"It's April." "Can I come in a little early today?" "I've been up all night trying to finish my final project and I just don't think I'll make it to noon." "Sure." "Can you just..." "Just hold on for a moment while I get my book." "No, it's no big deal." "I'll just see you next week." "It's okay." "When did you want to come in?" "How about now?" "It's no problem." "I'll see you in a bit then, okay?" "Thanks for seeing me." "I was on my way to school to turn this in and..." "I don't know why I did it, but I came here instead." "This is..." "The big project you mentioned?" "Would you mind if I had a look at it?" "No, go ahead if you're interested in shit." "That's really cool." "It's supposed to be a World Trade Center memorial..." "Of course." "What do you mean "of course"?" "Because god forbid any architecture student in the country gets another assignment ever again." "I'm sorry." "I'm an asshole." " Don't listen to me." " No, I think it's just..." "I think it's beautiful." "It's really..." "Exquisitely done." "Very beautiful." "I'm so tired." "You haven't been sleeping this week?" "No, not at all." "Between my anxiety and my lymphoma there's just never a good time." "That was supposed to be a joke." " Was it funny?" " I don't think so." "Neither do i." "Can I just..." "Do you mind?" "I tried so hard to sleep last night." "It was 2:00 a.m., I was out of ideas" "so I put it in the box." "I changed my sheets, I... lit candles, put on music." "It sounds like I was trying to seduce myself." "So did you eventually fall asleep?" "I couldn't." "My heart was racing and it felt like... {\I don't know. }It felt like it wasn't blood running through my veins, {\it was }something else..." "Fire, poison." "I just..." "I wanted to... open myself up and get it all out somehow." "Slit my wrists or take off my own head." "I would never." "Don't worry." "I'm just trying to describe how it felt." "It sounds like a terrible night." "I can't have another one like that." "I will lose my mind." "When you said that the poison was running through your veins," "Can I tell you what I thought of immediately?" " Chemo." " Cancer." " Same thing." " No, it isn't." "You can choose not to have chemo." "Touché." "I had this thought last night..." "I just kept thinking it over and over." "It used to happen to me a lot when I was a kid." "The summer before I went to high school, I got this song stuck in my head and I couldn't get it out." "I really thought I was going insane." "What do you think it would feel like to go insane?" "Like falling..." "Into nothing." "Can we not talk about losing my mind?" "Would you like to tell me about the thought that you had last night, the one that you couldn't get out of your head?" "I wanted to go home." "I really wished I could go home." "And then I thought," ""You can't go home." "Your home is so long ago and so far away."" "And then I just kept thinking," ""Your home is so long ago and so far away." "Your home is so long ago and so far away."" "And this home that you're... that you're thinking about, where is it?" "Or was it?" "Can I tell you in a moment?" "I mean..." "Can I just..." "I just need to close my eyes for a second." "I'm so tired." "What time is it?" " 8:00." " Really?" "Already?" "It's... 7:59 actually." "Perfect." "Could you..." "Could you wake me at 8:00, would you mind?" "Sure." "April, wake up." "Wake up, April." "Wake up" "What time is it?" "It's 8:00." "Good." "It's over." "This project was due yesterday but my professor said we had until 8:00 in the morning to turn it in." "It was hideous." "It looks better now." "Why do you say that?" "It didn't work at all." "The dimensions were all off." "I relied too much on negative space." "It was just sitting there." "I couldn't make it soar." "I have to tell you, it's... it's very hard to see you destroy your own work." "I did" "I did fall asleep last night." "I just rembered a dream I had." "I was on top of the model, but it was life-size, and I fell." "Do you ever get those?" "Falling dreams?" "Sure." "I get those all the time." "And how do you feel when you wake up?" "I don't know." "My heart is pounding, and I feel like..." "I don't even know how to describe it." "It's a kind of joy." "So, different from falling into nothing?" "So falling is something that you're afraid of and yet you're attracted to it at the same time." "What does that mean?" "When you're awake, you work so hard to keep everybody and everything under your control, so in your dreams, it makes sense that you find yourself finally falling, releasing everything, letting everything go, because it's a kind of fantasy for you." "Why are you telling me that?" "Is that supposed to help me?" "It'll only help you if it rings true." "If it doesn't..." "But it's in my head now." "You put it in my head." "Now I have to think about it." " Like that thought you had last night." " What?" "You started thinking about something, you can't stop." "Your thoughts become obsessive." "Don't say that." "You..." "You have no idea what you're talking about." "Have you ever been on a subway car that breaks dow and there's some guy... some shy-looking kid who starts repeating something to himself over and over, like, "7:15, 59th and Lex." "7:15, 59th and Lex," over and over, louder and louder until just saying the words isn't enough and he starts hitting himself and thrashing around and finally has to be subdued and tranquilized?" "That is what it means to have obsessive thoughts." "I just like thinking things through." "You're talking about your brother." "I've noticed that you're constantly trying to feel what he feels." "Well, he can't describe how he feels, so... he needs someone to interpret it for him." "Your empathy is..." "It's admirable, April." "But it can be really draining trying to feel everyone else's feelings as well as your own." "Maybe... instead of your own." "I don't..." "I'm sorry for losing my temper." "You don't have to apologize to me." "I did fall out of a building once." " When?" " We were on vacation in Miami." "I was only 10." "My mother is obsessed with Cuba..." "Cuban music, Cuban food, Cuban culture." "Anyway, we were down there without my brother." "We left him..." "For the first time ever, I think... with my grandparents, just me and my folks." "I remember this one night there was a band playing Cuban music down below and my parents started to dance right there in the hotel room." "I went over to the window so that I could watch them dance and feel the..." "The breeze from the ocean on my back at the same time." "Somehow..." "I don't even know how it happened..." "I fell out the window." "I must've just leaned back and fallen." "I landed on the..." "What's the word?" "The awning one floor below." "I mean, I was fine." "I just laid there for a second, I looked up at the window and then I slid off and landed on the sidewalk." "Do you remember feeling frightened?" "I remember as soon as my feet hit the sidewalk I started to bawl." "Then I walked back into the hotel and I rode the elevator up." "I looked in the mirror and I made myself stop crying." "So you could stop crying, just like that?" "I just looked at myself and I said, "April" ""you have to stop,"" "and I did." "I can still do that." "When I walked back into the room, my mother..." "Had her head on my dad's shoulder." "They were still dancing." "They hadn't noticed you were gone?" "Why did you have to stop crying?" " What?" " {\*I mean, y}You were 10 years of age, you had fallen out the window." "Why couldn't you cry to your mother?" "She was so happy." "The way she held my father in that room, the way they swayed, my mother closed her eyes as they swayed." "My mother never closes her eyes." "Why not?" "She can't take them off Daniel." "I'm not an empathetic person." "I'm really not." "You asked me where home was for me." "It was there, in Miami." "That's the place I want to go back to... that room with my parents." " Without Daniel." " Right." "Did you ever read that book "On the beach"?" "It's about the nuclear holocaust and these people are waiting for the radiation to reach Australia, but they're happy." "They fall in love." "They buy benches for their gardens." "They don't think about the future." "I was reading that while we were down there." "You were reading that book at age 10?" "I used to be precocious." "And that's what I had hoped would happen... a nuclear war would destroy everything else in the world," "and we could just stay on the beach." "We couldn't stay." "We had to get back." "Daniel had stopped eating, gone back to hitting himself." "My grandparents called in a panic." "My mother went to the airport and got the next flight home." "My dad and I drove back that night." "Daniel wouldn't even look at us." "He couldn't speak." "It was like we had set him back three years." "My mother never forgave herself for that trip." "You are an empathic person... the way you talk about your brother, the compassion you feel for him." "But you can be an empathic person and still feel contradictory emotions, still feel anger, still feel... jealousy." "Why would I be jealous of Daniel?" "Maybe because your mother never closes her eyes to him." "Daniel was allowed to show your parents how he was feeling." "When he got upset, hurt or scared, they knew it, whereas you had to be perfect." "You fell out a window" " and your mother had no idea." " You can't blame her for that." "Jesus, don't talk about her like that." " How am I talking about her?" " As if she was a bad mother." "She's a great mother." "She gave me my confidence, told me how smart I was." "She made me feel like I could do anything." "{\*But m}Maybe as a child, you took that to mean that you shouldn't depend on her, that you should take care of it all on your own." " I'm not going to do this." " What{\ are you not going to do}?" "Slam my mother." "She may not have been perfect, but she did her best." "She could have been a professional ballerina." "She trained at Juilliard, but she gave all of that up so that Daniel could have some semblance of a normal life..." " I understand that." " ... that he could not feel like such a freak." "So don't sit there and tell me she made all these mistakes." "She didn't have a choice." "I'm not attacking your mother." "I'm just trying to understand why you can't tell her that you're sick." "Well, how much more can she take?" "It's not your fault that she had to deal with Daniel." "Lately Daniel has been doing so much better." "She finally has some time on her hands." "He's living in this group situation, he's got a job at the library stacking books, and she has started to teach a dance class for little kids." "I went to meet her there." "She is having such a great time." "I am not gonna take that away from her." " You think being sick will do that?" " She would stop teaching the class." "She'd think she has to drop everything to take care of me." "Maybe that's okay if she does." "She should stop teaching for a while to help take care of you{\* for a little bit}." "She is finally getting the chance to live a little." "I respect your wanting to protect your mother, but I think at a deeper level you're also trying to protect yourself from seeing your mother's fear for you, from feeling how much danger you're in." "You say that you want to protect her, but surely you know that if you were to die, if you were to die, she would never... and I know this." "I can tell you this as a father... if that happened to me, I would never ever recover." "Listen to me." "You have to begin chemo immediately." "The reason you haven't is because you're scared to go through it alone." "Is there anyone you can imagine yourself telling?" "Anyone who you would want to be there with you?" " I can't." " You can." "It's too horrible." "What am I supposed to say?" "How am I supposed to tell her" " that her daughter..." " You mean you." "You." "That I have cancer?" "No, I can't." "It's too horrible." "Horrible as it is, not telling her is more horrible." "When you say it, it makes sense... just pick up the phone and tell her." "But I know that once I leave here, I won't be able to." "Call her from here then." "Now?" "Go ahead." "She'll just be leaving for work." "Can I use your phone again?" "Of course." "I presume you want the room again?" "Thank you." "How'd it go?" "She was in the car." "She wanted to call me back..." "It's illegal to talk and drive at the same time." "With my dad in the army, she follows the law." "You can stay here for 10 minutes and call her back." "No, I'm so tired." "I'm gonna take a nap and call her when I get up." "Will you call me after you've spoken to her?"