The Cover Illustration Is A Map Of The Românesti Cave,

The cover illustration is a map of the Românesti cave, where symphonic concerts are held annually. You can find out more at j.mp/caveconcerts

A story for my Andrews University Junior Preview Friends, November 2009 | Stephen Payne, Gum Guy

The Incredible Superpowers That Are Available With Exactly One Invisible Kidney

O

Of course, in the end, it turned out that the real Super Power wasn’t the Invisible Kidney. It’s always how it turns out in these stories, and it’s how it turned out for Penelope. In fact, right after they had talked in a Performing Arts Center about a liger (and a whale and a shark) and just before they went bowling (Penelope had lane 63 with her friends and she bowled 102), Penelope and everyone went to this worship by some guy named Dave Ferguson. And he talked about hands. Which meant that he wasn’t talking about kidneys at all, so Penelope sat there and thought about what she might take. At this university....maybe somewhere else. She should probably be a surgeon, of course. A surgeon had saved her life (even though the doctors back home said she probably could have kept her kidney), so maybe she owed Dr. Neagu some sort of gift of her life’s career. So maybe that had to do with hands, because surgeons are good with their hands and then she listens to a story about Dave’s daughter Emily. It’s a story about Disneyworld and autographs of oversized bald badgers and other bigheaded creatures or something like that and then about how Dave and his wife lose track of Emily. At Disneyworld, which may not be like the super greatest place to lose your kid. But Dave says he finally finds her and she’s hanging out, looking at some store, wanting to buy some more stuff — but that’s not what the talk was about, not about materialism or false gods or anything — and Dave tells her that she has to hold his hand, that he’s her father, she has to do it. And Emily says “I want to hold my own hand.” And then, right then, in that instant, the plot unfolded for the worship talk and, perhaps more significantly, the plot unfolded for Penelope. She realized a lot of things of course, including the point that this Dave is making that we need to not hold our own hands, but we need to hold God’s. Yes, true. That part she knew since maybe at least Cradle Roll if not Primary....she knew that the whole world and that she, Penelope, were in God’s hands and that she should hold on for dear life (and for eternal life) and. She thought about her Super Power Invisible Kidney which maybe had kind of made her even greater than all of that. She was, with that Thanks-To-The- Românesti-Cave vacancy, kidney-wise, somehow more powerful all on her own because she was living with one kidney. She was beating the odds. She was better. One better. And then she looked down at her hands, like Dave had them do at the start of the talk. They were visible. No super power in the thumb or the index or any finger or in the palm or even in her wrist. And she thought about Emily. And about what Dave was saying. And it was then, then, then that it suddenly struck her where the Invisible Super Power comes from. And in that church with the stone walls and the organ pipes and this invitation from up front she reaches up her hands. She doesn’t need two kidneys. She maybe doesn’t even need one. Instead what she needs is this: One more hand that can’t be seen. One that’s invisible. One that’s super powered. Like ultimately totally super powered. She reflects and prays and, startled, reaches out for the invisible, non-kidney dependent super power she needs. And she waits for His hand, and she waits to hold on eternally.

K

“King me, please.” Penelope, who does not like being called Penny but is always called that anyway (even and especially by her mother) looks across at Zion, who she has beat again. Her red checker piece jumped and demolished the last zigzag of defense that Zion had, and so she sat there waiting for the red piece to nest on top her victorious one. She always beats him in checkers, ever since they played their first game in fifth grade and she imagines, since some boys are not very smart and/or are often polite in their behavior around women both young and old, she is benefitting from this either way. He always says a really old joke when he loses: “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” as though his loss would be some sort of gambling-ish neon-lit secret between them and Penelope would try to figure out how to tell him to find a new joke, a new something... There is not much else to do as the rain falls loose from the heavens as though it might never ever stop. It is October turning on November, and it often turns to rain here in Ann Arbor on these Friday afternoons, with checkers unfolding. “Penny,” she hears her mother call from the other room, “that Krissi girl says in her blog (mykidney.com) that she’s lost 25 percent of the healthy tissue in her kidney after the graft.” “Yeah,” Penelope murmurs and her hand reaches absent, remembering and forgetting all at once towards the small of her back. “But I’ve got my kidney and it works.” “Oh, you’ve got to come read her blog, Honey.” Penelope says nothing to her mother and she looks back at the board and at Zion and she knows he’ll play again, he always will. His fingers scatter into the heart of the pieces on the checkers board, the heart of his perpetual and gracious losses and rearranges them onto the right squares once again.

H

Her class had decided three years ago to do some ADRA projects, and they thought of everywhere from Somalia to Ireland to Portugal and even Australia, but Penelope’s teacher knew about this project in Romania that was a place where families could go if they had no other options in life. They all took a vote in class and, despite a contingent that argued that they might see both kangaroos and platypuses, which meant they should go to the Operation Spring Boost thing, Romania is what got the vote, and the next summer 13 kids from her class, including Penelope, were in Romania, painting rooms and building bunk beds for kids and stuff like that. The project was called “A Kind of New Beginning,” and the first family to move in was the Iorga family, who’d lived in a hut built into the earth in Rasova. After they got settled, they all went behind and goofed around with a soccer ball and Aurel and Mary’s six kids They got done soon enough with the building to travel and see more of Romania and they knew the main thing they wanted to do was to go explore this cave where they play classical music every summer (Zion and Penelope had found it once on YouTube: j.mp/Romanesti). It was outside this little village called Românesti, and besides Mozart and Vivaldi and Beethoven it was, of course, an excellent place to see stalagmites and stalagtites, so Penelope threw in her Petzl helmet from when she’d gone caving once around Indiana and the Binkley’s Cave System. When they got there, Penelope was first as always into the dark and the vault of this space beneath the earth and there was that one spot, just past where the orchestra from Timisoara played, where the stone was slick and Penelope’s feet tumbled and tangled beneath her and she fell against a stalagmite the color of diamonds and water and ice and she could feel pain in her back that was like burning and a shower of stars and then she didn’t remember anything any more.

T

There were no helicopters or anything, just an SUV that ADRA had used to take them out to where the cave was. The trip took hours and Penelope slept and woke while the pain deepened and then dulled and then she was back in Bucharest at the Spitalul de Urgenta Bucuresti, or the

emergency hospital, and by the time the anesthesia and ether and whatever shots they had given her had drifted through and about, Dr. Stefan Neagu had removed her right kidney. Her mother was in the room by the time she was fully awake, and her mother would trace her fingers across the neat and furled stitching on her back and she kept saying “I’m sorry, Honey, I’m so sorry, so sorry....” and she didn’t....she couldn’t say much more and in the fog that still swirled about her, Penelope laid there and thought of her own dumb joke, a joke dumber than any Zion ever told after checkers. She thought, maybe, she should get a T-shirt made up that said: “I went to Romania and all I got was this lousy T-shirt (and one less kidney).”

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The deal is, of course, that you can live with one kidney, and when she was back home in Ann Arbor, Penelope would read even more than her mom or her dad on the Internet, which meant that she knew the two to three litres of water a day rule (even sites about kidney health had bad jokes: “So, if you have one kidney, drink lots of water; if you have two kidneys, drink lots of water; even if you have three kidneys, drink lots of water.”) and the exercise and she even found out about “super foods” before her mom found out and before her mom bought the blender and her mom tried to make shakes out of goji berries and nuts and brown rice and soy milk. It was too much to remember, really, so Peneleope simply decided to herself that she had a super power all her own, she even had a mark on her like some hero in the comic books, and this super power, her super invisible kidney, made her somehow more capable at everything she could do in life because she could do it all on her own and better than everyone else (and not just Zion)...she’d do it one better, thanks to her now invisible kidney.

P

“Penny, Honey,” her mom shouts out from her room the other night. “There’s this guy named Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie and he went to university and now he’s playing for the NFL...” “Yeah....?” Penelope’s never sure of the path her mom is taking at these moments, although she suspects. “And he has one kidney. You can do it, too, Sweetie....I just know you can.” Penelope, of the Super Powers, already knows this, although she’s not sure whether her mother is suggesting she become a football star, nor does she plan to explore that at length. She’s willing to hope that her mom just means that, well, she’ll be okay and that she can do anything, including school, including life, including... Penelope was already there. Ahead of her mom. Super Powered.

T

The sun came back and one monarch flitted amidst her mom’s Butterfly Bush out back and then on a Sunday, Jordan and Scott and Jon and Tommy and Tabitha and Joan and Margo and Megan and Michelle all get on a bus and while they’re traveling they talk about the school they’re going to go visit and how each one of them will be majoring in underwater basket weaving — or maybe something harder — and then when they get tired of that they again pledge that even though they were all supposedly vegetarians, they weren’t going to see either Twilight or New Moon no matter how great Edward or Bella were and then they played checkers with a magnetic set and Penelope beat every single person on the bus including the sponsors and then they were there. Not the university with the one kidney football star, but a university, and Penelope kind of wondered whether all these smart people, these professor types, could figure out her Super Powers.