The Phenomenology of Fatherly Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

Radiation immobilization masks look like medieval torture devices
when you vomit—because your stomach is swimming with chemotherapy and bile so you
must vomit—the mask traps your vomit, causing you to choke on it and repeat the process
for the next two hours
he never let me visit him in the hospital

A decade goes by, I am 17, crouching next to his shaking body on a beer-spilled sidewalk in
Lisbon
for the last few years, I avoided the house every time it’s gotten this bad but now we are
alone, and I am the adult

I don’t even know what triggered it
we are walking to a restaurant and when we find out the restaurant is closed he starts
shaking the locked door handles, goes to every window frame and tries to pry them open
We can go eat somewhere else, says I, it’s really no problem
he says
he wants to die
to call the police
to call my mother
that he wishes the doctors had amputated his arms and legs so then people would see his
disability and not ask him why he doesn’t have a job
that he’s sorry he missed my yellow belt ceremony when I was 6
that cisplatin sucks
that when he told Nana about the cancer she said not to go to the doctors, we’ll pray it away
that nobody knows nothing and there is no such thing as security

I sit down beside him on the sidewalk and awkwardly place my arm around his shoulders
his shoulders

that were once so strong, he’d stretch out his arms, flex his muscles, and my
brother and I would swing from his biceps like monkey bars

Dad, says I, I think we should go home

But we’re too far from the hotel for him to walk back, so I buy two tickets for the all-night
party bus, we board it, upper decker seats
and he falls asleep beside me

I watch as British bachelor parties and Lisbon drunkards dance the evening away
By the time we get to the hotel bus stop, he’s so deeply asleep I don’t bother speaking

All night, I sit under the stars, hearing faint EuroPop and inhaling second hand cancer stick
cigarettes, while our bus does circles round the cobblestone Lisbon streets…