My brother lay there - living. Although his doctors (most of them so fully detached from their emotions you were constantly tempted to check under their pristine smocks for a battery compartment) were convinced he was dying. They did every imaginable test to him - some non-invasive like the MRI or the CT-Scan. But there were other tests, like the one an Intern wanted to do with a huge horse-needle, to which our grandmother (whose turn it was to stand guard over him because you never knew what these ferenj doctors with their disdain for human life, especially for black human life, were gonna do if you were not there to monitor their every action) refused permission with her one unmistakable English word - Noooooo! She told the visibly chastened Intern who wanted to stick my brother with a horse-needle in an exploratory attempt to locate the liquid in his lungs the x-rays would not (could not?) show. Our grandmother didn't even wait for my brother to translate the procedure for her. She could see with her eagle-bright eyes two very clear things: the youth and relative inexperience of the doctor; and her eagerness to do the procedure. But the Intern was not to be denied. During out father's watch, the one time he came to visit my brother, she was allowed access to my weakened brother who would allow anyone to do anything if it meant he could recover. In the end, the needle she stabbed into his back to see if she could draw liquid out of his lungs came up empty and left my brother in dire pain for several days. Apparently, it was not just the ferenj doctors you had to keep an eye on.

I visited my brother everyday. Sometimes it was my turn to spend the night there, despite the fact that I had to work the next day, despite the fact that I have a bad back, despite the fact that we had to sleep sitting up in a visitor's chair with our legs propped up on another visitor's chair and a ghabi draped over us for warmth and a tiny bit of home comfort. In the evening, after work, I'd walk the long white linoleum mile to his door, smile at the nurses on duty, and enter my brother's room. Sometimes, he'd have a roommate - a man with a bad case of diarrhea for a few days; another man with a skin problem that kept him molting and my grandmother in constant fear of contracting whatever he had - so I'd join the small crowd of family around my brother's bed. I never thought about what it must be like for him, laying there between life and death, watched over by hopeful eyes, some red from tears, some red from lack of sleep, and wondering …. I know not of what.

I know that his eyes hurt sometimes from his condition. The noise of the TV would sometimes irritate him. And I'm sure the constant swarm of visitors didn't help his mood either. But there was love in that room, squeezed in between worry and heartache, between spiritual and physical pain. And we drew on it as much as he must have, and sometimes had enough left over to let it spill and grace one of his roommate's sickbeds.

Whenever he had to undergo another test and while we waited for the results, we would hold hands encircling his bed and pray over him, for his health and recovery. But he was growing worse by the day. The doctors' prognoses were being realized right before our terrified eyes. I would hold his hand sometimes, gently, but trying with all my might to infuse him with some of my strength and health. We'd laugh and joke together. He has an amazing spirit, my brother. In the face of adversity, he'd always find the strength to laugh and to make you laugh. I didn't want to lose that.

As hard as it was for me, it was hardest on our mother. He was her eldest and (although she always denied it) her favorite. He was her child - her baby. She could see still in the curve of his smile the toothless baby he had been, swaddled in cloth diapers and wearing her knitting. And he is beautiful. Even as he lay there struggling to live, you couldn't tell it by just looking at his face because his skin still glowed, his eyes still shone with humor from time to time. My brother looked more alive in his sickbed than some people did in the full bloom of health. Which was why it was so hard on our mother, I suspect. The reality of what was happening inside her son, her favorite child, did not jive with the way he looked physically. He looked perfectly perfect - and still the doctors insisted he was not.

So, as always, whenever she's faced with adversity, my mother turned to God. She brought her prayer books and her bottles of holy water and sat at the foot of my brother's elevated hospital bed and prayed to God. She prayed everyday, her meSehaf qidus in her lap, rosary beads in her hand, her lips moving silently.

Still, my brother did not get well.

My faith, already strained with agul ferenjinet, the theory of evolution, and the reality of my very ill brother, began to break. It would be easier to understand if my brother were an auger, a selfish man, a self indulgent ne'er-do-well who lived to wreak havoc on others' lives. He is not. He is one of those actually nice individuals who do good because it is part of their nature. So why him? Then at my breaking point, I realized if you didn't have God to blame, who were you going to point an accusatory finger at and rant and rave. Better God than nothing at all. So, I too prayed, my ineffectual Our Fathers mingled with sincere words seeking compassion for my brother - well, for me, actually, and my mother and my grandmother because let's face it, the dead don't feel pain. So please God, I prayed, let him live - for us!

Then one day, I saw my mother doing a curious thing while she prayed. For seven days, she prayed over a prayer book then blew her breath into an open bottle, your average, garden variety, colorless glass bottle. I asked her, hesitantly, what she was doing. Praying, she said. I gazed upon her, unable to decide whether this was faith or superstition I was witnessing. Whatever it was, I prayed, let it work.

One night, shortly thereafter, my grandmother awoke from her vigil by his bedside and saw the image of Jesus Christ superimposed on the wall above my brother's head. She tried to wake him, but could not speak. When she tried to reach out and touch the image, it vanished. And she told us this the following day, her eyes brilliant with certainty. You're going to get better, she told my brother. Soon, we'll all walk out of this hospital together!

On the eighth day after my mother began her breath-in-bottle prayer, and a day after my grandmother reported seeing the image of Jesus Christ, my brother recovered - miraculously. There is no other word for it. Certainly, the doctors had no explanation. The thing they could not name, the illness they could not identify, the virus they couldn't dig out of my brother's lungs with their horse-needles, had suddenly disappeared, leaving him well.

They kept him one more day - for observation.

Then, on the 10th day, they discharged him - and us along with him.