Dinged Up Heart

That was the phrase the doctor used. He wasn’t a real doctor but I didn’t believe in real doctors anymore.

What should I do, I asked?

Put it in this, he told me, then handed me a little Tweety Bird style birdcage.

It’ll be safer there than in my chest?

Apparently, he said.

I never liked carrying things around. I won’t even tie the arms of my jacket around my waist if I get hot; I’ll just sweat. Anne always teased me for the awkward way I handled her purse when given it, like I didn’t want anyone at Target thinking for even a second it belonged to me.

It’s not that, I confided to her one time in the wine aisle. It’s just, this one time, in first grade, on a field trip to the wetlands, I got made fun of for my Donald Duck fanny pack.

Who made fun of you for that, she asked. Let me at ‘em.

So I stored the cage on the cluttered armoire, nestled between the framed photograph of Anne’s grandma looking like Margaret Thatcher, a vase of plastic branches from Crate & Barrel, a homemade ceramic mug filled with earrings who’d lost their matches. The cage was rusty and the bars were all just the slightest bit bent. Looking at it, you could almost hear the strum of an untuned guitar.

Inside the cage, my heart appeared undamaged. I wished it had visible scuffs. Like those hatch marks cartoon characters get on their knees and cheeks after getting into a cloud of dust tussle with the thug alley cat. If my heart had looked injured, then when people asked how I was doing, I could just show it to them and they would know.

I couldn’t hear it beat during the day, but at night, around 3am, when the house gets so quiet, there it was. Da-dum, da-dum.

Over time it began to shrink. At first I thought I was imagining it. So I Sharpied a line on the bar where the aorta reached. The next morning, the aorta didn’t touch the mark.

The next morning, the heart had vanished entirely.

I patted around in the dresser drawers, tossed Anne’s old coats out of the closet into a perfumed mountain on the floor. Wished angrily I had a cat or a kid to blame for losing it. But there was only me. If the heart was gone it had to be through my own carelessness, or lack of attentiveness to it, or something.

I clocked in at work, clocked out. Made tasteless pots of coffee. Wondered how it could be that I was still here. Walking breathing nodding sighing not sleeping not dreaming.

I started getting served ads for make-your-own replacement hearts. I’d seen them in the past and ignored them, feeling vaguely sad for anyone who’d be low enough to order a mail-away facsimile heart through Instagram. But late one night I clicked on one of the splashy banners and it directed me to a slick-looking website featuring glowing testimonials that sounded real enough.

I added one of the cheaper bundles to my cart and put in my credit card information. When the box arrived four days later, I laid everything out on the coffee table, inhaling the plasticky scent of packaging. There was a red balloon, a series of vials filled with colorful goos, some rolled gauze. Following the directions, I tore the gauze into strips, dipped them in the goos, one by one, then laid them dripping across the ballon, which, having been inflated, resembled the Chicago Bean. Splatters dribbled down the table legs to the floor. I was glad Anne had bought one of those carpets you could wash, the kind she always called fake.

I listened to a podcast as I worked, about the history of modern warfare. The discussion of civilian casualties in Vietnam made me wonder how many others on Earth were getting their hearts dinged up at this present moment. Thousands? Millions? The thought buoyed me in a guilty way.

When I finished, the result was hideous. It looked nothing like the picture. It looked more like something a heart might cough up.

I tossed the sloppy mess in the rusted cage and slammed the door, went and stood in a scalding shower. My first in days.

That night I dreamt of the time Anne and I went swimming in Malibu. An unexpectedly large wave had crashed into us and stolen my glasses away. I thought I’d be safe if I only went in up to my knees. But nature was merciless. Anne and I patted around on the sea floor, causing puffs of sand to cloud up around our ankles. She’d had to drive us home, though she feared freeways. I sat in the passenger seat, tasting the salt on my lips, seeing the fuzzy landscape blur past outside my window. How unfamiliar it felt, to see the world like that, the way I only ever saw our bedroom in the morning when the light first came in. At a stoplight, to try and make me laugh, Anne tapped on her window, gesturing at the vast ocean.

Never again, she said, can you say there’s nothing of value for you out there.