MORTAL COMBAT

“Wake up, big sister, I have news for you.”

      A man stands before me, insistently poking my shoulder with a sausage-sized finger. He is huge, Andre-the-Giant huge, incongruously wearing cerulean blue tights, a matching T-shirt with the letter “C” emblazoned in white across its front, and white running shorts. He looks at me with a wicked sneer, his breath horrid.

      “Uh, what? Who are you?” I’m groggy, my neck stiff from sleeping in the waiting room chair in the medical center where my younger sister, Cherri, is undergoing a biopsy of the lump they found in her left breast. I instinctively pull back, repulsed.

      “Not too bright are you.” he says. “Obviously, I am,” broad arms sweep across his body, indicating his girth, “The Big”, two index fingers point to his chest, “C, and I will have her.”

And with a blink, he’s gone. I shake my head, clearing the remaining sleep cobwebs, convinced it was all a bizarre dream.

But then we meet again.

The biopsy result reveals triple-negative breast cancer. After hearing the news, Cherri and I consume way too much wine on her sagging leather couch, whipsawing between crying jags and “fuck you cancer” declarations, while repeatedly blasting Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” Eventually, I fall asleep on Cherri’s couch, but towards dawn, I’m again rousted by a meaty finger, the odorous breath preceding the actual manifestation before me.

“I told you so”, The Big C sings as he gleefully dances around the room. He is whirling like a dervish, chuckling maniacally when he dissolves into the air like so many pixels.

The chuckle still bounces through my head during my morning shower, and I whisper, “I will destroy you motherfucker.”

Weeks later, as I sit beside Cherri as she snores softly in the recovery room following her radical lumpectomy, The Big C appears again. This time, rather than shrinking in horror, I jump to my feet to confront him. I am armed, bizarrely, with a high-powered circular knife like the one I used during my brief employ at a meat packing plant. Before he has time to say a thing, I’m on him, swiping the knife across his chest, neatly cutting through the tissue beneath the downward tail of the shirt’s white “C”.

“Ha!” I yell, delighted as the knife comes back covered in blood. A globular slab of flesh flops to the floor, a hairy nipple clearly winking from the mess.

His large hands reach to cover the gaping wound, a look of surprise on his face.

“You,” he stutters, “you think you will win, but you will not.” And again, he vaporizes, but this time, the residual dots are decidedly red.

Yet he persists. As I await Cherri’s return from her first dose of radiation, The Big C materializes in the shadowed corner of the room. The white T-shirt still bears the bloodstained tear across its front, the injury beneath black and dripping with pus. The smell is atrocious.

I am ready for him. My weapon this day, a Jedi lightsaber. Embedded in the handle, though, is the bright yellow and black of a radiation symbol, the emitted light a pure, lethal beam.

“You cannot honestly believe you will win,” he hisses. “All your stupid gimmicks,” waving a dismissive hand, “they’re worthless. You’ll see, I will prevail.”

He starts to laugh but I charge, wielding the saber clumsily, on this, my trial run. Yet it finds a mark, neatly slicing through the muscles and tendons of his lower left arm. The hand falls to the tile with a wet plop, then slowly disappears as he does, sucked into the cosmos like soda through a straw.

As Cherri’s radiation series continues, I become more expert with my weapon. By the end, The Big C is down two hands, two full arms, one full leg, one foot, one appendage at a time. I cannot imagine why or how he keeps reappearing, horribly crippled, finally hopping on his one remaining bloody stump, a gory apparition still arrogant and defiant.

When The Big C arrives in the chemotherapy room where I’m holding Cherri’s hand through her first treatment, I am stunned and horrified to see that his severed limbs have begun to grow back. Stunted, misshapen stubs protrude from the openings of his ragged costume.

Again, he leers. “I survive,” he bellows. “I will not be vanquished. I will have her.”

He is easy prey, with his hopping gait, and I am on him quickly. The syringe I flourish is as long as my forearm, clearly marked with a skull and crossbones motif. The needle penetrates cloth and stomach flab easily and I jam the plunger home, screaming as I do.

“Take that, you prick!”

He promptly dissolves beneath my hands and is gone.

With The Big C’s appearance at each subsequent chemotherapy session, I am heartened and vindicated to see his body shrinking dramatically. He is no longer the giant he first appeared to be, dwindling first to the size of an average man, then to that of a teen, then a child, then a toddler. His temperament hasn’t changed though; he’s still nasty, angry and determined, often jumping up and down like a frenzied Rumpelstiltskin, flipping me off with two half-grown, misshapen middle fingers.

The final showdown occurs when The Big C has the audacity to show up as Cherri rings the bell in celebration of her last treatment. A group of supporters are here for her, the room alive with color as they cheer, balloons and flowers in hand. By now, The Big C is no longer big. In fact, he’s tiny, the size of a mouse. I watch as he hops furtively from corner to corner in the room, stopping from time to time to glare at me with still malevolent eyes.

As the well-wishers surround Cherri and usher her from the room, out into her new reality where she is currently cancer free but always wondering, I corral him between the water cooler and the door.

“You are done!” I raise my steel-toed motorcycle boot to crush him.

“We’ll see,” he squeaks out, just as my waffled sole comes down with a wet splat.