arrhythmia

it's called going under the knife. the carving thoughts knife, where i punch holes in your skin to make designs on your heart, peel back muscle to make it past the wasteland of your wasted lungs, thick white cartilage of your trachea, your rubbery veins pulled taut across your bones, and the still-expanding frame of your diaphragm.

 

--

 

when i get to your heart i dry heave once, twice, over the sickbed, eyes sliding out of focus. i wasn't designed for this work, i was schooled in the upper echelons of the mind and psyche, not to deal with the petty work of a cardiologist and the peons who still thought the study of your heart was actually the future, that emotions and not careful mental analysis could lead to answers.

 

i haven't felt nauseated about work since school and my first morgue.

 

what the f**k happened here? i demand after a good thirty seconds, the bile twisting and stinging my throat the way i bet fire does in a dragon. the anesthesiologist takes a drag, long and languid, shrugs real slow.

 

--

 

i remember the first man i ever studied under. he had that perpetual air of someone with a lot of things to do, fingers twitchy and jerky like he wanted to be tapping something into his palm pilot always, his spastic actions only ever soothed when he was. even during surgery he was still anxious and his face was squashed into itself with creases and the wrinkles of a man ill at ease with what he's doing. he was a frazzled man, greying hairs sticking out like he was in a state of perpetual electric shock, the kind of guy you imagined belonged in a dormant volcano.

 

i do remember his sharp bark of a laugh, like two frayed wires sparking together then fizzling out in a burst of unwarranted life. i remember the way he showed me how if you twisted a vein around your finger like the neck of a stubborn balloon, pulled back under your finger was a tepid violet and then with your breath held like the two-second span between light and sound in fireworks, let go in one quick snap, it would twang and hum like a plucked guitar string.

 

he was ambidextrous, could sign his name with both hands and i used to wonder if that was

forgery before he reminded me that no one accuses us of things like that anyway because no one can risk losing us. we are vital"not so many can sit through the schooling anymore. that's why you're a prodigy, he used to say, half-joking but only the half that wasn't his eyes. remember me when i'm dead, eh? i want you to be the one to sell me for parts.

 

i don't remember his face, even though the funny thing is that i feel like i spent many hours analyzing it, wondering if that was how i should or was going to look when i got my own practice. it's an odd phenomenon, the things your memory holds on to.

 

--

 

i took guitar lessons once, you mumble, fidgeting, watching the slit of a window at the top of the door to operating room 6. i didn't think what we were doing was allowed. maybe not very ethical either.

 

he laughs once, a great bang like a gunshot and fireworks all at once, hair quivering in perverse mirth. yeah kid, he says. it's something like that.

 

--

 

the anesthesiologist peers in over the outstretched cavern in the patient's chest, and lets out a low whistle at the tangle of veins and muscle laid open, like complex machinery. except the human body is far more straightforward than any computer. far more expendable, too.

 

damn, he says, and presses the cigarette to his lips, taking a sharp, punctual drag before shaking out the ash at the end over the pried-open muscle, black flakes fluttering down and settling on the white ribs.

 

stop that, you'll mess him up. like these people don't already have problems. he guffaws, a primitive sound honed and roughed up from years of experience being somewhat ruthless in his cynicism.

 

look at his goddamn heart"if you can call it that. thank you kindly, but he's already been messed the f**k up. who are you trying to kid"why the hell else would he even be here? and he snakes his hand under the ribs with a skincrawling squelch (i can't even bear to look"it's like i'm sixteen again), snatching at the still-pulsating and too-small heart, fingers clamping down on the open angry sores, purple and black bruises diagonal across the pericardium. this is why the field was not for me. the heart"too many complications.

 

my voice bubbles up in my throat, but it's not my voice, more like a scream of disgust and wretchedness. what is he doing? what am i doing? i'm not ever even supposed to set foot in his department, i don't do hearts and emotions and tangible feelings, i'm just supposed to handle memories, a new start"

 

so do it, he replies, and i never noticed the moment where my thoughts became a panic became verbal. sometimes fear and the isolation of the mind will do that to you, until you can't separate a from b and many things run together like light bleeding onto reflective surfaces. his hand tightens, bulging on the underside of the rib cage. a new start, his voice is crescendoing in your brain.

 

the heart throbs once, twice, a dull beat like a mantra.

 

so-do-it. so-do-it.

 

--

 

so i do.

 

--

 

it's called going under the knife. i try to think it's mom's meat loaf i'm carving, the bruised bits of an apple that i'm scraping away. i peel back the tissue of heartbreak like a stigma, like a parasite that requires removal and not like human flesh and trial and error, the pinker, unblemished tissue shining through. in a way, it's a relief to toss the tarnished parts out like we're in f*****g auto repair and something needs greasing and something needs the replacing and that way i can live with myself, the old pericardium dropped down the chute and into the incinerator.

 

when i am done, the heart is a few cubic millimeters smaller, but the better for it. it doesn't bleed, and i stick it back facing left, and knit him together again.

 

it's taxing, i don't lie. i'm a little worse for the wear for the playing at god. i still can't look at my handiwork. it will be awhile before i can return safely to my wing of the institution"whether it's for the shame or the utter nauseum is hard to say.

 

i cast one last bitter glance back at the heart. it fluctuates hopefully, pink and raw.

a new start.

Author's Note

my mind is a vat of halfassery

Reviews

[Nish Nish the Fish]

goodness Jenny, this is brilliant!
I'm in awe. Stuck in a gooey pool of silence. I have no words that would accurately describe the insane height of your writing ability. So ridiculously incredible...making me jealous...amazing...
Share this with the world...don't be so selfish, to conceal it from eyes that are ignorant from marvelous writing as this.