Original short story: Calypso, by David Sedaris

The American broadcaster and author spent most of last year on the road, catching up with family, doing book signings – and allowing strangers to perform minor surgery on him

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The thing about America is that it’s always something. I go twice a year, and arrive each time on the heels of a major news story: Sars, anthrax, H1N1. Bed bugs! In the fall of 2014, the story was Ebola; not the thousands who had died of it in Africa, but the single person who had it in Dallas. Because there are TVs everywhere one goes – restaurants, hotel lobbies, airports, even, I discovered, doctors’ waiting rooms – and because they’re all tuned to one cable news network or other, the coverage was inescapable. Every angle was explored, then subsequently beaten to death. When the patient, whose name was Thomas Duncan, died, you’d think he’d taken half the country down with him. A teacher in Maine was sent home because she’d flown to Dallas, not to the hospital where the man had been cared for, but just to the city. Schools closed. Hysterical parents were interviewed. “Ebola is here,” we were told by the media, “and it’s coming to get you.”

I started seeing people wearing face masks in the airport and decided that I hated them. What bugged me, I realised, was their flagrant regard for their own lives. It seemed not just over-cautious, but downright conceited. I mean, why should they live?

“Stay safe,” a Starbucks employee said to me one morning. I was in a hurry to get to my gate, so didn’t stop to ask, “Safe from what?” I was in the United States for a lecture tour: 45 cities in 47 days. “My God!” people say when they look at my schedule. But it isn’t like real work. The travel can occasionally be taxing, but anyone can turn pages and read out loud. What takes time are the post-show book signings – my fault, because I talk too much. “What kind of a name is ‘Draven?’” I asked one evening, squinting at the Post-It note attached to the title page.

“I don’t know exactly,” the woman on the other side of the table said. “He’s a friend of my brother.”

I looked at the name again. “‘Draven’. It sounds like… the past past tense of drove.”

In most of the cities on my tour, I didn’t know anyone, but here and there I caught up with people. In Winston-Salem, it was my sister Lisa. A week later in Omaha, I saw my old friend Janet, and her 25-year-old son Jimmy, who is tall and thin and was sporting a long, rust-coloured beard. Back when we met in the late 1980s, Janet was highlighting the grain in rectangular sheets of plywood. That was her artwork. Now, she just leaves the rectangles as they are, and has founded something called The Wood Interpretation Society. “Jimmy,” she said, standing in the living room that doubles as her studio, “fetch me my stick.” Her son handed her a length of bamboo and she used it to point to her most recent piece. “All right, can you see the snowman?”

I saw nothing, so she gestured to two knots. “His eyes. You can’t see his eyes?”

“Well, OK,” I said. “Sure… a little.”

“And now can you see that he’s talking to an owl?”

“Owls are a dime a dozen in wood grain,” Jimmy explained.

“That’s true,” his mother said, and she moved on to her next piece of plywood, in which a turtle considered a mountain. “And this is all just found!” she told me. “I honestly haven’t altered a thing!”

Later, over coffee, we got on to the subject of elderly parents. Janet’s mother is 89 and is in excellent physical and mental health. “Unlike my friend Jim’s mother,” she said. “This was a woman who never missed a church service, who was an absolute pillar of her community. Then she got dementia and became a different person.” She poured me more coffee. “The last time Jim saw her, she leaned over in her wheelchair at the top of her voice: ‘Hitler wants my pussy.’”

Jimmy stroked his bib-like beard. “They say he was quite the lady’s man.”

“Who even knew that word was in her vocabulary?” Janet asked. “And how had Hitler told her? He’d been dead for 50 years by that point.”

Being with Janet reminded me of how lucky I am. At 92, my father is in great shape. And should that suddenly change for any reason, he probably won’t linger all that long. I’d like to think I inherited his constitution, but in fact I’m more like my mother. Thus I took it seriously when, at the post-show book signing that night in Omaha, a fellow with a noticeable divot in his face pointed to a dark spot beside my left eye, saying, “I’m no doctor, but am 90% sure you have skin cancer.”

Four days later I saw a dermatologist in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The spot, he said, was nothing to worry about. Then he used the word “cancer”, albeit with a “pre-” in front of it – “a little pre-cancerous keratosis”. He hit it with some liquid nitrogen, and by the time I left his office, it looked like I had a pencil eraser stuck to my face. The following day on the plane, the eraser burst and pre-cancer juice ran like a fat tear down my cheek.

That was the first of several procedures I wound up having over the course of my tour. Funny, but for years I avoided going to any kind of doctor. If it was an emergency, I could be talked in to it, but anything else, especially anything preventative, was out of the question. Then my father forced me to get a colonoscopy, and a whole new world opened up. The paperwork is a drag, of course; so many forms that by the time you’re in the examining room you have to add carpal tunnel to your already long list of complaints. As far as the doctors themselves go, though, I’ve had a pretty good run. In the summer of 2014, while on vacation at my family’s beach house on the coast of North Carolina, and again at the insistence of my father, I went in for a physical. “All right, then,” the GP said after taking my blood pressure and looking into my ears, “what do you say you stand up now and I’ll do your back and front.”

It was such a classy, understated way to say, “After grabbing your balls, I’d like to stick my finger up your ass.”

The dermatologist was fun to talk to, as was a nurse who gave me a flu shot while I was passing through O’Hare. The only exception I’ve had so far is a surgeon I saw on the coast of North Carolina a few days after having my physical. Six years earlier, I had noticed a lump on my right side, just at the base of my rib cage. It was, I later learned, a lipoma, meaning a harmless fatty tumour. It continued to grow for the next several months until it was the size and feel of an unshelled, hard-boiled egg. I could have lived with it for the rest of my life, but after spending some time along the canals not far from our beach house, I got a better idea. The surgeon I met with didn’t have much in the way of personality. That’s not to say he was rude, just perfunctory. He took an ultrasound of my fatty tumour and said that he could remove it the following week.

“Terrific,” I said. “Because I want to feed it to a snapping turtle.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not just any snapping turtle,” I continued, as if that was what had given him pause. “There’s one very specific turtle I’m planning to feed it to. He has a big growth on his head.”

“It’s against federal law for me to give you anything I remove from your body,” the surgeon said.

“But it’s my tumour,” I reminded him. “I made it.”

“It’s against federal law for me to give you anything I’ve removed from your body.”

“Well, could I maybe have half to feed to this turtle?”

“It’s against federal law for me to give you anything I’ve removed from your body.”

I left with my tumour intact, thinking, Honestly. What has this country come to?

On tour sometimes, just before the question-and-answer part of the evening, I’ll stand at the podium and run my mouth for a while. I told the story about the tumour on stage in El Paso, Texas, and afterwards a woman approached my signing table saying, “I’ll cut that out of you tonight if you like. And I’ll let you keep it.” I pointed out the long line and she shrugged. “No problem, I’m a night owl.” She handed me a slip of paper with her number on it. “Just phone me when you’re done.”

The woman looked to be around 50, Mexican, I reckoned, and as short as a child. “In case you’re wondering, I am a doctor,” she said. “Not a surgeon, but I studied it for a year in med school, and unless your tumour has its own blood supply, removing it should be fairly easy.”

Its own blood supply! I thought of those people you read about sometimes with terrible potato-sized twins inside them, complete with hair and teeth. Recounting this story over the next few weeks, I was surprised by the general reaction it got. “She what! You didn’t take her up on it, did you?”

“Well, sure.”

“And how did you know she was a real doctor?”

These were the same overly cautious people who threw out their children’s Halloween candy and showed up at airports with masks on. “How do I know she was a doctor? She told me she was.” The only real exception was my father, who once took antibiotics prescribed for his dog, saying, “Aw, who cares. They’re the same damn thing.” When I told him that a strange woman performed surgery on me in the middle of the night, his response was the same as mine would have been: “Sounds like you saved yourself some real money!”

The doctor – I’ll call her Ada – returned to the theatre after I’d finished signing books, at around 1am. With her were the son and daughter of her girlfriend, both of whom were in their early 30s and looked more like soap opera actors than real people. While their attractiveness was preternatural – almost outlandish – the way they related to one another as brother and sister felt familiar to me, especially their little insults, blanks, for the most part more funny than mean. The four of us drove on deserted roads across the state line, to a dark clinic located in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. The late hour, the secrecy: it felt furtive and dangerous, like having an abortion in 1950.

My procedure began with a local anaesthetic, and though I didn’t notice when Ada cut into me, I could feel slight tugs as she hacked at the tumour. It was like having my pocket picked by a trainee. My fatty pocket. The shreds were placed in a metal pan, and resembled slivers of raw chicken breast. “Are my intestines hanging out?” I asked at one point.

“God, no,” Ada said. “Your lipoma is in a sort of pouch, so there’s nothing at all protruding from the incision. If you want, you can look for yourself. I can get you a mirror.”

“That’s OK,” I said.

While she worked, I talked to the son and daughter of her girlfriend, hyperconscious of how good they looked and, by contrast, how awful I did, half sitting up, my hairy stomach showing. “How do you say ‘tumour’ in Español?” I asked.

“Tumour,” the woman said.

I took Spanish in high school and am always delighted when I find another word I can toss into my vocabulary basket. It was like learning that shortcake is “shorto cakey” in Japanese, and beige “beige” in German. After I was stitched back up, we drove to Ada’s house, the only one with lights burning on its quiet suburban street. There I met her girlfriend, Anna, who wore a floor-length white nightgown. Her hair was white as well, and fell to the middle of her back. “So nice of you to drop by,” she said, opening a bottle of codeine tablets. “Will you take some for the road? For the pain?”

The house felt familiar; if not exactly like the one I grew up in, then at least close. “Artsy”, my mom would have called it, meaning there were paintings on the walls, but they weren’t all pretty. The back yard was flooded with moonlight, and while looking out at the sleeping city below us, Anna’s daughter told me about her youngest child, a girl of five. “She’s going through a phase where she wants to be a dog, insists she’s a dog. The barking and walking on all fours is something I’m willing to put up with, but then she shit on the ground over by that shrub, and I said, ‘That’s it. Now you’ve gone too far.’”

At 4am Ada and her girlfriend’s children returned me to my hotel, and three hours later I got up to go to the airport. All told, it was an exceptional evening: a chance to meet interesting new people, and have at least one of them reach inside me with her tiny hands. After I left El Paso, Ada shipped my tumour on ice to my sister’s house in Winston-Salem. Lisa put it in the freezer, and promised to bring it with her to the beach when we gathered for Thanksgiving at the end of my tour.

Meanwhile, I continued on. In Houston, I had an emergency root canal, which didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would. A few days later, perhaps because hanging out with doctors was something I’d gotten into the habit of, I saw a podiatrist in Dallas. “What seems to be the problem?” he asked. “My left foot hurts,” I told him. He took some x-rays, but nothing showed up, perhaps because my foot only hurt a little.

“This has to stop,” said my lecture agent, who’d been making all the appointments for me and was clearly tired of it. My last show was in Tallahassee, Florida, and the following morning I flew to Raleigh. My sister Gretchen picked me up at the airport, and by sunset we were with my boyfriend Hugh and my entire family at the house on Emerald Isle, The Sea Section. I like having a place that theoretically belongs to everyone, but technically belongs to me. It’s neutral ground, but not quite, meaning that if someone hangs a picture I don’t care for, I get to take it down, saying, “Let’s rethink this.” I, on the other hand, can hang whatever I like. “Why would anyone frame a piece of plywood?” my father asked the night before Thanksgiving.

He was frowning at an artwork Janet had given me during my visit to Omaha. “It’s a one-eyed raccoon looking in a mirror,” I told him. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Like hell it is.”

This Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law, Bob, was deep-frying the turkey. It has to be done outdoors, so while he scoped out a spot and constructed a wind barrier, I took my frozen tumour and headed to the canal with Lisa and my niece, who is 11 years old and very shy. It was cold, and during the 15-minute walk I asked Madeline who the most popular girl at her school was. She answered with no hesitation. “And is she nice?” I asked. “She wasn’t last year or the year before, but she is now.”

“You will never forget the name of the most popular girl in the sixth grade,” I said. “Even when you’re old and on your death bed, it’ll come to you. That is her triumph.”

“My most popular girl was Jane-Jane Teague,” Lisa told us.

“That’s such a good name,” I said.

Lisa nodded. “And you had to call her Jane-Jane – even the teachers. She wouldn’t answer to anything less.”

We arrived at the canal to find three boys standing on the footbridge and looking down into the water, their bikes sprawled like bodies on the ground around them. I leaned over the rail, but instead of the snapping turtles I was expecting, I saw only sliders, which are significantly smaller and less awe-inspiring.

“You looking for Grand Daddy?” the boy beside me asked.

I said, “Grand Daddy?”

“People call him Godzilla sometimes, too,” the kid told me. “He’s the one with the messed-up head. Me and my brother feed him toast a lot.”

“And grapes,” the boy next to him said. “We give him them sometimes, too.”

I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret, secondary life, and is being fed by neighbours who call him something stupid like Calypso. Worse is that he loves them as much as he loves you, which is to say not at all, really. The entire relationship has been your own invention.

“I never knew the turtle had a name,” I said.

The kid shrugged. “Sure does.”

“So where is he now?”

“Hibernating,” the boy told me. “Like every year.”

I was crestfallen. “And when will he wake up?”

The kid reached down and picked up his bike. “Springtime, ’less he dies in his sleep. What, you bring some bread for him?”

“Me?” I said. “No.” Ashamed to admit it was something more intimate. “And after everything I went through!” I whined on our way back to the house.

“Your lipoma will keep,” Lisa assured me. “We’ll just put it back in the freezer and you can feed it to Godzilla or Grand Daddy or whatever his name is when you return in May.”

“And what if there’s a storm between now and the spring, and the electricity goes out?”

Lisa thought for a moment. “Something that’s going to eat a tumour probably won’t distinguish between a good one and a bad one.”

I won’t say the hibernating turtle ruined my Thanksgiving. He did make it feel rather anti-climactic, though I’m not sure why. If you were to throw a lipoma to a dog, he’d swallow it in a single bite, then get that very particular look on his face that translates to “Fuck. Was that a tumour?” There’d be something to see. Turtles, on the other hand, never change expression, and live with fewer regrets. I’m certain that when I return and drop my little gift into the canal, the snapper will eat it unthinkingly, the way he’s eaten all the chicken hearts and fish heads I’ve thrown him over the past year. Then he’ll look around for more before disappearing, like the ingrate that he is, back into his foul and riled depths.

David Sedaris is an American broadcaster, essayist and author. He is currently touring.

• David Sedaris
• Weekend magazine short story special 2015
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