Consequence (33 page)

We take a walk down a narrow hallway on the hospital's eleventh floor. It's the Cardiac Care Unit. It's where you go to wait for a heart when you're too sick to wait at home. As we walk, we push our IV towers out in front of us. They're loaded down with bags of intravenous fluids and medicines. Both of us are on a constant infusion of a drug called milrinone. It's delivered through the permanent line in our arms. Milrinone is a powerful and dangerous drug that helps the heart beat more efficiently, but it has a shelf life. You adjust to it. Over time, you need more and more. Eventually, the dose maxes out. The benefits begin to fade. You die. Todd and I are on the maximum dose. We are fading. We need someone else to die.

I tell Todd about my son. He tells me about his daughters. We talk about how much we hate low-salt diets. Todd talks about how much he'll miss alcohol. Especially beer. He'll miss a good beer. He wishes he had had one last good drink before coming to the hospital. “Yes,” I say, “that would have been nice.” He talks about church. The five-minute walk exhausts us. We return to our individual rooms to rest.

On Wednesday, June 26, 2013, I'm moved to the intensive care unit. A catheter is inserted through my neck and into my heart. It's the end. The catheter delivers critical doses of medicine to the heart, but it won't last long, and it's dangerous, so I'm not permitted to move. I lie in bed and think about Ferdinand.

On Sunday, June 30, someone else dies. The heart is flown to Philadelphia. I'm taken to the operating room, where the nurse reviews my medical history. She says, “Glad you got the alcohol under control.” There's a section on my overseas service. She says, “Iraq? You were there? What did you do?”

The anesthesiologist asks me about music. I say anything from the eighties. They give me medicine. I feel good. The Bangles sing “Walk Like an Egyptian.”

13.10

I wake up. I think about Fallujah. I think I might be there. I'm scared. There are voices and shadows in the room. The voices tell me to calm down. The tube in my throat prevents me from asking about Ferdinand. I start to cry. The voice tells me I'm in the surgical recovery room at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. I've been intubated. I've had a heart transplant. I need to relax.

I point my finger in the air and spell out a word. K-A-R-I-N.

I spend the next two weeks in the hospital learning to live with a new heart. There are instructions on how to take my medicines, how to avoid infections, and how to start walking again. There is pain, sadness, fear, and euphoria. There is morphine and Percocet. There are emails and voice messages and Facebook posts.

The senior pastor from the First Presbyterian Church in Bethlehem, the church where I no longer feel welcome, brings his son to see me in the hospital. With the exception of family, they are the only ones who find time to visit.

13.11

In September 2013, it's been two months since the transplant. I'm lucky. This is what I tell people when they ask me how I'm doing. Occasionally I complain about side effects, or the pain from the surgery. I get lightheaded if I stand up too quickly. I get nauseated if I take the stairs too fast. But I don't tell them about the real side effects. I don't tell them about the inability to sleep, about the constant nausea coupled with an insatiable desire to eat. I don't tell them about the diarrhea, about the time I shit my pants while waiting for my son's school bus to arrive. People say, “Yes, but at least you're alive, right?” I say, “Yes, at least I'm alive.”

At night, I wonder how much longer I'll actually be alive. There are statistics worth consulting, but every case is different. This is what medical professionals say when I ask about the likelihood of living long enough to watch my son graduate from high school. They tell me to enjoy the present. “Every case is different.”

13.12

In Bethlehem, I park at Sand Island and follow the short path down to the Lehigh River. It is night. The steel mill's old blast furnaces are illuminated by decorative colored lights designed to draw attention to a $70 million arts and cultural center scheduled to be built next year. I stand in the river's waist-deep water, where the current flows at a steady pace. There is a Para Ordnance .45 caliber handgun, a Canadian kit weapon modeled after Browning's 1911. There is one round. The river will clean what's left and prevent the weapon from endangering anyone who finds me. It is late. The blast furnaces go dark. The water is cold. I think of a heart that isn't mine. I think, This must be how it feels to be baptized as an adult.

13.13

In April 2015, my father sends me an email about our family's history. He has cancer now, so we're having more and more conversations designed to preserve memories and pass down legacies. His latest email includes an audio file of a conversation my grandmother recorded in 1977 with her aunt Annie. It's the first time I've heard my grandmother's voice in three years.

The recording was made in Altoona, an industrial town in the central part of the state that once built the great steam engines of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The railroad went bankrupt in 1970, most of the engine shops closed, and Altoona went into decline. Annie Campbell, my grandmother's aunt, was born there in the 1880s, near the beginning of the railroad's empire. But in 1977 she's declining, too, and is unable to make the trip to the Burd family reunion in Colorado. So my grandmother records her voice in order to preserve the Burd family history.

On the tape, she introduces my grandfather. Like Aunt Annie, he was too sick to travel to the reunion. Multiple sclerosis was beginning to take its toll. By the late 1970s, he was spending most of his time in a wheelchair. The disease would eventually attack his esophagus. In 1986, during my freshman year of high school, he choked to death on a piece of chicken. His funeral was well attended, and he was remembered as a kind and gentle man.

My grandfather calls himself “old man Fair” and sends warm greetings looking down from the hills of central Pennsylvania. The multiple sclerosis renders his voice weak and slow, but his humor and goodwill remain intact. In the background, my grandmother reminds him to say hello to Nancy and to thank his brother Fred for the reunion patch. She says the patch will be a big sensation on Phil's pajamas down at the veterans hospital.

The conversation with Aunt Annie covers a variety of topics. There are questions about what it was like growing up on the farm in Pennsylvania Furnace (dull), and how often the mail came (twice a day), and what it was like to see a car for the first time (not too scary).

And then there are stories about growing up as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister in the late 1890s. As one would expect, the memories are mixed. There are good memories about living in the manse and attending large Sunday dinners, but Aunt Annie also has much to say about how she dreaded Sundays and how difficult it was to endure long hours at the church. She was forbidden from taking walks or playing outside. Much of the time was spent in Sunday services, where at least, she said, she could find time to sleep.

I think about the Reverend Campbell's sermons and his continued insistence that good behavior was a pathway to a right relationship with God. I can imagine Aunt Annie being lectured about this, and I can imagine her frustration at being told how to act and what to do. I can imagine myself in this scenario, and I can imagine myself choosing to chart my own path and make my own way, and I'm ashamed that I didn't do better. I'm ashamed that I didn't act more like a Campbell, a Burd, or a Fair.

But then my grandmother asks Aunt Annie how she felt about living with a minister, and if the long hours at church and strong focus on rules made her a better person. Aunt Annie says they were expected to be good examples, except that they weren't. My grandmother laughs and says, “Oh, Aunt Annie.” But Aunt Annie says, “We were just human kids. Not model kids by any means.”

I'm relieved to hear Aunt Annie talk about not always being a good example. There are no dark secrets in my family, no sordid episodes that overshadow my own transgressions. Aunt Annie is not about to expose some sin to which I can relate. But when asked to reflect at the end of her life, she seems keen to point out that she fell short of expectations.

Aunt Annie said she was a human kid. I can't know exactly what she meant by this, but it leaves me feeling less isolated. It leaves me feeling as though there is still a place for me in my own family. It leaves me feeling as though I have not done something that can't be undone.

Not long after my grandmother died, Don Hackett asked me whether I still prayed. I do not. But unlike those mornings at Abu Ghraib when I avoided prayer in order to ignore my own failures, I avoid it now because I have a debt to pay, and I have no right to petition someone else to pay it. I am a torturer. I have not turned a corner or found my way back. I have not been redeemed. I do not believe that I ever will be. But I am still obligated to try.

13.14

On July 5, 2015, I board the Pennsylvanian, Amtrak's train from New York City to Pittsburgh, with my father and my seven-year-old son. We are going to Pittsburgh to see a Pirates game, but the train ride is the most important part. My father loves these trips. They remind him of his childhood in Altoona, surrounded by the steam engines of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Now he wants to pass that love down to his grandson before he is gone. I pretend the love of trains skipped a generation, but secretly, I love riding the rails more than anything.

The ride is long and the train is crowded; when we board, no one moves to offer seats together to a seven-year-old and his stay-at-home father. So we sit in aisle seats, two rows apart. Near the end of the trip, in the dining car, the old woman sitting next to my son approaches and compliments me on his good behavior. He has been sitting still, reading books, and staying quiet. He's been acting like a Presbyterian. My grandmother would approve. “He's unlike any seven-year-old boy I've ever seen,” the old woman says. This makes me proud. But then she starts asking questions about me.

The old woman reminds me of my grandmother; she grew up in Latrobe, a town not unlike Altoona. She even sounds like my grandmother. She starts asking questions about family and where I live and where I was born. I want to talk about my son again, but, like my grandmother, she persists. She asks about the jobs I've had and the people I've known. She asks about what I've done.

In 2015, I should be telling stories about how I'm entering my fourteenth year with the Bethlehem Police Department. I'd be a detective, or a patrol sergeant, or maybe a seasoned beat cop content dealing with traffic violations and stolen bicycles.

Or, if I'd gone to seminary after college, I could talk about how I'm in my eighteenth year of ministry with the Presbyterian Church. I'd likely be leading a church of my own with the help of associate pastors like Austin Ashenbrenner. I think I would have been good at that. I think I will try that path again.

I'm still married. It's been thirteen years. I suppose, like most successful couples, we've survived by admitting we've failed. Karin and I have been to war against each other, and we are both casualties. But we sit together at night and find that there is still love there. We find that we are the same. We find there is no one who will ever understand us better.

Don Hackett used to tell me that the best way to hear God's voice is to seek out the silence. But there are so many voices now: the voice of the general from the comfortable interrogation booth, the cries from the hard site, the sobs from the Palestinian chair, and the sound of the old man's head hitting the wall in Fallujah. It is nearly impossible to silence them. As I know it should be.

I have not gone back to the Lehigh River with that gun in my hand. I hope I never do. But there are nights. Forgive me, there are nights.

I am just a human kid.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This journey is not possible without the friendship of Matthew Mellina and Amy Cramer, the camaraderie of Matt Gallagher, Phil Klay, Maurice Decaul, and Roy Scranton; the instruction of Emily Brandt, Craig Moreau, Lizzie Harris, Maxim Loskutoff, and Eric Weinstein; the fellowship of Keith Brown, Walter Cramer, George Maunz, Tom Mies, and Jerry Scharff; the kindness of Kelly Denton-Borhaug, Daniel Jasper, and John Pettegrew; the care of Christine Gearhart, Ashley Wetherell, and Anjali Vaidya; and most important, the counsel and accountability of Seth Goren and Austin Ashenbrenner.

I am indebted to Nick Flynn and Bill Clegg for opening doors I had no right to pass through.

I am humbled by my editor, Sarah Bowlin, who had the courage to guide me on this path while still finding the strength to navigate her own.

I am grateful for Karin Fair, for staying on a path she did not choose, and had every right to abandon.

And for Aunt Penn, who bought me that book when I wanted that toy gun.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR