The Yellow World Read Free Page A

best possible finishing touch: one last dance. I asked a nurse to dance with me and she said yes. I didn’t have any music but my roommate had lots of Antonio Machín CDs (he was a big fan of Machín, and even called himself “El Manisero” * ). I put on the CD he lent me and out came “Wait for Me in Heaven.” There was no more suitable song for this moment, for the last moment. I danced maybe a dozen times with the nurse. My last dozen dances. I danced so much! All I really wanted was not to hear anything, for Machín to melt magically with my mind, become nothing more than a repetitive noise, the perfect soundtrack. Don’t you like it when a piece of music is repeated so many times that you don’thear the words, the individual sounds? This music, these words, they end up being just like the wind, something that’s there, that you notice, that you don’t need to listen to, just feel.
    The next day they cut my leg off. But I wasn’t sad; I’d said goodbye to it, I’d cried, I’d laughed. Without realizing, I’d had my mourning period. I’d spoken about the loss without any hang-ups and I’d turned it into a gain.
    I like to think that I haven’t actually lost a leg but gained a stump. Along with a list of leg-related memories:
    1. A wonderful goodbye party. (How many people can say that they’ve had a party that cool?)
    2. The memory of my second set of baby steps (you forget about the first ones, but you never forget your second set, the first baby steps with your mechanical leg).
    3. Also, as I mentioned earlier, because I buried my leg, I’m one of the few people in this world who can literally say that they’ve got one foot in the grave. I always like to think that I’m one of the lucky ones, to be able to say that.
    Of course losses are positive. Cancer taught me this. But this is something that can be brought across into the noncancerous world. We suffer losses every day: sometimes important ones that upset us; sometimes smaller ones that only worry us. It’s not like losing a leg, but the technique for getting over them is the same as I learned in the hospital.
    If, when you lose something, you convince yourself thatyou aren’t losing it, then you’ve beaten the loss. Let it go: Mourn for a bit if you need to. The steps are as follows:
    1. Focus on the loss; think about it.
    2. Suffer with it. Call the people connected with the loss, ask their advice.
    3. Cry. (Our eyes are our private and public windshield wipers.)
    4. Look for what you can gain from the loss (take your time).
    5. In a few days you’ll feel better. You’ll see what you’ve gained. But remember that you can lose this feeling as well.
    Does it work? Of course. I never had a phantom limb. A phantom limb is when you still feel the leg even when you don’t have it anymore. I think that I don’t have one because, even without knowing, I gave the real leg such a good send-off that even its ghost went away.
    The first discovery of the yellow world: Losses are positive. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.
    Sometimes the losses will be small; other times they’ll be big. But if you get used to understanding them, to facing up to them, in the end you’ll realize that they don’t really exist. Every loss is a gain.
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    * Antonio Machín (1903–77): Cuban singer, most famous for “El Manisero” (“The Peanut Vendor”), the first Cuban song to be a hit in the U.S.

2
The word
pain
doesn’t exist
    What if injections don’t actually hurt? What if what happens is that we react to pain like they show us in the movies without noticing if we really feel it? What if pain doesn’t actually exist?
    —David, a real Egghead,
who gave me 60 percent of his life
    There’s no such thing as pain. This was the phrase that I heard people using most often with the Eggheads while I was in the hospital. The Eggheads was the name that some of the doctors and nurses used for us, on account of our lack of hair. It normally means someone