Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  My prisoner sat on a stool in the supervisor’s office, waiting for the police. I sat with him, chain-smoking. He shot shy glances at me now and then. I could tell he had something on his mind.

  “What?” I said.

  “I used to be married,” he said. “She was a good woman. But I—you know...”

  “I know,” I said.

  He smiled, his eyes wise with special knowledge. “I bet you do,” he said.

  He was quiet for a while, then said, “She called me Doctor Love. I don’t mean to brag, but that’s the way it was with us.”

  His grin faded, his eyes fogged over with nostalgia and confusion and regret. “Goddamn bitch,” he said.

  “I hear you, man,” I said.

  “You ever notice that time runs backwards in a mirror,” he said abstractedly. “You figure that says something?”

  “We can only hope,” I said.

  The Singular We

  What grows in your garden of dreams can kill you. Cancer has a thousand different seed beds. The heart will wither and fail in the mildest drought. The brain sits on its slender stem like a delicate white flower. These organs are vulnerable to the soul’s harsh seasons. All diagnoses are true. All remedies are quack. The truth is, we were not made for survival. I want to tell Señora Applegate this, but I specialize in lies. I am the one who will save her, but what saves her will be a fiction. Do you think that matters? It doesn’t.

  Fern Applegate understands this much: Doctors, most of the mainstream AMA types, get impatient with you when you assume knowledge of your own body. They believe they know you better than you know yourself. Your body is the subject of their long, demanding, and costly study. It is a hegemony established over the bloody millennia. It is their turf, and amateur opinions are not welcome. They know that livers, hearts, stomachs, lungs, bladders, kidneys, and spleens are not open to unlearned public debate but rather are major topological features of a dark interior continent, a continent whose shorelines and inlets and spiny divides have been thoroughly mapped, measured, catalogued, and traveled by the argonauts of medical science since Galen.

  Fern ardently believes she is unique: medical science tells her she is not. One femur is virtually indistinguishable from another—once you disregard such local properties as size, shape, density, and relative health. A knuckle is a knuckle, be it Hittite, Hottentot, Mongol, Inuit, or WASP. The history of our tragic descent from the trees is available in any worn-out knee you choose to study. Superficial features aside, we are one body. Individuality, the doctors know, is a romantic myth, a useful energizing principle in politics and the arts. In the operating room, surgeons count on the reliability of sameness. They do not want surprises when they open a chest cavity to replace the wheezing ventricles with sturdy replacements from the anonymous young donor who was good enough to run his two-hundred-seventy-five horsepower Z-300-X into a bridge abutment. Anonymity is a blessing in disguise.

  And Fern knew what she was up against: The good doctors see you as a squatter in your own body with limited squatter’s rights. You are not simply on their turf, you are their turf. Fern may have been a brief candle with a seductive personal luminosity, but her unremarkable wax and wick are theirs alone. And she knew that in doubting her neurologist, Dr. Mike Higgins, she was doubting the compass direction and self-assured thrust of Western Medical Science.

  But then every belief system is sooner or later tested. When Fern’s MRI showed, indisputably, a “large mass” in the sella turcica, above and behind the sphenoid sinus, camped at the base of her brain and engulfing the pituitary gland, everything she had come to believe about herself threatened to collapse like a house of cards.

  At thirty-nine she was a blaze of suntanned health. Blond, firm, tennis-lean, she was chief executive of her own company, The Magic Gourd—a New Age curio emporium—and the wife of a professor of mathematics at the local branch of the state university system. Her symptoms had been almost negligible. A flurry of bright spots, like flashbulbs going off across a stadium, would make a dazzling display now and then in the far left comer of her vision. Her ophthalmologist said there was nothing abnormal about her eye and sent her to Southwest Diagnostic for a brain scan.

  Fern didn’t smoke or drink, and she ate leafy foods that were organically grown. She read the works of visionary nutritionists who shared the belief that preventive medicine was, if not the only medicine, the best medicine. She also believed that there existed cures for disease that were not recognized by the medical orthodoxy, cures developed over the centuries by the brujos and curan-deros of Mexico, the medicine men of Native American culture, as well as the die-hard pagan herbalists of the Old World.

  And now, after having endured endocrinological tests and MRIs and CT scans, Fern was told by Dr. Higgins that surgery and only surgery could amend her condition. The tumor had to come out, and soon. “It’s in a bad spot, Fern,” he said. “It’s pushing into the optic chiasm—the place where the optic nerves cross—and its got a grip on your carotid arteries. If there’s an infarction...”

  Fern never felt better. How could she have a brain tumor big as a golf ball? How could her life be at risk at its peak? She’d never felt sexier or enjoyed sex more. Was it possible that her passion was merely a symptom of a pituitary gland gone wild because of a tumor’s influence? Were her enthusiasm, receptivity, and romantic daydreams just chemical accidents? Did her heightened sexiness signify a gloomy pathology?

  “...two methods of attack, Fern,” Dr. Higgins was saying. “We can do a conventional craniotomy, which might be best, since there’s a possibility this tumor might be a menengioma rather than a chromophobe macroadenoma. Or we can do the nondisfiguring transsphenoidal—up the nose. Right now I’d opt for the transsphenoidal. Focused radiation might have been a possibility some months ago, Fern, before the tumor reached its present size. But that would be too dangerous now, since the lesion is elevating the optic nerves.”

  Fern thought hard. She did not want disfiguring doors sawed into her skull, nor did she want Mike Higgins entering her brain through her nose. She was not ready to surrender her idea of herself, though she liked and respected Dr. Higgins.

  “I’m going to try some alternative approaches first, Mike,” she said, returning his familiarity.

  Mike Higgins had heard such spunky defiance before. He sympathized with these patients, wished to God he didn’t have to be the one to give them the bad news. But after years of trying to soften the blow by treating their evasions and fantasies with respect—an indulgence that only made the blow far more devastating when it came—he decided it was best to be up-front and direct. These people were grown-ups after all, and had to be accorded the dignity of having achieved a comprehensive vision of their lives, one that could accommodate the looming presence of mortality. Deeply religious people handled these bombshell announcements best. But self-indulgent dilettantes like Fern Applegate would erect shells of denial to the very end. Oddly, it was all too often the bright and educated who were most likely to challenge diagnosis and treatment.

  Dr. Higgins patted Fern’s knee. He was a big, fleshy man. His bearlike shoulders sloped with the gravity of his task. “We’ll do our very best to make you comfortable,” he said. “I guarantee you, your suffering will be minimal, Fernie. I’ve done hundreds of these.”

  “I’m not going to suffer at all,” Fern said. “I’m going to beat this damn thing, Mike.”

  Dr. Higgins hated to patronize his patients. But sometimes it was impossible not to. “Yes, we are, Fern,” he said. “We are going to beat this damn thing.” He shook Fern’s hand and scheduled another appointment for her.

  Fern decided not to tell her husband, Hector. Hector Applegate lived in abstract mathematical space. He paid no attention at all to his body. He ate what he wanted, or whatever junk food was handy, smoked unfiltered Camels, took no exercise, had no interest in himself as a flesh-and-blood entity.

  He was something of a child—her illnesses devastated him. He�
�d lost his preoccupied air when Fern had to spend a week in the hospital after her hysterectomy. A crop of fibroid tumors the size of hazelnuts had been discovered in her uterus. The pain and bleeding from this obtrusive clutter of tissue made surgery a necessity. Fern believed the surgeon’s knife had its place. You didn’t consult the stars over an ingrown toenail. Fibroids were intruders that required eviction. The surgeon, as the body’s landlord, would effect their swift removal. Fern could accept this.

  Hector had trembled in the waiting room, going out to the parking lot every ten minutes to fight up a Camel. He was a slight man with a large head, not in a freakish way but in a way that made you think of history’s great innovators: men who require capacious skulls to accommodate the billowing complexity of their thoughts, men who neglect their bodies because they are hopelessly transfixed by the abstract workings of the cerebral cortex. He smoked and wept, the subtleties of Chaos Theory momentarily overshadowed by the mystifying brutality of ordinary life.

  He was a narrow-focus genius. Outside his field of specialization, he was usually at a disadvantage. Just now the macroscopic behavior of phase transitions preoccupied him, but when he set aside his intense involvement with his life’s work, he was an ordinary and loving family man.

  He rarely got sick. When he did he went straight to his HMO’s primary care physician and passively accepted what the doctor prescribed. The doctor appreciated this, understood it as respect. Hector gave the doctor his turf without haggling. Like all good academicians, Hector knew instinctively that one did not question another’s area of specialization. His best friend, a historian, was an expert in medieval European kitchen utensils. But when they visited over lunch in the faculty dining room, they talked baseball, the future of American politics, the best way to weatherproof double-hung sash-style windows. At parties, Fern often embarrassed Hector by offering unschooled opinions to colleagues who had spent their entire adult lives achieving what they considered to be small but durable additions to their area of scholarship.

  “I think the Africanized bee will wipe out the organic-honey industry of Texas,” she once said to a world-renowned entomologist.

  Hector winced. The entomologist frowned—the same automatic frown that appeared on Dr. Higgins’s forehead when Fern challenged his recommendations. “It’s somewhat more complicated than that, Mrs. Applegate,” the entomologist said politely.

  Hector loved Fern and Fern loved Hector. They had a good marriage. Their children—two teenagers and a ten-year-old—were well-balanced high-achievers. But Fern couldn’t tell Hector about her diagnosis because she knew he would side with the experts. Fern had her own experts, but they were not recognized by the sanctioning academies. They were on or beyond the fringe.

  To her surprise, Fern was not depressed over her bad luck. She had taken tumor-shrinking herbal teas during the months after her diagnosis, along with a steroid, Decadron, that Dr. Higgins had prescribed. The steroid had side effects, both good and bad. The bad were supposed to be depression, nausea, headache. The good were euphoria and increased appetite. So far she had only experienced the good. She’d gained ten pounds and felt happy about it. She also felt an excitement, like a child waiting for Christmas.

  One of Fern’s contacts, an herbalist, recommended a curandera near Monterrey, Mexico, on the road to Saltillo. This curandera had a fabulous reputation. Fern packed her Audi and told Hector that she was going to visit her big brother, Louie, who lived in San Antonio. She’d close shop for a few days and bring in Xochi Lucero to run the household. Xochi, their maid and baby-sitter for fifteen years, lived in Ciudad Juárez. She had no green card, but that was a small matter in El Paso, where practically every middleand upper-middle-class family employed undocumented women to clean, cook, and take care of children. Immigration officials did not pursue this large-scale illegal activity. If they did, half the population of the city would have to be indicted. Most of these Mexican women made fifteen to twenty dollars a day, twice what they could have made in the dozens of foreign-owned factories, the maquilas, of Juárez. The national furor over Zoe Baird’s use of illegals as baby-sitters and her subsequent humiliation before an inquisitionally minded congressional subcommittee, amused and perplexed most El Pasoans. ¿Qué es el problema?

  Fern’s brother, Louis Stanton, lived in the King William district of San Antonio, a neighborhood of extraordinary neneteenth-century mansions. He was a retired air force colonel, having flown sixty missions in Vietnam. Louis, a happy eccentric, was ten years older than Fern. His wife, Kelly, had left him for a hippie minister while Louis was spreading cluster bombs throughout Lu Tan. It tickled him that Kelly’s minister had shed the cloth for a three-piece Armani and became an officer of one of the largest S&Ls in Texas to go belly-up. Then Kelly dumped him for another air force guy, this time a brigadier general who was the Pentagon liaison for a company that manufactured the electronics for smart bombs. “Isn’t that a kick in the tushy?” Louis said every time he recited this history. “I believe that I was bom to implement and then provide an audience for this singular joke. My life’s work is done.” Louis was a tall, silver-haired, movie-star-handsome drunk who did tai chi to Frank Sinatra records.

  “I’ve got a brain tumor, Louis,” Fern told him after their second Beefeater.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Louis said. “We Stantons don’t get brain tumors. We get hemorrhoids, ulcers, and heart attacks. In that order.”

  “They say if I don’t have it taken out, it will blind me, or maybe infarct, and kill me. They’re trying to worry me, Louis.”

  Louis took her in his arms. He would have said something consoling had he been able to. But he’d seen too much of hopelessness to indulge in sentimental lying. After a long minute of holding her close he said, “Shit, sis.”

  The next day, Fem drives south toward Monterrey, Mexico, and then to my little red house halfway to Saltillo. Since we have corresponded, I am expecting her. The cure I will effect will come from her, from the dark cave in her soul where the purifying waters hide.

  She is very güera, blond, and guapa, in that gringa way, a way that makes our short dark men stare momentarily, then turn away and smile to themselves. Such self-assurance is always a mask that conceals the face of chaos. The long, confident stride, the frank gaze, the uncompromising cheer and friendliness—all admirable in the geometrically ordered north, but unconvincing, even menacing, here.

  I like her, despite this. She is a child of light and has never seen her own shadow—the shadow inside, the second self, the ungeometric one who empowers and disempowers.

  “Why have you come to me, señora?” I ask, as I always ask.

  “You are a curandera. The best, I’ve heard. I am here to be cured.”

  “Wait, ’’I say, and go into another room. She must sit in the hard wooden chair, enduring the heat of my little un-air-conditioned house, while I finish washing my dishes. I expect she will think that the ring and clatter of china is the sound of potion-making. I need no potions, nor does she. We are in the process of inventing a fiction, one that will speak directly to her shadow. Está bien. For this much is true, every human body is unique, despite the convincing similarities. Sameness is the superficial reality that hides the peculiar twists and turns your physiology has been forced to take by a spirit world of good and bad influences. Every diseased organ is diseased because it was the recipient of a dark romance that must be exposed by a darker romance—my fictive art.

  Fern sat naked on the short-legged wooden table while Señora Montes held a black chicken over her head. She spoke in a language that was not Spanish, a pre-Columbian tongue that was guttural and lilting at the same time, a language of impossible consonants and hissing, diphthonging vowels. The burning copal, the resinous stuff that filled the room with incense, made Fern’s eyes weepy. The weepiness of her eyes worked its way down into her chest and she held back a sob as long as she could, then let it out. It was followed by another, and then more tears, a freshet,
as if a hidden tap had been twisted open and then beyond open. Through her tears, the room seemed red to her, though there wasn’t much red in it, and the eh, eh, eh, sounds Señora Montes was making also seemed red.

  Señora Montes passed the docile chicken over and around Fern’s shaking body, then set it aside and resumed the process with an eagle feather. Fern remembered a scene from her childhood, her father walking down a country path, away from her, she screaming at him to stop. It felt like an abandonment of some kind, an exaggerated mood that could not have meaning, for her childhood had been happy, and her parents loved one another and lived harmoniously, and yet his receding back, how the twilight caught in the folds of his shirt, how he seemed willing to allow himself to be swallowed by the darkness of the trees, moved her to scream at him, as if his peril was obvious only to her. The memory came unbidden, and made her sob again. But how could it have meaning?

  Está bien, Señora Montes said, touching Fern’s forehead with an egg. The cool egg drew on the skin of her forehead, drew on the bones and the sinus cavities inside the bones, and touched something even deeper. La limpia, the cleansing, was now complete. A young girl came in with a basin of water and a coarse cloth. Señora Montes went back into her kitchen and fixed herself a cup of tea while Fern bathed and put her clothes back on. The money was incidental. Fern left it on the table, and later, when the curandera picked it up and put it into her leather wallet, she did not count it.

  The operation—an up-the nose transsphenoidal—conducted by Mike Higgins, was a total sucess. The tumor was not a difficult one, not a clinging menengioma, but a fatty macroadenoma he spooned out like a puddle of Jell-O, leaving the neighboring arteries and nerves unmolested. It was more accessible than the radiologist had predicted, based on his readings of the MRI. “It looks like it de-bulked itself somewhat,” Mike Higgins said, attributing the redefined space around the tumor to a steroid he had administered two weeks before the operation. “The magic of modern chemistry,” he said.