C Reiss - Sing

I waved my hand in front of it. Nothing happened. I don’t know what I was checking for, or what about this mattered. He was brain dead. His body was a life system for a functioning heart muscle. End of story. I tore myself away from him and focused on the machines. There had to be a switch or a plug. Right?

There were switches and plugs everywhere, and nowhere. All the wires ran behind a two ton apparatus and disappeared.

Fuck. Why did I think this was going to be simple?

I flipped any switch I could get my hand on, and though the thing whined, there was no way to tell if what I was doing was having the necessary effect.

“That does absolutely nothing,” came a voice from behind me. I recognized it immediately in its shocking cold efficiency. Jessica.

“Get out,” I said.

In two steps she was at the machines, flipping everything back to the way it was. “You don’t move a girl in a vegetative state and care for her for ten years without learning something.”

“Get out!” I shouted.

“Listen,” she shouted back. Our voices were covered by the fire alarm, but for how much longer? “Find his catheter.”

I froze for a second, battling everything I believed about Jessica, and what I saw in front of me. She was trying to help me. Was it love? Or was she saving the goose and the golden eggs?

Did it matter?

I found the tube coming from the center of the bed and ending in a sealed bag under it. She saw me look at it.

“Put a kink in it. It’ll back up and he’ll die of septic shock in an hour.”

A few drops of yellow liquid flowed through the tube. Jessica put her hand on my arm. She wasn’t going to do it.

It was all me.

He loved me because he thought I was good. Would he love me if I ruined myself for him?

The fire alarm stopped. The silence was overwhelming. I could hear the forced breaths, and if I listened closely, the fluid running through the catheter and the beating of a superfluous heart.

“Do it,” Jessica whispered.

Do it, and risk my own life. Do it, recognizing that Jonathan hadn’t done it to Rachel, because he must have believed something bigger, deeper, more spiritual lived in our bodies. Do it, and lose Jonathan, even if he lived.

With a bend in my knee, and a twist in my wrist, I kinked that thing, and the fluid running through it stopped.

“Run,” Jessica said, and was gone.

I became aware of voices, the squeak of gurneys, the rustle of human activity. I backed out of the room, watching that tube fill up.

In my ignorance, I hadn’t silenced my phone, so when the bloop of a message came in, I jumped to turn the thing off. When I did, I saw it was from Brad.

—We have a heart. Coming from Ojai. One hour.—

Like a kid diving for the piñata candy, I went for that kinked catheter, and smoothed it until the liquid flowed. I ran out like I was coming back from a fire drill, slapped open the stairwell door, which was packed with people coming back from the drill, and backed into a corner, breathing in gasps like my soul had been saved at a minute’s notice.

I waved away anyone who looked concerned. I just needed a moment to collect myself. Breathe. That was the scariest thing I had ever done.

“Ma’am?”

Two police officers, the woman and man I’d seen outside Patalano’s hall.

“Yes?” I answered.

“Can you come with us?” the lady cop asked.” My heart sank. They’d come for me, despite the unkinking of the catheter, I’d tried it. Attempted murder. Someone had seen me and pointed me out. When they unraveled everything, they’d see my prints all over the place. The video. My seemingly meaningless appearance in the hall the previous night. Of course.

I was finished.

JONATHAN

I heard a fire alarm, but apparently, it was on a lower floor. Nothing to panic about. My family laughed with relief, even my father, who I believed didn’t actually understand levity. I stayed still and silent because I didn’t have the wherewithal to do anything else. A room crowded with people who loved me, and I never felt so alone. I wanted Monica to come back. I felt childish wanting her so badly, but I felt scraped down to a nub, without habit or discipline, no expectations or social cues. Just the core wants and revulsions, unfiltered by a personality built up by half a lifetime’s worth of experiences.

I was scared to die.

My body was uncomfortable.

I wanted Monica.

Past those three overwhelming sensations, I had only sensory inputs and petty feelings. Even the slight excitement that followed the end of the faraway fire drill didn’t move me. Some happy news amongst my family, like an unlikely Dodger win or an upcoming wedding. People scurried in sage green and pink, shouting orders. My mother came to me, smiling and kissed my cheek, stroking it until Dr. Emerson, the silver-haired one who came in and out of my room seventeen times a day, pulled her away. Her face was replaced with his.

“We have a heart. It’s a match. We’re prepping you for surgery.”

They handled my body like a jacket they were mending, and I felt humiliated and shut down, but hopeful.

“Monica.” I choked the word out to a nurse I didn’t recognize. She looked up and past me, to someone I couldn’t see. There was a conversation I couldn’t make out, then she said to me in a voice designed for clarity.

“We’ll let her know.”

“Where is she?”

“We don’t know. Just keep still now.”

She lifted my head and strung something around my neck. This was happening too fast. I’d already let Monica walk out of the room. I’d let it happen because I was weak and now I’d lost control of the situation entirely. That couldn’t happen. They couldn’t wheel me away and cut me open again without me seeing her. They’d done it last time, and look what happened (yes, make him believe she is his good luck charm)

“No!” I swung my arm, and it must have been truly pathetic, because they just strapped it down, easily, as if I was made of bone and rag.

I said her name to myself, over and over, but she didn’t appear.

MONICA

I tried not to fidget, even after they took my phone.

I was raised to think cops believed fidgeting meant lying. I wasn’t lying, much. I wasn’t with the mob or associated with any kind of underground business, which is what they kept implying. I didn’t know anyone they asked about. I was just me. One of the thousands of tall, skinny, struggling artists in this intestinal tract of a city.

“I wanted to look at him,” I said. The guy cop tip-tapped into a laptop, and the lady cop leaned her elbows on the table. The break room stank of stale coffee, non-dairy creamer and sugar glaze.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because my husband’s up on four waiting for a heart transplant, and this guy’s brain dead, with this nice heart, and I just wanted to say a prayer that he died. I know that makes me a bad person.”

I left it there. That was about as much lying as I thought I could get away with. I could have told the truth, but to what end? They weren’t looking for someone who’d screwed with his catheter, their questions told me they were looking for a true assassin.

“That your ring?”

I held my hand out. “The diamond is his sister’s.”

“The other one’s unusual.”

“Quickie marriage to a dying man who I’d really like to see.”

“Wait outside, please.” They let me to a row of chairs they’d set up for people they were questioning. A stocky guy with black hair went in next. Fuck, how long could this take? I couldn’t stop fidgeting. After twenty minutes, I looked at the clock.

Ten minutes to 3am. Did the morning count?

I waited for ten minutes, hands still, suddenly not feeling fidgety at all. When the second and minute hands hit the twelve, I closed my eyes and put my fingertips to my lips. I don’t know how long I held them there, but they pressed my skin until the lady cop came out and handed me my phone and ID.

“You can go.”

I ran like hell.

JONATHAN

It was bright. The people around me had voices that spoke like robots to each other and in fake kindness to me. They narrated what they were doing, but all I knew was, I was strapped to a gurney, staring at the ceiling, with no way to see what was happening around me.

“Okay,” said a man somewhere behind me. “I’m Doctor Chen? How are we doing today?”

“Ask yourself half the answer.”

“Right. Okay. I’m going to put this mask over your face. You need to just breathe and count backwards from ten.”

“Wait.”

He bent over to look at me. Asian guy. Mid thirties. Cap. Hissing gas mask in his gloved hand.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Uhm...” He seemed put-upon by the question. “Three.”

“Exactly three?”

“One minute til.” He started to lower the mask again.

“Wait.”

I looked around the room as far as my position would let me. Five people stood around me in the light blue uniform of doctors and nurses, hands up with the palms facing toward their shoulders. More scuttled in the background.

“Unstrap me,” I said. “One hand.” I didn’t think it was loud enough over the ambient noise of the room. Dr. Chen, cleared his throat, and exchanged some silent communication with the other doctors.

“Mister Drazen—“ he began.

“Please.”

“You shouldn’t be moving, now—“

“Please!” The plea came louder than I thought I was capable of.

Dead silence followed. The clock ticked, and though I couldn’t hear or see it, I was aware of it in the beating of my fucked up heart. I had, maybe thirty-five seconds.

“Mister Drazen,” said Dr. Emerson. “You need to calm down.”

“I’ll calm down. Just do it. Please. Half a minute.”

I couldn’t see his face past the mask, but his eyes stilled, and he glanced at an instrument before turning back to me. “No flailing.”

“No. No flailing.”

He nodded to someone, and I felt movement at my left wrist. I didn’t realize how tense I was until they let it go. Overwhelming gratitude flooded me, and a helix of fear unwound from my torso, though my limbs. When it reached my fingertips I slowly raised my hand.

“Can you tell me when it’s exactly three?” I asked Dr. Chen.

He looked at the wall clock, and I noticed the rest of them standing, in silence, all looking in the same direction.

Chen counted down. “In four, three, two...”

I put my fingertips to my lips.

MONICA

I couldn’t sit in that room any more. I was used to dealing with pain and worry by myself. I wasn’t accustomed to group stress. When Dad died, Mom withdrew, aunts and uncles took off and I basically dealt with it myself. Having these sisters, who were mine only by dint of a forced union, wasn’t the dream come true I’d imagined. They had personalities, and needs I didn’t know how to meet, and I didn’t know how to ask them for what I needed, because what I needed was to be alone.

So I quietly withdrew. Declan wasn’t in the cafeteria any more, but upstairs with the women, sitting by his wife, not touching her. They spoke sweetly to one another, which all things considered, was an improvement.

I felt hopeful. They did nine of these a year. That was good. It was a lot, apparently. He was going to walk out of this hospital and we’d figure out what to do. I walked into the back parking lot, just seeking an open space under the sky, with a spring in my step, a little dreamy, hoping he’d want to stay married and move into the same house with me. The heart would last ten years, but maybe we could squeeze in another two, and maybe another one would come and buy us twenty years together. It seemed like forever. I saw Jessica’s Mercedes, then her, lowering the trunk. She saw me and waved, but went for the driver’s side door, the wave was all I was getting. I got to her just as she was pulling out.

“Hey!” I tapped on the window.

She lowered it. “Yes?”

“Thanks.” That felt ridiculous, thanking her for telling me how to kill someone. “For helping.” Still ridiculous. “I got a call on the way out and I put the tube back the way it was.”