{"id":173028,"date":"2026-02-26T10:00:49","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T15:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=173028"},"modified":"2026-02-25T17:24:04","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T22:24:04","slug":"youve-always-been-the-caretaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/02\/26\/youve-always-been-the-caretaker\/","title":{"rendered":"You\u2019ve Always Been the Caretaker"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Dzan Fotos, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

October 2022. We were making up after a long argument when I gave my girlfriend a tight hug and we heard a noise like a car backfiring.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was that?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I broke your ribs,\u201d I said. I\u2019ve had a broken rib, I broke my friend Bob\u2019s ribs, doesn\u2019t make me an expert.<\/p>\n

The X-ray showed a density in her lung. Next she had a CAT<\/small> scan with contrast. (Never say \u201cdye.\u201d) After that came the pulmonologist, then radiology. Bronchoscopy. They sent her home on my birthday, still coughing up what they called a normal amount of blood. Needle biopsy and pneumothorax, a fancy way to say her lung collapsed. They kept her in the hospital on suction for two days. Then it was time for oncology. And chemotherapy and immunotherapy and thoracic surgery were still in her future, waiting.<\/p>\n

Medical stories should not be suspenseful. She lived.<\/p>\n

But our former lives, hers, mine, the one we had together, were demolished. One thing her cancer did was I had to stop being such an egomaniac and grow up a little. I\u2019m no great shakes as a grown-up. I\u2019m not impressed. A little less ego, maybe. I have lost interest in my inner life, in fact much or most of the time I would prefer not to have any thoughts or feelings, just get in the harness and pull the sleigh. C. Fred Alford writes, \u201cIt is easy to have thoughts; the trick is to know how to put them together, what is called thinking as linking, without being overwhelmed with terror or despair \u2026 emotions that feel as if the self is going to fall to pieces or explode.\u201d I don\u2019t know that trick. I do have a constant dim awareness of what I am feeling, and even that dimness is so bright it\u2019s almost blinding. Fine. That\u2019s fine. A little less ego, but still plenty of maniac. Turns out it takes a maniac to get the job done.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Siberian reindeer is the gamest animal in the world,\u201d writes Harry de Windt in From Paris to New York by Land. <\/em>\u201cI have seen them working incessantly day after day, growing weaker hour by hour, and yet bravely struggling on until the poor little beasts would fall to the ground from sheer exhaustion, never to rise again.\u201d It takes a Siberian reindeer to get the job done.<\/p>\n

It takes the man with the hammer to get the job done. At a party a long time ago, I told a mathematician from the Netherlands that I had gassed out on a long run and hit the wall. \u201cYou need the man with the hammer,\u201d he said. Perfect. From then on, if my commitment started to flag, I told myself: I call on the man with the hammer. Next level: I am the man with the hammer. Final appeal: I am the hammer.<\/p>\n

After many years, I saw that mathematician again, and thanked him, and told him how much I owed him. He said: \u201cYour story makes me feel happy, but that cannot be what I said. I think what I said must have been \u2018If you are American, you hit the wall<\/em>, but if you are Dutch, you meet the man with the hammer<\/em>.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t care if it\u2019s right or wrong. I just have to get her to Lung Center B on time.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Demolished, and something new is built on the ruins. I am grateful. But I have to say: I liked the earlier version better.<\/p>\n

Everyone has problems. These are some of mine. You may already know what Epictetus said about life on earth: Listen, if you don\u2019t like it, then get out. There\u2019s the door.<\/p>\n

When I say “demolished,” I want to be clear that I loved her doctors, even if they had to bomb the village in order to save it. No, I\u2019m talking about the wreckage of our former life, about people who were my friends who turned into ghosts, the ones who just couldn\u2019t take it. Look, I get it, man. I couldn\u2019t take it, either. I just took it anyway.<\/p>\n

I said to one of her doctors, \u201cBelieve it or not, I feel like some of her friends envy her the spotlight. Well, they can have the spotlight, and they can have her cancer, too. Do you know what I\u2019m talking about?\u201d and the doctor said, \u201cExtremely common.\u201d<\/p>\n

And I, John, saw these things, and heard them.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know why we called him Wink. I never saw him wink. I rarely saw him smile.<\/p>\n

Wink was a hellfire guitar slinger. The night I met him, he was working the door at Tewligans. He looked at my license and asked me my birthday, and I said, \u201cThe thirty-fifth of Delfember.\u201d We became friends, if friends<\/em> is the word for being subjected to Wink\u2019s excoriating diatribes.<\/p>\n

Wink recruited me for his Stones cover band, which he called sometimes the Dead Flowers and other times the Satanic Majesties, to play a show the night of Thunder Over Louisville in the run-up to the Kentucky Derby. We were redneck boozehounds and we did not get along at practice, but Pete and Mike and Little Mary and Bunny and Hannah and Tall Christian played great, and Wink was outstanding as ever, and I did my Pythia of Delphi act, drinking a forty of King Cobra shirtless in tight black vinyl pants. \u201cThe Rolling Stooges,\u201d Wink said.<\/p>\n

The neighbors called the cops, but when the cops showed up, they said, \u201cSounds good. Go get us a couple beers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fifteen years later, I was back in town to attend the Kentucky State Fair. A girl tried to sell me a goat. \u201cShe likes you,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

I ate sausage and biscuits and gravy, and then I drove to where I\u2019d heard Wink was tending bar. He was surprised to see me, and even more surprised when, after my second beer, I said, \u201cI think that\u2019ll do.\u201d He walked with me to my rental car and smoked a cigarette, scowling. Then he said, \u201cThis is so stupid. I\u2019m never going to see you again.\u201d He gave me a hug, shocking me, and he clomped away.<\/p>\n

And it was true: I never saw Wink again. He died. Turned out he had lung cancer, and everybody back home knew it. Not me, though. I must have been the only person he\u2019d had a conversation with in years who didn\u2019t treat him like a cancer patient. I\u2019m glad I could help him, even though he hurt me. He had a job to do: looking out for number zero.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

It takes the man with the jackhammer to get the job done.<\/p>\n

The city is demolishing an apartment building on my street. They\u2019ve sawn it in half, like a pretty girl wearing a dress with spangles and sequins in a magic show.<\/p>\n

From the edge of the river, outside the fenced-off demolition zone, you can see into the apartments, like a diorama, like an ant farm. There are all kinds of hairy dangling ends of wires and gray fibers.<\/p>\n

It makes me think of Scanners<\/em>, the 1981 David Cronenberg science-fiction movie in which Cameron Vale hears voices, lives in torment, and cannot function in society. He suffers from involuntary telepathy. His wires are hanging out. Other people near him, Cronenberg\u2019s script tells us, \u201care all alive directly in Vale\u2019s brain. Their presence increases until there is no room for any mind of Vale\u2019s own: he is a scrambled composite of everyone else in the room.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alfred Bester\u2019s 1953 novel The Demolished Man<\/em> is another telepathy-as-exposure story. Turns out it\u2019s hard to plot a murder when everybody has ESP and can read your mind, when your wires are poking out, when everybody can see into your apartment.<\/p>\n

I missed the cutoff date for science fiction\u2019s techno-optimist heroic competence fantasies: Arthur C. Clarke\u2019s 1961 novel A <\/em>Fall of Moondust, <\/em>say, about engineers dealing with a lunar tourist vehicle crash. That\u2019s the sort of book Barry N. Malzberg derided as The Rammers of Arcturus <\/em>in his 1975 antinovel Galaxies<\/em>. Pretty funny, too, right up until it\u2019s time to ram Arcturus. But when it is time to ram Arcturus, I don\u2019t need Cassandra\u2019s stylish paranoia and despair. What I need is a ram<\/em>. I need the competent action heroes of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a heap of Taxol, and an antiprogrammed cell death protein 1 monoclonal antibody, and the galaxy\u2019s greatest thoracic surgeon in her knee-high leather boots\u2014Doctor Belinda Epsilon, warrior priestess of the Arcturan Pulmonary Brigade!\u2014and an Atrium Express Mini 500 Mobile Dry Seal Drain, and then we\u2019ll need an antitumor necrosis factor-alpha monoclonal antibody, and can I get a double vodka on the rocks, stat.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The street is blocked off. There\u2019ll be no through traffic for another year, that\u2019s my guess. The cops in their yellow hi-vis safety parkas directing traffic think two years at a minimum. Despite the gargantuan orange detour signs, if you stand on the corner for five minutes you\u2019ll see three or four cars drive into the demolition zone, right up to the fence across the road, and stop and stare before doing a three-point turn. We call that the genius parade.<\/p>\n

The building has to come down. It was found to have dangerous fundamental structural flaws. Never had a chance. I know how it feels.<\/p>\n

Hammer of Arcturus, it was a happy day when my blood froze your handle to my palm. You did not fail my father, do not fail me now. Save her, and I will pay you in my blood, legal tender for all debts, public and private.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t fool me, God, You bloodthirsty freak. I know what You want.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

J. <\/em>D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and <\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s\u00a02013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection\u00a0<\/em>The Correspondence\u00a0was published in 2017.\u00a0His writing has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review, <\/em>Esquire,\u00a0<\/em>n+1, and elsewhere, including <\/em>The Best American Essays<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>The Best American Travel Writing<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cMedical stories should not be suspenseful. She lived.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-173028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nYou\u2019ve Always Been the Caretaker by J. D. Daniels<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 26, 2026 \u2013 \u201cMedical stories should not be suspenseful. 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