ben was now round-the-clock relocated on the sofa, semi-reclined in a fragile twist. A pillow elevated one shoulder; a rolled afghan pressed across his stomach, a poultice that might tease out some of the pain. I knew it was almost the time but not my place to ask. Ben was a teaching cardiologist at Columbia-Presbyterian. He was always the one issuing the directives, ordering the labs, stumping the young residents. One day, in the early stages of a new chemo cycle, after the oncologists, the radiology guy, and pain management team had left the room, and Ben motioned to Dyanne with a slight turn of the hand, in the intimate dialect of husband and wife, that he wished her to close the door.

“You know what’s the really scary part of all this?” he asked. I could think of any dozen scary parts. But Dyanne and I knew not to answer, understanding that Ben expected the prize of delivering his own punch line: “The scariest part is realizing you’re the smartest person in the room.” It was an undeniable boast, but not without basis. Ben had been top of his class at Harvard Med and a finalist for the Lasker-Debakey award while a resident at Hopkins. But that was back in the early months when everybody was forwarding emails of some new pharmaceutical study, low-alkaline or antioxidant food supplements, and testimonials for a Mexican clinic. Somebody sent a gift basket of turmeric capsules, teas, and lotion. Outside the medical community, people seemed adamant that cancer was reversible by an outlook adjustment, a tweak in the body’s pH, or a meditative imaging of good cells chomping the nasty ones in a Pac-Man game played out in the arcade of the mind’s-eye. It pissed Ben that people’s misinformed intentions held that cancer was the result of attitude or belief failings and that he could control his own cure by just getting his head right. Ben twisted the turmeric gift basket into the trash chute and we laughed as it whistled like Wile E. Coyote down twenty-six floors to the sub-basement.

Ben turned away from the game, his face pressed into the scrolled arm of the sofa.

“Ben?”

Maybe he couldn’t hear through the drone of pain. Or maybe he knew too obviously the question that hung there in space. Finally he raised his face, all the signature authority vacated.

“I’ve got to quit trying to be my own doctor,” he said.

“You’re saying it’s time to go?”

His eyes dipped to the floor so that I would not see that shadow of uncertainty and apprehension.

“I’ll see if Dyanne’s sleeping,” I said, more proposition than statement. “I can help her wake the boys and get them dressed.”

“No. It scares them when I go to Emergency. At the hospital, they’ll get me on some better pain management. Just call down to the lobby and tell them we need a cab. Probably sooner better than later.”

“Maybe call the EMTs?” I asked in a flat tone, trying not to suggest alarm.

“No. EMTs will really freak them out.”

The remote had probably fallen between the cushions nearby, and I didn’t bother to turn off the TV as I helped Ben rotate his feet from the cushion to the floor.

The only difference in the late game broadcast was the commercial breaks, with the slots now filled by discounted time-buys for a mattress warehouse in Fort Lee, a miracle mop, and a banquet hall in Chinatown, the voice-over in Mandarin. Jeter again came to the plate in the top of the third. He patted the side of his helmet then stared into the label of the bat as if reading a spiritual inscription. The pitch would be a high slider, same as the first broadcast. No, Derek, I thought. Swing under it. Foul it off into the screen. Or at least take the damn pitch. One goddamned pitch. But there would be no shift in the outcome. Like the original, Jeter hit the slider on a rainbow arc just beyond the left fielder’s glove and a Toronto fan left the stadium with a collectible, to be preserved for years, maybe decades, in the corner of a sock drawer or on a shelf in a Lucite cube.

Edmond Stevens has written extensively for television and film and contributed most recently as guest editor for The Alpinist Magazine. His novella, “Skating to New York,” was adapted for film and was runner-up for the Howard Frank Mosher Prize, Green Writers Press. His short story, "Buried," will appear in the coming edition of Deep Wild Journal. In 2018, Mr. Stevens received his MFA from Antioch University. He pursues wild, little-traveled peaks and destinations because these are a physical representation of the mental process of writing, finding by trial and error the path to the summit. For example, he most recently climbed Everest’s North Col via Tibet.