Chapter 2

RON'S BIG ARMS were closed around to hold me inside, and I was squeezed in the dark between Ron's new sweating tits that hang enormous, the way we think of God's as big. Going around the tavern basement full of men, each night we met: this is Lee, this is Cedric, this is Ron; Ron's big shoulders made me think of the horizon. Ron's thick blond hair was what you get when hair cream calls itself Samwell's Sculpting Solution, so thick and red and the part is so straight.

His arms wrapped around me, Ron's hand palms my head against the new tits sprouted on his barrel chest.

"It will be alright," Ron says. "You cry now."

From my knees to my forehead, I feel chemical reactions within Ron burning food and oxygen.

"Maybe they got it all early enough," Ron says. "Maybe it's just Bartholomew's Ball Blight. With Bartholomew's Ball Blight, you have almost a hundred percent survival rate."

Ron's shoulders inhale themselves up in a long draw, then drop, drop, drop in jerking sobs. Draw themselves up. Drop, drop, drop.

I've been coming here every week for two years, and every week Ron wraps his arms around me, and I cry.

"You cry," Ron says and inhales and sob, sob, sobs. "Go on now and cry."

The big wet face settles down on top of my head, and I am lost inside. This is when I'd cry. Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.

Anything you're ever proud of will be thrown away.

And I'm lost inside.

This is as close as I've been to sleeping in almost a week.

This is how I met Ginny Weasley.

Ron cries because six months ago, his testicles were removed. Then hormone potion therapy. Ron has tits because his testosterone ration is too high. Raise the testosterone level too much, your body ups the estrogen to seek a balance. The resulting hormonal disruption alters your body chemistry, which changes the alignment of your personal thaumaturgical field, and makes pretty much everything you ever learned about spellcasting useless.

This is when I'd cry because right now, your life comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion.

Too much estrogen, and you get bitch tits.

It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.

Ron loves me because he thinks my testicles were removed, too.

Around us in the Three Broomsticks basement with the thrift store plaid sofas are maybe twenty men and only one woman, all of them clung together in pairs, most of them crying. Some pairs lean forward, heads pressed ear-to-ear, the way wrestlers stand, locked. The man with the only woman plants his elbows on her shoulders; one elbow on either side of her head, her head between his hands, and his face crying against her neck. The woman's face twists off to one side and her hand brings up a cigarette.

I peek out from under the armpit of Big Ron.

"All my life," Ron cries. "Why I do anything, I don't know."

The only woman here at Remaining Wizards Together, the testicular cancer support group, this woman smokes her cigarette under the burden of a stranger, and her eyes come together with mine.

Faker.

Faker.

Faker.

Long red hair, big eyes the way they are in Japanese animation, skim milk thin, buttermilk sallow in her dress with a wallpaper pattern of dark roses, this woman was also in my wormwood support group Friday night. She was in my Sally's Sallow Skin Scourge round table Wednesday night. Monday night she was in my Firm Believers Barda's Blisters rap group. The part down the center of her hair is a crooked lightning bolt of white scalp.

When you look for these support groups, they all have vague upbeat names. My Thursday evening group for blood imps, it's called Free and Clear.

The group I go to for brain imps is called Above and Beyond.

And Sunday afternoon at Remaining Wizards Together in the basement of the Three Broomsticks, this woman is here, again.

Worse than that, I can't cry with her watching.

This should be my favorite part, being held and crying with Big Ron without hope. We all work so hard all the time. This is the only place I ever really relax and give up.

I went to my first support group two years ago, after I'd gone to Madam Pomfrey about my insomnia, again.

Three weeks and I hadn't slept. Three weeks without sleep, and everything becomes an out-of-body experience. Madam Pomfrey said, "Insomnia is just the symptom of something larger. Find out what's actually wrong. Listen to your body."

I just wanted to sleep. I wanted little blue dragonsbreath capsules, half-knut sized. I wanted red and blue turtletongue capsules, lipstick-red mandrake toes.

Madam Pomfrey told me to chew valerian root and get more exercise. Eventually I'd fall asleep.

The bruised, old fruit way my face had collapsed, you would've thought I was dead.

My doctor said, if I wanted to see real pain, I should swing by the Three Broomsticks on a Tuesday night. See the brain imps. See the degenerative bone curses. The thaumaturgical brain dysfunctions. See the living dead getting by.

So I went.

The first group I went to, there were introductions: this is Alice, this is Luna, this is Dudley. Everyone smiles with that Avada Kedavra to their head.

I never give my real name at support groups.

The little skeleton of a woman named Cho with the seat of her pants hanging down sad and empty, Cho tells me the worst thing about her brain imps was no one would have sex with her. Here she was, so close to death that her life insurance policy had paid off with seventy-five thousand galleons, and all Cho wanted was to get laid for the last time.

Not intimacy, sex.

What does a guy say? What can you say, I mean.

All this dying had started with Cho being a little tired, and now Cho was too bored to go in for treatment. Pornographic paintings, she had moving pornographic paintings on the ceiling at home in her apartment.

Cho had pornographic picutures, if I was interested. Succubus scent. Goblin grease.

Normal times, I'd be sporting an erection. Our Cho, however, is a skeleton dipped in yellow wax.

Cho looking the way she is, I am nothing. Not even nothing. Still, Cho's shoulder pokes mine when we sit around a circle on the shag carpet. We close our eyes. This was Cho's turn to lead us in guided meditation, and she talked us into the garden of serenity. Cho talked us up the hill to the castle of seven doors. Inside the castle were the seven doors, the green door, the yellow door, the orange door, and Cho talked us through opening each door, the blue door, the red door, the white door, and finding what was there.

Eyes closed, we imagined our pain as a ball of white healing light floating around our feet and rising to our knees, our waist, our chest. Our chakras opening. The heart chakra. The head chakra. Cho talked us into caves where we met our power animal. Mine was a basilisk, and it lived in a sewer.

Slime covered the floor of the sewer, and the basilisk said, slide. Without any effort, we slid through tunnels and galleries.

Then it was time to hug.

Open your eyes.

This was therapeutic physical contact, Cho said. We should all choose a partner. Cho threw herself around my head and cried. She had a bondage elf at home, and cried. Cho had oils and handcuffs, and cried as I watched the second hand on my watch go around eleven times.

So I didn't cry at my first support group, two years ago. I didn't cry at my second or my third support group, either. I didn't cry at blood imps or bowel distensions or thaumaturgic brain dementia.

This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.

Then there was Ron. The first time I went to testicular curses, Ron the big moosie, the big cheesebread moved in on top of me in Remaining Wizards Together and started crying. The big moosie treed right across the room when it was hug time, his arms at his sides, his shoulders rounded. His big moosie chin on his chest, his eyes already shrink-wrapped in tears. Shuffling his feet, knees together invisible steps, Ron slid across the basement floor to heave himself on me.

Ron pancaked down on me.

Ron's big arms wrapped around me.

--

BIG RON WAS A POLYJUICER, he said. Chugging polyjuice potion for kicks, playing pranks on people for fun, seeing how women lived, stuff like that. He had a side business as a private investigator, using the polyjuice for undercover work. He'd been on the wizard's wireless and in the newspaper, and had I seen him in the Daily Prophet, ever? He also sold the stuff to people under the counter, strictly small-time stuff, he said. His three wives divorced him when each found out, he said.

Strangers with this kind of honesty make me go a big rubbery one, if you know what I mean.

Ron didn't know. Maybe only one of his huevos had ever descended, and he knew this was a risk factor. Ron told me about postoperative hormone potions.

A lot of polyjuicers chugging to much juice would get what they called bitch tits.

I had to ask what Ron meant by huevos.

Huevos, Ron said. Gonads. Nuts. Jewels. Testes. Balls. In Mexico, where you buy your chupacabra bladders, they call them "eggs."

Divorce, divorce, divorce, Ron said and showed me a wallet photo of himself in the body of a big, muscled, 300 pound brute, collecting shakedown money from a tavern owner in Knockturn Alley. It's a dangerous and stupid way to live, Ron said, but when you're in the body of somebody else, seeing, smelling, feeling things differently than you ever have before, wearing somebody else's skin and experiencing the most mundane things in an entirely different fashion, you're blind from the rush, and deaf to the people mentioning how you're acting odd, maybe you have a fever, and I always thought you were left handed?

This is better than real life.

Fast-forward, Ron said, to the cancer. Then he was bankrupt. He had two grown kids who wouldn't return his calls.

The cure for bitch tits was for the doctor to cut up under the pectorals and drain any fluid.

This was all I remember because then Ron was closing in around me with his arms, and his head was folding down to cover me. Then I was lost inside oblivion, dark and silent and complete, and when I finally stepped away from his soft chest, the front of Ron's robe was a wet mask of how I looked crying.

That was two years ago, at my first night with Remaining Wizards Together.

At almost every meeting since then, Big Ron has made me cry.

I never went back to Madame Pomfrey. I never chewed the valerian root.

This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. If I didn't say anything, people in a group assumed the worst. They cried harder. I cried harder. Look up into the stars and you're gone.

Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I'd ever felt. I wasn't host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around.

And I slept. Babies don't sleep this well.

Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.

Resurrected.

Until tonight, two years of success until tonight, because I can't cry with this woman watching me. Because I can't hit bottom, I can't be saved. My tongue thinks it has flocked wallpaper, I'm biting the inside of my mouth so much. I haven't slept in four days.

With her watching, I'm a liar. She's a fake. She's the liar. At the introductions tonight, we introduced ourselves: I'm Ron, I'm Seamus, I'm Harold, I'm William.

I never give my real name.

"'This is cancer, right?" she said.

Then she said, "Well, hi, I'm Ginny Weasley."

Nobody ever told Ginny what kind of cancer. Then we were all busy cradling our inner child.

The man still crying against her neck, Ginny takes another drag on her cigarette.

I watch her from between Ron's shuddering tits.

To Ginny I'm a fake. Since the second night I saw her, I can't sleep. Still, I was the first fake, unless, maybe all these people are faking with their lesions and their coughs and tumors, even Big Ron, the big moosie. The big cheesebread.

Would you just look at his sculpted hair.

Ginny smokes and rolls her eyes now.

In this one moment, Ginny's lie reflects my lie, and all I can see are lies. In the middle of all their truth. Everyone clinging and risking to share their worst fear, that their death is coming head-on and the tip of a wand is pressed against the back of their throats. Well, Ginny is smoking and rolling her eyes, and me, I'm buried under a sobbing carpet, and all of a sudden even death and dying rank right down there with Frieda's Fade-Away Flowers as a non-event.

"Ron," I say, "you're crushing me." I try to whisper, then I don't. "Ron." I try to keep my voice down, then I'm yelling. "Ron, I have to go to the can."

A mirror hangs over the sink in the bathroom. If the pattern holds, I'll see Ginny Weasley at Above and Beyond, the blood imp group. Ginny will be there. Of course, Ginny will be there, and what I'll do is sit next to her. And after the introductions and the guided meditation, the seven doors of the palace, the white healing ball of light, after we open our chakras, when it comes time to hug, I'll grab the little bitch.

Her arms squeezed tight against her sides, and my lips pressed against her ear, I'll say, Ginny, you big fake, you get out.

This is the one real thing in my life, and you're wrecking it.

You big tourist.

The next time we meet, I'll say, Ginny, I can't sleep with you here. I need this. Get out.