Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(57)

I planned to think about the plastic bags of water for the remainder of the evening, but other stuff kept getting in the way—Francine’s house, for one, which was really more of a compound: the Francine Institute, with a big modern space for writing, and a separate alcove for the dozens of books she’s authored, and all the products these books have generated, the dolls and posters and calendars.

Dinner was taken in the backyard beside the canal. It was a clear night, cold enough to see our breath, and a fire was burning. Joining us were Pauline, Francine’s ex-husband, and one of their sons, a twenty-year-old named Dan. Like his mother, he was blond, with the sort of looks we all might have were we allowed to construct ourselves from a kit: perfectly spaced blue eyes, perfect cheekbones, a perfect mouthful of big white teeth. On top of that he was really kind and interesting. After dinner we moved our chairs into a circle around the fire pit and were served apple cake. Hugh asked a question about the economy, and Dan explained that the Netherlands has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. “As long as you get a master’s degree you’re pretty much guaranteed a job.” He himself was in his second year of college, majoring in saving the Earth. “That’s not the actual name of the program, but it’s pretty much what it amounts to,” he told us.

I asked what sort of things he was learning, and he brought up a biology class he’d sat through earlier that week. “We were talking about aging and how the average life expectancy keeps creeping upward. It used to be that people died in their midthirties, but now look at us! And it’s all changing so quickly.” Dan said that the first person who’ll reach the age of two hundred has already been born. “It’s anyone’s guess who it is, but he or she is definitely here.”

It could have been the authority in his voice, or maybe the firelight reflected in his eyes, but for whatever reason, this sounded to me like a prophecy. I swallowed the last of my cake and leaned forward to ask a question. “At the age of a hundred sixty, will this person be like, ‘You know what? I’m starting to feel a little tired,’ or will he be curled into a ball, puddled in drool and Botox?”

“We don’t know,” Dan said.

I stared into the flames and got a sickening feeling that the person we were talking about would turn out to be my father. And that I would be the one left to care for him. Think of the plastic bags of water hanging in the doorway, I told myself, but try as I might, I couldn’t get it out of my mind, not then, shivering beside the dark canal, and not later, on our way back to Amsterdam. The taxi meter clicked ever upward, and I saw the figures as ages rather than sums, thinking, Sixty-six, that’s like being in your twenties. Sixty-seven, that’s still nothing. When I’m sixty-seven my father will be a mere one hundred years old.

That would leave him a whole other century to call at odd hours and ask if I’d gotten a colonoscopy. This is a campaign he started in 1978, the first time he had one. “It was horrible,” he reported. “The doctor made me take my pants off and strapped me into a kind of bottomless chair—tethered me like a hostage. Then he tipped it forward and stuck, no kidding, a three-foot metal rod up my ass! Can you imagine? There I was, begging for mercy. Turned practically upside down, sweat dripping off my nose, I mean to tell you it was just god-awful, like torture. The single worst experience of my entire life.” Then, in the same breath, he added, “I think you should get one.”

“But I’m only twenty-two years old!”

“It’s never too early,” he told me. “Go on. I’ll pay for it myself.”

I said to my sister Lisa, “It’s like he thinks I’ll enjoy it.”

I’d heard the procedure was easier now than it was in the late ’70s. Rather than being strapped into a chair, you lie on your side, doped to the gills, while a slender tentacle no thicker than packing twine meanders the empty corridors of your colon. “It couldn’t be simpler,” a doctor promised me. “We knock you out, and you wake up remembering nothing.”

“Nothing about you doing God knows what inside my *?” I said. “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t sound very reassuring to me.”

“You’re a ticking time bomb,” my father said. “Mark my words, you wait much longer and you’re going to regret it.”

When I hit fifty he doubled his efforts. He doubled them again the following year, and then it was basically all he ever talked about. I had oral surgery in the summer of 2010 and had just returned from the periodontist, my mouth still numb and leaking blood onto my chin, when the phone rang. “Seeing as that’s done, I want you to get a colonoscopy,” my father said.

I took him with me to a college in New York where I was to give the commencement address, and just before I went onstage he tapped me on the shoulder. “I want you to think about getting a colonoscopy.”

He worked it into every conversation we had. The one after I returned from Amsterdam, for instance, when I called to ask what he wanted for Christmas. “I want for you to get a goddamn colonoscopy.”

“You want your gift to be someone sticking a foreign object up my ass?”

“You’re damn right I do.” He continued to hammer at it until, exhausted, I told him I couldn’t talk anymore. We hung up, and two minutes later he called again.

“Or an iPhone.”