Everything I Thought I Knew

by Shannon Takaoka

  I turn back toward Kai.

  “Need a lift?”

  “Nah,” he says. “Thanks, though.”

  “Where do you live, anyway?” I ask, wanting to know just one thing more about this boy who minutes before was leaning over me, close enough to kiss.

  “Nearby,” he says. “See you next Wednesday.”

  I swivel my chair in front of the computer monitor in the school library and poise my fingers over the keyboard. I’m supposed to be working on a research paper for my AP Physics class — the one I didn’t get to complete last December when I was busy getting my heart cut out — but instead I’m doing the thing my dad is always warning my mom and me that we should never do: Googling health advice. “The internet is a house of horrors for hypochondriacs,” he loves to say. I wouldn’t consider myself a hypochondriac, but where else am I supposed to track down answers without having to actually talk to someone? Like, for instance, my mom, who, due to her for-real hypochondriac tendencies, would probably rush me to the hospital the minute I tell her that I bashed my head — while surfing! — and then hallucinated a bunch of stuff that doesn’t even make any sense. So, yeah, that’s not going to happen.

  But I can’t stop thinking about yesterday. Was I hallucinating? Those images I saw when I was stuck under that wave are now burned in my brain, but why can’t I remember what they mean? And why do I keep waking up to the same horrible nightmare, with my head feeling like it’s been smashed by a brick? Something is definitely not right. Only this time, it’s with my brain instead of my heart.

  I type into the search bar: Heart transplant. Neurologic complications.

  Okay.

  It turns out that auditory and visual hallucinations are not uncommon for heart transplant patients. That’s somewhat of a relief, I guess. At least I know it’s not just me.

  I keep reading. Most commonly, transplant patients have reported hallucinations after surgery, while in intensive care on a ventilator. Interesting. Some people describe these hallucinations as “out-of-body” or “near-death” experiences, but these transient symptoms are likely due to the side effects of pain medications, e.g., opiates or benzodiazepines. Hmm. It’s been more than six months since my surgery. More than six months since I’ve been connected to a ventilator. And currently, I’m not on any pain meds. But I was. Could they have caused long-term effects? My eyes back up to the word transient. Temporary. Short-lived. Fleeting. Maybe the immunosuppressants that I’m taking now are triggering my recent symptoms. I’ll have to double-check the side effects listed on my current crop of medications.

  I try another search: Heart transplant. Memory loss.

  As I scan through a list of medical journal articles and health reporting, something I’ve never heard of before catches my eye: Organ Transplants and Cellular Memory.

  I click on the link and end up on what looks like a patient blog or forum of some kind. I start scanning the first entry. In it, Janet, a sixty-four-year-old office manager and soon-to-be new grandmother talks about how she feels like a “different person” following her heart transplant.

  After I started getting back to regular activities following my transplant, on a whim I signed up for an art class at the community center near my house. I’ve never taken an art class in my adult life, and never considered myself a particularly good artist even when I was a child. But as soon as I saw the flyer for “Introduction to Still Life Painting” in the mail, I just knew it was something I really had to do. Once I started the class, my husband was floored by the paintings I was bringing home! He even joked that I’d been hiding my secret talent from him for years and wondered when we could get rich selling my work. When I eventually made contact with my donor’s family, I found out that the woman whose heart I have had been a very successful artist. Some of her works are even sold through a gallery in New York! Now, I don’t know if it’s this cellular memory thing or God’s will, but somehow I think that I must have inherited her artistic abilities, that my eyes and hands are channeling her spirit.

  Wait, what?

  “Hey, brainiac. Can you look at my trig assignment again?”

  I’m knocked out of my trance by the voice of Jane Kessler, who pulls up a chair next to my workstation.

  Jane, who I had never exchanged a single word with until I got stuck in summer school, is my new friend here, mainly because I help her with math. She scoots closer to me.

  “Well? How about it?” She waves her assignment in front of me. “I’ll buy you lunch?”

  I think she’s trying to whisper, but Jane is not very good at speaking in a library voice.

  I don’t even know why she’s attempting to be quiet anyway. Nobody here cares — not the weird antisocial kid to my left, who I’ve never seen without Beats headphones attached to his skull, or the girl who talks to herself when she types, and especially not Mr. Adams, who’s hunched over his laptop at the librarian’s station, most likely trying to watch the Giants game on mute.

  Summer school is definitely not like real school. Serious school. The kind of school I used to attend. Until I learned that this was the best option for completing my graduation requirements, I had no idea that my high school even had a summer program. Most of the people here, I’ve never met before. Like Beats headphones boy, who, according to Jane, got suspended for throwing a chair in his history class and then missed a month of school because his parents sent him to one of those military-style boot camps. And Sydney and April, the two girls who had babies last semester.

  But Jane, I know. Or at least know of. In school or out, she’s the kind of person who is impossible not to notice. One, because she’s loud. Jane is not shy about voicing her opinion, even when nobody has technically asked for it. And two, she always looks kind of fabulous. Like today, in her sleeveless black T-shirt, Doc Marten boots, retro-red lipstick, and very short shorts that I’d never be allowed to leave the house in.

  Jane tells me that an F in trigonometry has foiled her graduation plans this year — a fact that she attributes to her trig teacher, Ms. Hines, “being a total bitch.” I’m dubious about this. Unless Ms. Hines has had a lobotomy since I had her my junior year for the honors course, “total bitch” is not how I’d describe her. She used to give us multiple chances to make test corrections and kept candy on her desk for anyone willing to volunteer to work out a problem on the whiteboard. Mainly, I just think that Jane hates math. Or maybe school in general.

  I turn my chair in her direction. “You’re buying me lunch?”

  She nods. “Your lunch wishes will be my command.”

  Another difference between summer school and real school is that previously, Jane would probably have had zero interest in hanging out with me. In real school, we did not swim in the same circles. Jane was not on the honors track. We didn’t have any classes together. Nor did we ever encounter each other at any of the extracurricular activities that normally kept me and most of my friends busy until well after dinner most nights: sports, student government, music lessons, Math Club, Community Service Club, fill-in-the-blank-with-whatever-might-look-good-on-a-college-admissions-application Club. I don’t think Jane does clubs. In fact, she probably didn’t even know who I was before I became famous (at school anyway) for getting a new heart.

  Jane, on the other hand, was kind of famous before I was. Or maybe infamous is more accurate. For telling Mr. Hoffman to “fuck off” in front of her entire history class when she got into an argument with him about the pros and cons of socialism. (I heard this from Mia Ryan, the most reliable conduit for school gossip.) For spray-painting a magnificent, albeit unauthorized, mural honoring Frida Kahlo on the school’s football scoreboard. (It was homecoming weekend, so everybody saw that one.) For organizing a huge beach party that resulted in about forty kids missing school during the final day of STAR testing. (I was not invited but did hear about it for days after.) There are plenty more Jane-related rumors, but these I can’t verify: That she is the reason why Dave Rubin broke up with Mindy Pi
erson, and why Lisa Tan broke up with Becca Strauss. That she’s the one who stole and then sold the answer key to the tenth-grade geometry final. That she’s the person to go to if you want to buy weed. Whether any of this is true or not, Jane doesn’t seem to care what people think about her one way or the other. Nor does she seem to care about always having the right answer or getting straight As. In other words, she’s everything I’m not. Or that I didn’t used to be.

  At the moment, however, she is at least attempting to pass trig.

  “Let me see the math,” I say.

  She slides her chair next to mine and hands me her assignment. Intricately drawn Japanese anime characters run up and down the borders of the worksheet. They all have speech bubbles above their heads with the same words inside: “Trig blows!”

  I look over her half-hearted attempts at working out the assignment and see immediately where she’s screwing up.

  “Okay, you can’t get that answer because cosine has no meaning on its own. You always need to find the cosine of an angle.”

  She looks unsure. “Umm . . . okay.”

  “So if the cosine of x is equal to one, you need to find a value for x so that once you take the cosine of the value, you get one.”

  “You get one.” Jane buries a hand in her platinum pixie haircut and nods in the way that people do when they don’t want to admit they have no idea what you are talking about.

  “Look at the graph of the cosine function . . . you have seen a graph like this before, right?” I glance at Jane. She’s reading the results of my Google search.

  “Jane. Are you even listening?” I ask, though it’s clear that she’s not. She seems to have issues with focus.

  “What are you doing, some kind of report?” she asks.

  “No, just research.”

  “About your heart?”

  I still haven’t told anybody about what happened at the beach on Wednesday or about any of the other stuff that’s been freaking me out recently: The gaps in my memory. The nightmares. The feeling of not being able to reengage with my old life. But Jane is not my worrywart mom. And she’s not Emma, who would probably just think that I’d lost it. Maybe it would be a bit of a relief to tell somebody. At least some of it.

  “I’m looking for some background on transplant recipients. About side effects from surgery, that kind of thing,” I tell her.

  “Like what kind of side effects?” she asks.

  “I’m not really sure what I’m looking for . . . I’m just curious about what other patients have experienced.”

  “Move over.” Jane nudges me sideways and leans in closer to study my screen. After a few minutes, her eyes bug out.

  “Holy shit, is this for real?” She nods toward the monitor. “This cellular memory thing? People can inherit their donor’s abilities and memories and stuff?” She stares at me. “Oh my god, is that happening to you?”

  “Jane, no,” I say, already feeling like it may have been a mistake to invite her in to all this. Especially when I’m reading random, highly unscientific heart transplant theories on the internet. “It’s not physiologically possible. Memory is a function of the brain. The heart is an organ that pumps blood. You can’t acquire neurological processes through a heart. Just because some woman took a community center painting class does not mean she inherited anyone else’s memories.”

  “But it says here that even cells in your heart include your entire genetic code. So wouldn’t that mean that maybe a transplanted organ could transfer some of your donor’s, like, memory cells to you and, then, voilà, you can paint?”

  I shake my head. Where to even start? “First of all, there’s no such thing as a ‘memory cell.’”

  Jane squints at me.

  “So, since your transplant, have you picked up any new food preferences or hobbies? Anything that you didn’t do before?”

  Well, of course, I think. There are tons of things that are different since my transplant. They’re different because I nearly died and had major, life-altering surgery. I did start eating meat again, but that was just for the protein, not because I have any new “food preferences.” And, yes, I’ve taken up surfing. But for all I know, my donor could have been a vegetarian who didn’t even know how to swim.

  A tiny voice inside my head asks: What about the other stuff that prompted this whole Google search in the first place? The memories that I can’t place? The nightmares?

  But all I tell Jane is, “Nope. Nothing comes to mind. Honestly, Jane, I think this cellular memory theory is . . . not serious science.” It can’t be.

  She crosses her arms.

  “What about this lady who can paint now? How do you explain that?”

  I gesture toward the computer screen. “Just because Janet here took an art class and thinks she painted a really good sunflower doesn’t mean she inherited a lifetime of fine-arts experience. What’s happening with her is probably more like the placebo effect.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes in drug trials, they give a control group a placebo, like sugar pills, so they can compare the results against the ones from the group that’s taking the real thing. But the people in the control group don’t know they’re not getting the actual drug and, even though they’re not, there are cases where some experience improvements in their symptoms anyway. It’s the belief that they are taking something that could help them that seems to have an effect.”

  “So I don’t get it,” says Jane. “What does the placebo effect have to do with this heart transplant story?”

  I’m in full-on class presentation mode now.

  “Once this lady heard that her donor was a professional artist, it made her believe that her own painting skills were way better than they probably are. Maybe she even painted with more confidence as a result, which meant her paintings really were better. Placebo effect. Get it?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Jane says. “But there are some other really wild stories here. Not just the painting one. You should totally read them!”

  Maybe I will later, when I can focus and think. “How about we get back to your math?” I say.

  “Ugh, do we have to?” Jane pretends that she’s banging her head on the desk in front of her.

  “Do you want to graduate, or what?”

  She raises her head.

  “Well, my mom says I can’t use her car until I do, so yes.”

  I click out of the cellular memory forum. My dad is probably right: searching for health advice on the internet is a terrible idea.

  It’s late, and I’m staring up at the wood beams on my bedroom ceiling, unable to sleep. Unable to shake the thoughts that have been circling around and around in my mind. It all started before the beach, didn’t it? Before the tunnel dream. Even before the memory gaps, or whatever they are. Because what I didn’t tell Jane today is that the first weird thing to happen was right after the transplant, in the hospital. When I saw the crying man.

  At first I thought he was one of the doctors or nurses who kept flitting in and out of my room to change an IV bag, make a note on my chart, or adjust one of the many machines humming and beeping all around me. But he wasn’t wearing scrubs, a white jacket, or anything that identified him as official hospital personnel. Plus, his demeanor stood out from that of the usual staff (detached and professional for most of the doctors — or trying-too-hard cheerful for most of the nurses). He was slumped in a chair next to my bed, his face resting in his hands.

  He stayed there for a while, but since I was still on the ventilator, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t ask him who he was. He didn’t speak either — just wept quietly, and then slipped like a shadow out the door.

  Once I was free of the ventilator and a bit less drugged up, I asked my parents who he was.

  “Nobody but family is allowed in the ICU,” my dad said. “Are you sure it wasn’t one of the nurses?”

  I told him I was sure.

  “A dream, maybe?” suggested my mom. “Dr. Ahmadi said the anest
hesia might make you feel kind of funky for a while.”

  “No,” I insisted. “He was real. I know he was real.”

  I tried to sit up but was nearly knocked senseless by a heavyweight boxing punch of pain.

  My dad jumped up from his chair, a look of panic on his face. My easygoing, goofball dad, terrified that I would come apart at the seams right before his eyes.

  And admittedly, I did feel a bit stitched together in that moment, as the line of black sutures tightened across my chest. Maybe I was coming apart.

  I lowered myself back against the pillows, hoping that would be enough to calm him down. “He was real,” I repeated, no longer so sure myself.

  My mom went out to check the visitor’s log at the front desk.

  Security was called.

  And not long after, a tight-lipped hospital administrator, accompanied by a man in an official-looking uniform, showed up in my room. The administrator, her hair pulled back into a tidy bun, introduced me to Mr. Platt, the hospital’s head of security, who proceeded to ask a bunch of questions.

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was tall, kind of muscular.” My throat was raw from being intubated, so I had to whisper.

  “Eyes?”

  I realized as he was questioning me that I never got a good look at his face.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Hair color?”

  “Not sure. It was buzzed . . . close to his scalp.”

  I could tell this was starting to sound suspiciously vague to him.

  “What was he wearing?”

  Mr. Platt seemed bored, in fact, like this wasn’t the first time he’d been called on to humor an ICU patient riding too high on pain pills.

  “Jeans. And a black puffer jacket. I think.”