Once I was dressed, I turned to him and I asked if I could leave my parents a note.
He said, “No.”
He grabbed my arm and rushed me out of the room. We went down the emergency stairwell, which was lined with men dressed like him, wearing rags that covered their heads and faces and only left their eyes visible.
I didn’t want to look at them. I didn’t want them to think that I could recognize them or remember any of them. All of these men addressed the man holding me as “Commander.” I knew immediately this wasn’t the army. I had seen men like this when we visited my father in Granada.
These were rebels.
When we got to the first floor, I realized they had seized the hospital. I was ordered not to speak and to go to my office.
I headed down this long corridor, and the farther away we got, the more hopeless I felt. We got to the office, and they had broken the doorknob. Inside, in the dark, two men awaited.
The man holding me told me that I had three hours to help him or I would have to come with them. I was terrified.
So I just asked, “Who is the patient?”
And from within the shadows, one of these men turned on a flashlight and revealed a boy about fifteen years old, wearing this ripped T-shirt and dirty pants and soiled boots.
His face was completely deformed by an exacerbated abscess that made the left side look like a water balloon about to burst.
The man holding me let me go. But when I approached the child and tried to touch his face, I felt a rifle firmly pressed against my spine.
He said to me, “Can you help us or not?”
I said, “Yes, I can.”
I told him to sit the child on the chair and that I would have to turn on all the lights and instruments. He agreed but continued to point the rifle at me.
Once inside, I realized that I was going to need assistance holding the child down. I couldn’t make him drowsy, because I knew they needed to leave the hospital on foot. I couldn’t apply any anesthesia, because given the degree of the infection no anesthesia would catch.
So I knew I was going to have to do this procedure without numbing him, and it was going to hurt—a lot.
I explained this to the commander, and he pointed to one of his men, who immediately put his rifle on the floor and jumped on the child, straddled him at the thighs, grabbed his arms, and held them by the side of the kid’s body.
So I had my assistant ready.
I was shaking. I had an idea what needed to be done. I’d seen it in books and in enormous slide projections in our oral pathology classes. But I had never done anything like this myself; it would be the first time.
What I did know was if I made a mistake in my incision and touched the nerve that runs by that area of the face, I could cause the paralysis of half of this kid’s face for life.
I also knew that if I let the infection progress, this kid could go into sepsis and die.
In the back of my mind, I also knew that if the army had been informed that the rebels were in the hospital, they could burst in at any time. There could be a crossfire, and I could become collateral damage by the end of the morning.
So I grabbed a towel, wet it with cold water, and rubbed the kid’s forehead. He was burning with fever.
I didn’t want to ask his name, so I called him pelao, which means “kid” in the area of Colombia where I come from.
I explained to him what I was going to do. I told him that it was going to hurt a lot and that he could cry or scream. But he could also tell me when he couldn’t take it anymore, and I would stop and let him rest.
He looked up at me, and his little eyes filled with tears. He nodded.
My heart shrunk. This boy was in so much pain. And he was terrified.
But so was I. I had a rifle on my back. So I put on my protective gear, and I wrapped my arm around him to prevent him from hitting me. I prepared the scalpel and a handful of gauze.
I took a deep breath. I calculated the position of the nerve in that inflated balloon of skin. And I made my first incision on that cheek, slowly and carefully.
I began to drain. The kid was screaming and twitching in the chair. I felt the rifle shake on my back. Greenish yellow pus came bursting out of his cheek. The man holding him closed his eyes and turned away—the smell was nauseating.
I made a wider cut. But suddenly the child began to cry uncontrollably, so I stopped.
I reached down for his hand and grabbed it. It was this small, cold, rough hand.
I told him that he was a brave boy. He closed his eyes and nodded. We were both sweating profusely.
I went back to squeezing and draining.
When the kid couldn’t take it anymore, he suddenly yelled out, “¡Ay, no más, Papá!” and it was then that I felt strongest the pressure of that rifle on my back.
The man, the Commander, who had been pointing the rifle at me this whole time broke his silence, and he said, “Almost there, m’ijo.”
And I was petrified. Because it was then that I realized whose child I was cradling in my arm.
This was the Commander’s son.
I couldn’t screw this up. I had to do this right.
I knew that if this kid got worse, or if he died, this guy would come back for me—I was sure about that.
I went back to working as fast as I could.
When the inflammation went down enough for me to look into his mouth, I found the culprit—a rotten molar. I had to pull it out. It was part of the procedure.
I explained this to the Commander and his son, and they agreed.
With every piece of tooth that I pulled, a scream came along. And with every scream, the barrel of that rifle shook on my back. This man was feeling his son’s pain. As I worked, however, I began to see relief on the kid’s face.
It was close to dawn. We were running out of time. So I finished preparing the wound. I got up and grabbed some free samples of antibiotics and some medical supplies.
I gave them to the Commander, and I explained how to clean the wound. I told him the boy should be okay in two weeks.
And that’s when he said, “I hope so, Doctora, because I don’t want to come back, and you don’t want to come where we’re going.”
He ordered the kid off the chair, and he obeyed immediately. They circled around me and walked out the door.
I felt the rifle pressure ease off my back. I closed my eyes, and I prayed to God that he wouldn’t shoot me right there. That’s when I heard them saying from the door that if I didn’t speak or move for at least a half an hour, I would be okay.
I nodded. And then I heard the door close.
When I opened my eyes, the kid’s blood was still drying on my latex gloves. My hands were drenched in sweat inside them. I kept reviewing the procedure: Had I done everything right? Had I forgotten something? Had I left anything out?
For the next two weeks, I was cold. I couldn’t eat anything. Everything made me nauseous.
I didn’t want to answer questions about the incident. I didn’t even tell my parents.
At night I couldn’t sleep. I would lie on my bed and stare at that door, hoping that nobody would break into the room again. I continued to take care of my outpatients, but every time one walked in, I feared it would be the child.
I was excused from the ER. They said that I didn’t have to volunteer if I didn’t want to.
And then one day I was at the office and the phone rang. It was from the front desk. They said I had a package there. I froze, but I went. The girl handed me this crumpled envelope and said that a man had stopped by and left me a note and that (she was pointing at a sack of oranges with a live chicken tied to it).
I opened the envelope and pulled out a note. In almost illegible writing it said, “The pelao is okay, Doctora, no need to come back—gracias.”
I felt this relief. I put the note qui
ckly in my uniform, and I went back to work. Later that night when I went to my room, I climbed out of the window onto the roof terrace. I could hear the bats flapping their wings above my head. I didn’t care.
I brought the note and matches with me. I pulled it out, and I burned it.
And I burned it because it reminded me of how scared I had been that night, of how frightened I had been for the last two weeks. I also burned it because I thought it connected me to the bad people.
But then I thought, What bad people? This was a sick child. I had to help him.
And besides, in Colombia in the nineties, who knew who the bad guys and the good guys were? Nobody knew.
We were just people trying to get by in this battle of warlords that nobody knew how to stop, that, as you know, to this day we’re still trying to stop. These people that had come in search of my help were just people with mothers and fathers and sons and toothaches, capable of love and hate and gratitude, amidst this violence. Capable, too, of killing, and kidnapping, and hurting.
And yet that man had risked his life that day for his son. Like my own father would. And he had respected my life.
Then I thought about my father’s words, about serving the people who need it the most.
Since then I’ve come to think that in times of war it’s very hard to tell the good people from the bad people. And if you’re gifted with the opportunity to help another human being, you do it. Because that’s how you serve—not a faction, not a party, not a cause, but the people.
So the following night, I volunteered at the ER.
I went down again to serve the people of Neiva.
* * *
MARTHA RUIZ-PERILLA is an artist based in New York City. Born and raised in Colombia, Martha graduated from dental school in 1992. Her love for storytelling, a tradition in her family, is evident in her live performances and her artwork, which includes painting, sculpture, and installation. Martha’s work is part of private and public collections in the United States and abroad. For the past twenty years, she has lived, studied, and worked in New York City. She was a graduate fellow and class salutatorian at Christie’s Education, earning a master’s degree in modern and contemporary art in 2002. Martha has captivated audiences with her stories since the age of five and made her debut with The Moth in 2016. She lives on the Lower East Side with her husband, Marc; her children, Fermín Adrián and Zeta Simöne; and their dog, Quesito.
This story was told on November 3, 2016, at The Great Hall of The Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the evening was Fever Pitch. Director: Meg Bowles.
I just finished my first semester of college, and I have a big bag of laundry. I come through the door of the house, and things aren’t looking too good for me and my mom.
The first thing I notice is that the piano is gone, and she had that ever since she was a little girl and took piano lessons. We always put the nativity on top of it around Christmastime. I took piano lessons, too (for two weeks, but still, I took piano lessons on that piano), and now it’s gone.
I go through the living room, and the only thing that’s left is one couch with broken springs sticking out of it.
There are two televisions, one on top of the other—one has a picture that works, and one has sound that works. One of the TVs is hooked up to cable, and the other one gets the antenna so the sound doesn’t quite jibe up, you know?
Over in the corner are the impressions from my dad’s La-Z-Boy that has been gone for four years now.
I walk into the dining room and I see that it’s empty. There used to be this big, beautiful dining-room set with carved chairs and a glass breakfront and a buffet table, and that’s gone.
In the kitchen there’s a small table and two chairs. There used to be four, but I broke one of them, and the other chair I also broke, and so there’s only two left.
I go upstairs to the bedrooms, and in my mom’s room there’s nothing left but her mattress on the floor. And there’s nothing quite as damning as a bedroom without furniture, because you see all the dings and the scratches in the wallpaper, all the mistakes that can usually be covered up.
My sister’s room is exactly the way it looked when she moved out two years ago to go live with my dad: Pepto-Bismol pink walls, and a canopy bed, and this big toy box in the shape of a rubber strawberry, as if she was gonna move back in and be the little girl that she was before she moved out.
My room looks exactly the way it was when I left for college. There’s posters all over the walls, and it’s ridiculous, like me.
I start to do my laundry. My mom comes home from work, and she immediately takes over, doesn’t let me do it myself. I end up helping her with it, and she’s happy to see me—she’s happy that I’m home.
When we’re done with that, we have dinner. My mom makes tomato casserole. It was one of my favorite things. It was canned tomatoes with cubes of Wonder bread and American cheese baked in the oven. If you put enough shaky cheese on it, it’s delicious, you know?
So we’re sitting there in the two kitchen chairs, and I’m telling her all about my first semester of college and how I finished up. She’s so proud of me.
And she’s telling me about work. My mom’s a nurse, and she’s been taking all the shifts that she can. But she had warned me that she was starting to have to sell stuff in the house to be able to catch up on the bills, because the house is too big for the two of us, and now that I am away at school, it is just her.
So she was doing everything she could, and she warned me, but it was still shocking, you know? She had just taken a second job, a part-time seasonal job at the mall, behind the perfume counter. My mom didn’t like people telling her what to do, so I knew that wasn’t gonna last very long.
While we’re sitting there at dinner, she says, “Pete, we’re not going to have a lot of money this year for Christmas, so I don’t think we’re going to be able to give each other presents.”
I said, “That’s okay, Mom”—and I’m being completely honest. I’m just happy to be home with her. I don’t need anything, and that’s the truth.
We sit there eating quietly for a minute, and then she says, “You know what’d be funny? What if we cut out pictures of things from magazines that we would give to each other if we could?” And we laughed about it.
And then we cried about it, because it’s sad—it’s a really sad thing.
But then we laughed again, because no matter how hard things are, you just have to laugh, you know?
The next day I decided I wanted to make the house look as Christmassy as possible. I went up to the attic, and I got down the boxes with the lights, and I hung the lights on the bushes out front and around the gutters. I wanted to go get a Christmas tree.
I grew up in a little town in New Jersey called Delanco. It was a small town, twenty-five-hundred people. It was mostly farms. At that time there wasn’t Walmart or big stores or anything, so I went over to the local Christmas-tree farm to get a tree.
I figured they’d give me a deal because I used to date their daughter. But it turns out they didn’t give me a deal, because I used to date their daughter. And the Christmas tree was like forty bucks—man, I couldn’t afford that. So I went back home, and I got an old saw out of the garage, and I cut out a tree from the side yard, and I brought it in.
It wasn’t even a pine tree, it was like a stunted maple tree. I put it in the tree holder. It had like five branches. I put twenty ornaments on each branch and just kinda put the lights on it and called it a day. My mom came home from work, and she just laughed about it.
When I visited my friends who were also home from college, I would steal their mom’s fancy catalogs and bring them home and cut out pictures of stuff. My mom always wanted a green Jaguar convertible. I found a picture of one of those. I cut out pictures of gold and diamonds and jewelry and an island, all these things that I would love to be able to give my mom for Christmas.
I kept collecting them and folding them up and tying them up with ribbons and hiding them in my room, and I was waiting to put them under the tree. And like I said, I knew it was a sad thing, but it was also something that would bring us together. I knew it was something that we would be able to hold on to together.
There is one night toward the end of December, close to Christmas, when we’re sitting there in the living room watching the TVs and the Charlie Brown Christmas special is on. And we’re sitting there right next to each other on the couch, but we’re worlds apart.
My mom’s exhausted. I’ve been trying to get her to sell the house for years, because I knew it was just too big for her to be in by herself. If I’m being honest, it was too big when all four of us were living there. I don’t know why they got it in the first place.
Four years before that, my parents—who had been separated on and off the whole time that they were married—were giving it one last try. The plan was that they were going to sell the house and take the money, and we were gonna move to Georgia from Jersey and have a fresh start. That was the big plan.
It went along okay for a couple of weeks, and then they started to fight and things went back to normal. So that fresh start never really happened, and it culminated with the four of us in the third pew at St. Casimir’s church in Riverside, New Jersey, for Christmas Eve midnight Mass.
Right before the priest started the Mass in the packed church, my dad stood up, and he walked out of the church. The only sound you could hear in the silent church was the hydraulic door just go shooo.
The three of us stood up, and we went past the priest and everyone we knew, and we walked the two blocks to where the car was parked. My dad was nowhere to be found, but he left the keys to the car sitting on the hood.
And that year my parents were done. That was it.
I got what I wanted for Christmas that year: my parents never got back together.
But here we are now, today, the two of us sitting on this couch and trying to watch this thing and be happy, something. And she’s a million miles away.
The Moth Presents Occasional Magic Page 3
