The Phoenix

‘It’s a brain tumor,’ Ella had informed her doctor two weeks ago, sitting in his plush corner office at San Francisco’s Saint Francis Memorial Hospital. ‘It’s growing. I can feel it.’

‘It isn’t a brain tumor.’

‘How do you know?’ Ella demanded. ‘How can you possibly know that?’

‘Because I’m a neurologist.’

‘Even so …’

‘And because I’ve comprehensively scanned your brain with the very latest technology. There is no tumor.’

‘You’ve made a mistake.’

The doctor laughed. ‘No mistake, I assure you.’

‘Yes. You must have made a mistake.’

He looked at his patient curiously.

‘Do you want to have a brain tumor, Miss Praeger?’

Ella thought about this for a moment. On the one hand, a brain tumor was a bad thing. Brain tumors could kill you. I don’t want to die. On the other hand, a brain tumor might be an explanation for a

ll the crazy shit going on inside her head. The headaches and vomiting were only part of it, the part Ella had told her doctors. It was the rest of it that really scared her – voices; music; high-frequency throbbing that sounded to Ella like some sort of coded transmission. That stuff had been going on for a long time. As long as Ella could remember, honestly, although in recent months it had gotten a lot worse. If I don’t have a brain tumor, I’m crazy. I must be.

‘Would you like to talk to someone?’ the doctor asked, his amusement shifting to concern. ‘A psychologist, perhaps? Oftentimes the sort of symptoms you describe can be brought on by stress. I could refer you to—’

But Ella had already gone, running out of his office, never to return.

The next day, her grandmother died. Peacefully, in her sleep.

‘Were you close?’

Bob, a shy, balding, middle-aged man who worked at the coffee shop near Ella’s work and was the closest thing she had to a friend, asked when Ella told him.

‘She was my closest relative, yes,’ Ella responded. ‘My parents are dead.’

‘Sure, but I meant emotionally. Were you close to her emotionally?’

Ella looked at him blankly. She liked Bob, but found him strange. Evidently he felt the same way about her, because when she’d suggested they sleep together months ago, he’d declined. Even though he wasn’t homosexual.

‘I’m married, Ella,’ he explained.

‘I know,’ she smiled. ‘So you like having sexual intercourse with women.’

For some reason Bob found this funny. ‘Well, yeah …’ he laughed. ‘I do.’

‘I’m a woman,’ Ella pointed out, with an endearing case closed finality to her tone.

‘You are a woman,’ Bob agreed. ‘A very beautiful woman. And I’m flattered … I mean, I appreciate the offer. But …’

‘You don’t want to have intercourse with me?’

‘OK firstly, just a little FYI – people usually use the word “sex”. “Intercourse” kind of sounds like a biology textbook.’

‘Right,’ said Ella. She’d been told this before, but her grandmother had always been a stickler for proper terminology, and old habits were hard to break.

‘And secondly, it’s not that I don’t want to have sex with you, Ella. It’s that I’m married. My wife would not be happy at all if I did that.’