Moonface

by Angela Balcita

  “Correction!” I interrupt. “It was a paring knife. For precision.”

  “She took it from me! The heartless harpy took my kidney!”

  “You weren’t willing to give it to me, wimp. What was I gonna do? You didn’t need it; you said you were willing to donate it.”

  “You misunderstood,” he says calmly and clearly. “I said I would donate . . . money ... to the National Kidney Foundation ... in your honor.”

  The crowd is a chorus of giggles, many of the guests shaking their heads. They’re too distracted to see Charlie walking backward and taking a seat on the couch, clinging to the armrest for support. No one notices but me.

  I should start thinking about my classes soon, as September is just around the corner. I worried all summer long that the surgery would fall through, and so I haven’t really prepared. I’m looking through my books at the kitchen table one day while Charlie’s on the couch watching yet another episode of Sesame Street.

  “Are you regressing?” I ask him.

  “No. I’m bored. We don’t have cable, and PBS is the only educational thing on,” he says without taking his eyes off the TV.

  I get up and sit next to him on the couch, and I squeeze him around his shoulders. I lean over to give him a kiss, and he holds out a cheek for me.

  “You know, Charlie, I don’t know why the heart is classically defined as the symbol of love. No way! I say the kidneys! You’re born with two: one to keep and one to share. You can’t literally give someone your heart. ”

  “Well, technically you can,” he says.

  “Yeah, but that’s really not fun for everyone, is it?”

  He grabs his cup from the table and stands up slowly to refill it. As he teeters toward the kitchen, I think, I’m not sure, but I think I hear him say, “But neither is this.”

  I find that when people ask me about the transplant, their eyes well up in a corny kind of way that makes for some awkward silences as they try to look up to make their tears trickle back into their eye sockets. Or maybe it’s awkward because I’m afraid I’ll start to well up, too. Or that our corny love story feels like a farce, that maybe I really did take the kidney from him against his will and left him with the raw end of the deal.

  Every time someone asks about us, I’m tempted to tell them Charlie’s been on the couch for a few weeks now, that he stares out the window and looks the way I did all summer long while I was on dialysis.

  It’s not like he doesn’t try, though. When the occasion calls, he can gather himself in new clothes and find his old spark again in a snap. Charlie realized at the first few parties after the surgery that it is easier for him to make startling proclamations than to try to explain how bad he really feels. Before a crowd of friends, Charlie explains that his kidney will not fail because it is half German.

  “Half German?” I repeat for clarification.

  “Ja, frau!” he says, standing straight and trying to hold his chest out in front of him like a male gorilla. “From the fair Krit-vise side of the family.”

  Our friend Maria, surname of Stadtmueller, agrees. “Ja!” she says with conviction, her sunny, freckled face suddenly turning stern and decidedly Bavarian. We are sitting at a card table on Erica’s front porch, and a streetlight is illuminating Maria’s strawberry blond hair from behind.

  “Ja, Marr-eee-ah” Charlie says, in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. His voice drops low and his jaw overex-tends.

  “Schwarzenegger was Austrian,” a snarky voice from behind the screen door yells.

  Charlie snaps back: “Same accent, though.” He is annoyed by the details.

  “Yeah, German kidney. So, what difference does it make?” I ask. Clearly there’s something he’s getting at here, and I want to help him get there.

  “Discipline. It will become the master of all those other organs and keep them in order. Achtung, all you other organs!”

  “Achtung!” The German Maria follows. She loves this.

  “That sounds a little racist,” Erica says.

  “Why, because she is Asian? It’s just that I have strong genes,” Charlie says.

  “That sounds worse,” Erica says.

  “But you’re half Irish, too. Right?” I remind him.

  “Hmm,” Charlie says, pondering for a moment.

  I find the perfect comedic timing and jump: “Let’s just be glad you didn’t give me your liver!”

  We lift our wine glasses and toast to that.

  In fact, there is no sign of my body rejecting Charlie’s kidney. My weekly blood tests show only astounding numbers. And while I don’t have reason for concern, I still wake up in the morning to assess my body—trying to see if I can feel a change, any change. Anything new. I look in the mirror and check out my face for any signs. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I keep an eye on it. Once, Charlie came into the bathroom and loosened the worried lines in my brow with his thumb. “Relax, Moonface.”

  “I should be worrying about you,” I told him.

  “Nah,” he said. “You shouldn’t be worrying about anything.”

  Later at the party, I escape into the corner of the room, watching people move between us in waves and overhearing conversations about us.

  “But, if this is her second transplant, isn’t that better?” Alice, an environmentalist and fellow student, asks, trying to sound hopeful.

  Joan, the mathematician, says, “No, that makes no sense. Where did you hear that?”

  “Yes,” Charlie says, “better is second, I reckon.”

  Joan completely ignores Charlie’s imaginative rhyme. “Absolutely no sense,” she repeats. “That’s completely unfounded.”

  Alice says, “No, I read it somewhere. Something about the antibodies or—”

  “No, that’s wrong. It’s about the body’s ability to tolerate the drugs,” Richard tunes in. Soon the room is debating the likelihood of my new kidney’s long-term survival. They go on, these experts, with an impromptu panel discussion about transplantation, while Charlie escapes from the middle of the porch, sneaks inside past the kitchen, slides in beside me, and whispers into my hair: “If they only knew that this kidney is going to outlive the both of us.”

  The second time I ever saw Charlie cry was on the floor of our bedroom.

  Two days after the operation, Charlie was soft-shoeing down the hallway proving that his intestines were working by demonstrating to the doctors that he could pass gas (and providing them with way more evidence than they needed). So Charlie got to go home early while I stayed at the hospital. A day later, the doctors let me follow him, making sure we were going to be taken care of by our families. This sounded like a good idea at the time. Our parents were staying at our friend Bonnie’s house a few streets away. But, by choice, they only used Bonnie’s house for sleeping. They spent most of the day at our bedside monitoring our every move.

  Charlie’s problems after the surgery started with our mothers, whose constant doting was selfless and sweet, but for two weeks in a tiny underground apartment, often suffocating. Depending on them for everything was not unlike living at home all over again. Our first morning started out peacefully. Charlie and I woke up to the sun coming through the window.

  “Not so bad,” Charlie said, his eyes barely open, a deep exhalation to follow.

  “No, not so bad at all,” I said. “And I have to pee!”

  “Pee! Pee! She’s peeing! She’s peeing!” Charlie said, acknowledging the triumph of a healthy kidney transplant.

  But when I opened the door, the waft of coffee filled the room. Charlie, who hates the smell of coffee, playfully gagged.

  Over the next few days, our parents brewed coffee and spoke loudly outside our bedroom door, and though they wanted us to come out and join them, it was hard being with them sometimes, keeping up with my mother’s boisterous laughter or their constant questions. Most of the time, we just wanted to sleep. We were still recuperating and none of our systems had yet gone back to normal. I woke up one ni
ght to find Charlie bent facedown over the floor, his rear sticking straight up in the air.

  “Charlie!” I gasped.

  “I’m fine. Go back to sleep.”

  The next morning, as we lay in bed reading, Charlie tore a piece of notebook paper out and gave it to me. On it was a cartoon of a skinny man with blue curly hair and a bloated stomach, and in that stomach, there was a TV, a telephone, a piece of furniture, a tree, an apple, a refrigerator, a bicycle, and some small birds. “That’s how I feel right now,” he said, before standing up slowly and trying one more time for the bathroom. We knew that one of the hardest parts of the surgery was getting his intestines back on task. Coupled with the painkillers, which slowed his system even more, he was in agony.

  Though I felt like I could walk all over Iowa City, I tried to stay close to Charlie. But, that evening, our parents left, and I was putting things on the shelf, arranging books by author from A to Z, fiction and nonfiction, poetry and plays. All night Charlie had paced up and down the long hall. When I was done with my redecorating, I found Charlie curled up on the floor, his knees almost to his chin, crying over the cramped feeling inside him.

  “Let’s talk about the pain,” she says. Joan is not a sado-masochist. She just really wants to know. She might be a hypochondriac, but I’m not sure. Maybe she just complains a lot. But I think she just really wants to understand.

  There’s a bookstore with a coffee shop that Charlie and I frequent. Steam’s always rising from people’s coffee mugs as they type away on their laptops. Charlie and I come for tea and to browse the aisles, and there is always someone there we know. A woman I know greets me as I stand in line. She has a no-nonsense haircut kept high and tight. Sometimes, questions come out of her mouth before she considers what she’s asking.

  For example: the last time I saw her, I was in the middle of kidney failure, with all the symptoms emerging all over my body. Canker sores had taken over my mouth and I was trying to speak without them showing. I thought I was being discreet by putting a hand over my lips, but as I answered Joan’s greeting, she had twisted her face and asked, “What’s wrong with your mouth? Did you have dental work or something?”

  Another time, Charlie saw her walking up the side of a country road and pulled up beside her and asked if she wanted a ride. She looked inside the window at his exposed arm on the steering wheel, and the first words that came out of her mouth were, “Is that a rash?”

  When we see her in line for her coffee, Charlie quickly ducks into the graphic-novel section deep in the store’s interior. Sly fox. When we sit down at a table, she looks me straight in the eyes through her thick lenses, and I think I will try to squirm my way out of this. I try to be clear without lying.

  “What were you feeling?” she asked.

  “Well, obviously, the incision was sore.”

  “How about before then? Did your kidneys—or your kidney—hurt? Did it feel like your kidney was trying to leap out of your body?” She grabs at the skin around her waist and squeezes. She scrunches her face; she furrows her brow. She looks like she’s taking a poo.

  “No, the kidney didn’t hurt. I couldn’t really feel that.”

  “Dialysis?”

  “Yes, getting the dialysis catheter.”

  “Yes,” she says, “tell me about that.” I go through details with her, the slow insertion of the tube in my neck, how I felt like I was not human, but a robot with interchanging parts out for repair. I go on and on, making the stitches, the cuts, and blood-letting, skin-tearing details more scenes from a horror film than a medical procedure.

  Her rapid-fire questions shoot holes in my brain. Little holes that open up spots I’m afraid will leak. I don’t tell her about seeing Charlie writhing in pain, curled up like a child on the bedroom floor. I leave out the part about the tears I caused him, how those moments are ingrained in my memory like scars, and how I replay those scenes and look for ways to call them back and change them. No, I don’t tell her about that pain.

  After the transplant, Charlie went to his own clinic appointments, where the doctors checked to see if he was healing up nicely. He wasn’t. An infection on his incision kept getting worse even though we thought it was getting better, and at one point they had to open him up again and let him heal from the inside out. So for several days, Charlie walked around with an open wound under his sterile gauze dressing, and if you looked under the dressing and closely enough, you could see straight into his gut. I thought he would be thrilled by the repulsiveness of this, by its resemblance to science fiction. He seemed embarrassed by it.

  This particular week, we arrive on his usual day, but it’s not the taciturn Taiwanese surgeon who operated on him. Instead, it’s another transplant surgeon who is white, stocky, and balding prematurely.

  “Hola!” he says, before the exam room door is fully open, before he even looks up from the chart he’s reading. “Charlie O”Doyle? You Charlie O”Doyle? Age twenty-nine?”

  “That’s me,” Charlie says, half-naked and supine on the exam table.

  “How’s it going?” The doctor’s words come out of his mouth in short, quick bursts. He is so clearly not from Iowa—New York, I think, definitely New York—and he is so clearly a surgeon. Even though he is short and only a little thick, his movements take up so much space in the room. And not in that clumsy way, but in the exacting, confident way of a man who is used to wielding a scalpel. This guy was born to be a surgeon.

  I’m observing him from a chair in the corner, and for the first five minutes, I’m pretty sure he has no idea I’m here.

  “You’re the hero?” he asks Charlie.

  “Pardon?” Charlie says.

  “The hero. That’s what I call the donors, because if you think about it, that’s what you are. You’ve saved a life. You know, heroes.”

  I can tell by Charlie’s half-smile that he is more amused than impressed by this guy’s schtick. Charlie’s eyes follow the doctor as he moves back and forth across the room with caffeinated energy. His blue scrubs swish between his legs when he walks.

  The surgeon, who does not even introduce himself, looks down at Charlie’s open wound and says, “Hay-oh! What do we have here? Got infected, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Charlie says.

  “Ouch,” the doctor says, leaning in for a closer look. He sucks in air through his teeth. “How’s the recipient look?”

  “Well, you can ask her yourself. She’s right there.” Charlie nods to me, and the surgeon finally turns around to find me there.

  “You?” he says. He looks me up and down, his eyes cutting down my body like a knife.

  I nod.

  He jumps back around to Charlie and doesn’t even ask me who I am or how Charlie and I are connected. Nothing.

  “How did you get roped into that?” the doctor says.

  “I thought the drugs would be better,” Charlie says, quite honestly. And it’s true. He listened carefully about the morphine pump through the whole evaluation process, but when it came to pass, he was disappointed. The drugs just dulled his pain and put him to sleep. They didn’t give him any of the hallucinations he was hoping for.

  “Perks! Ha!” The surgeon snorts and looks like he’s going to give Charlie a frat boy high-five or something. “Sweet.” He presses on the flesh around Charlie’s wound with his gloved hands, asking Charlie if it hurts. Every once in a while, Charlie’s leg jerks up off the table like he’s being electrocuted.

  “Yow-za!” Charlie yells once.

  “Let’s seal this puppy up.” I don’t listen as he tends to Charlie and gives him the horrendous details of what he’s about to do. “You might want to look away when I do this. It’s not going to feel good,” he says as he dabs a metallic liquid on the wound.

  “Curses!” Charlie yells, like an old angry man, tightening his face, gripping the sides of the table with his fists. I don’t know if I should run to him or stay where I am. I angle my head from behind the surgeon’s body so I can see if Charlie needs me,
but I can’t get past the white lab coat. As he keeps electrocuting Charlie, he tries to talk, like the way dentists try to talk to you as they drill in your mouth.

  “So, I always ask heroes this. I just want to know. Would you do it again?”

  Now I listen. This guy is upfront. He’s got the audacity to ask this in front of me the recipient, in front of Charlie’s one true love. I want to clarify things for him. Charlie wasn’t recruited for this. I didn’t ask him for anything. No, this was an act of love.

  Charlie lets out a weighty sigh and turns his face to the wall. “No. No, I don’t think I would.”

  He keeps facing the pale pink wall while the doctor puts his hands all over him. Meanwhile, I’m frozen in the chair. I have a supportive smile across my face, but I feel it slowly sliding downward, though I try to keep it up. Charlie is trying to hold his grunts in now, pushing those sounds deep down in a place where they won’t emerge. I lean over to see if I can see Charlie from the side of the doctor’s coat. But an explanation doesn’t follow. The paper on the table underneath Charlie crinkles every time he moves. The fluorescent lights are stark, buzzing.

  The surgeon puts another dab of the painful solution on his skin, and when he does, I am the one who winces.

  Chapter Eight

  The Illusive Sleep Stealer and his Dancing Cockatoos

  Sleep is slowly being stolen from me. i try to hunt down the thief, but all I can come up with are the usual suspects: medications, the seasonal changes, the burrito for dinner. I blame it on these things, but when I lie in bed, I know what keeps me up. Charlie’s frank admission has been on repeat in my head ever since we left the doctor’s office that morning, like a song that you hate to hear but can’t get out of your head. A week after that appointment, we still don’t talk about what he said. Charlie and I walk around the tiny apartment, dodging each other in the hall; I squeeze my shoulders into my body as I pass.

  During Charlie’s long bout with post-surgery constipation and the pain from an infected incision, a large envelope came in the mail, and in it was a diploma-looking certificate that acknowledged Charles Kritvise O”Doyle for giving what they called “The Gift of Life.” A grand, formal thing, it was printed on thick ivory parchment paper and embossed with the hospital seal. I told Charlie we should frame it and hang it in the living room.