The Threadbare Rope
A woman discovers the truth about miracles.
I sat alone in my room at a hotel in Santo Domingo and observed what I wasn’t thinking about. I wasn’t thinking about which sun-soaked beach, what fruity rum drink, or whether to learn the merengue at the dance club we’d passed on the drive from the airport. Instead I stared out my window at thick, green blades of Caribbean grass and asked myself if I believed in miracles.
I’d come to Santo Domingo with my brother, Michael, to seek help from a doctor who used fetal stem cells to treat degenerative diseases. Michael had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for eighteen years. He shook uncontrollably and walked in short, shuffling movements. He no longer blinked or smiled. His face had become a mask of blankness. My brother believed in the doctor’s miracle—and I wanted to believe. Dr. White claimed he could harness the power of creation itself with cells that were biologic chameleons, capable of differentiating into any type of cell the body needed. But I held no more stock in the case studies I read than I did in the eerie voodoo enchantments still practiced in the island’s rural villages.
I’d flown from my home near Boston to Milwaukee where Michael lived, and in the airport terminal, my childhood life assaulted me. First the smells: bratwurst, knockwurst, and sauerkraut. Then the sounds: “Paging Craig Wyznewski, paging Craig Wyznewski.” A name I never heard in Boston. Then a friendliness that startled me: the woman at the rental car counter who gave me explicit directions to the counter of a competitor, the rental car van driver who treated me like a drinking buddy: “I really thought the Patriots were going to win last weekend. Boy, the Celtics are doing great.” I remembered that you were a loser in Wisconsin if you didn’t follow your teams, and I knew enough to play along.
Outside it was 18 degrees. I picked Michael up at his apartment.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I told him. “I took a wrong turn.”
“I don’t understand. Who are you?” he asked, staring at me.
“I’m Carol, your sister.”
He was embarrassed and I was embarrassed for him. I told him I had changed my hairstyle and that it made me look different.
“That must be it,” he said.
I helped Michael pack, and we returned to the airport, where the security guard checked our boarding passes and IDs and told us to have a peaceful day. As we waited for the boarding call, Michael studied my face.
“The circles under your eyes are darker than they used to be,” he said.
I pretended to be merely surprised, then excused myself and ran to the bathroom to cover them with makeup. We’d never been close, my brother and I. He was six years older, single, no friends. He suffered from certain social deficits—the worst of which was an inability to empathize. But when he said, “I can’t do this trip alone. Will you come with me?” it didn’t even occur to me to say no. I left my family in Boston to pick him up in Milwaukee.
“Take lots of pictures,” my little girl said.
On the airplane, I walked down the aisle to the bathroom. When I returned, Michael told me that my hips had widened since I’d had children. He said this with no affect—no derision or concern. It was simply his clinical observation about how his younger sister had changed. I wondered how I’d survive the next two days under his scrutiny.
Traveling with Michael, I observed the world through the eyes of someone who seemed to have thawed after a lengthy freeze—emerging severely out of touch. He asked me why the passengers burst into applause when we landed smoothly. “Perfect landing,” I told him. He asked me to tell the waiter that he wanted Spaghetti Bolognese because he didn’t know how to pronounce it. He was surprised when I tipped the man who pushed his wheelchair from the ticket counter to our gate in Newark. “I never would have thought of doing that,” he said.
We landed in Santo Domingo at midnight, and the flight attendant hurried to get Michael a wheelchair. “Good luck,” she said from the jetway. It was January, but the night air was tropical and fragrant, and the clinic van was waiting for us.
At the hotel, I fell asleep quickly, exhausted from the journey and the effort of pushing my 200-pound brother through airports and up wheelchair ramps. In the morning, I found a flyer slipped under my door advertising a snorkeling excursion and a sunset amble to the marble burial site of Christopher Columbus. The usual sensations I felt when I traveled—excitement, curiosity, a craving for the exotic—were replaced by anxiety. I worried whether the injection was safe, if my brother was wasting the little money he had on an untested procedure. I feared his disappointment. When I knocked on Michael’s door, I heard him shuffle, then he appeared wearing nothing but white briefs.
“Don’t worry. I won’t look,” I said as I entered, shading my eyes.
“Why? I’m not naked. If I were, I wouldn’t have opened the door,” he said, as if astounded that I might have such a thought.
Why did my brother have to be so strange? I was annoyed by his oddness. It was hard to help someone who made me squirm.
At breakfast, I filled Michael’s glass with orange juice and cut his pancakes. I couldn’t escape the traveler inside me—always itching to leave home, shed my skin for a while and slip on someone else’s. So I ate a Dominican breakfast—fried eggs served on top of boiled and mashed plantains, soft cheese fried in peanut oil, slices of papaya and pineapple, and café colado, water poured over a cloth bag stuffed with ground coffee and served with steamed milk.
I looked around the hotel and saw tourists in flip-flops and wide-brimmed hats examining maps and planning itineraries—and also people in wheelchairs, a little boy with muscular dystrophy, a woman with Lou Gehrig’s disease who stared into space with her mouth frozen open. Dr. White’s patients.
I wondered how the tourists felt—the ones who came here to escape and ended up vacationing among people who were broken.
When I’d told my friends what we were doing, everyone discouraged me. Have you researched this? What are the doctor’s credentials? Have any clinical studies been published? I had nothing scientific to offer them. There were no clinical studies, and the doctor was a psychiatrist, not a neurologist. He specialized in treating eating disorders, not Parkinson’s disease. I lived in Boston, home of Harvard Medical School, Mass General. So an unknown clinic in Santo Domingo did not give me a sense of institutional worth. I tried to talk Michael out of it. It sounded too good to be true, too mysterious and too expensive. A friend told me she had just watched an exposé on 60 Minutes about offshore clinics that preyed on people desperate for cures. I pictured Dr. White as a flimflam man operating out of the back of his caravan at Carnaval. “Step right up and get your fetal cells!” And behind him, a row of gray fetuses floated in watery jelly jars.
“It’s easy to be rational when you don’t have Parkinson’s disease,” Michael said when I told him my concerns, and I was staggered by the truth of it.
That was it, wasn’t it? I didn’t have Parkinson’s disease. It was easy for me to stand in judgment, to question the validity of a doctor who could be a savior or a quack, bamboozling an easy $30,000 from people who still had hope, the threadbare rope they clutched before letting go. As Shakespeare said, “The miserable have no other medicine.” Only hope.
The van arrived early to pick us up. Michael sat silently in the back seat while I asked the driver questions in Spanish as he maneuvered through Santo Domingo’s busy streets. He said many people were coming to the clinic this weekend—babies, old people. We drove through a poor neighborhood, past women washing clothes on the street in red plastic tubs. In heavy traffic we slowed down, and I saw the open-air market. Normally I would have hopped off here to inspect what the locals ate, to put a frame around the life of the people. Instead we drove on, shuttling past bins of sweet potatoes, yucca, yams, and spices.
I imagined the clinic as a shabby building with cracks in the walls, bad smells, bare light bulbs, used syringes stashed in the trash. But the driver stopped in front of a thick mahogany gate that swung open to reveal a Spanish Colonial villa with a swimming pool and a fountain surrounded by palm trees. The walls were painted a creamy gold.
“It looks like the home of a conquistador,” said Michael. I saw the driver’s eyes in the mirror and wondered if he appreciated this comparison to the explorers who pillaged his country for God, gold, and glory. I wheeled Michael inside, and the interior looked like a movie set: heavy Spanish-style furniture on terracotta floors, gleaming chandeliers, ornate masks, and Mayan musical instruments hanging on thick white walls.
In the living room, a man with a heavy German accent cuddled his two young daughters. Each had cerebral palsy, their legs as thin and shapeless as pipes. A boy with severe autism turned away from his parents and rocked with his eyes closed, occasionally yelling.
“I sure hope it works,” my brother said.
I squeezed his shoulder. “Me, too.”
An assistant wheeled Michael to a bedroom where we met the anesthesiologist, a Dominican woman in her thirties. She took Michael’s blood pressure and inserted an IV needle into the top of his hand. He lay on his back, and his hand shook up and down, involuntarily slapping his abdomen. As the IV dripped into his vein, I felt the rush of hope.
Dr. White entered the room, dressed in a white jacket. He was slender, of medium height with thick, silvery hair swept back over his head. He managed to be both elegant and slightly nerdy. He hugged me and held Michael’s hand.
“We’ll put a local in your back, Michael, and then you won’t feel anything.”
Dr. White answered all my questions. He didn’t hide anything. I asked him about the fetuses, where they came from.
“In eastern Europe today the number one choice for birth control is abortion,” he said, “which doesn’t make sense to us, emotionally or financially. Healthy young women come in for abortions. They know nothing about this—they’re just asked if they want the material to be thrown away as medical waste or used to help someone. If they say they want to help someone, then we test the cells at one of the best laboratories in the world. They put them into liquid nitrogen at 196 degrees below zero centigrade. I select them, and they’re reconstituted. They’re alive when Michael gets them.”
He smiled at me, and I asked him if I could buy a copy of his book.
“I’ll give you a copy,” he said.
Dr. White left the room and returned with a copy of his book, autographed.
“Who’s the guy on the back?” he teased me.
I turned the book over. Dr. White stared from the back cover with a caring smile. His hand was over his heart.
“Just some handsome guy,” I said.
What was I doing? Was I flirting with him? I was buying it, the cure, the miracle, and the supreme confidence of the miracle worker.
I took a break and walked through the house. In the garden were potted palms, scarlet and orange tropical flowers, a thatched hut, and a bench carved from a tree trunk. Wind chimes played a sonorous tune. I opened a thick wooden gate and beyond it was the Caribbean Sea, cerulean blue and sparkling. I wanted to stretch out on the sand, maybe strike up a conversation with the family sitting around a wooden table, eating grilled chicken. Instead I let the sand slip between my toes for a few minutes and then returned to the clinic. A little boy sitting in a wheelchair on the terrace smiled at me.
“My name is Carol,” I told him.
“I’m Max. I’m ten.”
“What do you have?”
“I’m special needs,” Max said, looking away from me.
I saw a gold stud shining on his earlobe.
“I like your earring,” I told him.
“My dad just took me out to get it and didn’t tell my mom.”
“Oh, was she mad?”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
He yelled for his mom, a young woman with a sweet, round face.
“Is this your first time here?” she asked me.
“Yes. My brother has Parkinson’s disease.”
“Max has muscular dystrophy. He had four shots in his abdomen. We’re going to come back depending on whether we get results.”
The daughter of a man being treated for Alzheimer’s joined us and began to crochet.
“Good for the nerves,” she said. Her fingernails were so long they curled in arcs.
The families left and I sat alone on the terrace. A worker offered me a cafecito, a little cup of coffee. It was thick, like Turkish coffee and very sweet. When I was finished, she told me to turn the cup over and let the dregs drip down the sides.
“It’s an old Dominican practice,” she said. “I can read the coffee stains on the inside of the cup and make a prophecy.”
I thanked her but told her I didn’t want to know.
I walked back to Michael’s room. His legs were elevated to help the cells travel to his brain.
“I already feel better,” he told me.
I wheeled him to the foyer. In the living room, one of the girls with cerebral palsy sat on Dr. White’s lap, her head resting on his chest. When he saw us, he gently laid the girl in her father’s arms.
“Your eyes are clearer,” Dr. White said as he patted Michael’s shoulder. “Your posture is better.”
“Well, I’m still shaking,” Michael said.
“Oh God, give me a break. I’m not Jesus, the healer.”
Dr. White handed me his business card. “You might not see any results for six months. But keep me posted at all times.”
“You look good, Michael. Doesn’t he look good?” Dr. White said, turning to his staff.
I felt uneasy. Was he Jesus or wasn’t he? Was it all a hoax?
The driver took us back to the hotel. Michael was starving. In the hotel restaurant, he ate lasagna and I ate la bandera, a dish that symbolized the Dominican flag, with red pinto beans alongside white rice, stewed meat, and plantains.
In the morning, we flew out before dawn. I didn’t practice my usual travel tricks to prolong the experience—standing outside to soak up the last rays of tropical sunshine, buying the local hot sauce or a CD of some unknown steel drum band in the airport terminal. Anything to hold on a little longer. No. This time I let the country slip right through my fingers. A souvenir would only remind me of life’s inequities.
We landed in Milwaukee as the sun set. On the way to his apartment, I was thinking about what was happening inside Michael’s body, whether the new cells were multiplying like they were supposed to or just floating around without purpose. Michael, on the other hand, was thinking about bridges. He told me that the ramparts built to support bridges were supposed to last thirty years, but salting icy roads made them start to crumble after only ten. I wanted to know this man, but I wondered if I could, if I could ever get to the heart of who he was.
In his apartment, I noticed for the first time a drawing framed and hanging on the living room wall. I asked him about it, and he told me he’d seen a man at a hamburger joint sketching him.
“I thought that was really interesting,” Michael said. “I offered him $20 for it and he said no, just take it. So I gave him $10 and he took it. The only thing is he drew me without any eyes.”
He was shaking, and now I was shaking, too.
I made Michael a sandwich and thought but he does have eyes, clear and blue, and capable of seeing a life beyond the one he has. Perhaps this was the miracle—that a chronically underachieving, socially isolated misfit who could barely walk or feed himself still had hope, still believed a miracle might be possible.
I told my brother I loved him, and I left to go back home.
Carol Reichert writes in the sensory deprivation chamber that is the Newton, Massachusetts, public library. She has been a midwife to a cow giving birth in New Zealand, danced flamenco in the mountain caves outside Granada, and learned lomi lomi massage in Hawaii. In addition to writing, she dances flamenco in Boston and Spain whenever the rhythm moves her. She is currently working on a memoir about her family’s life in a village in southern Spain.