3 October, 1997
The last day of my mission was beautiful and clear. The sky hung massively blue over Mexico City like the great dome of a cathedral, stretching from horizon to horizon, ending at the mountains that ringed the valley. I felt like I had been placed at the very center of it, a perfectly still pendulum below which the ground shifted as I traveled. The air was calm, central Tlalnepantla bustled peacefully, and Elder Rodriguez and I went about our work without much grief.
My eighth companion, Elder Rodriguez, was just three or four months along in his mission and he had already had several companions before me. He was possessed by the wild restlessness of a child passed from one foster home to another and it’s up to someone else to say if his behavior was the reason he had been through so many missionaries or going through so many companions kept him from being able to settle down. The night before he’d been up well past midnight laughing on the telephone. He took me to task as he got into his bed for my having asked who he was talking with. Still bothered, that’s what we were talking about that morning, as we made our way like surefooted mountain goats—I had this limp that made me a slower, very careful goat—along an uneven range of unstable sidewalk. “Elder Barnes,” he said while I dodged the low-hanging branches of spindly trees growing out of grey dirt, “I know what I’m doing! I don’t need looking after, and I don’t need you asking me who I’m talking with!” He was expecting a confrontational response, which would make sense—aside from my instincts as senior companion to try figure out what this guy was up to, there existed the natural curiosity, as old as the telephone, of wanting to know who the person at the other end of the line is, especially when they’re the other half a particularly riotous conversation. But as there was a sweet healthiness in the air, I felt disinclined to press the matter, so I answered that I wouldn’t ask him who he was talking with again. My amiable abruptness caught him off guard.
Adding to the mystery of Elder Rodriguez, he also had an innate capacity for compassion and it shined that morning as he sympathized earnestly with a woman we visited in her home above an auto garage. After the visit was through I bought a new razor at a supermarket I’d never been to before and we caught a microbus home to the Peñuelas’s for lunch.
Members of the church, the Peñuelas family lived in our same rose-colored four-story apartment building. Several missionaries before I came to the Tlalnepantla/Los Reyes District, the Peñuelas had accepted the compensated assignment of feeding the missionaries daily. I had had one or two of these cook-families in each area of my mission, I loved nearly all of them to death, but there was something undeniably special about the Peñuelas clan. Maybe it was because they lived two floors down from us, or because their four children were all either a little younger or a little older than missionary age, but their home was our home, their concerns our concerns, and their days our days. I felt a member of the family, meeting every afternoon for lunch to compare notes on the day so far and then joining them nightly at the hearth of a bounteous dinner table and sticking around a bit after to decompress together at the end of the day.
We arrive at their red and chrome apartment to find our soup and rice waiting and lunch itself just minutes from being served. “Un momento, Elderes, solo un momento.” Sister Peñuelas, infinitely stern with her family but unconditionally loving to her missionaries tells us as the rest of the family who aren’t at work come to the table. Promotional images on a box of Zucaritas for the newest Batman movie catch my eye and I pull the box from its shelf to have a look at George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell dressed as the Caped Crusaders.
While I make all efforts to be as diligent and focused a missionary as I can be, I am definitely prone to fits of fascination with the trivial things I’m supposed to have left behind for two years and this new film, succinctly titled “Batman & Robin,” has me feeling particularly curious. It could be the flashier costumes, the challenging casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, or maybe it’s just nostalgia for a night two years before spent tearing around suburban Chicago trying to find a showing of that summer’s Batman Forever that wasn’t sold out, but Batman & Robin’s billboards and bus ads had been known to stop me dead in my tracks and distraction from the sight of bootleg Batman & Robin t-shirts had caused me to nearly lose my companion in crowded tiangis. I’m irked that I’ll just have to wait for 1998 and watch it on VHS, but then again I also missed Independence Day and the Star Wars re-releases. I’d survive.
Lunch served, we crack jokes with the Peñuelas’s teenage sons, Alejandro and Pepe, and argue with them over what should or shouldn’t be played on the stereo as Brother Peñuelas, a bristle-lipped retired railroad man turned Latter-day Saint, observes this daily nonsense, and the conversation shifts to a discussion of our plan for the rest of the day.
According to our yellow agendas the afternoon is completely free. Instead of filling the hours with door-knocking or dropping in unexpectedly on members of the two wards we’re assigned to, Elder Rodriguez and I are finally going to take the time to address a problem that had been bothering me for far too long. My leg. It was killing me. It had been driving me nuts since at least the end of July and now it was the beginning of October. The problems it gave me were bizarre and its origin inexplicable. At some point I had simply noticed a pain I could point to and press against right above my left knee. Some days it was too painful to sit, stand, walk, or lie. Other days the pain nearly wasn’t there at all. But everyday, anyone could see that I was walking with quite the limp and Sister Peñuelas worried endlessly about it, having me soak it with hot water nearly every night, fretting and furrowing her clean-shaven brow.
I had been seeing our mission doctor about my knee every week for at least a month. A long-retired doctor on assignment from St. Louis, he and his wife spoke no Spanish and he spent his days standing at the window of his office/apartment beside the temple, marveling at what was happening below on the streets of San Juan de Aragon. When I came to see him he’d act like it was just a friendly visit and talk and talk about the armed security guards at the ATM across the street while his wife offered Elder Rodriguez Fanta after Fanta in the loudest, slowest English imaginable. Eventually I would ask him to have a look at my knee, snapping him suddenly into the reason for my visit.
Every week, while looking at my knee, he’d ask me if I had hurt it playing basketball. I’d tell him that I didn’t care for basketball (true) and never played it (even more true). He would then look at me, a six foot three kid from Chicago, like I was doing the worst job of lying he’d witnessed in all his many days and tell me that I needed to quit playing basketball if my knee was ever going to get better. He’d then ask me how many Advil he had me taking, note the number, and tell me to take a handful more than that from there on. He also had me taking a significant amount of Pepto-Bismol tablets to counterbalance the possible consequences of all the Advil. On my last visit he noted under his breath that my left leg looked swollen, something I hadn’t really noticed myself. He had his wife bring him a tape measure from their apartment kitchen and he wrapped the metal band around my right leg, verbally indicated the circumference, then wrapped the metal band around my left leg, verbally indicating the size of that leg and the significant difference in inches, “Yes, see? Definitely swollen!” I asked if I should go to the hospital, he answered that what I should really do is stop playing basketball, but he begrudgingly wrote me a prescription for an x-ray. We left, the doctor perfectly certain the x-rays would reveal some sort of basketball-related injury and expecting me to return the next week apologizing for not having been honest with him about my unwillingness to lay-off the layups.
Well-fed, we left the Peñuelas home and made our way to the Rosario metro station and headed south beneath the city for nearly the length of the Orange Line. We’d get the x-rays done at Hospital ABC, a shiny and modern medical center run by a British company and staffed by Duke and Georgetown-educated Mexican physicians. Rodriguez and I were no strangers to the ABC. This hotel-like hospital, with concierge desks across from nurse stations and a video lending library on every floor, was already like an extension of our area to us as Elder Rodriguez’s older brother (who was serving in our same mission) had been laid up there for the last few weeks. This other Elder Rodriguez had some kind of problem with one of his legs that I didn’t quite understand, but I was inclined to think it was an infection of some sort. We visited him at the hospital often, we were there when he came out of surgery and we were there to watch the doctors pull drains out from a leg that looked like it had become someone’s whittling project.
When we arrived at the hospital the sun was starting to get long and, after talking to a few people behind desks, it began to look like I didn’t have a chance of being seen that afternoon. Frustrated, we went up to see Elder Rodriguez’s brother and consider our options. It would be a shame to lose another afternoon to trying to get the x-rays taken. We considered the uncertain safety of the hospital's neighborhood post-nightfall and excitedly but unrealistically entertained the idea of spending the night at the hospital and getting the x-rays in the morning.
While we discussed that idea, the other Elder Rodriguez’s orthopedist, a regular from our ABC Hospital cast of characters, came in to check on him. He was youngish and partial to pastel polo shirts tucked tightly into pleated slacks held up by a belt weighed down with beepers. Telling him then that I had been having leg-problems of my own, he asked to see my leg and listened to my stories of sleepless nights thanks to this exquisite pain beneath my bones. Nodding, rubbing his fingers through his hair, he made a few phone calls and told me I could get my x-rays done right away. When I suggested we could come back for them the next day, considering the hour and that we really shouldn’t be so far outside of our area at night he wagged his finger and stressed the “right away” again. With orders for expedited examinations in hand, we headed downstairs to deal with the same receptionists I had struggled with an hour or so before.
Of course, there really isn’t any such thing as “right away” in a hospital. Papers were signed, gowns were put on and then an orderly wheeled me down a hall towards Radiology and parked me, wrapped in a big white sheet, beside a fire extinguisher beneath a wall of mammograms.
I assumed that I was about to be taken care of, but the minutes began to pass and I grew restless listening to a hysteric Mexican teen in a nearby room demanding to see a different doctor. I wondered if there was a masculine form for “fresa.” I began to push myself backwards around the hall with my heels, into laundry carts and corners—a few minutes of this, wishing Rodriguez was there to take my picture, and an x-ray tech emerged and wheeled me into his room.
I was placed on the table in a number of cross-legged poses, contemplating the camera as it buzzed, shuddered, and hummed above me. I took a seat while these pictures were taken to the doctor, and when the tech returned, he pressed me switflty against the wall. With my chin propped up on a box containing additional films, shoulders stretched wide and forward, chest held tightly against the camera's bull’s-eye target, a coldhot wave came over me. My leg was the problem. Not my chest. It’s not easy to mistake “pierna” for “pecho,” right? Right? This wasn’t right. I chose not to think it over too hard, it was clear a variety of questions were about to be answered. I was minutes away from who knows what sort of revelations. I looked over my shoulder at myself in the tall mirror of the changing room as I dressed, holding a companionship inventory with my reflection, sympathizing with the fellow I saw and the identical news he was about to receive, and was ushered over to an exam room where Elder Rodriguez waited.
With a mixed look of respect and fear he stood when he saw me. He licked his lips and I asked him with a laugh, that laugh from when you’re figuring out that a prank is being played on you, what was going on, not in the what’s shaking way, but in the “Honestly, what is going on here?” way. Something was coming down, I could see it if not smell it and feel it. He looked at me, lowered his hands repeatedly, and said “calma.” Over and over again, he stressed again and again that the important thing for me to do was to remain calm. I asked him, only one and a half times, to tell me why, but he wouldn’t, he couldn’t. I understood. Of course this wasn’t going to be good news, nothing good keeps you up and limping and gritting your teeth for three months. But I wasn’t ready to guess I was looking at one of first people to know that I’d been walking around on a femur full of cancer those three months.
After minutes of silence in that room, the golf-shirt orthopedist entered with some colleagues he introduced along with the inscrutable Spanish names for their specialties and then he put the x-rays up on lightboxes. What words were said it’s hard to remember, but when the light was switched on the pictures said everything. There it was, my leg, surrounded from the knee to way, way too high up by a ghostly cloud, a form relating some density, some sort of devious acting amorphous matter not properly identifiable by my untrained eye. I rubbed my chin. They kept talking. They talked about all sorts of things. Drugs. Specialists. Plans. Great news! None of this cloudy phantom matter was found in my lungs and I could still probably keep my leg. It was salvageable. Like a shipwreck. It was hard to hear, I was looking so hard, thinking. Taking it in. My leg was haunted, my leg had a ghost. Staring at this Casper, this Jacob Marley, I heard a voice in my head say as clear as day:
“Well would you look at that.”
So that’s what had been bugging me? That ghost was the pain? In the cinematic version of this account the doctors fade into the background as a dolly zoom appears to pull me forward, their words dissolve into a mumble of background noise and the x-ray and I stare each other down until we stand silently, nose to nose, one thousand miles apart. I pop back to the natural world when a doctor abruptly removes the film from the lightbox. My temporary orthopedist addresses me again, he says something about beginning a regiment of treatments. Chemotherapy, the thought goes off like a firecracker in my brain. “What sort of regiments?” “That’s…that’s hard to say at this point, it…depends on….” Say it. Say it. Say Chemotherapy. But they won’t. They shake my hands, they act like we’ll all be seeing each other regularly, like we’ll be having this meeting again.
“Wait until the mission doctor hears about this.” I chuckle at Elder Rodriguez. He looks at me disturbed that I’d be disrespectful enough to joke at a time like this and leaves to call our mission president. The doctors have all left ahead of him with the nurses. An orderly hesitates for a moment before stepping out himself. “Any questions?” he asks. “Ninguna.” What I meant, of course, is I couldn’t possibly start with questions, and answers weren’t about to stop my future from rushing in to meet me.
Although it was obvious to my gut that this was cancer I was dealing with, and the thought that my leg pain could be a malignancy having occurred to me during dark moments in the previous weeks, I spent a few hours without a certain comprehension of what that shade around my femur was. After my meeting with the doctors there was a lot of bustling around, a lot of changing back into a hospital gown, a lot of this and that and just wanting to sit down for a minute so that it wasn’t until I was being dropped off at my room for the evening and I heard a stream of Spanish between nurses that ended in “-oma,” as in “sarcoma,” that everything solidified and I could say to myself “Oh, so this is cancer.” Hearing it at last, I felt big. I felt strong. I felt diagnosed and tough.
Elder Rodriguez spent the night across the hall with his brother, who placed a friendly call to my room before sending my companion over with some dystopian crime movie they had enjoyed earlier, but I watched some of Clueless on cable instead—I chose it because it was good and because it was my freshman roommate’s absolute favorite and watching it I tried to remember what Alicia Silverstone’s Batgirl costume looked like in that one Batman & Robin ad I saw one time.
I was brought a hot dog casserole for my late dinner and then spoke with my mission president on the phone. Harried by a day of mission business, this probably wasn’t how he’d expected to end his day. He spoke in his blessed big voice, we went over the facts. I’d be going home soon. Very soon. I had wondered if I’d have to make a Chicken Soup for the Soul-worthy deliberation between going home to be treated or staying in Mexico to tough it out in true romantic missionary style, but apparently enough of that sort of toughing it out had been done to fill inspirational messages forever and the policy was for missionaries to pursue the medical attention that they needed. Before going, President Cazier told me a terrible thing that I already knew.
I'd need to call home.
No good news comes by phone after midnight, especially in a house where everyone’s to bed before ten, especially when those calls are being made in October by missionaries who are only expected to call on Christmas and Mother’s Day. When Mom heard my voice she sent Dad to pick up the phone downstairs—obviously news was on its way, news to be shared by both. I had been complaining about my knee to them in my weekly letters home, who knows how bad it seemed by mail or how often or how much they thought about it between letters. I spoke to Mom while Dad listened. I started with a joke, "Guess what, I won a trip home" and then told them I had been to the doctor for an x-ray. I wasn’t too many words past that before the courage of the moment left me and I was sobbing, shaking, gasping on her shoulder, in her lap, crying full hot helpless tears. What a way to discover you love your mission. I fought for chances to show courage in that call, but in the end let Mom tell me I’d be all right in the morning, to get to sleep. What sort of all right I didn’t know, the all right only a mom can hand you over the phone from two thousand miles away.
On my first night in my first area of my mission I had stepped out alone onto the roof of my first home and stared at the flickering lights of houses, traffic and street lamps before me, receding forever into the distance. Not knowing a thing about my local geography, I thought I was looking out over the whole Mexico City valley and I took it all in quite dramatically, “These are the people I am going to serve. Look at all those lives.” The next morning I was out on the roof again and saw that the night before I had only been looking down the street towards the center of our neighborhood. Hypersensitively aware of that night and self-conscious about deliberately bookending my mission, but helpless to do otherwise, I dragged a chair over to my hospital room’s window when the call was done and looked outside to Chapultepec castle on the left, high rises on the right, and Mexico City between them, yellow and orange, receding forever into the distance.
4 October, 1997
With hardly a shudder, I crumpled and fell to the ground. Elder Rodriguez was picking me up before I realized I had fainted and he and the woman with my breakfast looked at me with knowledgeable eyes that seemed to say “Yes, this is that cancer-related fainting we’ve heard so much about.”
Perhaps there was a more accurate explanation. That morning in the hospital, a Saturday, began with a scream of activity. Doctors visited indiscriminately throughout the earliest hours of the morning, sending me off for CAT scans (I was thrilled to pass through the vibrating donut and follow the stern pre-recorded Spanish voice prompts), sticking me with needles or briefing me on what they’d do if I were to stay for treatment in Mexico City, which maybe they hadn’t heard wasn’t going to happen. Originally the president had thought I’d be going home as soon as Monday, but the office had arranged a flight for me that afternoon, leaving Mexico City at 5 to arrive in Los Angeles that night. A second flight would leave LAX near midnight and get me home to O'Hare before dawn Sunday morning. If I had had room to argue, I’d have asked for one of those Mexico City to Chicago direct flights of just three or four hours, and maybe more time to tell Mexico goodbye. No room to argue. I took a long hot shower sitting on a plastic chair, took phone calls from home, took phone calls from a Spanish-speaking orthopedist friend of the family who had hoped to talk with a doctor and find out exactly what was going on for my dad, and received numerous visits from a red-haired woman demanding payment for the previous night’s international phone call. I told her I couldn’t pay, probably a bit more indignantly than necessary, but I didn’t have seventy five dollars on me and I couldn’t have cared less if she got the money or not, I had an enormous, angry tumor in me and needed to get home. She left in several huffs, returning repeatedly to see if, perchance, I had earned seventy five dollars while she was gone.
Information, plans, logistics, facts, fears all swarmed through my body and when I stopped to stand beside my bed for a moment, I blacked out.
Sitting on the bed, drinking a cup of water, being de-IV’d by a nurse, Elder Rodriguez and I went over our plans. It was about 11 AM, we’d be taking a taxi back up to Tlalnepantla, I’d need to pack up all my stuff and we’d have to be on the road by three at the latest to arrive at the airport by four at the latest for me to catch my flight at five. I was handed a fax from United with my flight information, I slipped on my missionary tag and was out the door and down an elevator, headed for the exit when the golf-shirt doctor caught me and asked to take one more set of x-rays for the hospital to keep—I had the originals with me to take to Chicago, but they wanted some of their own. With an eye on the clock, I obliged and emerged close to noon from one more visit with an ABC Hospital x-ray tech. Dr. Golf-shirt saw us out, I shook his hand once more, and as Elder Rodriguez and I ducked into a cab he yelled out he’d need the originals back, they were ABC property, after all. “Sure thing!” I yelled back as I filed “returning these x-rays” at the very bottom of my list of things to be concerned about.
The taxi driver made quick work of the neighborhood traffic and got us onto the freeway nearly immediately—but the freeway itself (I’d heard it referred to as “El Periferico,” but as a missionary I didn’t know if that was the word for “freeway” or the name of that particular freeway, like the Eisenhower back home) had turned into a Saturday afternoon parking lot. We centimetered towards Tlalnepantla, ten miles to the north, as Elder Rodriguez told me over and over again to stay calm, to not worry, to everything was going to be all right. Between glances at my watch and anxiously trying to not be anxious, I wondered where Elder Rodriguez had gotten the Spider-Man t-shirt he was wearing and where his shirt and tie were.
Well past one, quite close to two, we pulled into our apartment complex parking lot, paid the cab, and dashed, in a sort of limpy way, for our building’s open-air stairwell. We lived on the fourth floor, the very top of the building and my leg shouted out with every hurried double-step lunge I took up the stairs, Elder Rodriguez calling out at me to take it easy. As we ascended the Peñuelas heard us coming and Alejandro and Pepe ran up the stairs with us. At our door I shot Rodriguez a glance, my “Go Ahead and Unlock the Door” glance (in our companionship’s division of power, carrying the apartment key was his responsibility)—and he looked at me as if he had just found out he had cancer, too.
“Compa—fetch—no tengo las llaves.”
In English: Rodriguez had left the keys at the hospital.
There was a pause. Then a shaking of the handle and a pounding on of our quadruple-locked door, followed by the shoulder-bruising throwing of our bodies against the door, and then a springing into action as my companion and Pepe ran to our dentist landlady’s nearby office for her spare keys while I remained with Alejandro to rattle the handle of our apartment some more before retreating to his family’s apartment.
Our landlady was Mormon and lived nearby but for some reason just hated us missionaries and begrudgingly rented us this apartment, her previous home. It was clear that she really hoped we’d move out and the Elders who had lived there had a long history of keeping their eyes peeled for alternate lodging. The only thing she liked about the missionaries, and why she kept doing business with us, was that we paid the rent and we paid it on time. Aside from that, she detested us. I could feel her irritation at the sight of us when we came by her house each month with the rent money (my eyes unavoidably drawn to the new Nintendo 64 she had bought for her three year old daughter). She had given us quite the screaming at once after we gave her number to someone who had called our apartment late one night trying to get in touch with her. Granted, the caller turned out to be a cousin our landlady had been hoping to hear from, but in principle, we were in trouble.
Elder Rodriguez and Pepe returned impossibly soon from her office. I expected to hear the jangle of keys being pulled from a pocket as they entered the Peñuelas home. Instead they entered yelling that our landlady wouldn’t give them her spare keys.
“What?”
“She said we deserved to learn a lesson!”
“Did you tell her Elder Barnes has cancer and has to leave right away?”
“Yes! We did! And she said we needed to learn a lesson!”
Sister Peñuelas left for the landlady’s office immediately to give her the yelling at of her life. We called a locksmith. We looked at the time. We sought alternate means of entry. One possibility was clear.
Our apartment had a laundry room whose barless windows we kept open to air out our hanging clothes. As we lived on the top floor of the building, we could get to the roof from a hatch in the ceiling of the hall outside our apartment. I’d already been up there to survey our corner of Tlalnepantla a couple of times before. We theorized that we could lower ourselves down into our apartment through the laundry room window from the roof. It was the exciting and dangerous only option, seemingly prepared and waiting for us since before the dawn of time.
Helpful arms pulled me up through the hallway hatch, climbing the ladder wasn’t easy with my knee as it was, swollen and barely bendable, burning like a foot long bee sting, mad about all the stress and use of the day. We headed to the edge of the roof and, after taking in the five story drop through lines of neighbors’ hanging laundry to the ground below, the Peñuelas boys lowered Elder Rodriguez to our open window, two hands on each of arm, slow and careful. I considered the view, the rail yards on the other side of the wall behind our building, an expansive empty field past that, then apartment buildings in the far distant distance. From here it looked like the city’s unstoppable growth was catching its breath, ending in housing developments that never took hold, sidewalks to nowhere ending abruptly at fields of nevermowed grass. I didn’t want to go.
Rodriguez was in, it was my turn.
I sat at the edge of the roof, Pepe and Alejandro’s hands hovering close by like they were about to place the final ace on top of a house cards. Below, Rodriguez’s hands reached out from the open window and I held tight to the roof’s edge and lowered my legs, kicking for stability at the apartment building with my good leg while the other leg swung crooked and heavy. The Peñuelas boys had their hands tightly at my shoulders, sliding along up to my wrists as I made my way down, Rodriguez reaching for my ankle—“No! The other one! The other one!”—then drew me in through the fluttering white curtain of our hanging laundry.
“Is he in?”
“He’s in!”
The apartment was, of course, a shameful mess. I had let my desk, the living room, our bedroom, the kitchen, my closet, the bathroom, and the two spare bedrooms lapse into a sorry state. I limped around the apartment in a fury, trying to decide where to start packing, and as I began this task a locksmith announced his arrival from the other side of our door. Some of our locks required keys to be opened from the inside, and even though we had gotten into the apartment without his help, we’d still needed springing if we were going to get out.
I hopped over to our bedroom and tore my sheets and blankets from my bed, wadded them up, took one look at my two suitcases, then threw the sheets back on the bed. And after this manner I packed, making sudden, executioner-style decisions as to what would come with me (mementos: a guidebook to the Palacio del Coreo, a piece of the tiled sidewalks of San Juan del Rio, wrestling mask souvenirs from a night of Lucha Libre at the Olympic stadium; belongings: my suits, a couple pairs of shoes, certain ties, my least worn out shirts and pants) and what would stay (another pair of shoes, more ties, more shirts, more pants, many books, my watch [accidentally]) until my two suitcases and two backpacks were full and my most valued belongings were accounted for and just as I clicked my second suitcase shut the locksmith snapped the final lock open, swinging the door in for me to make a coincidental departure.
The Peñuelas sons helped me carry my bags down to their apartment. I entered their living room to find the apartment dim and somber and peopled by a quickly-gathered quiet assembly of Peñuelas family members and neighborhood Mormons. By every clock and watch I was shorter on time than ever, the merciless countdown at least forcing a potentially wrenching farewell to be mercifully short as I shook hands with these guests, quiet like it was a funeral. The gathering followed me down to the parking lot where Brother Peñuelas had their landshark of a car ready to go. I shook hands. The girlfriend of Ignacio, the oldest Peñuelas son, reminded me I was always welcome back, I told them I’d be back, and slid into the backseat of the car along with Elder Rodriguez (still in his bootleg Spider-Man t-shirt) and Alejandro, youngest of the Peñuelas boys; my pseudo-nemesis, video game rival, harshest critic, and definite favorite. We rolled towards the parking lot’s steeply sloping exit, where my favorite Mexican hamburger stand in all of Mexico operated nightly, the asphalt our ocean, this car our schooner. And then we stopped with a kerchunk. Brother Peñuelas hit the steering wheel, Sister Peñuelas turned in concern, fingertips on his shoulder, her eyes on me. “No, Nacho. Not again?” and the still-assembled ward members watched in confusion as Brother Peñuelas tried to start the car back up.
“What do we do?” Sister Peñuelas asked.
Gabriel, one of the gathered ward members, whose mother my previous companion and I had taught the discussions to and he baptized, ran to the car door, “Hermana, my car is here, I’ll drive!” It did not seem right to leave her there then and there, but I told them goodbye, she told me she wished she could hug me, I told her the same. She told me my sickness was very ugly, but I was young and strong and there was hope in that. I waved goodbye again to my audience, and we loaded up and were off in Gabriel’s smaller, more reliable car—something like a LeBaron or a Dodge Shadow, I believe, with the feel of a used car whose second owner was taking a lot better care of it than the first.
We drove beneath freeway overpasses, Elder Rodriguez telling me to stay calm, Gabriel making skillfully practical small talk with me about the Mexico City freeway system, the hours of its heaviest traffic, the city of Chicago, and the location of the airport. I was mostly enthralled by this new view of my city, as missionaries we only come to know our missions by the bubbles we work in, the spaces between them obscure and unknowable, the paths between them utter mysteries. All I knew of the airport’s location was that it was on the east side of the city and I worked mostly to the west or north. We arrived sooner than I expected to, more quickly than my constant watch-glances warranted. Gabriel left us at the curb to go park, we rolled my luggage into the terminal and found the president speaking with a United ticket agent. I reached my hand into a coat pocket and realized I’d left my flight plan fax back at the apartment, panicked for a split-second, but the president, greeting me with his broad smile and warm, handswallowing grip, gave me his nervous double nod and handed me a boarding pass, just procured from the ticket agent. We checked my luggage, I checked my watch—it was going to be tight. Gabriel returned, the five of us stood in line for security, the president gave Rodriguez’s Spider-Man t-shirt a quick look, then told me I should call home, handing me his leather-protected cell phone. That I could call Chicago from a security line in Mexico City astounded me. I worried, perhaps aloud, about the hundreds of dollars I imagined this call would cost, but the President nodded approvingly and watched happily as I checked in with my dad, telling him I was at the airport and ready to go. Dad told me that both sets of my grandparents would be at LAX to meet me. I’d assumed that my maternal Southern-Californian grandparents would be, but it turned out his parents were down from Salt Lake visiting my aunt and uncle in Orange County and would be there, too. He asked if they could bring me anything, “Taco Bell and root beer” I answered, the President chuckling at my complete lack of hesitation. I said goodbye as I neared my turn at security. I posed for a photo with my friends and a photo with my President, and then went through, looking back just once, quite quickly, to see the president shaking hands with Alejandro and Gabriel, then putting a hand on Rodriguez’s shoulder.
Making my way to my gate, I struggled to reconcile what I was seeing with the airport I had arrived at fourteen months earlier. They seemed like two completely different places. The airport I arrived at was crowded, with ceilings high above me. This airport of my departure, the ceilings were low, there were lots of windows looking out at the runways and lots of ramps, and it was practically empty.
I limped through the terminal with the not-wasting-any-time speed of someone who has cleared security so he’s probably going to make his flight, but it’s going to be close so he’s not wasting any time. Passing seated passengers, I pull my boarding pass from my suit pocket as my gate comes into view then infer what these seated passengers mean a split second before the gate’s display informs me that my flight has been delayed an hour. The freeway. The door. The roof. The living room. The cars. Of course. There was no other way for this to have turned out.
I took a seat. Stillness after so much franticness strangely uncomfortable. Thought I should read. Didn’t know what to read. Pulled my yellow planners from my shirt pocket, gave them a glance, thought about the appointments I’d be missing, and moved them to my Uphill Down bag. Looked at my tie, a skinny green tie, inappropriately skinny, actually, according to mission rules, then adjusted the thin suspenders I rarely dared wear. At some point very early on in my mission I’d decided these were what I wanted to wear for my trip home from Mexico, and I was a little proud to have stuck to that plan in spite of the circumstances. A tiny victory for the day. During the mission additional homecoming ideas had come and gone. I’d heard other elders share their plans to emerge from their gate at the Boise airport draped in a poncho and wearing a Mariachi’s sombrero, but I’d never busied myself much with souvenir shopping during my missionary-time. Now I had time. I figured I should get souvenirs. So I stood and heaved my bags over to the concourse’s closest gift shop. Perusing the mementos in the silent tightness of the little shop, a heaviness comes upon me. It began to seem unfair, to stand here, settling on a Mexican flag keychain and a miniature red velvet sombrero to remember my mission by, to have no time to get something nice for Mom or the rest of my family. I scratch the imagining of a great unveiling of gifts to my gathered family in the living room from my vision of the future. The thought of all the scratching out I’m going to have to do twists my brow on my way back to my gate. A bit later we board the plane.
I’m seated in a center row of what turns out to be a nearly-empty flight, but as the plane is taking off I illicitly unbuckle and slip over to a portside window. I press my forehead to the window, take in the slightly familiar terrain of the city that had been an absolute stranger the last time I’d seen it from up here and an intriguing mystery the whole time I was down there. I take a furtive photo with my Canon Owl and put my forehead against the window again.
Having finally made my departure, the departure finally catches up with me. The twisting that passed through my brow at the gate clenches into a grip. My mission was over, I was going home. Early. All my life, but especially in the last couple of years before my mission, I had marveled at the commitment of a missionary—two whole years? It seemed so long. Would I really do that? It seemed like such a long time, and now I had my answer: Turns out, no. I wouldn’t. And I knew, there on the plane, how stupid it was to be thinking about it this way, that I had nothing to be ashamed of, that this was out of my hands but the black and the white of it: I did not serve for two years. I did not experience the mythic final night in the mission home and my heart-to-heart, life-framing final interview with my mission president. I was going home early. I didn’t finish my mission. I didn’t finish. Against my better judgment I repeat this to myself over and over, press my face against the window, sob again. Miss my mom again. Think of the Peñuelas again, feel my leg again. It was a lot for a kid to be thinking about.’
I composed myself over my airplane dinner, having always enjoyed tucking into the comfort of a little tray of food, courses partitioned so neatly, and as I dine I peruse my complimentary copy of United Airlines’ Hemispheres Magazine. Turning to the In Flight Entertainment section at the back of the magazine, I discover one more loss for the day that slugs me in the gut with pure insult to injury disappointment.
The Featured Films for US Domestic Travel: Eastbound (my direction in a few hours)—One Fine Day starring George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer. Westbound (not my direction) —Batman & Robin, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Clooney. I close the magazine with a sigh of disbelief and frustration. I open it again and take a closer look at the photo of George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell in their newest costumes, then tuck the magazine away and bite my knuckle in absolute hopelessness. Instead of spending the last leg of my trip home fighting crime with the dynamic duo, I'd be watching two workaholic single-parents fall in love. I could not win.
Later, we land in America.
The walk from Passport Control (“Welcome back, Mr. Barnes” I was flattered and impressed to hear) to LAX proper was long and terrible. Pulling along both of my suitcases and lugging my two backpacks, sweating and limping, the hall went on forever and I could feel that, beneath my coarse suit coat, my shirt had pulled out of my pants in the back and was riding up between my suspenders. I felt like a shoe was about to come untied at any moment but I was desperate to not stop walking, to not set a bag down, I had my momentum and that was about it. Where were those carts for handicapped people? Where were helpers? Shouldn’t there be helpers in a place like this? Passed on the left and the right by business folks and humble visitors, I made my way down this endless hall until finally, up ahead, the automatic doors to the rest of the airport and to their left, the baggage check to send my suitcases on to Chicago. In a minute I was nearly there and, past the doors, off in the closeby distance, I could see my grandparents, all four, and my aunt Diane and uncle Greg, and they could see me. I was an easy one to spot. I smiled, gave a sheepish wave, received smiles and waves in return and felt their eyes on me as I lined up to hand over my luggage. Glanced at them as I waited in the line, really had no idea how to act in the situation, it was an awkward way to be reunited, these protracted final moments before I was back in familiar hugs and handshakes, back in familiar familial arms, and finally I was squared away with United, through those doors and, heart pounding and bones on fire, with family again.
Taking seats nearby, I was warmly handed a can of root beer and a bag of Taco Bell—three Taco Supremes. I bit into those tacos, those magnificent American tacos and imagined my grandparents pulling up to the Taco Bell drive thru, puzzling over its expansive menu, and choosing the Taco Supreme for its qualities of supremeness, this extra-specialness that distinguished it from the rest of the tacos, just the sort of taco trophy for honoring a missionary returned. I devoured those tacos, I drained that root beer and fielded questions about the previous sixteen months while a nearby set of automatic doors opened and closed frequently, letting in scents of exhaust and receded sunshine and revealing quick glimpses of LAX curbside activity and American girls walking by in shorts.
The mood around me: warm, happy, familiar—talking and looking at me, miscellaneous queries asked and answered—and deliciously, not a word regarding my unfortunate circumstances—so not mentioned that I nearly asked in an aside “But you do know why I’m here, right?”—but from the soft eyes all around, I knew I was being lovingly observed to be lovingly reported on to Chicago once I had left.
It grew later and family members began to head home. Proceeding to the innards of LAX, towards my gate, I began to bump up against the culture I had done my best to abandon while in Mexico. On overhead televisions I observed that Ice-T now co-starred on a buddy cop show. In a magazine stand/bookstore/gift shop with my uncle Greg, Jenny McCarthy is on the cover of the newest Entertainment Weekly promoting her new sitcom, there’s additional copy regarding a Jane’s Addiction reunion, and I think about how much better it would have been for that to have happened while I was in High School. Within the confines of the gift shop my uncle tells me in a lower tone that a missionary from their ward has just come home diagnosed with an osteosarcoma that has metastasized in his lungs. I nod and take note, and I know this is bad news, but no one has explained all the new vocabulary words to me yet, so it doesn’t strike as hard as it should.
As the time for boarding draws near I tell the last of my family goodbye and press towards my gate with my fellow passengers in a restless mass reminiscent of an evacuation. Approaching midnight and everyone rubs against everyone, wide-eyed, loud. My suit bothers me. My tie bothers me, my bags are heavy, bulky—I wish I had left more in my apartment, I wish I hadn’t grabbed all my manuals. A man approaches me, has to shout something to me about someone he knew or was related to having just gone on a mission, shouts at me, am I coming or going, I shout at him that I was headed home early with cancer in my leg. "That's great!" He yells, smiles, shakes my hand. It was loud. I didn’t want to have a conversation like that again. I slip my tag off (snap) and tuck it into my suit coat pocket. Symbolically, a bold statement/action. In the moment, just a little thing, a little problem solving, only felt the smallest pang of guilt.
We board slowly. I lift my bags, walk a pace, set them back on the floor, repeat until I'm on board. Inside the jet the swarming pressure of the terminal has not diffused one bit. Everyone around me is in the business of survival, a kill or be killed spirit pervades, overseen by a crew of flight attendants, hard-edged terminators all, programmed to stow, shutclose, point, and snub.
Seating is in an ABC/DEFG/HIJ layout and I'm stuck with an F halfway in back. I jam one bag in the overhead compartment and the other under the seat in front of me. It takes up too much space to know what to do with my leg which is, at the moment, as inflexible as if it had been in a cast and as painful as if it had been broken. The aisle seat next to me is empty and remains so as the plane begins to settle down. That it should remain free for my taking is my heart's purest desire. Then down the aisle teeters a woman, touching each headrest she passes like you would to maintain balance in turbulence but this was a parked plane. She looks like she’s just been dropped off from years on the Sunset Strip and those years on the Strip were not kind—awesome, maybe, but not kind. She wears a leather (or approximation of leather) dress that laces up in the front from the belly to plunging neckline and her skin is squeezed together between and beneath those laces like the tongue of a tennis shoe. She's headed straight for me, for the free seat beside me—please, please, please, please don’t sit by me, I pray. She puts her hand on the headrest in front of me, we lock eyes, she pauses, I gulp deeply, audibly, and she passes by. I sigh. Shortly thereafter the empty seat would be taken by a businesswoman. Or a big guy in shorts. I don’t remember. I just remember the tight feeling of confinement. Never a claustrophobe, I feel positively enclosed, not only do I struggle for either elbow rest or to find a comfortable angle for my bad leg, but it seems like the overhead compartments are lowering to close me in completely. At take off my leg feels like it’s bracing against the entire weight of the jet as my underchair stowed backpack pushes against it. I want to kick back at it in little hissy fit bursts but grit my teeth as the force of departure presses me into my chair.
At cruising altitude my neighbor to the front reclines and my space grows more tightly enclosed. My shirt is riding up out of my suit pants again, I feel the straps of my suspenders against my bare lower back, feel like an idiot for deciding to wear these suspenders. I feel the coarse wool of my second-hand suit scratching against my lower back, soaking up a light sweat, who’s to say if it’s from heat or frustration, feel like an idiot for being so adamant about bringing this moth-bitten throwback with me and choosing to wear it home. Anyone can tell the arms are short! I’ve been in constant denial about this ever since I bought it at D.I. barely two years before but now, getting a load of all the white cuff showing right in front of me, I mean it’s just obvious. This jacket is too small. Or maybe it’s the seat? Maybe it’s the plane? My leg burns bright and red, I feel like the cancer is asking to be fed. I wonder what the bone looks like, a house full of termites? A tooth full of cavities? I see the cross-section image of a tooth: enamel, dentin, pulp and root system, I juxtapose it with the cross section of a femur’s bone and marrow. Amidst my suffering, the loudspeaker clicks on, dinner is to be announced.
But…prior to announcing our meal choices, something happens. An intervention. A miracle. A touch of Deus ex Aeronautica. The flight attendant informs us, like it isn’t even the biggest deal possible, that the night’s in-flight movie will be Batman & Robin. My head shoots up, my eyes open wide:
Are you kidding me?
I wanted to run up and ask her, right at that intercom system, I wanted to go right up and interrupt her and ask her: Are you serious? You realize the Hemispheres magazine lists Batman & Robin as the westbound in-flight movie selection for flights over two hours and that we are aboard an eastbound vessel? Some rebel, some unstoppable Batman fanatic who is also a United employee, has pulled off the greatest switcheroo of the century, quite possibly purely for my personal benefit.
Now the plane seems open, happy, free. The weight of travel lifts. The gnawings in my brain and discomforts of my situation fade into some background. I watched the time grow later with good cheer and finally the food carts came rolling down the aisle, soon I had my second airplane dinner of the day in front of me, soon I had my headphones on. I settled in, I hunkered down, and shook my head in utter disbelief at my incredible good luck. There was nowhere in the world I’d rather be than on this late night three quarters of a cross-country flight.
The movie begins.
Very shortly after the opening credits it was clear there was a problem.
I could give you the scene by scene, character by character, play by play breakdown on the blue and red neon hell Batman & Robin is, but it is sufficiently documented and understood that this movie is a painful, franchise-killing deathmarch. I was just three months late finding out what interested parties in the United States already knew. My primary reaction was utter disbelief in what I was seeing, all my grievances with this movie can be summarized as such: The movie is some kind of joke. A series that began serious and stylish had now turned completely garish and silly. I worried something was wrong, that they had put in the wrong movie. That the studio had released the wrong movie. That the producers had made the wrong movie. This was definitely not the movie I had been waiting for…there was a version that wasn’t awful, right? One that wasn’t such a pirouetting, giant-diamond-grabbing, glow-in-the-dark chicken-fighting, pun-making, scenery-chewing torture chamber? Right?
As the movie played the plane grew tighter again, my leg growled again. What should have been a dim cabin was filled with a nauseating red glow from the overhead televisions. The sound of the movie rang tinny and sharp in my headphones. I found my head nodding against the irresistible draw of exhausted sleep, my head unable to decide if I would surrender to it or continue to submit myself to the movie playing above. Not a quitter, I somehow made it to the savage end, I was somehow able to hang in there until Batman, Robin and Batgirl save the day by relaying African sunlight via satellite to thaw a frozen Gotham City, and finally, once all our heroes gathered at Wayne Manor and the villains were made cellmates at Arkham Asylum, the movie was over. The plane was dark. The plane was quiet.
In a roughly twenty four hour period where I had found out I had cancer and was leaving my mission, abandoned most of my belongings there, hadn't had time to bid barely a soul goodbye, and had to limp, lonely and pained and shamed, up and down jetways and concourses, it wasn’t until I saw Batman & Robin that I felt I had had a bad day. Things were not awful until I saw this movie.
Congratulations, Joel Schumacher, for making a movie worse than cancer.
5 October, 1997
I disembarked in Chicago and there they were, Mom, Dad and Emily—a seven-year old Greg and an almost ten-year old Owen were asleep at home. They smiled and hugged me like they hadn’t seen me for more than a year. My parents were in polo shirts and jeans and I was surprised by how young they seemed, like they had showered recently. Emily held a “We Love You Elder Barnes” sign. They were all so happy to see me, I had never felt so tall or handsome. I lugged confidently my own luggage until it was taken from me by insistent hands. Talking and talking I could feel my parents taking in my condition as I limped mightily out of O’Hare, assessing psychically between themselves the face of this new future.
Pulling into the garage, opening the back gate. The little walk through the backyard, the swinging open of the screen door, the unlocking of the back door. It was a symphony in succession of familiar sounds I had forgotten to miss. I inhaled deeply and heard dog toenails coming across the kitchen floor to greet in investigation. I touched the face of our stainless steel refrigerator. I noticed the map of Mexico on the kitchen wall and photos mailed from the field posted in tribute. I took a long, fearless drink of the waters of Lake Michigan straight from the tap, wiping my chin dry with the back of my hand when I finally resurfaced, contented. My mom remarked on how long I had been waiting to do that, everything was tender and slow.
Dad took my suitcase upstairs. I checked on the downstairs rooms, checked to be certain we really had the new Nintendo. It would have to wait.
I returned to my room. It had never been so clean or organized or had another brother removed of it so completely before. I looked it over with only the reading light on. The night was losing its ink. Lying in bed, forcing the tightness of the familiar tucked sheets loose with my bared feet, I ran my hands along the familiar sheets and adjusted familiar pillows. I looked over at my suitcase and backpack and suit coat. I adjusted my left leg, then rolled onto my right side, facing the wall, slung the hurtful thing over. I did not think and when sleep came I did not dream a single thing.
—-
Thank you for reading. I’ve been working on this story for a long while, there are drafts of parts of it from before I moved to New York in 2003 and it’s been sitting on my hard drive, nearly finished, for about 5 years now. Versions of this story were read by Matt, Kim, Collin, Lauren and Paula and I appreciate greatly their input, encouragement, discretion and help.
I spent some time making very small attempts at getting the story published in some form so that it wouldn’t just wind up a blog post but have now decided it might as well be a blog post.
Some names have been changed although they probably didn’t need to be.
This post from 2020 tells some of the later part of the story