Probability of Limestone Lifting

            Ben used a chunk of limestone as a paperweight, partly because it had a green hue, and partly because of the rock’s flat bottom, which kept it stable on the pile of physics exams.  Wind surfed through the window, curling up the paper's edges like white flames.  He had found the stone on the side of a Wyoming road where he had stopped at the request of his wife, Laura, who wanted to photograph wildflowers.  Limestone was not common in the area so he had noticed the rock right away.  He had scanned the mountains and road on the remote chance that he might find the person who had dropped it there, or some strange geological anomaly that could explain its presence: a green stone amongst all the brown sandstone and shale.  When he had shown the rock to Laura her eyebrows pulled together and she chuckled before hunching back over the blue flower she was photographing. 

            He lifted it from the desk, turned it in his hands a few times and rubbed its cold, hard surface.  Freed, the first paper glided off with a snap.  The second twittered a bit before leaping.  Then the rest followed like paratroopers dropping in formation.  The stone was the size of a baseball, perhaps a bit bigger, and weighed about half a kilogram he estimated.  

            Ben placed it on a postage scale for a precise measurement, then searched the bookshelf for the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.  Laura knocked her knuckles against the door frame and leaned against it.  She was wearing a blue bathrobe and slid a comb through her hair as she waited for Ben to respond.  Ben punched some numbers into his calculator, then scribbled with his mechanical pencil.

            Laura was eyeing the papers, which swirled in the corner of the room above the ones that had roosted on the rug.  "Got the tests recorded yet?" she asked. 

            Ben shook his head and peered at the rock over the top of his glasses.  He could feel her gaze, see the expression on her face.  Even hidden from him, her smile was not convincing.  He was consciously aware of hearing her voice, if not the specific words.  Ben sat back in his chair, holding the calculator in front of him.  He drew his hand down his face and let it rest over his mouth like a bandit's mask. 

            "Ben?" she asked again, and it startled him.

            "Yes?" he said as if shaken awake.

            "Couldn't you take the rest of the semester off?  Have another TA take over?"

            Ben nodded slowly.  He didn't like to talk about it.  They never talked about it.  He lifted the rock off the postage scale and turned in his swivel chair until he faced her.  "How many atoms do you think there are in this rock?" he asked, holding it in the open palm of his hand for her to see. 

            Laura slowly shook her head as she looked down at her feet, chuckling a little, not much, just a quick puff of air through the nostrils.  "Come to bed, Ben."

#

            Doctor Zimmerman flipped through the papers on his clipboard and scratched the corner of his mouth with one finger.  “I’d like to run this last test,” he said, pointing to what looked like some sort of science fiction stasis chamber.  Laura placed her hand on Ben's bare knee. 

"Aren't these things sexy?" Ben teased, rubbing the blue-plastic material of the robe between his fingers.  "They have these slits down the back, too."  Laura closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.  "That was funny," Ben said, then laughed since she didn't. 

            The technician opened her hand when Ben stood up, and he realized she wanted his rock.  Ben started to hand it to her, then withdrew. 

            "Look,” he said, “I basically have two superstitions in life.  One is that if I watch my favorite basketball team play, they’ll lose, and second is that this chunk of limestone brings me good luck."  The woman kept her hand out with the palm turned upwards, blinking slowly, and after some hesitation he handed it over with a shrug.  He didn't really believe in luck.  He believed in probability.

            Ben sat motionless on the bed as he listened to instructions and waited to be drawn into the machine and scanned.  The machine was supposed to work with a powerful magnet that pulled the magnetic moments of his atoms upward.  Through the magnetic resonance, he assumed, they could look deep into his body.  He wondered if he'd feel a trillion tiny pin pricks as the magnet powered on.  He pressed his hands against the bed.  When the buzz of the magnet came, Ben jump as if the electricity traveled through his body instead of through the machine, expecting to feel some sort of jolt, but didn’t. How could he not feel anything that affected every atom of his body?  He should be levitating if every atom stood erect like that.  What kept him from floating like some medium, possessed?

            If the machine pulled his electrons up, the centrifugal force would pop him right up off the table.  If every electron simply spun and by some cosmic chance hit the top of their orbits simultaneously, he wondered how far he'd go.  Hit the roof of the scanner, probably.  Maybe further.  The ceiling.  Maybe right up out of the hospital like some out-of-body experience, only it would really be his body, not his soul.  Or both.  He’d always believed his body was his soul.  His soul was in the atoms and in the electric cloud circling them, lifting him off the bed and smashing his face against the roof.

            He lifted his head to give Laura a wink, then closed his eyes.

#

Ben and Laura sat in Doctor Zimmerman’s office with their hands linked in the space between the arms of their big leather chairs.  "You definitely have cirrhosis of the liver,” Doctor Zimmerman said in monotone.  "There’s visible scarring caused by Hepatitis B, most likely, which you probably acquired from a blood transfusion.  I see from your records that you had a visit to the emergency room some years ago.  An automobile accident, looks like." Laura’s hand began to squeeze Ben’s almost imperceptibly.  “In addition, you have Hepatocellular Carcinoma—a type of tumor.  Unless we give you a transplant your liver will eventually fail.”  Ben nodded.  He had heard all this before, except without the Latin.

“So when does he get the transplant?” Laura asked.  

Doctor Zimmerman leaned forward, raising his eyebrows and running his tongue beneath his bottom lip.  “Well, it looks like his tumor is localized to the liver.  I can see no spreadage of the cancer elsewhere:  the lungs and lymph nodes all look clean.  This means he is a candidate.”

            "So all we have to do is wait until we find a donor, and he gets the transplant." Laura said it as if she were stating a fact, not a possibility.

            “I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple.  Liver failure usually occurs around six months after diagnosis and the average waiting period for a suitable donor can be anywhere from six months to a year—sometimes longer in cases like your husband’s.  Cancer patients are only recently being considered good candidates for transplantation."

            “But Ben is O positive, so it should be easier to find a match.” Laura protested.

            “Ironically, it’s often the patients with the most common blood type who wait the longest simply because there are more people on the list for any given match.  Even if we do find a transplant in time, there’s still a forty percent chance that we’ll find the tumor has spread outside the liver and we’ll have to abandon the procedure.”

            Laura stood and walked over to the window as she ran her fingers through her hair. 

            “Look, many patients in your circumstances end up living long, healthy lives, but I want you to know exactly where you stand.”

Laura crossed her arms in front of her as if she were hugging herself, or cold.  Ben and Doctor Zimmerman were watching her like actors waiting for Laura to give her next line.  Finally, Ben slapped his knees and smiled.  “It’s okay,” he said.  “It’s better that I know.”  

#

            Ben placed his book on the night stand, then slid his hand over Laura's stomach, her ribs, stopping at her breast.  She blinked at the ceiling and held her thumb against her forehead as if blocking the glare from the lamp.  He massaged her nipple with his fingers and she turned away.  "I'm tired," she said, but he could see her open eyes looking at the dresser, blinking.  He clasped her from behind, tracing his finger down her neck and beneath her nightgown.  "Jesus Christ!  What is this fascination you men have with breasts, anyway?" she said, quickly snapping the covers over her shoulder.

            Ben sat up.  He hadn't really thought about it before.  There had to be a reason.  They were secondary sexual organs and essential to reproduction, but what did they have to do with sexual intercourse?  Laura was still staring at the dresser drawers.  She pulled her knees close to her chest and hugged them there. 

            "Perhaps the men who were attracted to women with healthier and shapelier breasts could feed their babies better and therefore gave men a greater chance of passing on their genes."

            Laura twisted herself upright.  Her hair fell over her eyes.  Despite looking a bit silly and tangled, she didn't bother to brush it aside.  "Are you serious?"

            Ben was being serious and was starting to feel a little embarrassed about it.  He shrugged.  "Either that or it's the same fascination children have with Jell-O."

            Laura fluttered her eyelids and there was a lull.  Ben adjusted himself on the bed in the awkward silence, knowing that she would be angry at him for his jokes.  Moisture welled up around the bottom of Laura's eye lids, and her lower lip began to quiver on one side.  She fell forward and slung her arms around Ben's neck.  She did it so suddenly that Ben jumped, then calmed himself and cradled her head against his chest.  It was then that he realized she was laughing. 

"Oh, God, Ben.  I love you so much."

#

             The chance was about one out of ten raised to the eighty-fourth power.  That meant that if someone were to take any one atom and randomly place it somewhere in the Universe, the chance of Ben randomly choosing that same atom would be as likely as any one rock spontaneously lifting off the ground.  An event so unlikely that it might have only happened once in the history of the universe.  Or maybe it hadn’t even happened yet and the event was still to come.  He wondered, of all the rocks along dirt roads, of all the shale and granite and limestone, what the chance would be of choosing the only rock in history to have gained the gift of flight.

            If it became airborne, this rock would suddenly attain a huge significance.  Just as a few dollars worth of cheap cloth and pigment could become a Monet, something invaluable, this worthless piece of limestone could transform into something precious, more of a rarity than life itself.  By comparison, getting a transplant was a certainty.

            Ben folded up the scribble of calculations and placed it beneath his green stone.  He stacked his arms on his desk and rested his chin on top of them.  The stone had a polished surface, shiny beneath the fluorescent lamp, and his computer screen gave its skin a blue aura.  He let his eyes become microscopes, peering deeper, magnifying the sheen until it became a lumpy field of atoms twirling in pirouettes, a tiny carnival of Ferris wheels and teacups spinning.  The atoms’ only purpose was to twirl in their rides just as in him the cancerous cells' only purpose was to breed and multiply until they squeezed the life from his organs.  He closed his eyes and listened to the whirring laughter of particles at play.

#

            It finally happened in May.  Ben had felt dizzy during lecture and was forced to call class short.  To be safe, Laura drove him to the hospital where he was tested and probed and asked to piss in a cup.  Now Doctor Zimmerman was telling him he was dying.  His liver had taken a turn for the worse, and was about to fail. “How much time do I have left?” Ben asked.

            “It’s difficult to predict.  Days.  Weeks.”

            “Shouldn’t he be hospitalized?” Laura asked.

            “There’s not much I can do for him here.  If you’re more comfortable at home, I recommend you stay there.”

            Ben realized he had been rubbing his stomach and dropped his hand away.  "What are the odds that I will find a donor in time?"

            “There’s always a chance one could arrive today...”

            “...but it’s not very likely.”

            Doctor Zimmerman frowned slightly, looking down at his desk for a moment before answering.  “No.  Not very likely.”

            “What are the odds?” Ben asked.  He didn’t like the abstract uncertainty of it all.  He needed a concrete figure to ground himself in. 

             Doctor Zimmerman puckered his lips as if considering how best to respond.

“Please... it’s just easier for me if I know.”

 “Maybe...,” he said, shaking his head slowly from side to side, “one hundred to one.”

            Ben didn't like to gamble.  On the rare occasions that he had, he’d bet only as much as he was willing to lose.  It seemed logical.  Gambling was for entertainment, not livelihood.  One hundred to one; he considered the odds.  He wouldn't normally risk any money on that horse, despite the enormous return.

#

            At times, Ben was tempted to believe in Karma.  When he replayed certain events, like the time he had flown up over the dashboard and through the glass windshield of his roommate’s Blue Chevy Nova, he sometimes wondered if an invisible hand came down and guided him past the telephone pole and into the grass of the field.  “You’re a lucky man,” the doctor had told him, and he’d thought it was because of the homeless man he gave a buck to, or because of all the time he had volunteered tutoring at the local high school.  Then years later, as if to mock him, he found himself in another hospital with another doctor who told him that the very blood transfusion that had saved his life was going to kill him.  And he’d think, no, the seat belt didn’t work that day because he flipped the bird at that guy who cut them off on the highway, or because he lied on his resume.  Then the temptation to believe would disappear, and he’d realize that the world just didn’t work that way.  You toss a deck of cards in the air and there’s no way to know how they’ll arrange themselves.  His card had been face up, and now it was face down.  It was that simple.

All he could do was hold on and try and increase the odds.  Every day was another dealt hand, another upped ante.  He rolled the cold limestone over the scar left from scraping a specimen off his liver.  It felt good.  The coldness seemed to leech the poisons from him.

            The first night, Laura threw a leg over him.  She rubbed his chest and leaned close enough to his ear that the skin on his back tingled, and she whispered for him not to move, to just relax as she made love to him.   A few days later he was too weak to sustain an erection, and restricted his movements to playing solitaire on the bed sheets.  The yellow hue of his skin brightened into a deep yellow ochre.  He charted the progress every morning by looking at his face in the dresser mirror next to the bed.  Even if he could force the tainted blood into his penis, he couldn't imagine Laura wanting to touch him.

            His bare chest looked like the aerial view of the Sahara; he was almost alien.  Laura knelt on the floor, rearranging the items in her jewelry box for the third time.  His blood was like piss.  It was as if it were backing up in his veins, flowing through the capillaries, feeding every cell of his body and turning him the color of urine.  He wouldn't taste a drop of piss on a dare; now he was drowning in it.

            Laura no longer picked at the earrings in front of her.  When she saw him, she began to squeeze the bridge of her nose, looking as if she smelled something bad. 

            "Do you think maybe they have a donor?"

            "They have our beeper number," Ben said, his voice a bit raspy.

            "But what if they lost it?  Or. . ." she stood and talked to the corner, still pinching her nose.

            "They didn't," Ben said forcefully enough to blow the rasp from his throat.

            She stood for a moment with her hand resting on the doorknob.  She turned it.  "It couldn't hurt just to call," she said, and left.

              The limestone rested just a few feet away.  It looked like a frog basking contentedly in the sun.  He concentrated, not letting his eyes move from it, even when he heard the clicking of fingers on plastic buttons from the other side of the wall.  He halfway expected it to move a little, or turn to tan its backside.  He wouldn't let himself blink and pushed the sound of a reseating telephone receiver from his head.  The rock seemed so still despite the millions of electrons swarming about their atomic hives. 

            He tried to make himself pray, but couldn't.  He didn't believe in God, only in the atoms and their various arrangements.  And electrons.  The rock started to jiggle, building up momentum.  Laura slid beneath the covers and grabbed him from behind.  Couldn't she see it?  The tiny strip of light between the bottom of the rock and the dresser?  It was widening; the rock was lifting off.  Nearly a centimeter now.  Two.  Three.  She noticed now.  She had to.  There would be a loud crash when it tumbled down again and smacked against the wood.  Then she'd know.

            She pressed her cheek against his back and it was wet and cold.  "See it?" he said, unable to keep from smiling as he forced a trembling finger up toward the rock.  "You see it?" he said again, and waited, but there was no reply.

-end-