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.