Ground Zero is where hundreds died-killed mercilessly by terrorists . They called themselves Islamic warriors-dragging Islam into their war with the United States. No matter how much we try to seperate Islam and all the other Muslims from these terrorists,the public psyche and the emotions of the victims’ families has an image of the day the carnage happened; I bet they will not be able to accept a mosque at Ground Zero. A Ground Zero mosque would be a symbol of hurt and pain, it would serve no purpose.
Also, what is with all the fuss about who is funding the mosque. Why the lack of transparency? If those behind the idea of mosque at Ground Zero don’t want the public to know who is funding the project, what are they going hide from us in the future?
Build a mosque, any number of mosques anywhere in America, but leave Ground Zero alone. Keep religion, war, politics off from that sacred ground.
When my uncle was in his late forties, he began to notice anumbness in his legs, especially when he sat for a long period of time. Thetingling grew more persistent and pervasive and after a few years, it began tobe accompanied by muscle weakness and an increased difficulty walking. Thedoctors first began by ruling out all of the major neuromuscular disorders:multiple sclerosis, ALS, muscular dystrophy, and other, rarer diseases. One byone, they ruled out options, and one by one, specialists scratch their heads.My uncle lay motionless inside of MRI machines time and again, and all thewhile his legs grew weaker, until he was mostly unable to walk and confined toa wheelchair.
In this month’s issue of InTheFray, we explore our health, whatit means to be healthy and what it is like to cope with illness. We begin with LoriMarieLaSpada’s essay Hittingthe genetic jackpot, about her experiences living with a rareblood disease. Next, Lori Law tells the story of a woman waiting for a kidney transplant in Independenceday. Paul Jury shares his experience with a police officer and ajellyfish sting in Jellyfish conversations. In The rhythm of remembrance in health and healing, LarryJaffe shares several poems from his recent book OneChild Sold. Jacqueline Barba reviews The Murderesin Damned and damaged. Finally,we hear from Tian Miao as she shares her view ofportions of Chinese culture in The sadness.
Eventually, the doctors did figure out what was happening with myuncle. Calcium deposits in his spine pressed on his spinal cord, damaging itenough to interrupt the signal between his brain and his legs. The good news isthat the damage has been stopped and his symptoms won’t progress any further.The bad news is that it won’t get any better. I think it is easy for those ofus blessed with good health take our health for granted. It is one more thingthat we should try to remember to be thankful for each day.
Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Assoon as we set out last winter vacation, on the roads which lead me back to myremote, poor hometown, I realized there was still no change. Our car bumpedalong the narrow dirt road, and several times I thought we were going tooverturn. When we finally finished this perilous journey, what came into myvision was the exact two-roomed bungalow that I could remember from 20 yearsago: a dusted bulb which gave out dim light; two wooden single beds on theverge of falling down; and a small black-and-white television which displayedsnowflakes more often than clear images. And this was the legacy that I wouldinherit someday in the future.
Latermy cousin came to have a word with my dad and told us his wife had diabetes. Withall his money being spent caring for his wife, my cousin could not pay back themoney he borrowed from my dad after being fined for having a second child.
Ifelt sad. They had given birth to her despite not having enough money to raise herand her little brother. Having a second child is not allowed, according to the“single-child policy,” which has been in effect in this country for nearly 30 years.But I can see why they insisted on having her: Having more babies means morefortune and luck. And given the unequal enjoyment by citizens of medicalinsurance, depending on whether you live in the city or the country, ruralfolks raise “enough” children to prevent themselves from living a lonely andunsecured old age.
Thereis a main bus stop in front of our campus. Sometimes when a bus comes, “ladiesand gentlemen” would swarm to the door, pushing each other with no regard forold and young, just to grab a seat or squeeze on before everyone else.
Isaw many elders encourage kids to jump the line to buy tickets and then pushand then grab seats. If the kid is successful, he or she will get praised as ifthey had learned a skill that equips them to be the future masters of the nation.
Ifelt sad. Everyone seemed egocentric, concentrating only onself-advantage.
Someargue that we act like this because limited goods once forced people to pushand jostle to grab them or else suffer hunger.
Butwhy should we still suffer from that psychology despite peace and prosperitytoday? What happened to honoringthe elderly and taking care of children, keeping great order, and beingaltruistic?
Oneday I came across a 1984 article, “Why don’t we Chinese get angry?,” by LungYing-tai and published in Taiwan’s China Times. I was greatly enlightened: My sadness is actuallyanger in disguise.
Lungcriticized Taiwan during the 1980s, writing, “In a society ruled by law, peopledo have the right to get angry. If you are tortured (by the street traders),you should at first stand in front of them with arms akimbo and say to themangrily: ‘Please YOU get lost!’ If they don’t, send for the police. If youdiscover the street and the police work in collusion — that is more serious.This fury should burn until they (the police) eliminate the evil trends and getdisciplined. But you do nothing but close the doors and windows cowardly,shaking your head and shrugging your shoulders.”
Tomy disappointment, she is still right today.
Inmy residential quarters, if a neighbor makes noise at midnight, people usuallyonly complain with a few words and close the door and windows tight. We weretaught not to criticize or stir up trouble in order to avoid unnecessarytrouble. This seems to confirm an inherent flaw among Chinese: excessiveself-protection. We only care about how to protect and maximize our owninterests and try not to get involved with other people’s affairs. Thus wewithdraw, never complain or express dissatisfaction. We do not want to changethe present condition, as long as we can live smoothly regardless of improvedconditions.
Igrow sadder. As one of the “hopes of the nation,” I, a college student, shouldbe full of passion and dreams for an ideal future. But when faced withunpleasant scenes, I have no courage to announce my grievances but just remain“sad.”
Iwill change my attitude. I will air my anger. I will influence others to changeif the shabby houses greet my eyes again. If the anger cannot bring aboutchanges, I can only get sad. But I believe sadness will not come back any more.
AlexandrosPapadiamantis’s The Murderess, translated from the original Greek by Peter Levi, is afolktale, but not a simple one. It is a fairytale without a princess, a tragedywithout a heroine and a morality play without a moral. This is all to say thatthe novella, deemed Papadiamantis’s masterpiece by many, draws upon a range ofgenres, bends to none, and proves complex and beautiful in its own right.
Levi’s translation, originallypublished in 1983, was reissued last month. In his introduction, Levi arguesthat The Murderesscaptures an important crisis of the past in a way that helps us understand ourpresent. The crisis at hand in The Murderess is at once local and universal.It is the story of a damned, damaged family on the Aegean island of Skiathos,where Papadiamantis was born in 1851 and where he set many of his works — the most famous of which were short stories andserialized novels (such as The Gypsy Girl and Merchant of Nations), and which featured tales ofMediterranean adventure, provincial portraits, and legends of religioussignificance.
In The Murderess, Papadiamantis fuses portrait andlegend in his knowledgeable, intricate depiction of Skiathos, a poor place,strict in its adherence to local customs and stagnated by its own traditions.The implied and stated dangers, both tangible and intangible, of thisparticular breed of provincialism give heady subtext to a simple foreground:the story of a struggling family in a struggling community.
At the novella’s beginning, wemeet protagonist Hadoula, who sits hearthside at home keeping watch over hersickly newborn granddaughter. Papadiamantis grants the reader almost immediateaccess to Hadoula’s inner life:
Hadoula, or Frankiss,or Frankojannou, was a woman of scarcely sixty, with a masculine air and twolittle touches of moustache on her lips. In her private thoughts, when shesummed up her entire life, she saw that she had never done anything exceptserve others. When she was a little girl, she had served her parents. When shewas mated, she became a slave to her husband, and at the same time, because ofher strength and his weakness, she was his nurse. When she had children shebecame a slave to her children, and when they had children of their own, shebecame slave to her grandchildren.
On the heels of a thumbnail sketchof his main character, Papadiamantis reveals this dark realization of Hadoula’s — not a sudden realization but one that has plaguedher for some time. She can imagine no escape from her perpetual state ofservitude. And, worse yet, she knows well its cyclical nature. She is Hadoula,daughter of Delcharao; and mother to a second Delcharao; and grandmother to asecond Hadoula, “In case the name should die out,” she scoffs. To Hadoula, there’s noromance in the passing down of family names, only a reminder of the endlesscycle of suffering and want in which she is just a temporary player.
All are poor in Skiathos, but theworst financial burdens fall on families whose women bear girls. At the core ofthe island’s poverty is its longstanding dowry system. Even the poorest offamilies must provide for their daughters in marriage— or continue to provide for them into old age. In Hadoula’s mind thedowry system takes on monstrous dimensions:
… And every family inthe neighborhood, every family in the district, every family in the town hadtwo or three girls. Some had four, some had five. … So all these parents, thesecouples, these widows, faced the absolute necessity, the implacable need, tomarry off all those daughters… And to give them all dowries. Every poor familyand every widowed mother with half an acre of land, with a poor little house,was living in misery, and going out to do extra work. … And what dowries, bycustoms of the island! ‘A house at Kotronia, a vineyard at Ammoudia, an olivegrove at Lehouni…’ Everyone had to give in addition a dowry counted in money. Itmight be two thousand, or a thousand, or five hundred. Otherwise, he could keephis daughters and enjoy them. He could put them on the shelf. He could shutthem up in the cupboard. He could send them to the Museum.
In his translation, in excerptslike the one above, Levi captures Papadiamantis’s dichotomy of tone, a cleverfusion of the orally driven language of fairytale and the darker-edged languageof satire (as in the lines, “He could shut them up in the cupboard. He couldsend them to the Museum.”). We see this playful mix-and-match style throughout thebook, most notably in introducing Hadoula’s personal past:
For a long time[Iannis] had been an apprentice and assistant to [Hadoula’s] father … When theold man noticed the young man’s simplicity, his economy and modesty, herespected him for it and resolved to make him a son-in-law. As a dowry, heoffered him a deserted, tumbledown house in the old Castle, where people usedto live once upon a time, before the ’21 revolution.
But the whimsical quality of thelanguage is in direct and jarring opposition with the sinister advancement ofplot, as Hadoula comes to terms with the idea that the best daughter is a deaddaughter — and as she begins, almostmindlessly, to act on this realization.
The strength of The Murderess lies in its treatment ofcharacters, through skillful employment of tone and voice, as three-dimensionalindividuals rather than folkloric archetypes. We see Hadoula set out to murderthe burdensome, sickly baby girls of Skiathos. But we do not see her as amonster. Because we also see her intentions, we know her repentance; weunderstand her descent into madness. We experience the frightening burden ofher guilt-driven nightmares. And ultimately we feel remorse for Hadoula in herattempt to escape punishment, swimming across a too-rough sea, catching a lastglimpse of the deserted field that was her own dowry.
There isno time off from being handicapped. You are always on display when you leaveyour house, always proving what you can do. Once in a while someone asksfor the details of my condition. On a trip to Disney World in Florida, I wasasked if I suffer from the effects of the drug thalidomide. The answer is no.
I was bornwith a rare blood disease which causes my platelet count to be low. The doctors,after a week of decision, put all my conditions together and nicknamed thedisease TAR Baby; TAR stands for thrombocytopenia absent radii. They took myblood disease and combined it with my physical handicap to create a name for mydisease.
I wastold that, when I was born 33 years ago, only seven people had mydisease.
Thephysical handicap draws people’s attention to me. Both my arms are short, butthe right is even shorter than the left, which has fewer bones missing. My legsare handicapped as well. At my hips my legs are turned in to each other so thatI can turn my legs to point my feet behind me. I usually only turn them aroundin the snow to see my footprints next to each other in opposite directions — myhandicap humor for the winter. It took me several years to realize that my limpstems from a left leg that is longer than the right.
I wasblessed with two understanding and strong parents. Whatever the doctors said Ineeded, my parents did for me. I had leg braces to straighten and strengthen mylegs. The first two years of my life I was in and out of the hospital toreceive blood transfusions. There were life-threatening moments for me there,but luckily my body stabilized and has learned to live on the low plateletcount.
Thedoctors could not answer why I was alive. They felt since there was no reasonfor me to live, there should be no reason for me to die young. They neverplaced a life expectancy on me.
My clothesare bought in regular stores. My pants are hemmed when they are too long. Idon’t see hemming my pants as a big deal. I am 4 feet 11 inches tall.Most girls my size have their pants hemmed to fit. Of course, the right leg hasmore of a hem so that the pants fall at the same spot when on me. I buy mostlyshort-sleeved T-shirts, and they come pretty far down my arms to allow me towear them year round. I buy some sweaters and have them and a winter coat cutby a seamstress.
New stylesmake getting sneakers without shoelaces easier to find. I use to tie my shoesfirst and then put them on. Velcro never worked well for me because it alwaysripped apart.
My parentsnever treated me differently. I have an older brother and a younger brother,and we all had bicycles, except my bike had handles bent in so I could reachthem.
I was sentto Kessler Rehabilitation Center to learn how to drive a car. No, I did nothave my license on my 17th birthday, but I only had to wait a few extra monthsto take the driving exam.
I went toa regular grammar school and high school. The kids treated me well and on mostdays accepted me as an equal.
Life isnot always easy for me. It is very hard to find companies that will hire me. Inmy teenage years I wanted to be a cashier for a fast-food chain. I was called onthe phone to come in for an interview. When I went there and asked for themanager, he walked away and stayed in the back until I left. He told anemployee to tell me he double-booked a meeting and had to reschedule. I wasnever called with a rescheduled time.
I am acollege graduate with a degree in marketing. I was never able to find a jobopening in that field. I work at a desk job and in my spare time crochet dollclothes to sell on eBay. My fingers might be crooked, but I can hold a needleand work the yarn, producing even stitches. My father wanted me to have a hobbyas a kid. I had a cousin who taught me the basic crocheting stitches, and Ibought books to advance my skills.
As if mybasic handicap wasn’t enough, in my sophomore year of college I developed newcomplex partial seizures. They are milder than grand mal seizures. It wasimperative that the medicine I was prescribed to treat them not affect myblood. Only two medicines out there fit that criterion. One of them worked, andI have been seizure-free for five years. My seizures seemed to bother me morethan my birth handicap. I decided to write a fictional book loosely based onthese types of seizures. I hope I have better luck selling it to a publishinghouse than I had finding a job in marketing.
Thedoctors think my disease is hereditary. They feel that my brothers and I carryit in our blood. My parents were told the disease is so rare, it is likehitting the millionaire lottery twice in one year.
Needlessto say, my parents do not gamble. My father blames the volcano Mt. Nyiragongoin the Democratic Republic of the Congo that erupted in January 1977 before mybirth, and my mom tells me there was a black cloud over China. I neverunderstood how a cloud in China could deform a baby born in the United States.I don’t know what caused my disability, but I do know it is part of mypersonality. It has made me a stronger person to overcome it. I feel with thehelp of my family I have done a pretty good job of living life to the fullest.
LaSpada has completed the novel, “The Library ofJournals” about two sisters, one of whom is stricken unexpectedly with complexpartial seizures. Her struggle to adjust consumes her life and pushes peopleaway.
I don’t know whythis is, but it happens every time I go.On my first trip to the SeminoleState – a high school spring break jaunt – I left a pair of tennisshoes under a bed in a hotel room.On my second stint – a brief layover before my brothers and I left for acruise – I fell asleep in the airport and awoke to find my shoes stolen,although my laptop, wallet and video camera were untouched.I’m generally a pretty organized guy, yetwhen it comes to shoes and Florida, I seem to attain a nutty professorlevel of absent-mindedness.[1]
Driven and Determined
Thus, I wasdetermined not to lose anything as I dipped down into Gator Nation for a thirdtime.Twenty-eight states into my48-state road trip, I was having a hard enough time not losing my mind.This was the part of the trip when thenovelty of being on the road and doing something grand had subsided and wasbeing replaced by acute boredom and a growing realization that 12,000 miles reallyIS too far for one person to drive alone and retain their sanity.This, coupled by my recent near-breakupwith my girlfriend[2]had me desperately searching foranything resembling an “adventure,” just to fight the loneliness and keep mefrom throwing myself in front of oncoming traffic.
I settled on Pensacola[3],and rolled into the sleepy town just after dusk.Finding no one around, I decided my “adventure” in Floridawould be to sleep right there on the empty beach, something I’d never donebefore and a far superior alternative to dozing in my sweltering Taurus.
Sand-Angels Are Useless AgainstEvil Jellyfish
I slept soundlythat night directly on the warm, bleach-white sand, contently dreaming that I’dfinally picked the perfect “road trip” thing to do – that is, until I wasawoken at 6 a.m. by a four-wheeler roaring by about three feet from myhead.Of the many possible risks Iassumed when I decided to sleep on a beach, I admit I hadn’t anticipated thisone.
I climbed out ofmy panicked sand-angel and, adrenalized, figured I’d try to recover the morningwith a calming dip in the ocean.
I was promptlystung by a jellyfish.
At least I thinkit was a jellyfish[4].I don’t have a particular phobia ofmalevolent ocean creatures, but there’s something deeply disconcerting aboutsomething squishy squirming its way up around your inner thigh and then stabbingyou.Especially when you’re justbouncing innocently up and down in four feet of cloudy water.[5]
Whatever it was,it hurt like crazy, and by the time I scrambled out of the water, a nicefour-inch blotch had already appeared on the front of my pasty-white thigh.As I raced across the sand, the onlythings I could think of were a) whether or not jellyfish were poisonous, and b)if so, what was I going to doabout it. For some reason the notionthat jellyfish poison might be counteracted with urine kept tumbling through mymind, but I couldn’t remember if this was for jellyfish or snakebites.[6]
I jumped into the Taurus,sopping wet and swelling, and peeled out to find the nearest hospital.
I was promptlypulled over by a cop. Of course.
The officer tookforever to saunter up to my window as I sat there, shirtless, wet andpanicked.I should have been worriedthe cop would approach with his gun drawn, thinking he’d pulled over ahalf-drowned, naked meth addict.But mostly I was just worried that my leg was going to fall off.
Children are our future.Do they know how to cure jellyfish stings?
The tall cop leaneddown, resting his elbows casually on my open window.“Kind of in a hurry there, aren’t ya?” he drawled from undera bushy, brown moustache.
Despite the factthat my quad was beginning to inflate like a pink balloon, I decided to arguethat I hadn’t been speeding.“Sorry, I thought the sign said 30, and I thought I was under.I have this rule about speeding.[7]Also, I’ve been stung by a jellyfish.”
The cop did notseem concerned.“It’s a schoolzone, this time of the morning.Limit drops to 20. Youdidn’t see the yellow sign?”
“I’m sorry, I musthave missed it,” I said.My legwas throbbing, as if a small techno rave was forming inside it.“Listen, is there a hospital somewherearound?“
“Also, fine’sdoubled in a school zone,” the cop continued.“Lots of kids around.”He glared at me, accusingly, as if I’d been trying to run kids down onpurpose.
“I’m sorry, Ididn’t see any kids.Butseriously, is-“
“LOTS of kidsaround,” the cop persisted, staring at me.“You always drive like that, when there’s kids around?”
I looked up athim, not sure what answer he was looking for.I wondered if he could smell the combination of fish andfear wafting up from the Taurus.“But I’ve been stung by a jellyfish!And isn’t it summer?”
“Summerschool.Aren’t as many kids asusual,” he admitted.“But they’rethere, alright.Lemme look at yourleg.”
Confounded, Ishowed him my leg, hesitant to mention that 6:30 a.m. seemed a bit early forsummer school.The cop frowned, regardingmy puffy limb for a moment.Hepopped his gum.
“It’s not toobad.I’ll be back.”
Without anotherword, the cop went back to his car, and I was left in the Taurus, leg burning,salt beginning to soak into my now-dry skin.Another eternity went by as I waited for the officer to return,presumably with a vial of jellyfish antidote that every Pensacola cop carriesin their car.Instead, he cameback with a paper.
“I’m giving you a warning,” hesaid.“But if I catch you speedingthrough another school zone, I’m gonna drop the hammer on you.”He handed me the paper.“Children are our future.”
I didn’t know whatto say.“Um… thanks?” I managed.“But honestly, do I need to go to ahospital, or something?Can youdie of a jellyfish sting?”
“I told you, it’snot bad,” said the cop, standing to his full height.“You may not even have been stung by a jellyfish.”
And he was gone.
I started the Taurusand headed west.I called Craig,my cancer-curing doctor friend in St. Louis, and he assured me that no, I wasnot going to die of a jellyfish sting.[8]After an hour or so my leg stoppedthrobbing, and the swelling went away.As I entered Mobileand started looking for something interesting to do in Alabama, it occurred tome that I’d gotten my adventure in Florida after all.And, for a few hours at least, I hadn’t been the least bitlonely.
And that’s when Irealized I’d left my shoes on the beach, back in Pensacola.
“The Jellyfish Cop” is an excerpt from “48 States in 48 Days,” abook by Paul Jury about a road trip he took to all 48 continental states oncehe graduated college and realized he had no plan.
[1] Perhaps it has something to do with partying too muchevery time I visit Florida. Nah.
[2] Who was notenthusiastic about my dodging her for eight weeks.
[3] Why Pensacola seemed like a good place for adventure,I don’t recall; I guess I’d recently seen the movie “Contact” and thought maybeI’d see Jodie Foster, or some aliens.
[4] As a Minnesota boy, being stung by random crap in theocean was not something I had a lot of experience with.
[5]And it’s not like I was even attacking their jellyfish nest! Though thisvengeful thought would occur to me later.
[6]And the idea of laying sideways on the Pensacola sand peeing on myself seemedoddly inappropriate, even for someone who’d just slept on a beach.
[7] The rule was: I already had four of them on my record,and if I got one more, the Minnesota DMV had promised to tear up my license,something that seemed quite detrimental to a
48-state road trip.
[8] Did Imention it felt like my leg was going to fall off?
Onan ordinary Wednesday morning, during one of her three-times-weekly dialysistreatments, which she calls her “dates with needles,” Janet Long’s doctor saidsomething she has not heard him say during the six years she has been living ondialysis waiting for the kidney transplant thatwill return her to independence: “My guess is that this is going to happen thissummer. I think you’ll get your transplant.”
AsDr. Raul Hernandez moved to the next patient in the next reclining chair andthe next set of vital signs on the screen above the machine with blood-filledtubes and a hemodialyzer, Melissa Miller, a registered nurse at the dialysiscenter, checked Long’s blood pressure reading.She tells her she has heard Dr. Hernandez give only twoother predictions about transplantation to patients, both of whom weresuccessfully transplanted within weeks.
“Hewould know,” said Miller. “I don’t know how he does it. He just seems to know.”
Longsaid she was taken aback for a moment.
“I’mtrying not to get my hopes up, but that’s exciting,” said Long. “He does justcall it. I was here when he told the one he would get transplanted soon andthen he did. They called him at three in the morning, and that was it. He’snever said that to me before so he must know something. I could get my lifeback.”
Longsaid looking ahead to her day of independence from dialysis with a transplantedkidney feels “like a prisoner just being released from a sentence.”
“Ihaven’t been a part of the real world. I’ll be starting over,” said Long. “I’vebeen working as much as being on dialysis allows, part time, but I’ll have toreaccustom myself to nine to five and changing my schedule around to makesure my kids are taken care of. My priorities have changed while I’ve been aprisoner to dialysis. I’ll have a life again. You don’t go more than four dayswithout dialysis. It hinders a lot. You are very confined. I get no days off,no holidays. There’s no time off for good behavior. There is no break. I amhere three days a week for four and half hours.”
Ondialysis since December. 10, 2004, when she was diagnosed with kidney failure, Long isn’t certain of the cause. It waslikely either from frequent strep infections the busy human resourceprofessional said she was slow to treat or chronic hypertension.
“Ithought I had the flu,” said Long. “I had been sick with something — a virus,I thought — and I couldn’t shake it. I finally went to the hospital when Icouldn’t keep anything down and at about 1:30 in the morning, I found out. Theyinserted a temporary catheter and dialysis started immediately. I knew nothingabout dialysis. None of my family had problems. It was an awakening.Fortunately, Dr. Hernandez was very open and explained everything veryhonestly. He didn’t hold anything back. That man saved my life. He’s one of thereasons I’m here. He’s a wonderful doctor. I’ll be with him for the rest of mylife, even after transplant. He has fought for me and fought for me. If youdon’t do what he tells you, you are cut loose and I understand that and Irespect that. He’s made me fight for myself, for a transplant and to get mylife back. When he walked in that first time to see me, he got a little chokedup telling me that I was in kidney failure so young and with my boys to raise.That’s what you need in a doctor. He understands where I am in my life and whatI am up against. I feel very privileged to be one of his patients.”
Oncereleased from the hospital, Long looked for information on the Internet.
“Iscared myself simple,” she said. “I don’t think you can fully understand unlessyou are experiencing it as it goes. Reading about it doesn’t tell you enough.Dialysis three times a week takes your life over. I didn’t realize how brutalit was going to be. I wasn’t used to sitting around for a long time and I don’twatch a lot of TV but that’s pretty much all you can do. I don’t sleep wellhere. Some people can, but not me. I have a full, busy life waiting for me to getout of here and live, so I get anxious. They tell you that you might have todeal with depression, but I don’t get depressed much. I have a little breakdownabout once every six months and have to get angry and cry it out and then Imove forward. It turns your whole life around. The waiting and the uncertaintyis really hard.”
TheWaiting Game
Longis far from being alone. Nationally, according to the NationalKidney Foundation, the waiting list for kidney transplants hit 100,000for the first time in 2009. To put that number in perspective, it would be asif the entire population of Green Bay, Wisconsin, were in need of a kidneytransplant. More than 4,000 are added to the waiting list each month and sadly,there will be some who die while waiting for their gift of life.
The National Kidney Foundation has launched acomprehensive initiative that aims to end the wait list over the next 10 years.Encouraging donor registries, increasing both living donations and deceasedones and eliminating barriers are part of the mission of End the Wait, whichhas been endorsed by the United Network for OrganSharing.
Longmeets the criteria to be put on the waiting list for a donated kidney, joiningmore than 11,000 in her home state of Ohio. She understands having an O+ blood type often means a longer wait on the list, sincecandidates with an O blood type can only receivean O type donation. Because type O’s are universal donors, it is less typespecific for those in need of donated organs and tissues.
Morepositively, though, advances in organ procurement techniques are making livingdonation a more viable option and recipient survival rates have improvedsignificantly. The National Kidney Foundation reports97.96 percent of transplant recipients from living donors survive one yearafter transplant and from cadaveric donors, 94.4 percent.
Livingdonors now undergo a simpler surgery than before with laparoscopic nephrectomy. In this procedure, a laparoscope is inserted intothe abdomen allowing the surgeon to see and operate, making severalsmall incisions in the abdomen, called "ports," to allowinsertion of a laparoscope and other instruments. The camera and instrumentsare used to cut the kidney away from surrounding tissue after clamping off thearteries and ureter. The kidney is removed through an incision below the bellybutton.
Hernandezsaid the recovery time from this surgery is much shorter, with fewer long-termcomplications for the living donors.
“Thesurgery for donating is much simpler now because they do it laparoscopic,” saidHernandez. “They’re back to work sometimes in three to five days.”
Hernandezsaid the quality of life for transplanted patients is vastly improved when theycan be freed from dialysis.
“Ihave over a hundred transplant patients,” he said. “I’ve got as many transplantpatients as anywhere in the state. I’d rather transplant them all. I’d preferthat to coming in to a dialysis center. This is the part of my job I don’tlike.”
MelissaMiller comes into work every day at the dialysis center as a registered nurseon the front line for both the patients waiting for transplant and for thosewho don’t meet the criteria, who will live out their lives on dialysis.
“Ofcourse I wish they could all be transplanted, too, but I’m here for them,” saidMiller, who added that switching gears between patients and maintainingprofessional boundaries is often hard. “I was drawn to working here becauseI’ve had problems with my kidneys in the past. I didn’t have problems to theextent that these patients do, but I think my experience gave me a betterunderstanding of what they go through. I’m happy here, but sometimes it’s hardnot to take your work with you when you go home. You really get to know yourpatients in this setting. You know about their life and they know about yours.It’s a relationship. You celebrate with them when things are going well andyou’re happy when they are one of the lucky ones who get transplanted and theyget their life back. At the same time, you miss them when they don’t have to behere anymore. When things go wrong and they can get really bad really quickly,you have to be able to react professionally. You take an individual directionwith each patient on a day to day basis. You get attached and it would beeasier to just be technically focused, you know, put them on treatment, takethem off treatment and watch their numbers. It’s hard to separate yourself fromthe work and you take it to heart. That’s what it’s all about, though, intaking a holistic approach to nursing, you have to take the whole person intoconsideration and you have to be able to get in touch with who they are andcare about them all as if they were family. It becomes a way of life. I got alittle teary hearing what Dr. Hernandez told Janet this morning. I want thisfor her so much, even though I’ll miss taking care of her and being with her.”
AFamily Affair
Nowhaving helped her father to the other side of dependence on dialysis, RachelYoung had watched as her father’s health and options while living on dialysisdwindled.
“Atfirst he didn’t want either one of us, me or my sister, to have anything to dowith being tested,” said Young. “He was apprehensive, and when a couple otherpeople were tested and nothing came of it, he was put on the waiting list. Hewas on home dialysis five times a day and he was beginning to really get sick.He was told that it could be two or three years before it was likely that hewould get a transplant. At that point in time, I said that it didn’t matter ifhe liked the idea or not, I was going to get tested.”
Youngsaid she was free from any ties, unlike her sister who is a mother to a littlegirl.
“Isaid, let me go ahead and see if I’m a match and we would go from there,” saidYoung.
Thetesting process is exhaustive, Young explained, and took months to complete. Inthe end, she was a match for her father.
“Itwas hard not knowing if I was going to be a match,” she said. “That was harderthan the surgery itself. The team at Ohio State won’t look at doing it unlessthey think there’s an almost 100 percent chance that things are going to gowell and you’re going to recover fully. It was an emotional rollercoaster, thatnot knowing and the ups and the downs of the unknown.”
Younglearned she was a match on a Monday and the surgery was performed just fourdays later on Friday morning.
“Upuntil a few days before, I wasn’t sure yet that I was a good match,” she said.“That was probably the hardest thing of everything overall that I had to dealwith. Once I knew, the doctors answered all my questions and really helped putme at ease. They said I would fully recover and I would be able to lead anormal life. Other than only being able to take Tylenol for pain becauseibuprofen and a lot of the other drugs are hard on your kidneys, there weren’ta lot of stipulations. The surgery went really well. I woke up and wascomfortable and very aware of my surroundings. I got back on my feet reallyquickly.”
Oneof the first things Young did was to go down the hall and see how her dad wasdoing.
“Itwas amazing how quickly I recovered,” she said. “I had pain but it wasmanageable. I was there when my dad came out of surgery and I was able to seehim. It was great. He was doing really well.”
Youngwas discharged from the hospital on the Sunday of that same weekend, and herrecovery was uneventful.
“Thereis an initial shock as the remaining kidney and your liver adjust to the onekidney being gone, but overall, I felt pretty good,” she said. “I took my timerecovering at home and did a lot of sleeping. I was off of pain medication inthat first week and able to drive after two weeks.”
Youngsaid she and her father had a close relationship before, but the surgerybrought them even closer.
“Wewere close to begin with, but now he makes sure to thank me every time he talksto me, every time he emails me or calls me,” she said. “At first I think he hadsome guilt about having me do this. It wasn’t up to him, though. He had nochoice in what I was going to do. I was going to do it and that was it. It wasdefinitely hard for him.”
Youngsaid her father is doing well now.
“He’sdoing great,” she explained. “His levels are mostly back to normal. They are alittle high, but for his condition, they are where they need to be. They arereally happy with his recovery. He’s golfing now, he’s doing all his own yardwork and he’s working full time again. He bounced back and he looks ten yearsyounger. He looks and acts totally brand new.”
Uncomfortablebeing labeled as a hero for her decision to donate her kidney, Young said sheis happy to talk to anyone considering living donation.
“Mydad and I joke that now he owes me for life, but that’s not really how I seeit. It was the only choice I could make,” she said. “We had a lot of talksabout this and he said that he would have done the same in my situation. I hopemy story can educate people and encourage organ donation,either way, living or not. Many people talk about the guilt associated withneeding an organ that would come from someone who had passed on. So many thatI’ve talked to through the donor network have said that it gave meaning totheir loved one’s passing, that something good came out of it. That’s somethingthat’s hard to understand, especially if you are the one that is needing thatgift of life and you aren’t used to having to ask for anything. If you aren’tcomfortable checking the box on your driver’s license, then do talk to yourfamily because ultimately it comes down to something happening to you; theywill have to know and make that decision. It’s a great thing. For me, I don’tthink anything of that whole hero thing; I just know that it is something thatso many people would do in the same situation. It’s just something that you cando for someone that you care about and there’s a real need.”
StillWaiting
WhileJanet Long waits for her day of independence from dialysis, she keeps the donorbox on her license checked.
“Imade that decision a year before I found out what was going on with me,” saidLong. “I don’t know why I hadn’t done it before, but I just decided that ifsomething was to happen to me, that someone should benefit. It’s still checked.Even now, there is still something on me that someone could use and ifsomething happens to me, I’ll want that. I don’t know what made me change mymind, but I chose to check that box and I won’t uncheck it. I can only imaginewhat it feels like to receive an organ or how somebody feels when one isoffered, but just the idea that somebody would want to do that, to make that giftis overwhelming. The idea that there is something like that for me and thatsomeone will make that gift and give me my life and my independence back haschanged me. I know I’ll get there. You just can’t give up.”
The musical starts out in a congressional hearing of conservative Senators interrogating NASA scientist Dr. John Holden on climate change research as they mock the existence of global warming with an aggressively sharp and witty choral piece, Junk Bunk, music and lyrics written by my collaborator and music genius composer James Behr. In a moment of this overwhelming stir, Dr. Holden transforms into the famous astronomer Galileo Galilei. The play then shifts and unravels into parallels of haunting similarities of social, political, and religious ideologies and attitudes toward science and progressiveness.
I was fortunate enough to have a cast of outstanding actors for last week’s festival. Paul Fraccalvieri, who played Picasso in a musical piece I had written this past November, played Dr. Holden and Galileo. Fraccalvieri eloquently filled the theatre with his deep, rich baritone voice while playing a believable, emotionally vulnerable Galileo. (Congratulations, Paul, for winning an honorable mention for best actor in Galileo for the festival!) Members of the Senate also doubled up their roles. The Sarah Palin-like senator, played by Jennifer Eden, hilariously began the chant of the ever-famous "drill, baby, drill," then transformed into Galileo’s lovely mistress, Marina, in a beautiful duet, Through These Eyes (music by Behr and lyrics by Behr, Cheryl Krebs, and myself) that would make any soprano green with envy. Eden’s voice mixed perfectly with Fraccalvieri’s, adding a dimension of birds flying through the heavens as her high pitches were perfectly layered with the spiritual emotion of the song.
Other ensemble senators also doubled as Renaissance clergymen. Gospel singer Justine Hall (Madame Chair/Clergy), Samantha Moorin (Court Reporter, Artist and Scribe), and Madeleine Thompson (Strong Clergy Soprano) added animated expressions and powerful voices to the ensemble. Paul Mischeshin hilariously played a Southern John Edwards-type of senator which paralleled nicely as Pope Urban’s "special" clergyman who had to kiss his feet upon demand. Pope Urban (Ben Prayz) and his clergyman (Mischeshin) have a comedic few scenes in between the music pieces of the play that lighten up the heavy message by poking fun at the corruptness of the church. Both proved themselves to be fine character actors as well as leads.
We could not have had such a tight ensemble without the brilliant direction of Stephen Wisker, who created an atmosphere of ease and humor and brought a passion for politics and the environment. Stephen and I spoke nearly everyday, analyzing the play and voicing ideas about how to better express current events such as the disastrous BP oil spill. Stephen had an image of black oil spilling all over a white stage. If only we could have pulled it off in the festival setting. With his background at the Living Theatre, this could have embossed an historic image. He is also a master of Shakespeare and handled the language of the play (particularly the prose of the Renaissance scenes) with utmost subtlety.
Thank you, everyone, again for a superb performance! We look forward to our upcoming process of revisiting the script and performing cast recordings and then hopefully getting the message out there in the world again. We must not stop until political action is taken, alternative fuel sources are underway, and humanity and wildlife can be protected.
Cast from left to right: Madeleine Thompson, Justine Hall, Jennifer Eden, Paul Fraccalvieri, Ben Prayz, Paul Mischeshin, and Samantha Moorin.
Severe, persistent mental illness (SPMI) is something that is always difficult to deal with. The people afflicted with this and the case workers and other support staff that help them get along in our world have difficult roles, but they do the best that they can. Recently, a gentleman diagnosed with SPMI moved out of a group home and into his own apartment. On the first day he moved in, his case worker called to ask how things were going. "Fine," he replied, "but there’s a troll in my apartment."
The case worker wasn’t sure how to respond. "Ok," she said, certain that whatever was in the man’s apartment, it wasn’t a troll. Trolls do not exist.
The next day, the case worker called again. "How are things in your new apartment?" she asked.
"Fine," he replied, "but I told you, there’s a troll in my apartment."
Again, this struck the case worker as odd, but she wrote it off to a mental delusion, and made a note to stop by. Later that afternoon, she stopped by to visit and found all of the man’s furniture piled up in front of a closet near the door. She gestured to the pile and asked why it was there. "I told you, there’s a troll in my apartment."
She began moving the furniture away from the door. When the stack was cleared, she opened the door to find a 3’10" Jehovah’s Witness inside, terrified and shaken. The man was thrilled to be freed, and, understanding the nature of the other man’s mental illness, agreed not to press charges. I’m certain that both men were frightened of each other, and neither man understood the other’s motives.
In this month’s issue of InTheFray, we start with a short story by B. Tyler Burton titled The Stream. Next, Stella Chung takes on a journey through China’s Hainan province in The two Sanyas. In An uncle breaks the silence, Michelle Chen tells of how her parents and her uncle live with the latter’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. We finish this month’s issue with Amy O’Loughlin’s review of Eduardo Galeano’s book Mirrors.
Mental illness is a class of diseases that can be very difficult to understand. As we don’t have any window into another person’s mind apart from their behavior, it can be tough to tell the difference between unpleasant actions caused by an unpleasant person, and unpleasant actions rooted in a chemical imbalance in the brain. Worse, some forms of mental illness arise in the wake of emotional trauma, and can be difficult to treat with traditional drug therapies. There are no easy answers in the mental health community, and we should all give thanks for the facilities that we have, for there are always others who are less fortunate.
Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
In April 2009, at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez handed President Barack Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. Published in 1971, this treatise details the history of European colonization of Latin America and argues that the United States has exercised a negative influence in the region throughout recent times.
Obama might now want to consider adding Galeano’s latest work—Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried—to his library.
A provocative and wholly original interpretation of human history, Mirrors consists of nearly 600 vignettes and succinct essays written in a meditative prose that leaves oneyou virtually breathless for its beauty and piquancy. Galeano’s writing style, which lilts in rhythmic back-and-forth exposition, then culminates into a final, salient point, parallels Gabriel García Márquez and John Dos Passos. However, neither magical realism nor surrealism is at work here—realism is.
Galeano believes the authentic history of mankind has been falsified by convention and the élites who retain ultimate authority over what is to be remembered, recorded, and propagated. His task is to unveil the realities of human existence that impact and form our shared identity throughout time—be they love, war, racism, creativity, repression, poverty, valor, prosperity, knowledge, diversity, death, memory, tyranny, or contentment.
Make no mistake, though. Mirrors is no easy stroll through the annals of centuries-old, oft-told chronicles of our past. While it offers moments of lightheartedness, it’s mostly a solemn book, free of smug congratulations, exalting the integrity of humankind. Galeano demands that the historical record be viewed through a revisionist lens, wresting history from its glut of constraining inaccuracies to reclaim truth-telling and exactitude.
In doing so, he creates a masterwork of mosaics. Stories of Harriet Tubman; Ho Chi Minh; Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon, female Japanese writers whose novels "share the rare honor of being praised a millennium after the fact;" Hollywood; Vermeer; Queen Juana of Castile; Lenin; the Marquis de Sade; the Barbie doll; "outlawed writer" Isaac Babel; Peruvian liberator Túpac Amaru; Darwin; King Midas of Phrygia; Jomo Kenyatta; ITT, BMW, and IBM; Aphrodite and Apollo; and U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson appear in a wondrous and seemingly endless procession of people, places, epochs, and events.
You have to marvel at Mirrors’ magnitude and Galeano’s dexterity. In the space of a ten- to fifteen-line narrative, he constructs scene, personhood, and a moment in time with precise poetic finesse and pieces together the magnificence and savagery of our "human adventure" here on Earth. Here are examples of Galeano’s thrifty, yet profound style:
“Word Smugglers”
Yang Huanyi, whose feet were crippled in infancy, stumbled through life until the autumn of the year 2004, when she died just shy of her hundredth birthday. She was the last to know Nushu, the secret language of Chinese women. Their female code dated from ancient times. Barred from male language, which they could not write, women founded a clandestine one, out of men’s reach. Fated to be illiterate, they invented an alphabet of symbols that masqueraded as decorations and was indecipherable to the eyes of their masters. Women sketched their words on garments and fans. The hands that embroidered were not free. The symbols were.
“Resurrection of Camille”
The family declared her insane and had her committed. Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum; held captive. It was for her own good, they said. In the asylum, a freezing prison, she refused to sketch or sculpt. Her mother and her sister never visited her. Once in a while her brother, Paul the saint, turned up. When Camille the sinner died, no one claimed her body. It was years before the world discovered that Camille had been more than the humiliated lover of Auguste Rodin. Nearly half a century after her death, her works came back to life. They traveled and they astonished: bronze that dances, marble that cries, stone that loves. In Tokyo, the blind asked and were allowed to touch the sculptures. They said the figures breathed.
Mirrors follows a chronology—beginning with the delightfully paradoxical "Origin Of Man"—but doesn’t adhere to a fixed timeline. In story after story, you learn about acts of virtue and contributions to cultural identity that aren’t commonly known or valued, because they’ve been "rewarded with collective amnesia." "Legacy Denied" describes the eight-centuries-old "Muslim legacy" left behind by the Moors in Spain, "whose culture shone there as nowhere else" and of which "[m]any Spaniards know nothing." "Another Missing Father" tells of forgotten founding father Robert Carter and the freeing of his 450 slaves 70 years before the abolition of slavery, a deed that "condemned him to solitude and oblivion."
And the attribute that may be most praiseworthy—that forces Mirrors to poke at your conscience and stay in your memory long after you’ve finished its last entry—is the way Galeano fuses past and present to demonstrate that there’s no veering away from time’s continuum. The present is molded from the past, just as the future is the fusion of every moment that precedes it:
“Guernica”
Paris, spring of 1937: Pablo Picasso wakes up and reads. He reads the newspaper while having breakfast in his studio. His coffee grows cold in the cup. German planes have razed the city of Guernica. For three hours the Nazi air force chased and machine-gunned people fleeing the burning city. General Franco insists that Guernica has been set aflame by Asturian dynamiters and Basque pyromaniacs from the ranks of the Communists. Two years later in Madrid, Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of the German forces in Spain, sits beside Franco at the victory parade: killings Spaniards was Hitler’s rehearsal for his impending world war. Many years later in New York, Colin Powell makes a speech at the United Nations to announce the imminent annihilation of Iraq. While he speaks, the back of the room is hidden from view, Guernica is hidden from view. The reproduction of Picasso’s painting, which hangs there, is concealed by an enormous blue cloth. UN officials decided it was not the most appropriate backdrop for the proclamation of a new round of butchery.
Fujimore was an engineer at CHB Nagasaki for eight years before he wandered up to the banks of that stream. It had been redirected through a large tunnel under the highway. When he saw this, a hundred yards up, Fujimore thought, “I have finally reached the end of the line.” Because there was no … Continue reading The Stream→
Fujimore was an engineer at CHB Nagasaki for eight years before he wandered up to the banks of that stream. It had been redirected through a large tunnel under the highway. When he saw this, a hundred yards up, Fujimore thought, “I have finally reached the end of the line.” Because there was no bridge to cross, and the highway was treacherous.
His reflexes were no good after eight years of office work, so he didn’t trust himself to the shoulder of the busy road, in case he might need to jump sharply out of the way. Yet, because he hesitated a bit longer, wandering closer to the water, he saw that there was — almost — a path of rocks he could use, stepping one by one, to cross it. And, for an engineer, this problem of approximating the adequate surface areas and slickness coefficient of each rock was much like what might happen if an autistic child wandered past one of those jars full of gumballs, the kind where customers are encouraged to guess how many gumballs there are in the jar.
After a taciturn series of calculations, Fujimore gambled that if he took his first step onto the large brown rock, with his right foot, then he might just make it. He looked up to the sun, which was still far from the peak of its daily arc, adjusting the glasses he wore, and then he took the first step.
His foot landed squarely on the rock, it did not slide, and he felt he could almost certainly chart the high curve of torsion before it might even begin to slip as well. He made it to the second, and the third; and soon he was standing above the cool rushing water, which was brown from the mud because it was the rainy season, and going back was not an option anymore.
His legs got a little rubbery at the thought; but he had only to step from this rock with his right, and then to that one with his left, and so on, until he reached the other side. Or was it this rock with his left?
His feet were equally balanced, directly underneath him on two parallel rocks, and after all this deliberation he had forgotten with which foot he’d taken his last step. He led with his left for an agglomeration of reasons only a man of algorithms would understand; and now, with his feet respectively pointed north by north-west, he saw only a better step with his left foot and nothing for his right.
To lead, again, with his left would put him that much more at an angle, which was at the very least a good stretch for him. The water continued unperturbed beneath him. If he wanted to look to it for help, he knew its answer would be cold and maybe precipitous even, with these rocks to worry about.
On the other side of the stream, from the direction of the highway, Fujimore saw two fishermen approaching down a dirt path. One was a squat man, who brought up the rear, steadily plugging away down the middle of the trail, “Like a tuba,” Fujimore thought. He could almost hear the polka music coming from his parent’s old phonograph from the way the man stepped. The tuba’s skinny partner trumpeted ahead, back and forth across the path, racing down the steep grades, only to wait for his friend at the corners.
They walked along the bank, and stopped maybe twenty feet to the right of where Fujimore would be whenever he made it to the other side. They still hadn’t noticed him. The tuba said, “Kyoo wa takusan de sakana. Wakarimasu.” There will be many fish today. His sharp, expert eyes gauged the opaque water for the fish which always spilled out from the pipe, especially during the floods. He didn’t have to see them to know today would be an excellent day. The skinny trumpet had set down his tackle box, unpacking it, while he nodded his head in agreement, saying, “Kore wa tsutomete.” We work for this.
The fat man laughed. And, yes, Fujimore knew he was right. He had to not forget that he was stuck on the rocks though. “Ohhhh,” the fat man said, noticing him. “Who is that there?” he asked. “Just Fujimore,” he said. “Oh,” the tuba answered. “Well, what are you doing in the middle of that stream there, then, Fujimore?” “I had to cross somehow.” “Well, how did you get across before?” the tuba asked, apparently believing theirs was the only way. Fujimore told him, “I come from Urakami.” And now the fat man understood, since that was quite a ways in the other direction.
By now the skinnier man had stood back up again, and he was looking at Fujimore too, “So you just have to put one foot in front of the other,” he declared. “Ah,” Fujimore said, relaxing then flexing the arches of his feet, “But just now I feel like I’ve realized something.” “What’s that?” asked the tuba. “That, somehow, it’s quite a metaphor for life out here,” Fujimore said. “Quite a what?” the trumpet snapped. But the tuba man, in low tones, must have assured him what it was, for he said afterward, “Oh, what, because you’re stuck in a stream?” “It’s because of my feet,” Fujimore said. Fujimore and the fishermen all looked as he explained. “There’s not a good way to step clearly across for my right foot. So I have to either back up, which is not as easy as it looks, or bring this right one up on the same rock as my left.” “Ohhhh,” the two men said together.
After about an hour of no bites, and no movement on Fujimore’s part, the skinnier one looked out across the water and wryly asked the engineer: “Still haven’t moved?” “I was thinking about it,” Fujimore said — which struck him, strangely, as the most oddly balanced thing he’d ever said, in light of his standing between two rocks. “But I really am quite relaxed out here,” Fujimore told them. “It’s surprising, but true.”
“Then you’ve found a bit of solitude out there, so be it,” the fat man answered. Fujimore noticed that he toasted him with a small glass of sake that he had not seen him take out and fill. “Perhaps,” Fujimore thought, “he has had a few already by the sound of it.” “But don’t think you can spend your whole life in the middle of stream, Fujimore,” the fat man said. He and his partner toasted, and a few minutes later the trumpet had a bite on the end of his line. From his unique vantage point in the middle of the stream Fujimore watched them struggle with the foot long Namazu, hauling it up, careful not to touch the barbs on its cheeks; and he was happy to feel like the stream, and he too, could provide some sustenance, be it for the belly or the mind. But she had never wanted that.
Another hour later, Fujimore’s legs had steeled themselves so that he hardly felt the passage of time anymore. He was amazed to feel, almost, more firmly balanced than he had been, instead of weaker. The fishermen began to pack up their things. The sake was gone, and they hadn’t had a bite since catching that first Namazu. Before leaving, the bigger man turned around, a frown grazing his face for a moment as he contemplated this poor youth in the middle of the stream. “You think you can handle it from here?” he asked. It was a piteous way to summarize all the things he wanted to say, but so be it. “Hai,” Fujimore said, “Kore wa tsutomemasu, desu ne?” We work for this, right? “Hai,” said the tuba.
The skinny man carried the fish at his side in its plastic bucket of water, slung through its gills to a metal chain but still alive. Balanced on the rocks, which bit into his feet now, Fujimore thought, “It is just like that chain must feel for the fish.” And maybe twenty minutes later, in the delirious afternoon sun, he lost his balance and fell into the water.
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