Day Out of Days (22 page)

They wheeled him into the operating room and parked him under a bank of intense halogen lights. One of them depressed a brake and tested the gurney to see if it might somehow run off on its own but it held firm. Large monitor screens loomed down at angles from the ceiling. One of the green male nurses explained in a very flat even voice that he was going to attach a sterile bag
around the penis and testicles in case there might be some involuntary urination during the process, in which case he should feel free to cut loose. He remembered nodding to the nurse as though giving permission and then felt his sexual parts being collected as someone might gather up plums at the grocery store and stuff them into a bag for weighing. He wondered how many times in a week this nurse might repeat this process and then he wondered again about the body-building. The idea that he might piss himself in front of total strangers bothered him more than the possibility that something could go terribly wrong in the catheter’s sojourn into the long and winding cardiovascular system. A chunk of plaque might easily chip off and rush directly to the heart or the artery might entirely reject the implanted stent and the whole game would be over, just like that. The whole game.

“Can’t believe that was—how many months ago and here I am now—Snow. Ice. Subzero. Maybe it’s not such a great idea to push this thing. You don’t really know what you’re doing, do you? Sucking in cold air can’t be so good for an ailing heart. What if something actually happened—I mean out here in the middle of nowhere? Who’s going to find you? First of all you’d probably freeze to death if the heart didn’t finish you off right away. It would take days for them to track you down. You never even told anybody you were coming up here. Very smart. There you’d be—stiff as a board, wildlife sniffing all around your corpse. Fox. Badger. Great horned owls landing on your chest in the night, pecking at your eyes. Critters shitting all over your sorry self—what’s left of it. Who’s going to know? You could lay out here for weeks before they’d track you down.” He kept moving; shuffling through the crusted snow like some preprogrammed android. He had no real plan. He wasn’t counting his pulse or measuring miles or going about this in any sort of scientific way. He was just crashing ahead through the cedars and pines, hoping he wasn’t going in circles like the proverbial lost desert rat. What was he actually trying to prove? he asked himself but no answer came back. Nothing but the
pounding blood in his head, the gasping breath. “This was stupid,” he began to chant. “This is really dumb.” But nothing in him stopped. His legs kept churning; his arms kept swinging. He tried returning to his original idea—that it might just be possible to find the real threshold where the body gave out entirely. But then, how was that supposed to work exactly? Would he be able to sense the very early stages of a full-blown heart attack through some mysterious prescience he couldn’t assume he possessed and then draw back and save himself with a raw act of will which he also found deeply absent? In fact, suddenly, nothing in him seemed deliberate. It was as though he had become possessed by a maniac intent on provoking calamity and he was just along for the ride. He charged on, sweat pouring down his ribs and the insides of his thighs. The back of his skull felt like it might blow off. In the distance someone was practicing with a high-powered rifle; the dull thud of the repercussion drilling through his chest, straight to the heart. Now the whole world seemed to be about nothing but the heart. Like when a baby is born into the family all you can see is babies. Or dying—someone dying in the hospital—but that wasn’t right. The rifle went off again in a staccato flutter. His heart seemed to match the report, thumping up through the stem of his neck into both temples. The air was so cold the moisture from his eyes froze them shut when he blinked then cracked back open with a sting. He was losing sensation in both thumbs even though he’d pulled Thinsulate gloves on over thinner wool ones then encased both hands in puffy red mittens. The rifle kept on thudding in regular intervals. He wondered who it was who could be so utterly bored that they needed to come out in weather like this and shoot random holes in a pine tree. But then, who could be so out of their minds as to lash snowshoes to their feet and slam through cold woods pretending to be a man on a mission?

A slim plane silently etched its way across the blank sky. He kept marching far below. He thought about the passengers at twenty thousand feet, heading somewhere—somewhere warm
and tropical. Mexico, maybe. The thought of Mexico always warmed his heart. There it was again—the heart. Coming up again. How many aspects to it? How could something so animal become fractured into so many parts? Montezuma. Rivers of blood pouring down the halls. Glimmering shrines to the Dreaded Duality. Two monstrous eyes encrusted with precious stones, girdled with serpents and clawed lizards, necklaces of silver hearts and below, dripping in golden chains, the very human hearts freshly torn from the hairless chests of teenage children—ripped out of them with obsidian daggers in the shapes of eagles and dogs. The walls and floors of the oratory were so splashed and encrusted with blood they had turned a deep ebony black, throbbing in the pit of the jungle. He marched on through ice.

Sometimes, lying propped up against the half-opened window, a great calm would come over him listening to the distant songs of madmen moaning in the streets below. He could never make out the exact words but melody lines would weave together; weave in and out of other sounds like faraway sirens, trains, TVs from other open windows, babbling news. There was some peace in the distance, in the listening, in the longing wails impossible to be answered. Peace of a kind that had no ambition, no plan, no political motive. Peace for its own sake.

Man finally makes it to the shore of the lake with the severed head teetering above him the whole way. He can hardly wait to get rid of it. This whole ordeal. The burning pain in the back of his neck. The trembling in his shoulders and arms. Why should he have to endure this torture? For what? He stands there panting, staring out across the flat green water to the cattails on the opposite shore. A great blue heron struts then freezes on one leg; its wild yellow eye staring back, over all that space. “Right here,” the head tells him. “This is perfect. Right here.”

“What do you want me to do?” asks the man with a helpless whine.

“Just toss me in,” says the head. “Just give me the old heave-ho!” The man lowers the head to his waist and stares into the face of it. The eyes are still shut tight; squinting with that rictus that must have been its last quick moment before the sword came down. The man has a sudden wish that he could see into the eyes of the head for just one flashing second. That he might see the person behind the voice. That he might know something, some small inkling of the nature of the head.

“Do you think you could open your eyes for me? Just once?” asks the man.

“No,” says the head, without hesitation.

“Why?” asks the man.

“Because you wouldn’t be able to take it,” answers the head. The man quickly tosses the head straight up in the air, without knowing why. It’s as though his whole body has reacted with an electric
jolt and jettisoned something poisonous. The heron takes off on the far side of the lake, pumping its enormous wings in slow motion. When the tumbling head smacks down into the flat green water it immediately bobs back up and starts swirling in tight circles like a volleyball cast overboard in the open sea. The man makes a little gasp as he watches the head twist and roll through the expanding ripples, drifting farther and farther from shore. The man takes three quick steps into the water as though he might swim after it and catch hold of its black, curly hair but the man stops short and just watches the head floating away. The shadow of the great blue heron passes over the man, who can’t take his eyes off the head. Then the head just sinks and never comes back up. It just sinks like that. As the man watches intensely for any sign of its reappearance, the green water slowly heals itself back to stillness. Smooth and flat. A painted turtle pops its yellow nose up on a lily pad. The man waits there a long, long time, knee deep in the water, searching for any sign of the head, but nothing comes up. Finally, the man turns his back on the lake and wades to shore. He stands there dripping for a while, afraid to turn around. He can hear the drone of the highway, far off. The chimes of the church. He can see the gray dot of the heron, sailing away. He opens his mouth but nothing comes out. No expression of any kind.

What little town was that where we drove for miles weaving through hills and hills of olive groves poured out like little oceans and arrived at a tall gray pensión with an ancient church right across and canaries singing in every window from every balcony and old pudgy women in black ankle-length dresses hobbling along and the two of us, I remember, walking hand in hand with our children, talking of living somewhere idyllic just like this somewhere suspended in time and then all of us brought to a stop by a pianist practicing some lovely lilting waltz outside a window with iron bars in a narrow backstreet and we all just stood there entranced and applauded from the street when it ended for the unseen player and from somewhere deep inside the thick stucco walls, very faintly, came a woman’s voice, very very soft, and the voice said “Gracias,” and we walked on.

That was one of those days I remember.