A Thousand Silent Beats a Minute
By Natalia Anania
Copyright 2013 Natalia Anania
The parts snicked together, whirring gently. Long fingers flexed, turning it on its head, nails pinging against glass. The devise flashed gold, then silver, then bronze with a hint of red. Red like a rose, like a promise broken, like blood spilled across pristine floors.
[‘What are you doing?’
‘Don’t watch. Dear God, don’t watch. Joan-]
“What on earth is that?”
Joan’s fingers jerked, fumbling. She caught her breath and released it slowly, reverently setting her burden onto the table before her.
“Go away,” Joan answered, eyes scouring the mechanical bauble. The ticking had halted now that she no longer held it and that was unacceptable. She was missing something.
“Joan. Joan? Joan, what is that? Joan? Is that..? Joan? Oh god it is, isn’t it? Joan?”
Joan pulled herself out of the grasp setting tentatively onto her shoulder, using the motion to propel herself more upright so as to better reach her materials. Diamond or quartz? Emerald or obsidian? Not the ruby. She couldn’t use the ruby.
“Joan, listen to me. Please. When was the last time you slept? The last time you ate? Jesus, just look at this place.”
“Go away, Vivian.”
But despite herself, she risked a glance. The flat was in shambles of course. She’d appropriated every table she owned and pieced them together like an absurdist rendition of a jigsaw puzzle in her living room.
All other furniture had been shoved haphazardly aside and most of it was ruined. The couch had been shredded (it had been promising but, no, not quite the right colour of blue. She needed something lighter –the sky from the hallway painting perhaps?), the bulbs had been removed from the lamps, the nails pried out of the wooden floorboards.
The tables were covered with a rendition of miscellaneous items: jewellery, zippers torn from clothing, parts from her laptop, binding from her books, wiring torn from walls, rubber from coat hangers. A stray yellow sock.
“You need to stop this,” Vivian saw her fleeting attention and seized her chance. “You’re just delaying the inevitable.”
“I can’t just leave it,” Joan returned absently, already returning to her work (the obsidian, of course the obsidian.)
“You don’t have a choice,” Vivian insisted, a trifle desperately, “He’ll never accept it. You know that. He’s stubborn.”
“I know,” Joan agreed. Obsidian and iron and graphene. “But I’m worse.”
The graphene sliced her finger open. Joan slotted it into place regardless, mindless of the blood. Under the raw calluses on her palms, she felt the device shudder and pulse a single, independent throb.
[It’s raining when she waves goodbye. She’s disgruntled as the farewell means her brother is showered with an attention her parents could be bestowing upon her.
Ben laughs as he runs to the car, waving over his head and not able to escape the rain despite his efforts. Seth lingers, manners holding him still while his parents make their assurances to Joan’s own. Promises to keep in touch are exchanged and solemn oaths to document the trip sworn. Seth’s father unfurls an umbrella and, exchanging a final farewell, they leave.
Joan pushes herself onto her tiptoes to peer over her mother’s shoulder and watches them go. Seth, catching sight of her, grins. Joan directs her gaze to the car at once, trying to pretend she’d been looking at her brother who is, she sees, already busy entertaining the toddler in the car. He’s never like that with her.
Seth climbs into the car and his parents follow after him, the umbrella disappearing in the process. They leave and Joan isn’t watching them go. She’s already realizing that she has free reign on the whole of the house and, for the next ten days, her parent’s undivided attention. Her mood brightens at once as she deduces just how awesome this will be.
Three hours later, she loses her brother.
Five hours later, Seth loses everyone else.]
It’s the most perfect thing Joan had ever made. Parts of it are uneven and unweighted, so much so that it no longer sits steadily upright but must instead be kept propped up. Sections of it jut out completely, sharp to the touch (Joan’s fingers are littered with wounds as a testament to this) while others are so smooth they repel touch altogether. Should Joan ask a colleague to act as a consultant, they’d be mad to approve it. It seemed remarkable it worked at all.
But work it did, contracting gently every second as if to defy the world at large. Joan finds it beautiful but she doubts anyone else would... except Seth.
She hopes Seth agrees.
[The first time Joan meets Seth, he steals her barbie doll and she kicks him in the shin.
Ben screams the house down defending his new friend, so filled with his own self importance now that he’s started “big school”. Joan, only two years away herself, gives as good as she gets.
The both of them lose television privileges for a week and Seth’s mum is called to pick him up, the play date cancelled.
As first meetings go, theirs is somewhat lacking.]
Everyone knows Joan here. She’s greeted constantly as she walks, all the tones vaguely sympathetic. There isn’t any privacy; people as clear as cellophane, their lives spilled out for public consumption like morsels at a buffet.
Joan nods where appropriate but doesn’t smile. One part of her mind is picking apart the mechanical thing ticking away in her purse. Another is observing the people that greet her, analysing the emotions in their eyes. Yet another is counting her steps. There are three hundred and twenty six of them all together.
The door is worn and familiar as the knob slots into her hand. Seth is there, his eyes fixed upon a barely audible television set and his gaze far away. He doesn’t look towards her as she enters, doesn’t even flinch. Joan drinks in the sight of him, damaged as he is. He’s naked from the waist up but his torso is so wrapped in bandages that it hardly matters.
Joan approaches and stands directly beside him. She doesn’t try to speak, instead reaching delicately into her bag and drawing forth her creation. She sets it onto his lap and steps away, trying to shove down the doubt (‘He won’t take it Joan, he won’t’) as it’s hardly helpful.
The device pulses away, the minute vibrations allowing it to settle deeply into stark white sheets. Seth, finally, looks down. His face, an expressionless mask, somehow becomes even more so. His hand raises and he brushes a pinky against the blue-green side of the object. It topples over and lays almost on its head, thumping smoothly away.
“It’s a heart,” Seth says at last, voice hoarse from disuse. Joan struggles to remember the last time he spoke and can’t quite grasp it. The number runs into the double digits. “You’ve built me a heart.”
Joan badly wants to ask how he knows the organ is of her own creation but decides mere moments later that she probably wouldn’t like the answer. So she says nothing at all.
Seth doesn’t seem to be expecting a reply anyway. His fingers shake, hovering around the heart with trepidation, as though both ensnared and repelled by it.
“I won’t take it,” He declares, voice firm, “I don’t want a heart.”
“I know,” Joan agrees mildly, keeping her hands still by sheer determination alone, “That’s because you don’t have one.”
“I don’t want one,” Seth repeats, “What good is it? All it does is hurt. I’m better off without one.”
[When Joan is thirteen, she spends four days straight in a hospital.
Ben is gone –had slipped away before he’d gotten to the emergency room at all. Seth lingers, giving
his doctors ulcers. He’s a temperamental patient and goes from stable to not in three seconds flat, swinging back and forth between the two like a pendulum. Joan wonders is he’s aware there’s nothing to come back from –if he knows his family is dead.
The doctors murmur worriedly about heartbreak and Joan thinks that maybe he does. It might be kinder to let him go.
She feels a flush of guilt thinking that way, feels worse daydreaming she can trade his life for her brothers. The hospital itself provides a distraction, one that takes her well away from her parents who, sitting a vigil over a boy not their son, are trapped within a web of emotions too complex for Joan to pick apart.
She swipes things off lone trolleys, shuffles the magazines around in the waiting room, lights candles in the hospital chapel without making a donation and spends the rest of her copious free time visiting utter strangers.
No one stops her or asks her who she is. She spends an entire day in the maternity ward, peering at bodies too small to be real, too fragile to be believed. There’s so much promise there –Joan can pretend the babies will grow up to be anything, anyone. It’s a strangely liberating form of torture.
Paediatrics is explored next. Some of the children there are her age, many younger. All are overjoyed to have her company. She plays a hospital wide game of hide and seek with two other children and they inadvertently cause an utter panic in their absence. Once she’s wormed herself out of trouble, she returns and shows a three year old some absolutely terrible magic tricks. He’s utterly awed by them
“My heart’s a robot,” A five year old girl informs her when Joan tells her a story about a robot from the future. Joan doesn’t even flinch –all the children here are remarkably blaze about their conditions.
“Just like the robot,” Joan says instead, “His maker made sure he had one, you know. It was made from pure iron.”
“Mine has nylon in it,” the girl says, carefully articulating the foreign word, “Cause my old one got ruined by the fire. Doctor Kay said nylon is r-re-resis...”
“Resistant,” Joan prompts, “It’ll be harder to burn.”
“Yeah, that,” she agrees, “And mummy says they can get rid of the marks too even though they’re not that bad. Look, see.”
She thrusts a wrist out, the skin there textured with burns. Curious, Joan brushes a finger against them but all she can feel is the girl’s pulse, strong and steady and without a hitch.
Its then (not in the maternity ward or hiding in a closet or stealing articles out of journals because she can) that Joan decides what she wants to do with her life.
Elsewhere in the hospital, Seth’s eyes flicker open.]
Seth refuses the heart.
This comes as a surprise to absolutely no one, given that to call Seth stubborn is like calling the sun warm.
“If you’re going to convince him, do it soon.” His doctor advices, as though he and Joan aren’t colleagues and she doesn’t already know this. “Wait much longer and he won’t be capable of accepting a new heart at all.”
His voice is unabashedly grim. He’s discovered something that Joan has painstakingly spent years learning and has thus deduced that the chances of Seth accepting a heart aren’t high. He sounds resigned to that already. Seth is clearly something worse than an idiot –one who will give something up without the ability to understand what it is he’s sacrificing.
It’s possible to live without a heart. Of course it is.
It’s just not much of a life.
[Joan is twelve when she catches Seth and Ben kissing behind the cubby house in the backyard. She surprised because, until that point, what she knows about kissing has been learned from watching daytime television. As such, she’s never considered that boys could kiss boys. Finding such a thing out is a revelation.
It doesn’t really change anything and she never sees them kissing again after that. In fact, she doesn’t give it another thought until she turns nineteen and realizes she’s been in love with Seth for so long she can’t remember when she fell.
After that, things get a little awkward.]
“Stop asking.”
“Stop saying no.”
“Joan –”
“No,” Joan interrupts him fiercely, blowing her hair out of her eyes, “Don’t even. You need this, Seth. You just can’t see it right now. And I made this for you. The heart is yours now, whether you take it into your chest of not. Seth, the materials... you need to understand. I made this heart and I know you. Don’t deny that I do. This heart couldn’t serve as a better personification of who you are if it tried. It’s perfect. I promise, you won’t regret taking it.”
Seth cuts his eyes over to where the heart sits pulsing on his dresser, his face showing a hint of emotion for the first time in days. For a brief moment, he looks achingly young.
“Alright,” Seth agrees finally, reluctantly, “If it means that much to you.”
“It does,” Joan says simply, holding her elation in.
“Only if you’re the one that does it,” Seth adds after a seconds thought, “I don’t want anyone else.”
It breaks more than one ethical rule to operate on someone you’re desperately in love with. It breaks more than one ethical rule to operate on anyone your close to at all.
Joan very much doubts anyone will object.
[The most famous person that managed to live without a heart was Hannah Merari.
She was a holocaust survivor and one of the many whose heart had been burnt right out of her by experimenting Nazis. That she survived the Death Camps was remarkable in itself; that she survived without her heart is awe inspiring. Of all the Jewish people whose hearts were deliberately destroyed, she was the only one who lived.
There are movies made about her, countless biographies written. People whisper how brave she is, how tragic the story.
By the time she was rescued, there was nothing any doctor on earth could do. No mechanical heart that would take.
Joan has seen the movie (everyone has –it’s considered a classic and the awards it has won stretch a mile long) but it didn’t leave a lasting impression on her. Instead, what she remembers most of all is seeing the woman on Oprah.
Hannah Merari is over 80 by then and gives a heartbreaking account of how she lived through everything for the sake of her children, whom she’d sent ahead with her sister mere hours before she’d been captured. Oprah is moved to tears but Hannah Merari doesn’t cry.
Her face is expressionless, her eyes empty. Her hands lay dormant and still in her lap, her lips unsmiling. She speaks calmly and without hesitation as she tells her story.
Safely tucked away in her living room, Joan watches her. She presses a palm against her own chest to feel the reassuring thrum from behind her rib cage.
Oprah doesn’t ask her what it’s like to live without emotion, to exist without a heart, but curled up on her living room couch, Joan wonders and imagines and presses down harder still on her own chest as she shivers.]
When Joan cuts Seth’s chest open, she sees what is left of his heart.
She’s seen ruined hearts before, more times than she can count. The first time she’d cut a patient open and seen only ashes where the heart should have been, the world had momentarily spun out of orbit around her. Hearts that have been burnt out are the worst but, luckily, they’re also quite rare.
Since then she’s seen it all: broken hearts, caved in hearts, burst hearts. Hearts that have been ruptured, bruised or twisted. Some hearts were so clogged with fat that they simply didn’t work. Others were merely old and tired. Joan had once even operated on a newborn, who had been born with a heart half the normal size.
Seth’s heart is nothing new. Not really. It shouldn’t take her by surprise or cause the nausea she’d been prone to as an intern.
And yet…somehow it does.
Looking at the twisted black mass, shuddering within the chest of the man she’s loved since she was a teenager, Joan feels physically ill.
> The valves are twisted, the body shrivelled, the pulse of blood sluggish. The noise is something more akin to a tortured gasp for breath than a beat and even that rhythm is intermediate at best.
Steadily, surrounded by some of the best surgeons in the country and utterly alone, Joan starts cutting the creature out.
[Joan loses her virginity at twenty-one. It’s nothing like the tawdry romance novels she’d deny ever reading had led her to believe. First of all, it hurts in a way that Joan doesn’t have words to describe. The man, John, tries to be gentle with her and fails utterly.
The only mercy is that the whole ordeal is short lived. Afterwards, Joan feels naked in a way she didn’t even when John was thrusting awkwardly into her. She aches unpleasantly somewhere deep inside and feels impossibly young –too young to deal with this.