Today, Tuesday 13 September 2005, I received a phone call from radiation oncology. The requested CD holding a copy of the latest MRI scan of my brain was ready to pick up. Would I like to come in and pick it up?
        "Pick it up?"
        I was dismayed. In the aftermath of my daughter's return to Japan, I have not slept well. While she was here in New Zealand I felt as if I could sleep endlessly, but then she was gone, and sleep was gone with her. Today I was feeling weak, exhausted. An extra trip to the hospital to pick up a CD seemed out of my range.
        "Or we could post it out, but only to the address we have on file."
        I checked the address they had for me. Yes, correct - an address in Devonport, in the city of North Shore, in the Auckland area, in New Zealand. Just across the harbor from the hospital, in fact.
        "I would be very pleased if you would send it to me," I said.
        I need a copy of this MRI scan for when I go back to Japan, probably in December of this year. I have already seen some of the MRI photos on Dr. Gillian Campbell's computer screen, and I have already read the MRI report, so I already know the outcome.
        The first couple of MRI reports that I saw were pretty cryptic documents which appeared to be written in some kind of language not known to me, perhaps Revised Technical Klingon or something like that. This latest report, however - which I saw a few days ago in Dr. Campbell's office - was amazingly short and stunningly clear.
        The key point was this:-
        "There is no sign of lymphoma recurrence."
        This is the good news that I received at my consultation with Dr. Campbell on Friday 2 September. I'm now looking forward to receiving the copy of the CD, and I'll be very interested to find out whether I can view this on my own computer. If it's a series of picture files, sure. If specialized viewing software is required, I'll be out of luck, but no doubt the doctors in Japan will be able to open the files. [Later: the CD, when it arrived, included some viewing software which ran off the CD itself, and, yes, I could see my brain.]
        Dr. Campbell was very pleased to be able to show me the pictures of my brain on her computer. A little scarring here - look, this whiteness - and a little scarring there. But no lymphoma.
        A golden moment, my wife there to share it.
        But not baby Cornucopia, who, on the day of my meeting with Dr. Campbell, was in Devonport, being looked after by my mother.
        For some months now, baby Cornucopia has been living in Japan, pursuing her education at the local daycare center, where she has learnt, amongst other things, that we wash our hands before we have dinner.
        But, recently, back toward the end of August, baby Cornucopia got on a plane at Narita and flew out from Japan to New Zealand, bringing her mother along for the ride. Baby Cornucopia spent eleven days in New Zealand demonstrating her rapid cultural and intellectual development. The high point of the visit, I think, was baby Cornucopia's demonstration of her Advanced Banana Ingestion Technique, of which more later.
        What follows are some notes on baby Cornucopia's visit, plus a little more detail on my latest meeting with Dr. Campbell, and my prospects of living (or, alternatively, of dying).
        At the start of my handwritten notes on the visit there is a cryptic list, unexplained. It is as follows:-
        "Milk ... banana ... bread ,,. oranges ... kiwifruit ... chicken ... yasai ... Cornucopia chan ... Mallowpuffs ... wine."
        What does it all mean?
        My first naive thought is that it might be some kind of shopping list, but "Cornucopia chan" (which translates from Japanese to English as something like "Cornucopia the cute") is my baby daughter, and, as far as I remember, we didn't buy her at the supermarket. We got her at the hospital, I think.
        But, for some reason, "Cornucopia chan" is on the list along with everything else. Maybe the list is actually some kind of coded message from Assassination Control or something like that, and I've deliberately done a data dump. Or maybe not. One of my questions, at this stage of my medical saga, is how much I can trust my own brain, and the answer is that I quite simply don't know.
        My inability to clarify the exact meaning of the list, and my inability, likewise, to remember the exact context, is a reminder that all memories are fictional. The world we possess is a kind of improvised story, scrambled together from moment to moment by way of hints, notes, suppositions and theories, my version of this story never quite the same as yours, even if your life is lived only one skin distant from mine.
        I am a fiction maker. It is part of my nature. And it is part of the nature of the kind of animal I am.
        Even so, I want to leave, in this memoir, a trail, if I can, not of fictions but of fact. I lived. I loved. I wept. The room was sacred. There was a golden moment. I wept alone, fatigued by sleeplessness and mortality. And … And I was at the airport to meet her, my baby daughter, Cornucopia. who arrived asleep, asleep in her stroller, which rather suggests that the negligent people at immigration control made absolutely no attempt to interrogate her, but, rather, accepted her claim to be who she claimed to be on the evidence of that ridiculously out-of-date little baby photo on her passport, which looks nothing like her at all.
        With that preamble, what follows now are some notes from the days of my baby daughter's visit. Some notes from the pages of what we might think of as "real life" - husband, wife and baby.
        Starting on day one of the eleven-day visit.
        Day one.
        Baby Cornucopia showed no fear of me and voluntarily brought me fridge magnets she had found while foraging in the kitchen. However, when baby Cornucopia's mother disappeared from sight (to have a shower, for instance) baby Cornucopia screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. And screamed.
        A random note here on clothing: baby Cornucopia came to New Zealand with a "sleeping quilt", a kind of one-piece garment padded with down, a bit like a sleeping bag with arm holes.
        This first day (have I established the time frame? - I forget) was at the end of August in the year 2005. Not, I hope, the last year of my life. With a bit of luck, the first of many.
        Baby Cornucopia's vocabulary at the age of sixteen months proves to consist of the words "mama", "papa", "momo" (peach), "wan-wan" ("doggy", or, if you like, "bow-wow" - the Japanese for "dog" is "inu") and "hapa", meaning "leaves". Of these words her favorite is "momo" - peaches are presently in season in Japan and have become baby Cornucopia's favorite food. However, her use of "momo" is not quite accurate: she uses it to denote any fruit-shaped object which happens to be in sight. She also uses the English word "More!" - together with a vigorous pointing gesture - to demand anything edible that happens to catch her eye.
        All in all, impressively bilingual for sixteen months, I thought.
        No sign as yet, however, of the first novel.
        Having grown beyond childhood, I have become a strong believer in child labor. So, very soon after arriving in New Zealand, my baby daughter was put to work as an agricultural laborer, harvesting things in my father's garden. She harvested pretty much everything in sight: flowers, leaves and lemons.
        The lemon tree in the garden is roughly baby height and is rich with lemons, and, by grabbing one of these with both hands, Cornucopia was able to haul it off the tree.
        One of the lemons turned up on the dinner table that night, to be used as a condiment for fish, and baby Cornucopia demanded it, pointing at it and saying, again and again, emphatically, "Momo, momo!" ("Peach, peach!")
        I sampled a small piece of the lemon and found it incredibly sour. Someone said that these were "New Zealand lemons", which, supposedly, are sweeter than "ordinary" lemons. Be that as it may, to my palate this lemon was as sour as sour gets. However, when the pieces of one half of a rather large lemon were presented to Cornucopia, she avidly gorged herself on them. She then demanded the second half of the lemon, but at that point we adults lost our collective nerve and, fearing the sudden reappearance of all the ingested lemon, decided that enough was enough.
        It was at that meal that Cornucopia got introduced to honey, something she had never eaten before. If I remember correctly, my wife told me that, for some reason, honey should not be fed to babies under the age of one. Having attained the glorious age of sixteen months, baby Cornucopia was permitted a taste of adult life in the form of honey.
        She did not, however, get to share our wine.
        Day two.
        My parents got in the car and drove away, heading south, bound for the tourist area of Waitomo, the plan being to stay away for three nights, giving me the chance to play house with wife and baby.
        My wife and I went shopping with Miss Wonderscream 2005, who went to sleep in her stroller. Cute Cornucopia, that day, persisted in screaming whenever she was separated from her mother. Later in the day, Cornucopia started attacking me, yelping with glee as she buffeted into me, which I took as a step forward.
        Day two, Cornucopia demonstrated her Advanced Banana Ingestion Technique. Put a piece of banana in your mouth. Hold it there so the banana can meditate on its fate. Spit out the banana on the high chair. Repeat this process as many times as is necessary until the banana, grown soggy and war weary, finally realizes that resistance is futile. At this point, the banana may safely be eaten.
        I was enormously impressed by the verve, energy and originality of this technique. But my wife, I regret to say, was negative. She did not share my unbridled enthusiasm for our daughter's wonderful achievement. It seems my wife wants baby Cornucopia to sit there and eat her banana, one piece at a time, without spitting it out - not even once. When it comes to bananas, then, my wife would like Cornucopia to be entirely conventional, like Barbara Bush or some other incarnation of good taste. Still, so far, the child's gung ho creative genius has survived the blanding effects of the socialization process.
        My wife says she doesn't like it that she always gets to be the one who says "No!" while I play the role of the amiably tolerant parent, so I guess that when I get back to Japan I will have, really, the duty ot trying to play the role of the severe father.
        My wife told me that, while in Japan, Cornucopia suddenly had an allergic reaction to kiwifruit, something she had eaten several times previously with no bad effects. Apparently the skin of her forehead went red and her eyes also turned red. A doctor, consulted later, advised that she should not be fed kiwifruit again until older.
        At about sixteen months of age, Cornucopia is pattering about confidently, walking and running, occasionally taking a fall on the floor, which is unforgiving stone - my parents opted for a slate floor in the kitchen and living room as part of a solar heating system. So far, the occasional low-speed collisions with the stone floor have proved harmless.
        Day two, my wife gave me a belated birthday present. My old watch died just before I left Japan, and, on the flight out, I bought a temporary replacement at the airport, an extremely cheap watch with an extremely cheap plastic strap which my father later ended up fixing with glue after the strap came apart from the body of the watch. My birthday present was a new watch, Alba brand, mechanism made in Japan, case made in China, a watch with an extremely clear face that my hazy eyes can cope with. A timepiece watch: no bells and whistles. No date, no altimeter, no alarm for setting off your backpack bomb. An hour hand, a minute hand and a second hand. Metal bracelet, presumably steel.
        Since I am a mechanical idiot, my wife adjusted the metal bracelet to fit my wrist, which involved taking out one of the links with a special tool. Years ago I tried to buy a watch with a metal bracelet in a watch shop, but they had trouble adjusting it to my wrist, so I gave up and walked out. This time, however, the fitting process went perfectly.
        I was very pleased with my new watch and happy to have been confidently attacked by my baby daughter. But the day did have one unhappy moment.
        Some time ago, some of my wife's friends gave her a baby book package. This consists of a template for text and photographs. You write the text then deliver the text, plus your selection of photographs, to the baby book company, and they give you back a properly printed copy of a book about your baby's early days.
        It had been difficult for my wife to find the time in her extremely busy schedule to writer the text and to gather together the photographs, but she had managed to get this task done, and the result was very pleasing. I was enjoying my way through the book, the Japanese text of which was easy enough for me to understand, when I came to the part about the birth, and there I saw something which made me very angry, and that was "Doctor's name", with the name of some doctor attached.
        My anger was instantaneous.
        What the hell was one of the hospital's doctors doing with his name in our baby book? The hospital birth: any doctor even remotely involved with that debacle should be down on his knees sucking exhaust pipes in Hell, not enjoying a life of ease and leisure in our baby book.
        But I concealed my anger and focused on the wonderful thing featured in the book, the amazing baby Cornucopia.
        Day three, in the darkness of early morning, my baby daughter, the amazing baby Cornucopia, began to cry, loudly and without reason. I waited for some animal of appropriate size, drawn by her cries, to emerge from the darkness and devour her alive, but no such thing happened. There is, obviously, an unfilled niche in the local ecology.
        I am pleased to say that baby Cornucopia did not wake me up on subsequent nights. However, my wife informs me that the reason for this was not that the baby did not cry, but, rather, that I slept happily through her crying.
        On the morning of day three, breakfast at a Devonport cafe where, for my benefit, my sister read out the menu written on the chalkboard. I could see that the chalkboard existed but, for the life of me, I could not make out a single thing that was written on it. On the way home, I distinguished myself by walking slap bang into a street sign, much to my wife's alarm. Fortunately I did not suffer any serious damage.
        As I gradually (well, not so gradually, really) go blind, I must somehow be developing mannerisms which are characteristic of a blind person. A woman in the post office put a purchased stamp into my hand even before I started groping around for it. And, in the supermarket, while I was trying to decide whether I could or could not see where the shopping baskets were stacked up, a man, a complete stranger, saw my need and cheerfully volunteered one into my hands, saying "Here you go!"
        There is a significant downside to being visually impaired. Life becomes more effortful. Proofreading written work on a computer screen which is in the process of receding into the unfathomed infinities of haze is a major hassle. And crossing the road has become dangerous, particularly at one place where, in the late afternoon, the glare of the sun dominates the road. Oncoming cars are lost in the haze of that glare, and the sounds of their approach are masked by busy traffic on an intersecting road.
        The upside?
        The world which the blind inhabit is a kinder world than that in which the fully-sighted live.
        One thing I've noticed is that the words "I can't see" are instantly comprehended, and people will, thereafter, willingly help me with whatever task it is that I am trying to accomplish, whether it is hunting down a block of paper in a stationery story or finding my way through a hospital which is signposted with signs which I can no longer decipher.
        Nobody I've met so far has had any problem at all in instantly wrapping their head around the notion that they are in the presence of someone who cannot see properly. And everyone I have met so far has seemed perfectly at ease with that situation. The standard response seems to be a cheerful "Oh, I can help!" reaction.
        All going well, an eye operation some time in September 2005 will restore my vision. Two operations in one. A vitrectomy - a jelly-removal operation - to get rid of the junk of dead cells, cancer debris, which is floating in my field of vision. And, at the same time, a lens replacement operation, the natural lens, degraded by cataract, to be replaced by an artificial plastic lens.
        It is the right eye, all going well, which will be fixed. The left, the optic nerve badly damaged, is usable, up to a point, but cannot, at this stage of human civilization, be fixed by any technology currently available to the human race. As the saying goes, them's the breaks.
        Although I did have the collision with the street sign, I got home alive, and, later in the day, late in the afternoon, as my wife cooked ginger pork, baby Cornucopia approached me voluntarily for the first time to play, and we played with some of the books, blocks and plastic stickum-togethers which live at my parents' house but which actually belong to Cornucopia's cousins, who are somewhat older than she is.
        I found my end of baby play to be more tiring than anticipated. Having a lively baby in the house reinforces my understanding of the fact that my recovery has some way to go yet.