Cancer Can Be Eaten

The ripping tale below is true, more or less. In a Colossians 3:9-10 and Ephesians 4:22-24 metaphorical sort of way: “Ye have put off the old man ... and have put on the new man.” I know this because it happened to me this week.

One morning he awakened to discover he’d been transformed.

Not into a monstrous vermin — he remembered that with a shudder from the nightmares beetles sometimes had — but into something infinitely stranger: a man. Soft, featherless, bipedal, pink. Smooth as an overripe plum. Corporeal in all the wrong ways.

He lay there breathing shallowly, overwhelmed by the warm, wheezing pleural sacks in his chest. His carapace — his proud, lacquered armour — was gone. In its place, flaccid skin. His legs — once six quick, precise instruments — were now long, ungainly contraptions made of bone and complaint. His days of crawling around on the linoleum, walls and ceiling seemed at an end.

The worst of it was his mouth: a gaping, expressive thing capable of forming syllables but no longer suited for tasting rotting pears behind the cast iron radiator.

He felt obscene. Exposed. Mammalian.

The mammals who found him — neighbours, paramedics, one curious terrier — did not recoil. They wrapped him in cloth, lifted him gently, spoke in soothing tones. They asked whether he knew his name. He didn’t, not really.

Beetles maintain identity through scent and territory, not labels. Yet when someone placed a clipboard before him and asked him to sign “Asma S. Roger,” something in the absurdity of the situation made him comply with trembling strokes. Not having mastered the use of his fingers or thumbs, he scrawled “Rogerg” by mistake.

Life as a human was difficult. There were too many passwords and far too much paperwork. Food tasted different when it wasn’t found beneath mulch. And responsibilities multiplied like fruit flies: decisions about electricity plans, prescription refills and laundry cycles.

A beetle’s tasks were simple — find warmth, avoid birds, eat cellulose. A man’s tasks seemed like an endless round of always changing, never enduring human exchanges. Still, he adapted. With about 400,000 described species, the Coleoptera are nothing if not resilient.

He learned to walk without tripping over his own legs. He learned to boil eggs. He even learned to listen when others spoke of grief, illness and loneliness — things beetles never talk about because they cannot afford to stop moving long enough to suffer. Also because they can’t talk.

Through it all, he found himself still wanting to live. Wanting the strange warmth of mammalian companionship. Wanting the laughter of friends he’d made, the taste of morning coffee, the soft thrum of city traffic, the kiss of his wife. Wanting even the grief and fear, because they, too, were proof of this improbable new life he inhabited.

Humanity, he realized, was not a curse. It was simply another metamorphosis, and he — ever adaptable — would learn its rhythms. He took it as a sign of progress when the apple lodged in his back fell out and rolled along the floor. He bit into it with teeth instead of mandibles.

The phone rang.

“There’s no longer any trace of cancer in your body,” the oncologist said.