Moonface (3 page)

I didn't want to leave because it felt like my life was just beginning—a life in which I didn't worry what would happen if I stayed up late or if I stood outside without a coat. To relinquish such a status so early in the game, even for just one weekend, would offset any hopes I had for status or consistency, for making a name for myself in the partying world on campus.

I got a ride home that weekend, not the least bit concerned about the state of my health. I knew my father could make the swelling in my ankles go away, just as he had so easily done with my other ailments in the past. As soon as I left campus, I was hurrying to get back.

“My
anak
,” my mother said, pulling my head down to her chest as I walked into the house, not yelling now, but clinging to me and not letting go. My father pulled my feet up on the couch, looked at my ankles, and shook his head.

I began missing classes shortly after then, sometimes weeks at a time, as my father dragged me from one hospital to another, to doctors with blood pressure machines and needles and tongue depressors who told me to wait in the other room as they talked to my folks in private. I sat outside reading magazines, and when they came out and asked me if I had questions for them, I said, “Yeah—when am I going back to school?”

On car rides home, my parents yelled at me for not paying attention to the doctors, and told me to stop complaining about my puffy face and what the medications were doing to me. At the hospital, the doctors pulled my father aside in the hallway and said, “I think she's more concerned about the aesthetics of this disease than what's happening to her.” I overheard that and thought it might be true.

I went back to school for a time, and then a result from my blood test required me to come home again. My dad drove down to Baltimore by himself this time, and picked me up and took me back to Pittsburgh. I stood in the parking lot waiting for him while girls walked by and said, “Going out tonight?”

I said, sadly, “No, going home,” without an explanation.

This went on for weeks, all a blur for me, as I scrambled to get my missed assignments when I got back to the dorm, and as Marsha recounted the weekends for me, telling me who had hooked up with whom, and who had beat up whom, and I was so jealous of her and her big ballooning tits bouncing as she talked with her big Italian gestures.

Then, just when I got home for winter break, when I thought I'd finally have time to relax after trying to play catch-up all semester, a doctor with a thick German accent and a white lab coat brought us into his office. His eyes were warm and understanding across the table, and he spoke slowly. “You have
Glomerulonephritis
, which is a kidney disease. Your kidneys are failing, and now we're going to have to treat them. It may work with medication or may not. I don't know, but we're going to try our best.” He tried to make himself sound clear, but to me his words just sounded vague and cruel.

So this was the point at which my higher education went from learning about Western civilization, philosophical anthropology, and basic bong hit methodology to taking a crash course in applicable premed. Now, I sat up in hospital beds and people pointed to anatomical diagrams of the kidneys, and showed me how they regulated blood pressure, how they filtered the waste from the body. It was the beginning of my father finally revealing to us the world of medicine that he had kept from us for so long, thinking that we simply weren't interested. When I had specific questions, he explained my disease in a language that was logical and plain. Curling his forefinger into his thumb to show me how filters in the kidney worked, he said, “These filters in your kidney are usually very small, but yours are big for some reason. They're letting all the wrong things in and out of your body, and that's a problem.”

Prior to this, I was not dependent on numbers, measurements, and ratings, even though I had gone through twelve years of schooling. But now I began watching as the nurses took my blood pressure, and I learned to watch as the needle swept along the scale before hiccupping at 200 or 220. It was the first time I'd try to use my psychic powers to determine that number or to lower it, begging that the needle move far down on the scale before it began to hiccup and slow.

To my surprise, different things came more easily, like getting my blood drawn. I had gotten used to the smell of the alcohol pad that they smeared across my arm, and that quick prick that followed. I watched as the blood spurted into the tube, and I watched until the tube was full. These, I learned, were minor details in the process. The moment when I really needed to sweat? Waiting to see the reaction on the doctor's face when he came in to tell me the blood test result, about my creatinine level, the measurement for how well my kidney was functioning. And I was beginning to get used to his face cringing uncomfortably as he read the number: 2.5, 4.3, higher and higher every time, when I knew it should be less than 1.0. That 0.7 is normal.

This was not the beginning of my mother praying, or wrapping rosary beads around her hand, then tucking them under her sleeve and trying to be subtle about it (she had been doing that for as long as I could remember), but it was the beginning of her going to church daily, waking up at 7:00 a.m., and kneeling before God for an hour before coming into the hospital to see me. Near my bed she'd say, “Oh,
anak
, if I could only take this thing from you and put it in me, I would. That's what I pray for.”

Over those weeks, my father's face grew permanently worried, sinking slowly from the lines in his forehead to the skin under his chin. His smile, which he usually flashed with ease, was now a struggle for him.

Buxom Marsha started calling me more frequently then, first with more stories and more assignments, but later to tell me that the boy in philosophy class whose attention I had recently acquired? Yeah, well, she was dating him now.

I held the receiver and thought that this was what kidney disease can do to you. It can make clear the things you stand to lose.

“Transplant,” the doctor said, when I finally asked him how we could make this all end. I traced back into my memory what I knew of this word: baboon hearts, organs in coolers on helicopters.

The intern came in, her lab coat sagging with pocket-sized reference books. She held her hands against my hips and chest and asked, “Can I listen to your heart?”

“Sure,” I said.

“You're a college student?” she asked. She wore braces and a ponytail and didn't seem much older than I was. “Taking time off from your studies?”

I nodded.

“Breathe deeply for me,” she said, as she touched my shoulder blades. And I let out a slow deep breath.

“Well,” she said, tossing her hair back and pushing her hand into my hips, “at least you're learning some anatomy.” She laughed to herself, trying to make a joke out of all this. But it just didn't seem all that funny.

Chapter Three
The Movie Classic Noly Brother of God, Complete with Beautiful Lighting Effects

L
ater that summer, I woke in a hospital room in Pltts-burgh from a mid-afternoon nap. My mother stood over me with a half-empty plastic bottle shaped like the Blessed Virgin Mary. I thought to myself that somewhere in China there was a factory where small Asian women were melting plastic, pressing it into a mold shaped like Mary, pressing it again and letting it harden until her arms stayed outstretched without drooping or falling, and until you could see each individual fold in her gown. We always had little bottles like this around our house, and ever since I was little, I had always likened them to Mrs. Butterworth, also a woman in bottle form, a vessel for her own product.

My mother splashed me with Holy Water that she shook off her fingers with force, the way superheroes throw fire with their hands.

“It's getting in my eyes,” I said.

“Then you close them,” she said. She, in fact, had her eyes closed, and under her breath, she was mouthing a Novena.

I listened for the sounds in the hallway: someone wheeling a metal laundry cart, a nurse scolding a patient, a woman crying out in pain. I imagined that this was the woman I would be tomorrow, after they had opened me up, attached my brother's kidney to the wiring inside me, and sewn me back again. I would be the one waking up and screaming, holding my hand over my side.

A sharp pull in my hair, and I opened my eyes to see my mother pulling through the knots the way she sometimes pulled loose threads from the hem of a skirt.

“Mom!”
I yelled, but she didn't stop.

The old loud hospital phone rang, shaking the movable table on which it sat. “Channel 3. Siamese twins who've never been detached, ” my brother said. They had put my brother in another room and on a different floor, something about separating us to keep our names straight so they didn't have to switch the medications, and since our check-in, he had been calling me every time he saw something funny on TV. This time, it was a gross sight, really. On the wall-mounted television, there was one normal-sized woman, and attached to her at the hip (literally) was her sister, her smaller version. A side effect of sorts, clinging to her as they moved and talked. My brother had always been obsessed with the gross and absurd.
Ripley's Believe It or Not. Planet of the Apes
.

“How do they get dressed in the morning?” he said.

“Or go to the bathroom?” I asked him.

The things that made me retch were the things that enthralled him. Once, when we lived in Queens, he collected dead flies stuck in our bedroom window, and then took a needle and thread out of my mother's sewing box and made a fly necklace.

“Ow!” I yelled.

“What's wrong?” he said.

“Mom is pulling my hair out in large chunks.”

“I'm not!” she yelled into phone.

“Tell her to lay off you.”

“Lay off me!” I told her.

“Don't talk to me like that,” she said to me, the line between her eyebrows deepening. She grabbed the phone from my ear and said the same thing to my brother, only, when he responded with something I couldn't hear, she laughed with him. He always won her over, though she didn't like to admit it.

A memory: I stood on a chair in our living room. A crickety wooden one that sounded like it was going to pop under my feet. My brother's back was against the white-painted wall and his arms were perpendicular to his body. I was on the chair beside him.

He turned to me and said, “Now, you pretend you are a Roman soldier and nail spikes into my hands.”

I looked down around the room “What nails?” I asked.

“Just pretend,” he said. “Pretend like you're hammering nails into my hands.”

“Oh, I can't do that,” I said.

“Just pretend!” I could tell by the volume of his voice that he was getting annoyed with my ignorance, with my lack of imagination. “You're a Roman soldier, okay? I'm Jesus, okay? When they crucified him, they nailed his hands and feet to a wooden cross and let him hang there to die.” By age ten, my brother was well versed in the New Testament. In religion classes, he paid close attention to parables and stories. At six, all I knew was that today was Holy Saturday and I was too sick to play outside. We were in our pajamas. My nose was running, and my head was hot, but he promised the crucifix game would be fun. The day before, he and my mother had watched the movie
Jesus of Nazareth
, staying up late while I fell asleep. He seemed to know what he was doing, so I followed him as he rescued me from boredom.

From my chair, I pretended to hammer a big spiky nail into his hand. He grimaced, and grunted painfully. “Oh,” I said, easing up with my pretend hammer and pulling out a pretend nail.

“I'm just pretending,” he whispered. “Keep going.” He winked and nodded. “Now, you say, ”Jesus, King of the Jews, you shall die!” ” He continued to feed me the lines. “Pretend to laugh as you do it. You know, ”Ha! Ha! Ha!” ” He threw his head back with hearty laughter.

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” I repeated, throwing my head back, too.

He looked up at the ceiling and looked as if he could cry. “Forgive them, Father,” he pled, “they know not what they do.”

I was confused, not quite sure why I was laughing, or why I was nailing spikes into his hands. I looked up to see whom he was talking to, but all I could see was the bright yellow ceiling light. It shone over him, casting the shadow of his entire crucified body on the white wall.

A week later, back in religion class at school, Sister Mary Victor's long navy blue habit was swinging low and heavy behind her. “Now, does anyone know who died last week?” She had one palm in the other as she paced back and forth. “I'll give you a clue,” she said. “He is the King of the Jews. He suffered for our sins, and they nailed him to a cross. He died, came back to us, and then went up to Heaven. Does anyone know who this is?”

“Jesus!” someone behind me shouted out.

“That's right!” Sister Mary Victor cried.

It came to me like a puzzle. All the pieces started to make sense. “My brother!” I said aloud.

“Excuse me?” Sister Mary Victor snapped, her big eyes bulging and coming closer to me.

“Jesus Christ—is my brother! When I crucified him, he asked our father to forgive me!”

Sister Mary Victor gave me a long, cold stare through the thick lenses of her glasses, one that pierced straight through me and shrank me back into my seat.

“Well, I think he is . . .” I mumbled before I dropped my eyes toward the floor.

When I got my first pimple at thirteen, my mother told me that when a girl gets a pimple, it means that she is secretly in love. Of course, I was—with some boyish face I can no longer recall. But her prophecy made me embarrassed, and I blushed. The stress of everyone finding out my secret made me worry even more until I broke out in full acne.

“Don't tell them that!” my father would say to my mother when she told my brother and me these things, but she never listened. While my father was a quiet Catholic who prayed privately, my mother was the one who believed that you got punished for your sins.

Throughout high school, there were times when I struggled with insomnia. I turned over and over again in my bed, paced the floor, and sometimes went downstairs to watch TV for hours before finally dozing off on the couch. I even tried praying. When I told my mother about it, she said that a deep-rooted guilt could keep someone awake for days.

“Something is on your conscience, isn't it?” she asked me, squinting her eyes and trying to find the answer in my face. I flinched, and then I turned away. “You cannot sleep because you feel guilty. Am I right? Maybe you should go to confession,” she whispered, her cold stare like that of a witch casting a spell.

I believed her. I told the priest everything I'd done. Everything: my secret crushes, my secret wish that the ceiling fan at church would fall down into the pews in the middle of Mass (just to make things interesting). I told him how, once, a friend dared me to steal purple mascara from the local mall. During the week, I kept a running tab of my offenses so I could confess them by week's end. I prayed every night; I listened to the gospels during Mass. My brother and I both did.

Every Sunday in church, I sat next to my brother, who sat next to my mother, who sat next my father, who sat by the aisle. Every Sunday, we stood, we knelt, we sang, and we prayed. Every Sunday since my First Communion, we all got up, stood in line, and took the Eucharist.

But one time it was different. I remember the loud dramatic sounds coming from the organ. They made our pews vibrate and made my bones shake. My brother was a high school senior, and between the weekly sermons, all he talked about was where he was going to college. I looked at his outfit. He had started wearing jeans to church, sweatshirts instead of button-down shirts. Lately, he had stopped singing the hymns, and he had started slouching in his pew while the priest was talking. My mother nudged him with her elbow and he shook her off.

When it came time for communion, everyone stood up and got in line. My brother, who didn't stand, held up this usually orderly process. He remained seated, leaving me stuck on the inside of the pew.

“Go!” I whispered.

“I'm not going,” he said. He shook his head, put his feet up on the kneeler. I must have stood there with my mouth open, frozen by his protest. “No, I don't think I'm into it this week. You go.” He moved his feet to allow me to pass.

I kept my eyes on him as I moved up the communion line. He slouched and looked around. He was confident in his decision. I was unsure of what was going on. I watched the other parishioners kneeling and praying. I wanted to yell at my brother right there from the communion line, “What are you doing? He's watching, you know!” But his body language was deliberately hostile, clearly stubborn. I took the Eucharist in my mouth, and prayed for my brother's salvation.

The morning of our surgery, I woke up early to find my mother yet again hunched over my bed. This time it was comforting to have her there. As the nurse wheeled me out of my room on a gurney and toward the O.R., my mother walked alongside, her hand trying to keep in constant contact with my arm, or my shoulder, anything.

“You pray!” my mother commanded, pulling a blanket over me before she left me with the nurse. I had been praying for weeks before the transplant. I asked God to make it work, to let me finally be okay, be done with the dialysis treatments, and get back to my life at school. Sometimes I sank to the ground on my knees and begged that the transplant would work.

Back in the room, balloons had filled the ceiling, and cards from well-wishers were stuck to every available surface of the wall. “Your courage is an inspiration,” said one card with a cartoon lion drawn on it.
Fraud, fraud, fraud
, I thought to myself. Give me a choice, and I'll show you how “brave” I am. Give me the chance to open the door and run away from this whole disease, never have to deal with it again, and I'll show you I'm made of nothing but fast feet. I'm on automatic pilot. I'm reading the lines off the script and making the appropriate facial expressions.

But my brother? I didn't know what was keeping him there. He could have left any time he wanted and told everyone that he just couldn't do it, and no one would have hated him for it. They would've thanked him for trying.

Once, when I was in kindergarten, I rode the bus with my brother and his classmates, but he forbade me from talking to him. The girls in my grade sat in the back while he and his friends sat in the front. Only once do I remember him talking to any of us. There was one Korean girl, Jae-Bok, who had taken my finger puppet right off my pinky.

“Too slow!” she said and stuck out her tongue before stuffing the puppet into her jeans.

“Not fair!” I said. “Give it to me!” I must have said it loudly enough for my brother to hear because—bam! —just like that, an imaginary cape hovering behind his shoulders, he turned around in his green vinyl bus seat and said, “What happened?”

“Jae-Bok took my Piggy Puppet!”

“So!” she said, playing tough with my brother.

I wanted him to hit her, smack her in her place. But, foreshadowing the wit and insult comedy he will master in later years, my brother said, “Jae-Bok, you're a thief! You're a stealer! You're a Pittsburgh Stealer!” At the time, I hadn't caught how clever this was, how my brother linked up Jae-Bok's crime to a football team's mascot, especially since we weren't yet living in Pittsburgh.

But everyone else on the bus got it and hummed “ooooh,” shaming Jae-Bok into returning the Piggy Puppet to me.

An orderly and my father came down into the white room with Joel in a gurney between them. My dad came over to kiss me on the forehead and quickly made an exit. “Don't be scared,” he said.

Our stretchers were lined up along each side of the stark white hallway. Between us, nurses and orderlies shuffled by, flinging open the operating room door as they moved in and out. My brother, too, was clothed in white and had an IV running from his hand. I could tell by the flutter of his eyelids that the anesthesia was just starting to work.

I held my hand over the side of my waist where they would put in the new kidney, where they would transplant his organ into my body. There was an emptiness there now, like skin stretched over bone with a hollow space underneath. I tapped on it impatiently. I watched a nurse stand beside me, turning the pages in my chart. My eyes followed an orderly who came down the hall and repositioned my gurney so I was closer to the wall and out of the way of traffic. He tugged on my blanket to cover my exposed foot.

The double doors swung open one more time, and inside the room ahead, trays with equipment were rolled from this side to that. One nurse called out directions and another one adjusted the tube of my IV. I looked at my brother on his narrow gurney. He was dozing in and out of sleep. I felt my pulse, the tremble of my skin. The lights from the other side of the double doors seemed brighter and stronger than they were minutes ago. They seemed to come right over my brother, over his long white figure, his outstretched arms, his long legs. They illuminated his entire body.