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bastard.

    George T. Death.

    The analgesia was absorbing, or it had been absorbed. My throat felt as if a tack were stuck in it. A stinging sensation--hardly noticeable (to the properly-hypnotizing cortex). One could scarcely expect a lavish use of clinical techniques for blocking off the mere prick of a biopsy. Still--it would be inconvenient to be reminded by my own flesh, prematurely, of what it had fallen heir to. There was stir enough in my gray matter on the topic, already; no additional goad was needed.

    We death-dreaders--we victims of the marvels of science-souped up to the last ganglion by every advertisement, billboard, radio commercial, lecture, and editorial--by damned near every syllable we read or hear--to live to enjoy things (rather than to stand ready to die for the sake of ideas) are poorly prepared for carcinoma--for whatever your equivalent may be.

    Or--was I afraid, not so much of dying as of the manner? Get busy, I said to myself; you'll have plenty of time to savor these notions.

    Or--was I even afraid? Shocked, rather?

    Work.

    There's the drug you need, boy.

    I lay back on the divan, smoking.

    George T. Death. I knew him of old.

    In several guises.

    I remembered the year I was ten, the year I had appendicitis, then peritonitis, then general blood poisoning. Sometimes, at night, the pain of my body, the pain of my tube-filled, pus-lathered guts will come back to me. And the smell. The fever. The thirst. They didn't believe in giving you liquids, then--not any--and I know what it's like to be on the Sahara without a drop to drink--and your viscera opened up, in the bargain.

    I know.

    Father came to the hospital during one of the spells of consciousness. His eyes were desperately gentle. "How's the fight, son?"

    "Am I going to die?"

    "You're pretty sick, son."

    I laughed a little with my curdled belly. Too soon to answer, You're telling me.
    Nineteen-twelve. That was what I meant.

    "But--will I die?"

    His tender passion became tenderer still. "Would you be afraid to, son?"

    "No."

    "Do you believe in God?" "Of course."

    "Want to live--still?"

    Still, he had said. He could see--what I could only feel.

    "Yes."

    "Then--fight."

    That time I looked right smack into George T. Death's eye sockets and fought. But I was a kid then--and kids are brave if they have brave parents.

    In some ways, my father is the bravest man I've ever known; in others, a coward.
    Who's different?

    ''Who's different without being more coward?

    There was the time in Warsaw.

    My half brother Ted and I had finished our tour of Russia and come shaken across the Polish frontier--like two unconvinced readers of Dante who had gone there ourselves to be sure which part was poetry and which was accurate reporting. We found out. Our Dante was a good journalist.

    In Tiflis, after too much vodka, in the biggest, best restaurant where the rats were so bold they would sit under your table and nibble your crumbs and run off a little way if you took the trouble to skid your feet at them--in Tiflis, where every kind of man goes by on the street, Negro and Turk, redhead and ash-blond, because every kind of man has poured through the Caucasus for thousands of years on the way to conquer Europe or the way back in conquest of Asia--in purple-walled Tiflis where the archeological strata are as clear as the story of the stones in a cross-cut syncline and bare human feet have drilled deep paths in the rock floor of the old Roman baths--in Tiflis where Persians still sit cross-legged on tables and play what Ted called snake-charmer music on bulbous pipes--
    we talked too much.

    We drank too much and talked too much--to a dozen tourists who sat about the big table, waiting for their late dinner--waiting an hour or two, as you do in Russia.
    Tourists who, for the most part, had come from France, Germany, England, and the United States so pre-entranced with communism, so ignorant of farming and industrial process, so self-blinded to