Host
Steve Gehrke
After the urine test, the bloodwork, that little flume inside the tube, after I was browsed like a showroom,
after the ultrasound, its wand like a caver’s lamp, after the lulling whoosh-whoosh, the blurred
mysteries on the screen like equations written in chalk and sloppily erased, after the doctor again
asked how much I peed and when, did my ankles swell, did I taste metal on my tongue, did my sweat smell
like urine when I exercised, did I itch a lot, get short of breath, did my muscles ache, did I forget
things easily, did my mind go blank, did I feel like I was floating above myself, did wounds heal
easily or slow, and how long have I had that acne on my chest, after the toy hammers to the knee,
after the stethoscopes and tourniquets and urine cups, after being examined again like a roughed-up
boxer, like a horse for sale, after Mom and I drove to the hospitals at the U of M, after we roved
those endless hallways, got lost and lost again, after the bullseye drawn on my back in felt pen,
after the numbing medicine, the tiny incision, small as a papercut, they said, a needle trephining that hole, and then, like gag teeth on Halloween—SNAP— a bite taken from the kidney, after yet another lap
through the baffl ing halls, after the IV, the MRI dye, after the invasion of the catheter, my bladder filled so that I could pee in front of them, so they could watch my urine refl ux into my damaged kidneys on a screen,
after an empathetic nurse—I still remember her— held my shaking hand when they took the catheter
back out, after we were banished into the waiting room again, after my grandparents brought plates
of food to us, after we sat there and ate and played pinochle, after this made me feel slightly less afraid,
after I went to pee again and they rigged the deck to give me the perfect hand when I came back,
after we all couldn’t stop laughing when I didn’t pick up on what they’d done, that joy like a mint
in the mouth of a foul-tasting day, after they finally called us back, then asked to talk to Mom privately,
after she told them I was old enough, after she lied and said that I was tough, after I sat there dry-eyed
(thankfully) while they said, “dialysis,” “transplant,” “a semi-normal life perhaps,” that phrase like a chant inside my head on the drive home and in the days that followed, after I walked the hallways in a haze, dropping schoolbooks, getting lost, not hearing a word the teachers said, after I fully disappeared into my thoughts, after I became silent, angry-looking, odd, only then did I feel the rage in me suffocating God.
* The surgeons told me that a new kidney would transform me, upgrade me, I’d be like Pac-Man when he eats the magic pill, they said, and I did my best to picture this, that power-surge, the haunted world turned to prey, but what I wanted really was to stop living inside the maze of my uncertain fate, the transplant a haze
I couldn’t see or see beyond, that strangeness, that pain-to-come, a sense I’d be rearranged
or at least added to, be 1.0001 of a person, a pregnancy in reverse, mother-inside-son,
the kidney curled like a fetus in the brochure the nurses gave us, now buried on the floor
of my locker. I tried, too, to bury the surgery but it would rise again like Jesus or a zombie,
rewrite itself in UPPERCASE and try to shout its way out of me. Still, I didn’t tell a soul about it until the meanest kid in the entire class— my mother let it leak to his—began to harass me with it everywhere—the halls, lunchroom, gym—admit it, weirdo!—his voice booming
through me, like a wind through a scarecrow, until I wanted to crumple my body up and throw
myself away. I’d go mute, would go entire days without a word, feel looked at, both on display and quarantined, hunchback of the seventh grade, and worse—the God that I’d worn like a band-aid on the wound of life had begun to fray and peel away. Since I was a child, I could simply feel him in the room with me, a literal dot of yellow light at times, that would follow me, would grow
or shrink in sync with my love or my gratitude, small as a firefly, barely there, then an amplitude that would overflow my vision. “Body of Christ,” the priest would say, and I would praise that sacrifice, the communion wafer, for me, being as close to Pac Man’s capsule as I could imagine, a dose of God that I once believed could, if not cure me, at least ease the aloneness in my head. That purity had begun to lose its force, its taste, though I still groped for HIM, at least hoped that even my illness might renew my faith. What was my mother’s kidney, after all, but the host made earthly, a bite of her as generous and healing to the body as the flesh of Christ was to the damaged soul, a blessing, a yes to my body’s prayers, or at least it was meant to be, but the surgery failed and—like God—her kidney died in me.
* My error was in believing that there was an end-date to it all, not in understanding that my illness was my fate.
*
Nurses in elf hats, shoe-bells. Christmas, 1985. They passed out candy canes. My vomit, a festive green, smelled of peppermint and bile. Forty hours past surgery and the kidney had yet to power on, my lab work spiking in the wrong direction. They took blood and urine to rule out infection.
I don’t feel right, I said, and the doctor scoffed: That’s to be expected. But there was something off about his voice, a worry that his dismissiveness couldn’t quite conceal. The nurses, too, seemed less
cheery, more disguised, their faces like wrapping paper torn and retaped, a secret there, a widening gap
between what they would say and what they knew, everything careful, rehearsed, as if there were cue
cards hung above my bed, the whole thing such a façade, a matinee tragedy, and my body like the stage they trod upon. I tried to ignore them and watched the snow, equally withholding, fall like static on the window.
At last, they wheeled me down for tests, a tube threaded up my thigh. Here comes the dye, the radiologist said and the burning started—bright, electric—like an eel moving through an artery. I tried not to cry but reeled
and swooned with pain, stared up at the blank ceiling like a sheet pulled across my face. I could also feel
the silence growing in the room, could see them see a bright green line worming upward on the screen.
Then it stopped and pooled into a swamp of toxic sludge, the kidney as solid as a brick—ischemic
I learned years later—blood-starved, damned by a clot or twisted artery, the kidney not just dead, but rotting
inside me, necrotic, a mini-corpse decomposing, flooding my veins with infected tissue, poisoning my blood.
It was after midnight when at last they chauffeured me back, three nurses in my doorway like a gathering
of fates. Everyone was there: two doctors, my grandparents, a priest and my aunts Cathy and Dianne,
a tribunal of whispers and concern. Then they wheeled a likeness of my mother in, a statue of herself, she too healing
from the surgery, thinner than I’d ever seen her. My fever blurred away her face. Still, I could barely look at her.
Are our bodies’ betrayals still our own? I still don’t know. The priest approached. There being no place else to go,
I turned and fell into the falling snow.
Even for them, it must have been a macabre task, the surgery repeated like a solemn ritual, a masked and somber gathering, the flesh marked with iodine, then the scalpel tracing that same pink, still-raw line, each suture parting with a little pop, as if the body ached to be torn apart again, then the grim, ungodly duty of exhuming the tiny cadaver of my mother’s kidney, the arteries clamped and clipped, a butcher’s chore, the dead and bloodless, infected thing peeled out, synced with the ripe cadaver organ being wheeled into the room, already biopsied, crossmatched, flushed with fluid, tended to and prepared, like a bride rushed to the cathedral, though wouldn’t the ancients call it an unholy marriage, this blending of flesh and flesh a desecration, knowing that the body must remain whole to be saved and resurrected? What else could my own body have done but treat this dead-man’s organ as a blasphemy, the inquisition starting the instant it crossed into me, though the pills later made it seem as if the imposter kidney was the true self and the rest of me the stranger,
a demon-me, a child of prednisone and cyclosporin, a new face laid atop my own, like a costume worn for a horror scene, the acne so extreme it seemed a texture of its own, the skin itself an oily sheen— moon-face—that’s what the social worker called it—my cheeks bloated, cratered, part Chucky doll, part Freddy Kruger. Back at school, one kid dubbed me grease machine, another called my shiny face a hockey rink, and I felt myself sinking deeper into daydreams of escape or consolation, creating intricate scenes of being the spoiled, favorite son in a sitcom family, or in which I was literally invisible, unbodied, lonely, perhaps, but at least not sick or teased or pitied. At home, I’d argue with my mother, rant and plead with her to let me go at least a day without my pills, but she wouldn’t hear it, would stand above me until
I’d swallow, glare at me as I choked down the liquid cyclosporin, like something secreted from a squid, so toxic it oozed through the syringe, plasma-yellow with a chemical glow, like downing a shot of petrol-
eum mixed with chocolate milk. Before school, she’d drive me to get my blood drawn, while I sulked or devised new methods to try to fool her, chipmunking my pills inside a fat cheek until she finally turned away, spilling the poisoned milk, but she’d rage back at me, refill the glass, the two of us, all morning, passing back and forth the flask of our resentment, drinking from a love soured by failure and rejection. Maybe rage, however illogical, is the only cure for life’s endless disappointments. She couldn’t not believe that I had caused this. I despised her for keeping me alive.
* At school, walking through the onrush of gazes in the hall was like trying to navigate a rapids. I crept along the wall, counted steps, every sneer, every look of pity or disgust filed away in me, logged—the body keeps the score—trussed together in some secret chamber where my shadow-self was being born, fed and clothed by the shame and selfhatred I repressed. That other me slept fitfully for years, latent, patient, until, decades later, it finally awoke in me as Satan.