Everything I Thought I Knew

by Shannon Takaoka

  “They give me a lot of leeway on account of the heart,” I lied. “You know, you only live once and all that. Or, in my case, I guess twice?”

  Jane acted like she was considering whether or not to make the call, but I could tell I’d already won her over.

  “Okay. But you cannot mention where, because my friend Chris could lose his license. And try to pretend you’re sober.” Jane made a call, then we stumbled out to wait for our Lyft.

  At Chris’s shop, Jane got a small infinity symbol between her shoulder blades. I got a heart on my right wrist.

  Not a cute Valentine’s Day one in a candy color, but a real one. It’s anatomically correct, in red ink so dark it’s almost black. A massive aorta arches between the branches of the pulmonary artery and superior vena cava. The coronary arteries twist across the ventricles like roots. It’s in honor of the one that used to be mine. Only mine.

  Jane says my tattoo is a little bit gross, but in a good way.

  On the way back to her dad’s apartment, Jane and I are quiet. It’s late — early, really — and now I have a massive headache from all the scotch. My mouth is so dry that all I can think about is drinking a big glass of cold water. Like right now. Did I remember to take my medication earlier? That’s probably why my mom was calling, back before we left. I have an image in my mind of the pill bottles lined up on the sink in my bathroom at home. Yes, I forgot. I pull my phone out of my jacket pocket. There are four additional missed calls from home. Crap. Well, I can’t do much about it right now. I’ll just have to tell my mom that my ringer was off or my phone battery ran out.

  I look out the window and see a man walking up the sidewalk along Divisadero Street. Buzzed scalp. Muscular build. Black jacket. Tattoo snaking up the side of his neck.

  Holy shit. A flash of recognition jolts me like an electric shock. It’s him. The crying man who visited my hospital room on the night of my transplant. The one I’ve been trying to convince myself was just a medication-induced hallucination.

  He’s alone, his face shadowed by the string of Victorian town houses he’s passing under, their bay windows jutting out over the ground-floor garage doors.

  But it’s him. Somehow, in some way, I know it’s him.

  “Stop the car!” I say to the driver.

  “Chloe, it’s, like, fifteen more blocks.” Jane must think I’m confused. “Uphill.”

  “Stop the car!” I say again, opening the door as the driver pulls over.

  As I jump out, I catch my foot on the curb and almost tumble to the ground.

  Jane is still inside, trying to unbuckle herself.

  I have to stop him. I have to see him.

  And then what?

  He’s about a block and a half away and walking quickly. I start to run toward the intersection as the light turns to yellow, then red. Although it’s past two a.m., there’s still enough traffic on Divisadero to block my way.

  Jane is catching up and cursing at me at the same time.

  “Chloe, what the hell?”

  The light goes green and I dash across the street just as he turns the corner up ahead. I keep running, as fast as my legs will carry me, wheel around the corner, and . . .

  Nothing.

  There is no one. Both sidewalks are empty. Fog swirls under the streetlights.

  I sit down on the cold front steps of a darkened Victorian. I can feel my pulse pounding everywhere. In my wrist, still throbbing from the tattoo needle. In my chest, heartbeat thump, thump, thumping against my rib cage. In my ears, as I hear the blood rushing in and out.

  Jane is standing in front of me.

  “What the hell, Chloe? What are you doing?”

  Was I imagining him again? Seeing things that aren’t there?

  “That guy!” I look, in vain, down the quiet street. “Did you see him?”

  “Did I see the guy in the black jacket?”

  “Yes! Yes! You saw him?”

  “Of course I saw him.” Jane looks exasperated. “Why were you chasing him like a maniac?”

  He’s real. I’m not crazy. He’s real.

  “Chloe.” Jane stares at me, impatient for an answer. “WHO IS HE AND WHY WERE YOU CHASING HIM?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” I say, realizing how weird I must sound.

  I cross my arms over my knees, put my head down, and try to push back the tears that are welling up, but I can’t.

  I cry in frustration that the man has disappeared. In relief that he’s actually real. In confusion. In fear. In gratitude that Jane has opted to just sit down next to me on the steps and let me have a meltdown. Cars sweep by in the darkness.

  And then a sour spasm rolls through my empty stomach and I vomit all over my feet.

  “Yeesh,” says Jane, jumping up. “Guess it was a good thing we got out of that car.”

  She pulls me up to standing as a light goes on in the upper floor of the house behind us. “C’mon, we should probably go.”

  We slowly walk the rest of the way to Jane’s dad’s apartment. Jane makes me leave my shoes on the back stairwell and then drink a full glass of water, take two aspirin and a vitamin B12 tablet, wash my face, and brush my teeth. She calls this her “after-party routine.” When I come out of the bathroom, I hardly have a chance to sit before she asks, “So are you going to tell me what that was all about or what?”

  When I look over, there are two Janes, both sprawled on the rug with their heads propped against giant floor pillows. I look away and back again. Now there’s only one. My still-queasy stomach desperately wants her to stay that way.

  “That man,” I say. “He came into my room the night of my transplant. At least I thought he did. Everyone else thought it was a dream, or some kind of hallucination from all the pain meds. I had even convinced myself that they were right, until I just saw him walking down the street.”

  “So you do know him?” she asks.

  “I don’t know know him,” I say. “But I remember him from the hospital. Like, I’m telling you, Jane, he was in my room, sitting next to my bed. And what’s weird is that night . . . it sort of seemed like he was the one who knew me.”

  Jane is thinking. I study her face, trying to find a focal point so that she’ll stop uniting and dividing. Dividing and uniting.

  She’s wearing black jeans, an oversize white T-shirt, and boots that look like they’d take at least an hour to lace up. I compare my outfit to hers, which makes me feel both over- and underdressed. Overdressed because I’m still wearing the skirt and blouse that I had chosen for Emma’s party. Minus my now-ruined shoes. Underdressed because my clothes seem hopelessly uncool in comparison to those boots.

  “Chloe.” She raises her eyebrows. “Maybe he knew your heart donor,” she says. “Maybe he came to see you in the hospital because he knew the person who gave you their heart. Like, he wanted to see who got it.”

  My brain is slow to process, but as it does, I find myself nodding along. Even if nobody saw him come in or out of my room, he still could have done so without being noticed. The ICU is busy and chaotic. The nurses staffing the main station get distracted. If this man was my donor’s next of kin, then it makes sense that he might have needed to see me, see where the heart went, in order to have closure. This even explains why he might not have wanted to be contacted. He’d already made his peace.

  Then Jane sits up straight.

  “Or — oh my god, oh my god — maybe it’s like those cellular memory stories we were reading about the other day in the library. Maybe you recognized him on the street just now because your donor knew him. The memory of him has been, like, transferred, to you.”

  I shake my head. “Jane, Jane, Jane, Jane, Jane. I already told you, there is no scientific evidence that that’s even possible. Zero.” But even as I say this, I think of the woman who looks sick, of the silver-gray pit bull, of the vegetarian zombie comic that I can remember but Emma can’t. The man on the street. Where is all of it coming from? Could it be that none of these memories make
sense to me because they’re not mine?

  Impossible. Jane is just messing with my head. And, like me, she’s drunk.

  “You know, there’s no evidence that God exists either,” she says. “Doesn’t seem to stop people from going to church.”

  “I don’t believe in God,” I tell her. “I believe in science.”

  “Yeah, you seem like a science kind of gal.” Jane nods at my chest. “Does it still hurt? Your heart?”

  I think about this. “It doesn’t hurt anymore, but I feel it. You know how you don’t really notice your heart unless you’re lying somewhere quiet or you get scared or something?”

  “I guess,” says Jane.

  “Every time this one beats, I think about how it’s not really mine.”

  Her blue eyes widen slightly and she nods.

  We’re both quiet for a minute, then Jane adds, “Well, there’s only one way to know if this cellular memory thing is real or just bullshit. You need to find out who your donor was.”

  Before I can tell Jane that this is not going to be possible, she claps her hands together, making me jump. “My mom!” she says.

  “Your mom what?” I ask. I wish she could turn down the volume on her voice. It’s making my head hurt.

  Jane grins at me. “She works in the maternity ward.”

  “And you are telling me this because . . . ?”

  “At UCSF.”

  The hospital where I had my transplant.

  “She has access to the medical records system. And she can’t remember anything, so I’m sure she’s got the login posted somewhere in her home office. Maybe we can find some information on your donor that way.”

  Hacking into hospital records. Sure.

  But then I think, Why not? It couldn’t hurt to just dig around a little bit, right? And even though I’m still skeptical about the whole cellular memory idea and probably wouldn’t agree to break HIPAA laws when I’m sober, it would be such a relief to know something — anything — about my donor.

  I dive over and hug Jane.

  “Thank you. We should definitely do that. Also, I really, really love your boots. Can I borrow them sometime?”

  Jane shakes her head and disentangles herself from my clumsy hug. “Remind me not to let you mix weed and whisky next time. Let’s get you to sleep, Chloe.”

  But after I’m tucked into the bed in her dad’s guest room, I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about the man from my hospital room. About seeing him on the street. About the motorcycle crash. The dog. Emma. Jane. My parents. Kai. Images flash like lightning through my head. A female face: beautiful, breaking into a smile, dimples deepening. A blue house with a white porch swing. A twisted cypress tree. An EKG readout. Ocean. Tattoo. Traffic. Tunnel.

  My brain is a pinball machine, each thought sending another ricocheting. It’s all so loud and disorderly. So random and difficult to control.

  I just want it to stop.

  I’m tired of this game.

  People often ask me what it was like, getting a new heart. Did I feel different after? Changed? Yes and yes — more than I ever bargained for, as it turns out.

  But in the immediate aftermath of my transplant, here’s what I noticed first: My feet weren’t cold. A failing heart can’t pump enough blood to your extremities. In the weeks before the transplant, my fingers and toes had turned blue. No matter how many blankets my mom had piled on the bed, I couldn’t get warm. So as soon as I woke up, I noticed my feet. They felt like how feet are supposed to feel. There. My mom laid her hands on them and started crying, her shoulders relaxing in relief.

  And the crushing, suffocating, all-consuming tiredness was gone. I was so, so tired before. Stairs had become Mount Everest. Breathing was like trying to suck air through a tiny straw. Even thinking required effort. The head, it turns out, is hopeless without a well-functioning heart.

  After the transplant, it was almost as if I could feel each one of the trillions of newly energized red blood cells, fat with hemoglobin, racing through my arteries and outermost capillaries, bumping up against one another in their rush to oxygenate muscle fibers, synapses, and neurons.

  Oxygen is a beautiful thing. After living through the nightmare of not having enough, I’d never take breathing for granted again.

  Dr. Ahmadi had come by my room once I was awake, giving us all a thumbs-up.

  “Everything went great,” he said. “Looks like you have a fully functioning, beautiful new heart.”

  He almost made it sound as if we had picked it out in a showroom, like a Toyota. But I couldn’t stop, and I haven’t stopped thinking about where it really came from. Who it came from.

  When you consider it from a medical standpoint, the transplant of a living heart from one body to another is a pretty incredible achievement. Until recently in the course of human history, this mad scientist–level ambition was considered impossible. Before the heart-lung machine was invented to take over the oxygenation process during a procedure, there simply hadn’t been enough time. A brain without oxygen couldn’t survive more than a handful of minutes, nowhere near long enough for surgeons to do the painstaking work of removing a sick heart and replacing it with a healthy one.

  And then there was the problem of rejection. Our immune response is programmed to make war on foreign invaders. And what could be more foreign than having your own heart replaced by one that used to belong to someone else? Early transplant patients often only lived a few days before their bodies attacked the new organ.

  Immunosuppressant drugs changed everything. There are still plenty of risks, of course, but all things considered, I’m incredibly lucky, as everyone keeps telling me. Lucky to exist at a time when transplants are not just possible but successful. Lucky that a donor heart became available before my own ran out of gas. Lucky to be alive.

  So, of course, my parents are, as I expected, furious about the tattoo. Well, my mom is furious, anyway. My dad is just bewildered. Anxious. Wondering what has happened to his level-headed, predictable Chloe.

  I think they both suspected I was hungover when I arrived home yesterday morning. They wanted to know why I hadn’t picked up my phone the night before. Why I was no longer hanging out with Emma and my other old friends. Why I had started acting like the sort of sullen, monosyllabic teenager that we used to make fun of. Why, why, why? I didn’t have many answers for them.

  “Chloe, what were you thinking?” my mom asked, her face tired from lack of sleep. Her faint worry line looked as though it had deepened to a full-on wrinkle overnight. “You left your medication here, and I know you know how irresponsible it was to get that tattoo. We are going to have to do a blood test now. Jesus! Do you even realize how lucky you were to get this heart? How could you put yourself at risk like this? I just don’t understand what’s going on with you lately!”

  “I’m sorry — I just forgot!” I said, which, admittedly, was a weak answer.

  “You forgot? You can’t forget!”

  “Everybody forgets stuff sometimes!”

  “Well, you are not everybody!”

  My dad interceded, as he usually does. It’s the middle-school science teacher in him. He’s used to defusing hormonally challenged students. “Chloe, we know you want to do the same things that every normal teenager can do. And you can, mostly. But you do have to remember that your heart is a little more special than others. Treat it that way, okay?”

  I hate that word. Special. It’s a cop-out word. Instead of saying the truth — that special really means “Sorry about your shitty luck!”— people try to make it sound like you’re holding a winning lottery ticket. My heart is special? Yeah, right. One, it’s not my heart. And two, special should refer to being able to do something really mind-blowing, like discovering a wormhole into another universe, and not something that requires a lifetime of medication, blood tests, biopsies, and the constant threat of rejection. And perhaps a shorter life span and complete mental breakdown in addition.

  But I just wanted th
em to back off, so all I’d said was, “Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful. I promise.”

  “Okay, good,” my dad said, as if my promise ended the discussion. Problem solved. But Mom was not playing.

  “That’s it? ‘Okay, good’? No, not ‘Okay, good’! I don’t think she’s getting the seriousness of this. She can’t just forget her medication! She could die!”

  My dad does not like to hear the word die.

  “Nobody is dying, Julia. Forgetting a couple of pills is not going to kill her. Don’t overreact.”

  Even I know that telling an overreacting person not to overreact is kind of a bad idea. My mom had looked as if she was about to vaporize my dad with her radioactive eye beams.

  “Are you serious? I hate how you get to be the calm good guy all the time! So you know what? You keep track. You get the prescriptions filled. You deal with the insurance approvals. You keep tabs on the pills that need to be taken, in what order, and at what time. And whether she’s got all her appointments scheduled. And when she fails to take her lifesaving medication, and is out doing God-knows what, God-knows where, you try to reach her cardiologist to find out whether she needs to double-up the next day or skip a dose. I’ll just swoop in to let you know when you’re overreacting and take her out to the movies after to give you some ‘space.’ Sound good? I’d really like that job so much better!”

  “Julia, stop.”

  I think they’d completely forgotten that I was standing right there.

  They hardly ever used to fight. But now they fight about me.

  So today I am buckling down. Today I am making amends. I am at the library, staying late after classes to put the finishing touches on my AP Physics report. Now that I’ve finally turned in my Grapes of Wrath essay, it’s the last big project that I need to complete in order to graduate. I read over what I’ve written so far:

  Subject: “Multiple Theories of the Multiverse”

  Thesis: Physicists have developed a number of theories to explain the true nature of reality. Is our universe infinite? And, if so, is it the only one? In this paper, I will examine the multiple theories put forward to explain the possible structure of a multiverse and make a case for the existence of parallel worlds.