One Long River of Song

by Brian Doyle

  Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backward. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied starfrontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

  Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

  The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a small room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

  Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

  So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

  A Shrew

  One time a long time ago when I was supple and strong and rubbery

  As a snake in a hurry I was on my belly in the bush and saw a shrew

  In the litter of leaves and for the longest shortest moment we startled

  Each other considerably but maybe the scale of our encounter was so

  Ludicrously unbalanced that our normal fear of weird missed the bus,

  Leaving us eye to eye under the epic ambition of a huckleberry tangle.

  I remember thinking that the shrew was awfully near my two absolute

  Favorite eyeballs and that shrews are said to be terrors among the tiny.

  I remember that it was the size of a thumb or a thimble or a little cigar.

  I remember that it had a lustrous dense shining coat as black as can be.

  I remember wondering even then what it could possibly be wondering.

  I remember that he or she seemed to be missing a northeast appendage.

  Many questions and angles of inquiry presented themselves to me later,

  Such as what combination of factors could deduct a limb from a shrew,

  And what manner of beast could have executed said deletion—perhaps

  A romantic tangle, a political wrangle, a religious debate turned savage

  As so often has been the case? Or the usual suspects snuffling for meat.

  Or maybe shrews, who do not live long in the way the world calculates,

  Dissolve a leg at a time, growing ever closer to the sensuous roil of soil,

  As do we all. But meanwhile there’s such a hungry immediacy, correct?

  All these years later that’s what I remember from that shrewish moment,

  That I stopped thinking and just stared. Yes, partly because I was scared,

  But there was something beyond curiosity or the startle of astonishment.

  For just an instant I paid attention with every shard and iota of my being.

  Maybe we couldn’t survive if we were like that all the time, I don’t know,

  But when it happens we see that which none of us can find the words for.

  Sometimes we are starving to see every bit of what is right in front of us.

  Tigers

  I am standing in the hospital watching babies emerge from my wife like a circus act. First one out is a boy, dark-haired and calm, the size of an owl. He is immediately commandeered by a nurse who whisks him off for a bath and a stint in what appears to be a tiny tanning bed. Now, says the doctor, reaching around inside my wife while he talks, here’s the other one, and he hauls out another boy. This one is light-haired and not calm; he grabs for a nurse’s scissors and won’t let go and they have to pry his fingers off and the nurse looks accusingly at me for some reason and I want to say hey, I don’t even know the guy, but I don’t say anything, being overwhelmed with new roommates and tears and astonishment at people emerging from my wife one after another like a circus act.

  This boy, the second one, the burglar, turns out to have a major problem. He’s missing a chamber in his heart. You need four chambers and most people get four, but he gets only three and there’s no one to whom I can complain so they have to fix him, otherwise he dies.

  Fixing him entails
cutting open his chest with a saw and prying the chest bone open with a tool that looks like the Jaws of Life and chilling his heart with a bucket of ice and hooking him up to a machine that continues to pump his blood and some of mine through his brain and body while the surgeon reroutes his veins.

  I ask if I can hold him in my lap during the operation, just to have my skin on his skin while he goes off to another planet while they fix him, but they say no.

  Outside the hospital window I see three crows dogging a hawk. The hawk flinches when they flare by his head, he ducks and rolls and hunches his shoulders, but he doesn’t leave the tree. His troubles are inches from his face but he glares and waits, stolid, angry, churning, his thoughts sharp as razors, his brain filled with blood and meat.

  The operation was really two operations, it turns out, and the doctors did the first one pretty soon after he was born, and that operation went by in a blur. Then comes a second operation when he is almost two years old, and that goes by in a blur, too, though I remember a nurse praying by his crib at four in the morning when I got up to pray by his crib.

  A day after his second operation the doctors tell me I can try to feed him real food, the food he likes, which is peas.

  So here I am feeding him in his hospital bed. The bed is cantilevered up at the north end so that he can eat. He is eating pea by pea. He is awake but groggy and each time a pea hovers into his viewfinder he regards it with sluggish surprise. He likes peas. I put the peas in his mouth one by one. His lips reach out a little for each pea and then maul it gently for a while before the pea disappears. Each time his lips accept the pea they also accept the ends of my thumb and forefinger for an instant. After thirteen peas he falls asleep and I crank the bed back flat and kneel down and pray like hell.

  Next day the doctors say I can heft him gently out of his bed and hold him, just be careful with all the wires and tubes. There are a lot of wires and tubes. There is a heart monitor running from his chest to a machine the size of a dryer. There is a breathing tube planted in his nose. There is a blood pressure monitor attached to his big toe. There is a drainage tube running from his chest to a clear plastic box on the end of his bed. The box fills twice a day with blood and water. There is a tube in his neck, in his carotid artery. This tube runs nowhere. It’s for emergencies. It’s the tube through which the doctors would cram major drugs in case the surgical repair of his heart fails, slumps over, gives out, blows a tire, gives up the ghost, kicks the bucket, hits the wall, buys the farm.

  I lift him out of the bed. He whimpers and moans. I feel like my fingers are knives on him, but I fold him into my lap and we settle back into the recliner and arrange the wires and tubes so that no machines are beeping. I grab the clicker and flip on the television, which hangs from the ceiling like a goiter. Click bass fishing click talk show click infomercial click news click nature show click basketball game click sitcom click commercial at which point the boy who has been slumped in my lap like a dozing seal suddenly reaches for the clicker, startling me; I thought he was asleep. But no—he punches away at the clicker with his thumb and back down the channels we go, click sitcom click basketball game click nature show, which is about tigers, and having arrived at the tigers he wanted to see, he stops clicking, leans back in my lap again, and laughs!, a guttural chortle, a deep-in-the-throat guffaw, a basso huh huh huh, and a great sob rises in me suddenly, and for the next few minutes as we watch the massive grace and power and patience of tigers I cry like the baby he used to be before all these tubes and wires, because this is the first time he’s laughed in weeks, and he is going to be fine, and everything is suddenly over.

  A few minutes later he grows tired of tigers and the excitement of being out of bed and I put him back in the bed and arrange his nest of wires and tubes, and he is already asleep by the time I flip out the light and stand against the window and lean forward and touch the window with my face and think about hawks and tigers, and pray like crazy.

  Leap

  A couple leaped from the South Tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

  Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

  Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

  The mayor reported the mist.

  A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

  Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backward with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.

  Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

  But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

  I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

  Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

  No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.

  Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold on to that.

  Two Hearts

  Some months ago my wife delivered twin sons one minute apart. The older is Joseph and the younger is Liam. Joseph is dark and Liam is light. Joseph is healthy and Liam is not. Joseph has a whole heart and Liam has half. This means that Liam will have two major surgeries before he is three years old. The first surgery—during which a doctor will slice open my son’s chest with a razor, saw his breastbone in half, and reconstruct the flawed plumbing of his heart—is imminent.

  I have read many pamphlets about Liam’s problem. I have watched many doctors’ hands drawing red and blue lines on pieces of white paper. They are trying to show me why Liam’s heart doesn’t work properly. Blue lines are for blood that needs oxygen. Red lines are for blood that needs to be pumped out of the heart. I watch the markers in the doctors’ hands. Here comes red, there goes blue. The heart is a railroad station where the trains are switched to different tracks. A nor
mal heart switches trains flawlessly two billion times in a life; in an abnormal heart, like Liam’s, the trains crash and the station crumbles to dust.

  There are many nights just now when I tuck Liam and his wheezing train station under my beard in the blue hours of night and think about his Maker. I would kill the god who sentenced him to such awful pain, I would stab him in the heart like he stabbed my son, I would shove my fury in his face like a fist, but I know in my own broken heart that this same god made my magic boys, shaped their apple faces and coyote eyes, put joy in the eager suck of their mouths. So it is that my hands are not clenched in anger but clasped in confused and merry and bitter prayer.

  I talk to God more than I admit. “Why did you break my boy?” I ask.

  I gave you that boy, He says, and his lean brown brother, and the elfin daughter you love so.

  “But you wrote death on his heart,” I say.

  I write death on all hearts, He says, just as I write life.

  This is where our conversation always ends, and I am left holding the extraordinary awful perfect prayer of my second son, who snores like a seal, who might die tomorrow, who did not die today.