THE CANCER DIET

In his rear view mirror Tony could see the last golden-red scrap of sun falling behind the curve of the world. It was beautiful, almost like somewhere far away an entire city was on fire, and he wanted to show it to Jasper. But Jasper wouldn't have cared. His son didn't care about the sun.

"How much farther, you think?" Tony asked him instead. They'd already been on the road for a while.

"What?"

"To Newton's."

Jasper shrugged. He looked out his window but there was nothing to see there now but the night. Just like that, all the light was gone. He kept looking anyway.

"I'm kind of thirsty," Tony said. "They have any water out here?"

"Pretty sure they do."

Tony nodded, as if they were actually having a conversation.

"I bet they do," Tony said. "You're probably right. I bet they'll have lots of water. I bet your buddy has water and he'll want to share it. I bet we'll find that to be the case. If he has a spigot. I used to drink water directly from the end of a hose when I was your age, but no one does that anymore. It seems a little third-world-ish now, doesn't it? Drinking water from a hose on a hot summer day.

"Water comes in bottles now or it doesn't come at all. I wonder how long before it'll be the same way with . . . air. Maybe when you're my age you'll look back at those days when you were driving down an empty stretch of highway in the night with your dad to some friend's house and both of you were just breathing the air that happened to be in the space around your mouths. Ah, remember how it was before we had to strap canisters to our back and breathe through a tube? Those were the days!"

Nothing, nothing, nothing from his son.

"I bet we'll be there soon," Tony said.

But they weren't there soon. Long stretches of two-lane blacktop bordered by darkening fields of mysterious crops (corn? tobacco?) coupled with equally long stretches of total silence, and pretty soon Tony's mind cradled a single thought: why didn't Jasper have a friend who lived close by? He could ask him: there Jasper was, sitting right next to him. But it wasn't a question he would answer.

Jasper rarely spoke. There didn't appear to be any reason why – he wasn't abused or forced to do onerous chores or to go to church or to do anything, really – he just didn't talk that much anymore. Yes, no, and I don't know and I said I don't know! were about all they could squeeze out of him.

There were articles he'd read online that said this was par for the course with a twelve-year-old. But it was sucking the life out of Tony, the quiet. Sometimes he just had to talk to make noise – meaningless, stupid noise, to stay sane. "Makes no difference if he is a hound, better quit kicking my dog around," he said.

He almost sang it. His own father had sung the same thing to him, and Tony had hated it because it seemed forced and dated even thirty years ago. But Tony had become the last thing in the world he wanted to: his father. And one day Jasper would become Tony, and that was just sad, because Tony didn't consider himself particularly wonderful. He was mediocre, or maybe slightly above mediocre if only because he was aware of his own mediocrity. Jasper could do better.

But this quiet! Tony whistled, he sang an old song Frank Sinatra probably sang. He turned on the radio and Jasper turned it off. Then he rubbed his son's head – anything to maintain a connection.

They drove over a hillock and suddenly the moon was there, full and big and bright. They passed an old dilapidated barn and an ancient house crumbling into itself, with a huge hole in the roof, as if a meteor had crashed into it.

Tony pointed at it. "I bet everybody who ever lived there is dead," he said.

From Jasper, nothing. I mean, all I want to do is talk, have a conversation. But this twelve-year-old kid with black bangs so long they covered one side of his face was harder to talk to than a beautiful woman, and talking to beautiful women was hard.