by Robert Atwan
The fourteenth round started with Mancini storming off his stool. He gets to the center of the ring, and seconds later Duk Koo Kim is flat on his back, and then he tries to climb the ropes, stumbles back, and it’s over. Mancini is jumping in the air. Kim is pulled into his corner, loses consciousness, and that’s it. Except as a kid, I didn’t know that. The camera was on Mancini. CBS interviewed him, he talked about what a fierce competitor Kim was, about wanting to fight Aaron Pryor, there was a commercial, and then, when they returned, Duk Koo Kim was being taken out of the arena on a stretcher. The announcer called him “very game.” His mouth was open slightly. He was covered in sweat. One arm hung off the side of the stretcher, the other was across his chest. His eyes were closed, his face swollen. He was completely limp.
Jews have closed-casket funerals, so I didn’t see an actual dead body again until college, when two of my friends killed themselves and I attended their funerals. Standing over their open caskets, staring at their painted faces, I thought that they didn’t look dead at all. They looked like mannequins. There was no part of them that seemed to have ever been alive. They’d both died alone, one by overdosing, the other by shooting himself in the head, so millions of strangers never saw their final living moments. For many years I have wondered why their deaths don’t haunt me as much as this stranger’s death, this boy who died by the calculated risk of becoming a boxer, and I can only conclude that it’s all about distance. I didn’t see either of my friends die—though in some respect I should have at least seen the signs, but I was a boy too, and they were boys, and you can’t expect boys to see things like pain and depression as clearly as retrospect would like us to believe—I just stood there in the aftermath and wondered why I was thinking of a dead boxer.
I took down all the pictures.
The last time I saw a person die, it was my mother. I felt lucky to be there, even though I’d spent the previous thirty-nine years of my life wishing her gone. She wasn’t a good person, I’m not afraid to say anymore. She was at times cruel, malicious, mentally abusive. At other times she was simply mad. And at other times still, she was the darkness that kept me awake at night as an adult, wondering if I was becoming her.
And yet.
My sister Linda called and said that the doctors were only giving our mother four hours to live, that she’d fallen, that if I wanted to see her before she died, I needed to get to the hospital right away. The hospital was four hours away, with no traffic, but we would be leaving our house right in the middle of rush-hour traffic. We would be lucky to make it there in seven hours.
My wife and I made it there in four hours.
My mother, who’d been dying of cancer for a very long time, was in the hospital bed, her eyes barely open, her face was swollen and black-and-blue from her fall, her mouth agape, one arm was slung across her chest, the other was falling to the side of the bed. She was limp and unconscious.
I sat down beside her and told her it was okay to go. And thirty seconds later she was gone.
I stopped hurting myself after Duk Koo Kim died. I don’t know why. I still have the pocketknife, however. It’s in an old tackle box that’s out in my garage. It’s strange: I have a tendency to hold on to things that are relics of bad memories, as if by knowing where they are I’ll somehow be able to avoid the unlucky occurrence of running into them and being overwhelmed.
The problem is, you can’t mitigate chance. That’s what makes this life so pitiless, so unnerving. Duk Koo Kim died at twenty-three, killed in a boxing ring, and by chance I sat and watched it happen when I was eleven. Twenty-eight years later, almost to the day, I sat beside my mother as she died and he came back to me, the vision of him on that stretcher, the congruence of their bodies, their faces, and I wonder if now those last moments of hers will finally replace his in my mind and who, eventually, will replace her.
VICKI WEIQI YANG
Field Notes on Hair
FROM South Loop Review
And nothing is less worthy of a thinking man than to see death as a slumber. Why a slumber, if death doesn’t resemble sleep?
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
AFTER THE BRAIN THING2 the world became divided spatially and temporally. There were those who knew the truth about my illness, and those who knew the easy-to-swallow version that I had personally lubricated for them. And, as much as I tried to prevent this, there was the cleavage of my life’s short timeline into two separate but unequal segments: before the brain thing, when I possessed coveted big-name qualities like Radicalism and Bright-Eyed Naiveté; after the brain thing, when I lost a little bit of those things, and also, for several months, a lot of hair.
I suppose I should say now that this isn’t a sob story. Within these lines you will find no hysteric account of how the world has wronged me or marred my idyllic youth. If I think it, I refuse to verbalize it and I—I don’t think it in those terms except at my lowest of lows. But still, I carry that scar within my head. There are phantom visions for me, the way other people have to live with phantom limbs, and I stand, divided in the wake of a Capgras delusion in which another me had replaced myself without due warning. And the encounter, spanning the length of a midwestern winter, left behind cold streaks of clarity in an otherwise muddled mind.
Hair loss begins and ends on its own terms.
The whole affair began on a winter weekday, the kind of weekday that, because the school term had come to an end and the absence of the usual regimen left blank vast stretches of time, blended seamlessly from Monday to Friday to Monday. At 3 A.M. I said goodbye to Tonya, whom I had been talking to online, and then I had my stroke. For some reason I like the sound of that—I had my stroke, as though I am talking about some private but routine gesture: in the afternoon, I had my coffee, and at the stroke of three (as if on cue, by clockwork) I had my stroke. Tonya, a quiet, warm-palmed Mexican Jew with perpetual bedhead, is one of my college friends who got the lubricated version. She likes to dress nicely, in a cardigan and loose button-down, for the girls she could picture as girlfriends. If you had a bad cold, she’d make you chicken noodle soup and feed it to you too. That’s the kind of girl Tonya is: A girl who tripped over your softest falls. A girl who I knew would apologize incessantly for things that were nobody’s fault. That’s why I could never tell her the truth about any of it, you understand—not about the nature of my illness, nor about the fact that she almost became the last person to see me alive.
So I had my stroke (a splitting headache, waves of nausea followed by vomiting, residual pangs that made me knead my temples hard). When it happened, I didn’t realize that it was a stroke. Strokes weren’t had by nineteen-year-olds. I consulted the wisdom of the Internet with search terms like differences between stroke and migraine and came to the unhelpful conclusion that the two often shared symptoms. I tried to go to bed and in the morning had an MRI, which revealed whole areas in my circulatory system that were missing capillaries. So it was back to the blinding white of Chicago. No, not really white.
Light slate. I moved into a shared room with a high school girl whose digestive organs were failing by the day. I heard her moaning through the heavy curtain between us, until I was transferred to a private room. Occasionally I would lumber about the halls with my own leash in one hand and the other clutching the train of my dress: a blushing bride in green with IV infusion sets as my bridesmaids. The halls were filled with construction paper posters for the sake of false cheeriness. NEUROSURGERY WARD WINS AWARD FOR BEST CARE, one might proclaim. Tests, some involving blood and others involving spinal fluid but all of them involving needles, became a routine part of my day (today I had a CT scan, yesterday I had a lumbar puncture). The nurses clapped hands and complimented me for my “skinny” frame (for an absence of flesh folds made finding veins relatively simple; even so, we were running out of them by the second week). I began looking forward to morphine injections, which made the senses melt deliciously like diluted watercolors.
All of this I l
earned to take in with serene indifference. I cried at first, because none of the doctors could give a definitive answer. And the radiologist (a studious-looking man with kindly but overworked gray strands) kept averting his eyes. Of all the possible long-term side effects, I dreaded this the most: “a decrease in intellect.” What kind of woman would I be without my intellect? Not a beautiful one, I knew. At night I tossed and turned as much as I could without disturbing the plastic needle planted in the crook of my arm. My hair pressed against my face and made it greasy. In the daytime I tried to keep my mind occupied by reading about the upbringing of John Stuart Mill. (He was, of course, infinitely more precocious than I was. Things like this used to make me agonize.)
Embolization One. I took uneasy trips into the REM world and brought back souvenirs. I dreamed of a North Korean footrace through mountains and classrooms with shattered windows. People stepped in the beads of glass dotting the linoleum and hardly noticed the red footprints they left behind. There were many casualties. The winner was awarded with a large medal of yellow brass. If you looked closer, it probably came with a raised etching of the Great Leader—I couldn’t tell, since one does not zoom in on dreams.
I came in second, or maybe sixth. I remember there was a small lecture to the ten of us forerunners. The speaker was throwing out jagged pieces of Confucian maxims at us, except he attributed them to Kim Il Sung and I’m not sure if he knew the difference. There was a bony lady (the nurses would have no trouble finding her veins) who had an especially pious countenance, who kept bowing little solemn bows and repeating, “That’s very wise, Professor. Ah, yes. That’s very wise, Professor.”
In the waking world a mere block away, my friends were celebrating the cancellation of classes for the second day in a row. This was a rare event that had not occurred at the university since 1999. A blizzard, so I heard, which had washed over the slate and made the city a true white.
Embolization Two, “stereotactic radiosurgery.” It was after that that the hair started falling away in droves. Months later, back in the dorm room that I share with Eliza, I started making a list with everything I knew about hair.
You cannot tear out hair except from the roots.
You can cut hair, but you cannot hurt it.
And:
Mine is black.
Mine is black, but not everyone has black hair. Some have brown, dirty blond, platinum blond, salt-and-pepper. This I learned in Miss Morris’s classroom at the age of seven when I moved from Shanghai (where, at the cusp of the twenty-first century, almost everyone’s hair was black) to Dallas. When I was younger I used to wonder whether people’s pubic hair always matched the color on their heads, so I compared notes with my ginger friend Bryce. I learned a new term that I still find kind of funny: firecrotch. At the hospital I met a young man with black hair like mine, except his was wavy and he had dark skin. Like the other resident physicians, he was startlingly handsome. All of the residents at the Medical Center, if they weren’t already going to be all sorts of -ologists, could have been models. I fantasize about eating in the hospital cafeteria—when I am better and in something other than pastel-colored hospital gowns—and trying to catch the eye of the curly-haired, dark-skinned ER doctor. When I go back to school, I don’t go back to the hospital cafeteria. Not because he’s seen me use a bedpan. Not because he’s already seen my breasts through the size XXL gown (so that I had one less feminine wile at my disposal), the neck hole of which could fit around my waist.
At my parents’ house in Texas, the hair loss came to me like an afterthought several days after the radiation. Nothing happened on the first and second days. I washed my hair vigorously.
2-in-1 Shampoo & Conditioner ≠ shampoo + conditioner
Do you know what they do to you when they come at you with numb, technical-sounding words like stereotactic radiosurgery? To be sure, it’s not serious the way chemo is, so forgive me for adopting a nihilistic attitude. First they have to affix a crown to your head. They do this by drilling four evenly spaced screws into your head, and they stop when you can hear the screw crunching against the cranium, turning bone into fine powder like pestle on mortar. Then they bring in physicists to crunch out the numbers: at what angle to aim the laser, how wide the blast radius should be, how long the exposure.
“This is not the elegant part of the procedure,” the resident doctor, who was preparing my head for the placement of the crown, admitted.
I remember saying to her (a nervous young woman with light brown skin, whose dark frames and tightly scrunchied hair kept her from metamorphosing into the heartbreaker that she might have been), to keep the situation light, “Oh, I am so screwed!” She laughed but hastily stopped herself.
Post-radiation hair is thinner, fluffier, and paler than pre-radiation hair.
You become deathly afraid that strangers have x-ray vision. And then you’ll grow defiant (“Who gives a shit if everyone can see my bald patch,” you’ll reason, and then meaningfully leave that knit cap on the bedpost), for there is no room for your dignity to flower into anything except bleary-eyed defiance.
I don’t buy a wig. Most of the time a wig serves the purpose of making sure that other people feel comfortable; in my defiance I believed they had no right to that comfort.
Wigmakers are not only selling beauty, but also dignity. But that dignity is fragile.
Later, when the hair has returned, strangers will meet your eyes for the first time. They will say, “Oh, I recognize you.” “I’ve seen you around,” they’ll say, neglecting to mention that they sat a few rows behind you in Intro to East Asia: Korea and every Monday–Wednesday stared at the back of your yin-yang head.3
Hair is best as a binary. You want hair, true, or you want hair, the absence of. Anything in between looks ridiculous, and the comb-over is not a valid option for girls barely out of their teens.
Good friends joke about bad hair days. Acquaintances ask What Happened To questions. Other people look everywhere but at your head.
There is no inherent shame in this, but it is a curious spatial phenomenon. A sociology professor who had nothing to do with me prior to the brain thing approached me one afternoon and said, It is different for people like you and me, who have seen the other side.
“Even the Chicago sky doesn’t look so gray.”
Baldness, at least the involuntary kind, is not “shiny.” You get the shininess from repeatedly wearing down your scalp with blades, as though polishing the edge of a kitchen knife, and from moisturizers. Instead, the baldness of radiation is soft and pink—thoroughly unnerving to the touch like eggshells soaked in warm vinegar. What was once alive now pulsates with vengeance at the living.
The truth about the brain thing is that it will always follow me. I don’t mean in an abstract way. I mean that every year I cast a die to determine whether I will have another stroke, and there is nothing I can do about it.
Should I write a will? I suppose it would be heartbreaking if it were ever found—heartbreakingly idiotic (like a child’s crayon drawing of her nuclear family, the feet sprawled at impossible angles and the hands like flattened cakes of Play-Doh, created with the intent of saving a doomed marriage) if someone found it while I was alive, but plain heartbreaking if someone found it after my death. And anyway I have nothing of value to give anyone except my books—the last vestiges of a brain-rose prematurely pruned.
Another time in the hospital, I had a terrifying nightmare. Half of the world had suffered through a gigantic natural catastrophe of some sort and had to relocate. My family was doing the same; everybody’s front lawns were littered with possessions, waiting for their turn to be carried into their new homes. All of my books—compacted into four neat bookshelves—sat there unguarded, tantalizing. And amid the chaos of movers and children and carpenters, some clever soul decided to masquerade as the owner of the books and conduct an impromptu yard sale. In vain I screamed THOSE ARE NOT YOUR BOOKS TO SELL, running from bookshelf to bookshelf, but I succeeded only in ga
rnering jeers. I grew so flustered that my desperation devolved into violence, and I began hitting book buyers left and right. Most of my blows were harmless, but then I distinctly remember picking up The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate and jamming the corner into somebody’s eye.
This nightmare bothered me for two reasons:
1) Why did the physical manifestation of knowledge matter so much to me? I was not generous with this knowledge, as I should have been—rather, I hoarded earthly paper and ink as though they meant something on their own.
2) Why did I retaliate violently against innocent people, and was my reaction representative of a ruthless survival instinct in waking life? If so, then that makes me morally decrepit. Or at least inauthentic. It must not be a coincidence, then, that the lesion in my brain is next to the pineal gland. Descartes, although he was mistaken about its location, believed it to be the seat of the soul.
In the mornings, clear packing tape clears hairy pillows. The same goes for hairy consciences.