Elizabeth Downs
A HOLE FOR A HEART
You must have thought a lot about organ transplantation, heartless as you are, all hollow inside like a spooned-out melon.
Once you first sensed what you lacked, that without it you were essentially the living dead, or at the very least akin to the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, and appreciating that in this particular production there was no wizard to whom you could bring your request, you must have had some difficulty coming to a decision regarding how to rectify the situation. You must have at least mulled over the ethical quandaries concerning transplantation, considered other options for…oh…say, a fraction of a second or so before taking the matter into your own fallible hands. You must have at least allowed the possibilities to roll around in your thick head for a moment before deciding upon HOMICIDE as a method for procuring your replacement organ. Before becoming all hell-bent about it. You at least entertained other options, I would like to believe, however briefly, before spinning your web. Before hooking your bait. Before scribbling your name and number on the walls of random ladies’ rooms and placing an ad in the personals section of the local newspaper with the hope of attracting your donor/victim.
A Hole for a Heart, the ad stated. SWF seeks SWF to assist in disheartening experiment.
You must have also done a good bit of pre-writing concerning the matter. Homicide aside—transplantations in and of themselves are risky operations, and forethought is essential for any good writer.
Sometime during your twenty-minute lunch hour at McKee’s Grocery, you probably pulled a legal pad from the depths of that carpetbag you call a purse and hid out in the produce section, claimed your spot on a small crate of green bananas, and balanced the pad on the tops of your thighs. There, among the unassuming vegetation, you hatched your sinister plan, and you sketched a few diagrams so that you might thoroughly appreciate the complexities the procedure—diagrams which, in the end, greatly resembled that family favorite, Operation. You always were a whiz at that game, you thought, and for that you thanked your lucky stars.
If you were capable of growing a mustache, you would have twisted it, villainously, at this point. But you, of course, were not. So instead you engaged in some free-writing exercises. You clustered your ideas on a piece of the yellow, lined stationary. Made an outline. Made a list. Wrote at the top of the list: Heart vs. Hole. Considered the pros and cons of having a heart while spooning the fleshy pulp of a honeydew into your mouth. Considered the pros and cons of having a hole while discarding the rind onto the newly waxed floor. Concluded the Heart was better. Considered the word on the page. Circled it. Drew stars around it, in clusters. Laughed whole-heartedly as Barney, the OCD bagboy, watched in bewilderment before becoming distracted by the geometry of a lopsided pyramid of Granny Smiths.
You hadn’t always known of your heartlessness. You must have sometime prior to this had a revelation of sorts. You must have seen people—living people who weren’t all-dead inside—and suddenly thought: Wouldn’t that be nice, to not be all-dead inside. You probably glimpsed children laughing outside McKee’s, chasing each other around the parking lot with melting popsicles, or watched a man sobbing at a bus stop for a very long period of time. Perhaps the man reminded you of an old linguistics professor whom you once—not so surreptitiously—loved, or your deceased father. And you felt as if you wanted to cry. Thought you might cry. Remembered a time when you could cry. Back when your father was more than a mere abstraction, when your professor more than a memory. When people were flesh and bone to you, living and breathing, when a heart was something more than a symbol, when a person was more than a possible character, a device to further the plotline of a story. But you didn’t cry. Instead, you watched the man—the living and breathing man—wipe his face on his tattered sleeve and you sat down, unmoved, on the bench beside him to consider the severity of your detachment.
Then it dawned on you, perhaps like an actual dawn, as if broad shafts of sunlight suddenly fell across your face and shoulders, perhaps your problem was physical. Before this you had regarded your heartless nature as purely metaphorical, and your emotional unavailability a matter of choice.
You laid a hand on your chest, over the yellow cotton of your McKee’s brand tank top, over the hollow spot where your heart should have been, and couldn’t find a pulse. Thought: That’s funny. Pulled a compact from that pit of a purse. Opened it and brought the mirror up to your mouth to see if you were still breathing.
This, you thought, explained a lot.
You wrote stories whose protagonists were women who looked a lot like you, only prettier. Younger. Trimmer. Girls, really. Girls with unnaturally high metabolisms. Girls who weren’t sexually frustrated. Girls who had claims to much more in life than a dead father, a defunct love affair, and a failing calico cat. Still, despite their privileged lives, your characters lacked motivation. Direction. A heart. Because—you now realized—you had no heart to give them. Your characters wandered dreamily, aimlessly, from scene to scene, in and out of rooms as if carried on a breeze. They picked up things merely to put them back down. They stood naked before full-length mirrors and stared at themselves for very long periods of time. They moved close to the glass and breathed upon it to see if they were still living.
You are not entirely brainless, I’ll give you that. You, of course, researched transplant procedures before attempting to perform one. Made a few calls to recent heart recipients, who loved their new hearts with the whole of their hearts. You listened to their heartening stories while doodling hearts down the margins of your legal pad. Mostly broken hearts. Some whole hearts with arrows piercing them. “Vive that day,” they must have said, before asking that you cease calling.
And you did your research, certainly. Scoured the shelves of your local public library and thumbed through medical journals. You were amazed by the recent advances in science. Surprised to learn that bioengineers were growing skin in a controlled environment. You kept articles tucked behind your cash register concerning the propagation of whole living organs.
“What are these?” Barney, the OCD bagboy, no doubt asked while tiding up your station for the umpteenth time.
“Research,” you replied.
“My aunt needs a liver.” He flipped through the journal as if it were a J. Crew catalogue. “Her old one’s caput.” Shook his head. “She’s all hooked up and waiting.”
Then Barney again lost his train of thought and began counting the ceiling tiles.
At this moment perhaps you wished you were a bioengineer. Wished you could propagate whole living organs. A brain for Barney. A liver for his aunt…
And for you, a heart, so you could give it to your characters, so they would stop staring at themselves, naked, before full-length mirrors, stop wandering in and out of rooms, stop picking up things only to put them back down.
But you were not a bioengineer. You could never have done the math. Murder was your only option.
When preparing for the big event, wandering around your father’s old hunting cabin, sharpening his knives, you must have been glad of your heartless nature. Ironic, but your heartlessness in this one case proved beneficial, as it allowed you to appropriate the heart of another, ending its previous owner’s life in the process, without experiencing regret.
You probably left evidence of your preparation somewhere—you are not THAT smart—perhaps scattered about your cabin. Memos consisting, mostly, of doodles and maybe one or two actual words, often misspelled.
As weeks passed, it no doubt occurred to you that these memos were multiplying. Scraps of paper were appearing as if from nowhere, as whole organs were appearing in various laboratories across the nation. But in this case they fluttered down as if from heaven. Like manna. The answers to your prayers! you thought and caught one in your hand. You quickly realized, however, that you hadn’t prayed to begin with, that you were the memo’s author, and that you were in no position to be supplying answers to anyone—not even yourself.
It was as if the sky were raining illiteracy. Misspelled words were everywhere. Between the couch cushions. Behind the bookcase. In the litter box. You woke one morning to find a scrap stuck to your forehead, and you peeled it off you like a band-aid.
Cardiomyopathy. You said the word as if it were a question.
Then came the last straw. One evening you watched your calico cat for no apparent reason, tip over—straight-legged, like a cow in a pasture—just short of the bathmat. Dead. It was her heart, and you wished, you wished, you wished you had one to give. You cursed your wretched hollowness, and that night you laid out a trail of breadcrumbs, leading to your door, and switched on your porch light with the hope of attracting visitors.
You were flipping through the ratty pages of Frankenstein, looking for surgical insights, when a figure appeared on your porch, dressed in a loose, white cotton frock. She was carrying something that under the flickering porch light resembled a plate of cookies wrapped in cellophane.
She looked dotty, or lost, but appeared relieved when she spotted you inside, under the lamplight, gazing up from your book, an inviting look about you, bare feet pulled up on the seat beneath you, your long blond hair piled on top your head.
She rattled the screen door twice with the back of her free hand.
The girl greatly resembled you, only prettier. Younger. Trimmer.
You kept a length of rope beneath the cushion of the chair at all times for this very occasion, and you then closed the book, laid it flat on the end table beside you, located the rope with one hand, and smiled.
The girl opened the door and stepped inside. “I brought these for you,” she said. “I live…”
But before she could finish her thought, you knocked the plate of cookies from her hands, and had her on her stomach in a half nelson.
Holding her against you, as you secured her wrists with one hand, you could feel that robust, healthy heart of hers beating all they way through her back. Yet, as you bound her hands and feet, you were surprised to find that despite all your research and mental preparation you still felt ill prepared for this procedure. The girl was such a squirming handful of flesh and hair and running mascara.
Still, you forged ahead, stretching her out flat on her back, securing her feet and hands with the rope to the handles of your looming armoire and the legs of the couch.
As you made your first incisions into the flesh of her torso—the girl, the pained expression that crossed her flushed face, her now glassy and directionless eyes—you must have thought it strange. Suspicious. How had she appeared on your porch like a phantom? How had she found you there? you heard yourself demand.
But the girl could not give you any answers. You had restricted her dialogue with a large square of duct tape. She simply heaved under your knife. For a moment she choked on her own spittle, and something inside you, at this point, must have batted its wings.
She hadn’t seen the ad, had she? Or your number on the bathroom stall? If so, you would have received a call, not a late night visit. Isn’t that right? And the breadcrumbs you had earlier made a trail of could only be seen by nocturnal animals at this time of night.
What a streak of luck! You thought.
You pulled at her strings, tightening your slipknots. My puppet, you thought.
And after some time, after hacking through sinew and bone and you felt that thing, wet and fluttering in your hand, you must have watched her there. A calmness about her now. Her face against the earth tones of your area rug, that thick rectangle holding her like a grave. Hair everywhere. Cookies scattered around her, as if revolving in some celestial scene. The partially destroyed cookies, like sickle moons. The crumbs that clung to her hair, like stars.
A Van gogh, you thought.
It was no doubt then that you no doubt first noticed the slight swell of her stomach.
No, a Madonna.
Suddenly, you couldn’t catch your breath. Became dizzy. Something inside you ached.
And perhaps, as the girl now gasped for breath beneath you, you then first considered that you had had it all along, the thing that now pulsated inside you. As the Tin Man had. Perhaps you’d been too close to see.
Cardiomyopathy, you thought.
Or perhaps you were too influenced by narratives, and for a moment you considered your life as merely a series of narratives, and you feared you weren’t the author, the mastermind behind this particular diabolical plot line. The man behind the curtain. Perhaps, you thought, you had done the wrong thing.
Or perhaps you thought this was an inappropriate way to dissect this particular text. You may have recalled your long-gone linguistics professor, how he paced the classroom floor, how he had often spoke of the dynamic nature of language. The human mind, he had once said, was not its mere inventor. We were born in accord with it, he said, a pair of soft-toothed twins. He had called words living things, flesh and bone. And for the first time you considered that might be true, the way the girl lurched beneath your hand, gasped dramatically, and then, suddenly, stopped.
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