The children’s bible Dad gave me featured a colored illustration of the story of Zechariah on page 357. Zechariah carried a hempen basket of stones on his impossibly muscular shoulders, stepping up the ladder to the top of his half-finished wall, gleaming like a salamander pulled from the water. Dark hair covered the backs of his hands. His burden was great, but his serene face betrayed no sign that he struggled, that he even considered his mission from God as anything other than the ultimate joy of his life.
I cleared the mucus from my lungs, studied the illustration. The pictures told the same stories as the words, but the message the pictures gave me was always more hopeful. I imagined what it would be like to be out of this bed, my lungs finally drained, my limbs strong and muscular once more. I could build a wall like Zechariah’s, I thought. I could hoist stones, build a temple so high I could touch the tip of God’s nose.
Dad peered into my room, saw the page I’d opened my bible to. He tore the book from my lap, skipped ahead to the section of the Gospels where Jesus sends a herd of pigs careening over a cliff like lemmings.
“Read that one instead,” he chided me. “Keep the Jewish stories to a minimum.”
—
The Jacob we meet in Genesis wrestled an angel. Or perhaps it wasn’t an angel. Perhaps he wrestled God himself. I’ve never understood the story, but the fact remains that Jacob, after the battle is over and neither Jacob nor the angel are victorious, becomes “Israel,” which Mom said means “grabs the heel.”
Since it’s in Genesis, it was a Jewish story, and thus forbidden. Mom, a former Catholic, told it to me anyway. She also told me to not read anything in the bible literally if I could help it. People don’t rise from the dead. A whale can’t swallow a man whole. The Earth is not flat, nor is it the center of the cosmos. If you do something terrible, sometimes you can never be forgiven. Things like that. But she never told me what a parable was, and that’s what almost killed me.
When Jesus commanded his followers, “Man shall not live on bread alone,” I interpreted him literally. You can’t blame me for misunderstanding something so simple. Unlike his father in the Old Testament, who chose to address the world in plagues and famines, Jesus spoke cryptically.
Don’t eat bread on its own. Find butter, find cheese, find meat. Just don’t eat it on its own.
—
That first morning I couldn’t breathe, Mom called her family’s priest over. Dad hated that priest. Father Chavez sat at the side of my bed, muttering prayers, counting rosary beads in his free hand, the rattling of the resin beads in synch with the rattling deep within my lungs. Father Chavez was bald, wall-eyed. One eye looked down at my pale face while the other stared up at the stucco ceiling. Did he see the same patterns on the ceiling that I glimpsed at night, the same demon’s face and angel wings?
Dad was in the living room, performing his prayers, keeping his own vigil. He wouldn’t emerge, wouldn’t so much as look at me or Mom until Father Chavez was off the premises.
Suddenly, Father Chavez stopped his prayers. He brought both of his eyes down to my level, peered at my face. He tilted his head to the side. His head was like a fat brown egg perched on his collar.
“Stick your tongue out, kid,” he commanded me.
I stuck my tongue out. Father Chavez stuck his nose close to my mouth, inhaled, grunted. He turned to look at my mother, who was praying silently in the corner of my room, between my dresser and the map of the constellations Uncle Roderick had bought me for my birthday.
“When was the last time this kid ate?” Father Chavez asked Mom.
Mom raised her shoulders, shot a pleading look at the priest as if the matter was out of her hands. Suddenly, Father Chavez’s soft jowls hardened into a scowl. He pointed a finger at me, spoke rapidly to Mom in Spanish. I couldn’t understand the conversation that followed. Dad was English, and so was I. But Mom and Father Chavez and the world they hailed from were Spanish, an alien world with an alien language.
Father Chavez stuck his tongue out at Mom, pointed at it. He shook his head. He looked down at me, softened his voice, and asked, “When was the last time you ate?”
It hadn’t just been bread. I had avoided eating so many things the past few days. It had less to do with Jesus’s mandates, and more to do with the fact that, when you can barely breathe, you don’t have much of an appetite. I sank down beneath the duvet, chose silence.
In English, he said to Mom, “That tongue was white! White! If it looks like that again, I’ll—” But he didn’t finish the thought. Instead, he shook his head, rose from his stool, and stormed out of the room.
Dad peered into my bedroom once Father Chavez was gone. He hung his head low, as if ashamed of being afraid of his wife’s priest.
“What happened?” he asked Mom.
She pointed at me, spoke as if I wasn’t there. “He’s not eating.”
“Why aren’t you eating?” Dad asked. He placed his hands on his fat hips, the Marlins logo on his t-shirt stretched taut across his chest and abdomen.
“It just hurts,” I said.
“Yes, but you gotta eat, little man,” Dad said, shaking his head. “Do you need another spanking?”
“Maybe.”
“Maria, spank him,” he said to Mom. He ran his hands through his gray, thinning hair and left my room.
“Spanking” wasn’t a punishment. It wasn’t really spanking, it was simply the name we’d given to my treatment. I rose, lay across Mom’s lap, facing away from her. I stared into the blank blue wall of my bedroom as Mom began slapping my back rhythmically, bringing up the excess mucus until I could breathe easier. Sometimes I’d miss the cup I held beneath my lips. But if it got on the knees of Mom’s slacks, she didn’t get mad the way Dad did.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “I’m not trying to be hungry on purpose, though.”
“I know you aren’t,” Mom said.
“It’s just hard to swallow sometimes.”
“I know.”
The cup was half-full. It was discolored, which was never a good sign. It was like scrambled eggs before you cooked them—a sign of infection.
“I’m going to die, right?” I said.
“No, no. Enough of that.”
“I’m not going to be an adult. Ever.”
“Shut up,” she cooed into my ear. She pinched the back of my neck before she resumed slapping my back. Though she said nothing for the remainder of the session, I could hear her breath catching.
—
I couldn’t bring myself to eat that night, or the nights that followed. For five days, I couldn’t force myself to swallow anything. And when I tried, I simply vomited it back up.
The nurse in charge of me at the hospital had a forehead constellated with scabs and pockmarks. Her nose was broad like a buffalo’s, and her breath reeked of celery and goat cheese as she placed her gloved hands over my mouth, pried my lips open. The tube she fed past my teeth and down my throat tasted like her gloves, only the tube was colder than her fingers, the jagged edge scraping against my esophagus until I could feel the scrapes running all the way down to my stomach. When she saw me wince, she shook her head and said, “It’s either this or we try the crackers again. And you know how that ended.”
I blinked rapidly, my eyes watering. Her wide, scarred face dissolved into a cream-colored smear above me. I could feel my stomach slowly filling, though I wasn’t satisfied. I could feel the cold rawness of the abrasions lining my esophagus, the gradual drip of my own blood down into my belly.
—
A crucifix hung from Dr. Tallis’s neck. The cross was gold, but Jesus and the nails piercing his wrists and ankles were tarnished silver.
“I ate plain bread yesterday,” I confessed to him. My throat was still sore from the feeding tube sessions, but it was even more sore from the scrap of crescent role the nurse had coaxed me to eat.
Dr. Tallis didn’t look up from the folder he was writing in. His eyebrows were thick and black, as was the mustache that hung over his lips. From where I sat, the individual hairs seemed to have lives of their own, like a cluster of baby spiders swarming from an egg sac. Dr. Tallis glared at me, arched an eyebrow. The pale tip of his tongue wetted his lower lip. “You need to eat. That’s the reason you’re here.”
“I don’t want to go to hell,” I said.
Jesus was duller than his cross. His face had been erased by black smears and corrosion. He dangled on Dr. Tallis’s neck, thudding against the dark patch of hair that peeked over the collar of his shirt.
“Just focus on getting better,” Dr. Tallis said.
I slowly lifted my arm, pointed to the crucifix he wore. “You know what happens,” I said.
“You need to rest.”
“I ate plain bread and I’m going to hell.”
“You did what?”
“I ate plain bread. So that means I’m going to hell. Man shall not live on bread alone.”
I studied his face, studied the twitch of his eyebrows and eyelids, studied the pendulum swing of Jesus as he hung crucified from the good doctor’s neck. You’re a believer, I thought. You need to understand.
Dr. Tallis shook his head, never allowing his eyes to stray from mine.
“That’s a parable,” he said incredulously.
“It was a command,” I said, unsure of what “parable” meant.
“No. It’s not. Is that why you’re not eating?”
I explained that it had more to do with my cystic fibrosis than the bible, that it always came back to my lungs more than it did my soul or stomach. Still, the fear of hell was always there, along with the fear of God, lingering in the backrooms of my brain. A thought occurred to me then, something I thought Dr. Tallis should hear.
“I’m closer to heaven or hell than most people,” I said. “On account of I’ll die soon.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“That’s what everyone says,” I told him. “I’m probably not going to live past thirty.”
“Quit it,” Dr. Tallis said. “We’ll let God decide that.”
—
When I finally got out of the hospital, Dad picked me up alone. When I asked where Mom was, he said she’d gone to stay with her sister.
“Is she coming back?” I asked. I set the plastic daffodils in the seat behind me, along with the red plush dog the scar-faced nurse had given me. I’d end up throwing both the flowers and the plushie away, but until then, they’d lie in the back seat, bleaching in the sun until Dad threw them away shortly after I turned ten. But until then, neither of us thought of them as either trash or mementos. They were what they were, free of symbolism and secondary meaning.
“She didn’t say,” Dad said. He started the car, pulled out of the parking lot. The sun glared at me through the windshield, blinding me. I blinked, my vision marred by dark discs where the sun had overwhelmed my retinas. This wasn’t hospital light. I would have to adapt.
I looked over at dad. Dark spots swarmed around his balding head, a dark purple halo. I thought back to something Mom had told me about Christian art when I was little, how halos didn’t start to appear until the Renaissance. Before then, Christians never thought about halos, had no need for them.
There were some stories Dad never wanted told. I had a feeling Mom was one of those stories. So I chose silence.
—
Dad baked bread that night, set it on the table before me. It was burnt around the edges, the scoring on top revealing the soft, steaming innards. Dad stabbed it with his pocket knife, tore it apart with his bare hands. The whiteness of its insides was blinding at first. Dad’s glasses fogged over. He laughed as he shoved pieces of bread toward me.
“Eat,” he said. “God ain’t watching right now.”
I’d gained ten pounds in the hospital, but Dr. Tallis had warned me I wasn’t in the clear yet. I needed another twenty pounds of flesh before I could be considered cured.
I devoured piece after piece of bread. The hard rind of the crust cut the roof of my mouth. The soft taste of yeast and salt melded with the taste of my blood. I savored the pain, savored the burning.
