No one told my mother that the hospital she had planned all along to give birth in was scheduled to be closed and demolished in less than a week. The nurses told my mom to cross her legs, as there was no doctor on duty to help her give birth. So perhaps it’s not too surprising that when I was born, there was a considerable amount of fluid in my lungs. The doctors (who, I suppose, finally showed up at some point) were bemused as they looked at my x-rays. I shouldn’t be alive. The nurses pityingly allowed my father and grandmother not to wear the usual protective smocks when in the room with me. They didn’t think I’d last the night. My grandmother was a devotee of a religion known as Christian Science, which, if you don’t know, is neither Christian nor a science. She approached my mother at her bedside and asked if she could have her “practitioner,” a Christian Science term analogous to “guru” or “witch doctor,” pray for me. Of course, my mother had no objections. The next morning, an x-ray showed I now had no fluid in my lungs. The doctors were surprised at my miraculous recovery, but my mother, prone to seeing events in the most improbable context possible, put the responsibility for my rapid recovery elsewhere.

My body did not just discharge or absorb the liquid. That could not be further from the truth. High in the night sky, clouds swirled around San Luis Obispo Medical Center. Drums and cymbals clashed as the shrill crescendo of “Oh Fortuna!” exploded across the valley, sung by the brass lungs of a chorus of a million luminous, linen-clad angels. A bolt of lightning smashed the hospital asunder in the cacophony, blinding the burlap-clad retirees of the valley as they emerged from their condos strewn around the California foothills. The wind whistled and howled through the ruins of the hospital as my mother held me away from the gale that consumed the sky. A beam of pure, divine light fired from the heavens as a spiral of angels bent on rending my illness asunder from my mortal body plummeted in legions from the sky. An archangel, a superhuman Roman warrior with a crystalline sword, landed in the destroyed hospital wing and slashed at my tiny body, splattering the demonic lung fluids inert on the patterned tile.

After settling on this, the most rational reason for my recovery, my mother wanted to learn all she could about faith healing. I’m sure you don’t have the time for that, so here’s the part where you get your own crash-course in Christian Science. Pencils ready? First, the boring part:

1) Founded by a woman named Mary Baker Eddy in 1866.

2) The universe (as in the Earth, or your favorite pet) does not exist as matter. The universe is “spiritual.” Okay, saying the universe is “spiritual” is cute, but essentially unprovable either way. Now let’s take the express train to loonytown:

3) Sickness (as in the common cold, a broken leg, or pancreatic cancer) does not exist. They are “imperfections” in one’s perception of the true, perfect, spiritual reality. It is, to use church jargon, “error.” The church believes that the only way to be healed is to pray for the clarity to heal yourself. No doctors allowed. Even medical diagnosis itself is verboten.

4) I’m not joking. Go ahead, Google it, and laugh it up when they dance around what to do if a Christian Scientist breaks a bone. [Christian Science] “does not prevent them from having a bone set if they so choose.” Just like Judaism does not prevent a Jew from eating a tasty ham sandwich, but you’ll be ostracized if you do.

The cough had been getting steadily worse. What had begun as a slight tickle in my throat that would make Ms. Cupp, my third grade teacher, stare daggers at me for interrupting her lesson, had progressed to a full-on flu. Not that I really knew what a “flu” was, at that point. All these words belonged to a class of abstract ailments that were only fictional labels for the real spiritual battle espoused by Christian Science.

To distract my mind from the illness (because, as we all know, sickness is only in the mind), I played the upright piano in the living room after school. I would lapse into coughing fits that would leave me breathless and clutching my stomach, but I would recover, find middle “c,” and continue. My mother was in the adjoining kitchen preparing dinner, her mouth moving almost imperceptibly as she prayed. After a particularly ravaging coughing fit, I slipped off the piano bench and walked around the freestanding fireplace to the kitchen. My mother was drying a pan she’d just washed.

“Mom…” I started, unwilling after years of Sunday School indoctrination to admit pain or sickness to her. She could read it in my eyes though, a bit bleary from the strength of my last coughing fit.

“I know, honey. Have you been praying?” she said reluctantly, putting away her last dish.

“Yes, mom.”

“Are you done practicing?” she asked, looking at the piano.

“Yes. I’m tired. I think I’m going to go to my room.”

“You should lie down.” She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead. “You don’t look so good.”

Exhausted, I walked down the hall to my bedroom, passing one of the anodyne oil landscapes my great-grandmother had painted. Kicking off my shoes, I climbed under my big blue comforter, breathing with an audible wheeze as I looked up at the ceiling. I could hear my mom pick up the phone and dial in the other room.

“Is David there? Yes, I’ll wait.”

I began to cough again, slowly but loudly, cough after cough. I could feel the blood leaving my face.

“Hello, David? It’s Diane.” It wasn’t unusual for her to call her Christian Science practitioner, who lived eight hours away in my grandma’s hometown of Sacramento.

“Yes, I know you’ve been praying for him, and I’m so thankful for that. It’s just that he’s not getting better.”

Across my room’s expanse of blue carpet, the model train tracks snaked around the room while the curtains let in the white early afternoon sun. I wanted to go plug in the train set, turn on the locomotive, and set it chugging through the tunnel under my bed, over the suspension bridge I’d made out of shoeboxes and LEGOs, but I felt another cough coming on. After it passed, I could still hear my mom in the other room.

“I just—I just don’t know what to do.” Her voice broke. “He can barely fight off these coughing fits. He’s on the ground hacking away—I can’t imagine what they think at the school.”

“Yes. I know.” The timbre of her voice had changed. There was a very long silence. The last sentence had a resolute defiance unlike any of her conversations with her Christian Science teacher. “I’ll do what I have to.”

I heard her put the receiver down in the other room. Her footsteps approached in the hall, and she peeked in on me, pausing by the door. Her curly mop of brown hair framed her weak smile.

“How are you doing?” She walked in, wearing one of the mismatched sweaters my grandma had knitted for her and a pair of sweat pants, and sat on the edge of my bed. I tried to answer, but I erupted in an inexorable hacking. She put her arm around me.

“It’s going to be all right.” She got up and walked defiantly into the other room. I heard the phone dialing again.

“Hello, Barbara.”

In my mind’s eye, I looked towards Barbara and Alfred Coble’s house, just a ten-minute walk down the fence line along the empty two-lane road. We didn’t have a car, but the Cobles were always willing to drive us to the little country store to get anything we needed.

“I was wondering if I could ask you for a favor. I need to go to the Lake Earl Store.”

            An hour later, my mother was sitting on the edge of my bed again, pouring a dark red liquid from a plastic bottle into a spoon.

“Mom, what is that?” I eyed her suspiciously.

“It’s something that will make you feel better.” She held the spoon, filled with its cherry-sweet poison, out towards me.

“But at Sunday School they tell us that sickness is error.” I didn’t know what she was intending with this spoon. It went against everything she had ever taught me. “Is this some kind of test? I won’t take any medicine. Being sick doesn’t have anything to do with my body.”

“Come on, Arthur. Don’t you want to feel better?” She smiled, showing the small gap between her front teeth.

“But Mary Baker Eddy says that being sick isn’t real. I’ve been praying about it. It’ll go away soon.” Her expression was drifting from anxiousness to annoyance.

“Look, Arthur, sometimes there are times where you need to just listen to me.” Her expression changed even more, and I knew this conversation was close to being over.

“Mom, why are you giving me medicine when you told me that Christian Science people are the only people that can heal anything?” I started hacking again; my mom cupped her hand under the spoon in case it spilled.

“Just take it. Sometimes you have to just not ask questions and do as you are told.” She handed me the spoon, and I drank the medicine. I looked her straight in the eye as I did. Her expression told me nothing. Not asking questions about what I was told, I silently mused, was how I got in this boat in the first place.

I slept through the night and woke feeling refreshed. I couldn’t believe it. The medicine had worked. My mother’s gold-embossed, leather-bound copy of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, which often sat on the coffee table, was no longer a benign presence. Nor was the Bible, a book I’d tried to read cover to cover at a very young age. I knew the answers to the questions I would be asking would not come from Mary Baker Eddy. I would never take what I was told at face value again. I waited for the sky to darken, for the wind to begin to whistle through the fields, for a chorus of angels to blast our house asunder for this thought. I got out of bed and looked out the window, seeing our cows grazing far off towards the fence line. My little cat was walking through the field near our vegetable garden. I made up my mind then, and never looked back. I’d never be lied to like this again.