He walked without stealth across the campus, then up the road to town. He passed Timmy's, where he and Robin had drunk and where now the girls who would send him to prison were probably still drinking. He and Robin had sat in a booth on the restaurant side. She drank tequila sunrises and paid for those and for his Comfort and ginger, and she told him that all day she had been talking to people, and now she had to talk to him, her mind was blown, her father called her about her grades and he called the dean too so she had to go to the counselor's office and she was in there three hours, they talked about everything, they even got back to the year she was fifteen and she told the counselor she didn't remember much of it, that was her year on acid, and she had done a lot of balling, and she said she had never talked like that with anybody before, had never just sat down and listed what she had done for the last four years, and the counselor told her in all that time she had never felt what she was doing or done what she felt. She was talking gently to Mike, but in her eyes she was already gone: back in her room; home in Darien; Bermuda at Easter; the year in Europe she had talked about before, the year her father would give her when she got out of school. He could not remember her loins, and he felt he could not remember himself either, that his life had begun a few minutes earlier in this booth. He watched her hands as she stirred her tequila sunrise and the grenadine rose from the bottom in a menstrual cloud, and she said the counselor had gotten her an appointment in town with a psychiatrist tomorrow, a woman psychiatrist, and she wanted to go, she wanted to talk again, because now she had admitted it, that she wasn't happy, hadn't been happy, had figured nobody ever could be.
Then he looked at her eyes. She liked to watch him when they made love, and sometimes he opened his eyes and saw on her face that eerie look of a woman making love: as if her eyes, while watching him, were turned inward as well, were indeed watching his thrusting from within her womb. Her eyes now were of the counselor's office, the psychiatrist's office tomorrow, they held no light for him; and in his mind, as she told him she had to stop dope and alcohol and balling, he saw the school: the old brick and the iron fence with its points like spears and the serene trees. All his life this town had been dying. His father had died with it, killing himself with one of the last things he owned: they did not have a garage so he drove the car into the woods and used the vacuum cleaner hose. She said she had never come, not with anybody all these years, she had always faked it; he finished his drink in a swallow and immediately wished he had not, for he wanted another but she didn't offer him one and he only had three dollars which he knew now he would need for the rest of the night; then he refused to imagine the rest of the night. He smiled.
"Only with my finger," she said.
"I hope it falls off."
She slid out of the booth; his hand started to reach for her but he stopped it; she was saying something that didn't matter now, that he could not feel: her eyes were suddenly damp as standing she put on her parka, saying she had wanted to talk to him, she thought at least they could talk; then she walked out. He drank her tequila sunrise as he was getting out of the booth. Outside, he stood looking up the street; she was a block away, almost at the drugstore. Then she was gone around the bend in the street. He started after her, watching his boots on the shoveled sidewalk.
Now he walked on the bridge over the river and thought of her lying on the small one over the pond. The wind came blowing down freezing over the Merrimack; his moustache stiffened, and he lowered his head. But he did not hurry. Seeing Robin on the bridge over the pond he saw the dormitory beyond it, just a dormitory for them, rooms which they crowded with their things, but the best place he had ever slept in. The things that crowded their rooms were more than he had ever owned, yet he knew for the girls these were only selected and favorite or what they thought necessary things, only a transportable bit of what filled large rooms of huge houses at home. For four or five years now he had made his way into the dormitory; he met them at Timmy's and they took him back to the dormitory to drink and smoke dope and when the party dissolved one of them usually took him to bed.
One night in the fall before Robin he was at a party there and toward three in the morning nearly all the girls were gone and no one had given him a sign and there were only two girls left and the one college fag, a smooth-shaven, razor-cut boy who dressed better than the girls, went to Timmy's, and even to the bar side of it, the long, narrow room without booths or bar stools where only men drank; he wore a variety of costumes: heels and yellow and rust and gold and red, and drank sloe gin fizzes and smoked like a girl. And Mike, who rarely thought one way or another about fags but disliked them on sight, liked this one because he went into town like that and once a man poured a beer over his head, but he kept going and joking, his necklaces tapping on his chest as he swayed back and forth laughing. That night he came over and sat beside Mike just at the right time, when Mike had understood that the two remaining girls not only weren't interested in him, but they despised him, and he was thinking of the walk home to his room when the fag said he had some Colombian and Mike nodded and rose and left with him. In the room the fag touched him and Mike said twenty-five bucks and put it in his pocket, then removed the fag's fingers from his belt buckle and turned away and undressed. He would not let the fag kiss him but the rest was all right, a mouth was a mouth, except when he woke sober in the morning, woke early, earlier than he ever woke when he slept there with a girl. A presence woke him as though a large bird had flown inches above his chest. He got up quickly and glanced at the sleeping fag, lying on his back, his bare, smooth shoulders and slender arms above the blanket, his face turned toward Mike, the mouth open, and Mike wanted to kill him or himself or both of them, looking away from the mouth which had consumed forever part of his soul, and with his back turned he dressed. Then quietly opening the door he was aware of his height and broad shoulders and he squared them as glaring he stepped into the corridor; but it was empty, and he got out of the dormitory without anyone seeing him and ate breakfast in town and at ten o'clock went to the employment office for his check.
Through the years he had stolen from them: usually cash from the girls he slept with, taking just enough so they would believe or make themselves believe that while they were drunk at Timmy's they had spent it. Twice he had stolen with the collusion of girls. One had gone ahead of him in the corridor, then down the stairs, as he rolled and carried a ten-speed bicycle. He rode it home and the next day sold it to three young men who rented a house down the street; they sold dope, and things other people stole, mostly things that kids stole, and Mike felt like a kid when he went to them and said he had a ten-speed. A year later, when a second girl helped him steal a stereo, he sold it at the same house. The girl was drunk and she went with him into the room one of her friends had left unlocked, and in the dark she got the speakers and asked if he wanted any records while he hushed her and took the amplifier and turntable. They carried everything out to her Volvo. In the car he was relieved but only for a moment, only until she started the engine, then he thought of the street and the building where he lived, and by the time she turned on the heater he was trying to think of a way to keep her from taking him home.
All the time she was talking. It was the first time she had stolen anything. Or anything worth a lot of money. He made himself smile by thinking of selling her to the men in the house; he thought of her sitting amid the stereos and television sets and bicycles. Then he heard her say something. She had asked if he was going to sell his old set so he could get some bucks out of the night too. He said he'd give the old one to a friend, and when she asked for directions he pointed ahead in despair. He meant to get out at the corner but when she said Here? and slowed for the turn he was awash in the loss of control which he fought so often and overcame so little, though he knew most people couldn't tell by looking at him or even talking to him. She turned and climbed up the street, talking all the time, not about the street, the buildings, but about the stereo: or the stealing of it, and he
knew from her voice she was repeating herself so she would not have to talk about what she saw. Or he felt she was. But that was not the worst. The worst was that he was so humiliated he could not trust what he felt, could not know if this dumb rich girl was even aware of the street, and he knew there was no way out of this except to sleep and wake tomorrow in the bed that held his scent. He had been too long in that room (this was his third year), too long in the building: there were six apartments; families lived in the five larger ones; one family had a man: a pumper of gasoline, checker of oil and water, wiper of windshields. Mike thought of his apartment as a room, although there was a kitchen he rarely used, a bathroom, and a second room that for weeks at a time he did not enter. Some mornings when he woke he felt he had lived too long in his body. He smoked a joint in bed and showered and shaved and left the room, the building, the street of these buildings. Once free of the street he felt better: he liked feeling and smelling clean; he walked into town. The girl stopped the Volvo at another of his sighed directions and touched his thigh and said she would help him bring the stuff in. He said no and loaded everything in his arms and left her.
Robin had wanted to go to his room too and he had never let her and now for the first time grieving for her lost flesh, he wished he had taken her there. Saw her there at nights and on the weekends, the room—rooms: he saw even the second room—smelling of paint; saw buckets and brushes on newspaper awaiting her night and weekend hand, his hand too: the two of them painting while music played not from his tinny-sounding transistor but a stereo that was simply there in his apartment with the certainty of something casually purchased with cash neither from the employment office nor his occasional and tense forays into the world of jobs: dishwashing at Timmy's, the quick and harried waitresses bringing the trays of plates which he scraped and racked and hosed and slid into the washer, hot water in the hot kitchen wetting his clothes; he scrubbed the pots by hand and at the night's end he mopped the floor and the bartender sent him a bottle of beer; but he only worked there in summers, when the students were gone. He saw Robin painting the walls beside him, their brushstrokes as uniform as the beating of their hearts. He was approaching the bar next to the bus station. He did not like it because the band was too loud, and the people were losers, but he often went there anyway, because he could sit and drink and watch the losers dancing without having to make one gesture he had to think about, the way he did at Timmy's when he sat with the girls and was conscious of his shoulders and arms and hands, of his eyes and mouth as if he could see them, so that he smiled—and coolly, he knew—when girl after girl year after year touched his flesh and sometimes his heart and told him he was cool.
He went into the bar, feeling the bass drum beat as though it came from the floor and walls, and took the one untaken stool and ordered a shot of Comfort, out of habit checking his pocket although he knew he had three ones and some change. Everyone he saw was drunk, and the bartender was drinking. Vic was at the end of the bar; Mike nodded at him. He drank the shot and pushed the glass toward the bartender. His fingers trembled. He sipped the Comfort and lit a cigarette, cold sweat on his brow, and he thought he would have to go outside into the cold air or vomit.
He finished the shot then moved through the crow to Vic and spoke close to his ear and the gold earring. "I need some downs." Vic wanted a dollar apiece. "Come on," Mike said. "Two." Vic's arm left the bar and he put two in Mike's hand; Mike gave him the dollar and left, out onto the cold street, heading uphill, swallowing, but his throat was dry and the second one lodged; he took a handful of snow from a mound at the base of a parking meter and ate it. He walked on the lee side of the buildings now. He was dead with her. He lay on the bridge, his arm around her, his face in her hair. At the dormitory the night shift detectives would talk to the girls inside, out of the cold; they would sit in the big glassed-in room downstairs where drunk one night he had pissed on the carpet while Robin laughed before they went up to her room. The girls would speak his name. His name was in that room, back there in the dormitory; it was not walking up the hill in his clothing. He had two joints in his room and he would smoke those while he waited, lying dressed on his bed. When he heard their footsteps in the hall he would put on his jacket and open the door before they knocked and walk with them to the cruiser. He walked faster up the hill.
DRIVING THE HEART
BY JASON BROWN
Boston General Hospital
(Originally published in 1999)
Traveling between Danvers and Natick yesterday I saw a man in a flower truck drive by at 80 m.p.h. with his eyes closed. I turned to Dale, a guy the hospital hired for me to train, and said, "Nothing, not even someone's liver, is that important." He put his hand on top of the metal case marked Liver and nodded.
We drive the no-rush jobs, eyeballs, livers, morphine, or kidneys, through the day traffic to or from the airport. Sometimes when a patient decides to die at home and runs out of painkillers, we will bring extra morphine out to them at night. Tonight we are driving way out to Lebanon Springs, to the town where I was born, with a heart for a woman about to die from some accident or some disease. Hearts travel at night.
Dale sits next to me holding the metal box marked Heart. His eyes droop. His head leans to the right. Next thing he'll be sleeping, dreaming down the highway. I know what it's like.
When the weather is foul like tonight and the airplane can't make it, they send us. We're the only choice they have of reaching such a small town in such an out-of-the-way place. Cellular phone service is out and in many places the power is out, but most of the regular pay phones still work. We stop every hour at designated places and call the hospital to make sure the patient in Lebanon is still alive. The hospital is in contact with Lebanon. We are not allowed to stop for food or drink and, if we can help it, even to urinate on this six-hour journey. We make the call and if she's still alive we rush on. If not then we can pause briefly for food and bathroom before we turn around and drive without stopping for Worcester, where a plane will take the heart to some other person in a city with a major airport. This heart, however, is getting old. There probably won't be time to take it anywhere after Lebanon.
Hearts are packed in ice. But even a frozen heart will only last for twenty-four hours on the outside, unofficially. That's why if we have to take it to Worcester, there will only be time to fly the heart to a major airport, then rush it from there by helicopter to a hospital in the same city. There is always a patient. Driving to Lebanon, we shoot for six or seven hours at the most. Tonight we have to hurry through the high winds and beating rain, in order not to waste this heart.
I stop the car and have Dale run out through the rain to the pay phone with the number I gave him.
"What's her name?" he asks.
"You won't be talking to her," I say, "and it doesn't matter. Just give the hospital the job number. They'll say drive on if she's still alive, or turn around."
A few minutes later he comes running back, gets in the car, brushes the rain off his sleeves, and nods his head. After a few more minutes he says, "I'm hungry," even though I've already explained the rules.
Hospital delivery often attracts people like myself, who have cared very deeply about the wrong things. Who, in less than half an average life span, have been born, born again, arrested for armed robbery, and born once more. A person can only be born so many times before even the Christians don't want to take you seriously. The second time I was born I was twenty years old and lying in a donated suit on the floor of a jail in Sturgis, Michigan. I remember one of the officers brought me a bowl of stew and suggested I eat something before going into court, but I shook my head. I was being charged with driving under the influence and assaulting a police officer, although I didn't remember doing those things. The judge informed me that I had drunk ten ounces of 151 in a few hours. He lowered his head after this announcement, not because I was a startling case, but because I was the same kind of case he saw day after day and he was tired. I asked what I co
uld do to show him that I had finally gotten the picture, that all I wanted was one more chance. He looked at me and laughed, which was to say: that's what everybody says. He didn't know that I was reborn, that over in Grass Lake, where I wanted to go after I was released, people believed.
We drive all over New England, sometimes to New York, but mostly we stay around the Boston area. If you know the Wenham-Woburn-Needham-Braintree route, then you know that the places to live are Belmont, Weston, Concord, or beyond but not so far out as Lowell. All the names up and down the coast, Weekapaug, Quonochontaug, Naquit, Teaticket, Menauhaunt, and Falmouth Heights, remind me of the life I could have had if things had been different. I have a friend living that life over in Sakonnet right now. I go over and visit him once in a while—from his second-floor bathroom window a sliver of ocean can be seen.
Dale reaches over and turns the radio up; he leans on his right elbow against the window. He slumps in his seat. I turn the radio back down. No amount of training will make a kid like this understand his job. Even as the passenger you should sit alert. Someone else's life sits in your hands. His head nods against the passenger window as I flick the radio off. "No more radio," I say. That wakes him up. Dale straightens himself and asks what happened to the woman who needs the heart, but I can tell by the way he fiddles with the buttons on his coat that he doesn't really care. I tell him I don't know, that the woman could be thirty, could be seventy. Could be heart disease, could be anything, they never tell me. Usually they take the heart from someone who is alive but brain-dead and transport it to someone whose thoughts are clear but whose heart is dead. And in truth, I explain, they usually give preference to the young. The moment the heart leaves the body of the donor, it is cross-clamped and the clock starts ticking. In the Lebanon hospital they are standing there in the operating room right now, smocked and ready, waiting for us. Dale nods and we drive on in silence.
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