I was going up from the school canteen, desperately searching for Internet. I needed to fulfill some meaningless task: paying a bill, booking a restaurant, I forget. It was one of those hectic inter-trip days filled with boring classes and droning itinerary-planning that take away from the pleasures of exchange. I was hardly calm. It was hardly serene. The skimpy Internet finally showed up as I climbed to the third floor.
I might have been expecting an email, but I received the one I didn't want. I re-read it another time and double-checked the sender. It was a one-liner, like a caption of a cartoon: unexpected, thought-provoking, offensive. It said so much yet so little. It raised more questions than it answered. I reserved my emotions.
Anyone familiar with these types of ailments will know the number matters. What stage, what grade. One in a thousand, apparently, but that wasn't the probability I wanted to know. I quickly called her and was met with an overriding nonchalance I took to be a sign of gravity, of dealing with the situation. It would have been easy to blame the system which seemed to have missed the signs years ago, but even with that there was restraint. I myself settled on clear-headedness until the numbers were known. There is no point despairing over the unknowable.
For the entire time, messages like "Hi David" scared me to death. I took refuge in silence, of unknowing. Breaking it was facing the truth, like a ringing phone after an interview. The false alarms are so foreboding.
One such conversation was grave. An instruction from him to oblige any of her phone calls. I read the tea-leaves correctly. They thought it had spread, according to a scan; the number then would be 4. I started thinking about the Obit, like the finale of The Economist. It might have read like this article.
But I didn't start writing. It was a false alarm.
Now, risks of recourse seem low. This is my exceedingly composed reaction to trauma. It is composed because of my characteristically blunt approach to life: people die. The discount rate in life is much too high to spend it doing things as means to ends. Long-term goals are overrated because you might not be alive.
