Relics

The rhythm of life

The heart is one long muscle, coiled in a tight fist. When it stops beating, the blood does not run out.

*****

The surgeon folds the model of the electric heart in your hands. You squeeze it, feel the matt silver flex, soft as flower petals, and you consider the weakening walls of your own heart.

You twist the model apart to inspect the core and the leads that weave into the chambers. You’re told that it will work like a casing with the new core implanted. When it’s your time — or what would be your time — your heart will tilt, and the tissue will wither until only the new heart is left.

You look up to ask, “How long does it live?”

*****

If your heart beats an average of 72 beats per minute, that means 4,320 per hour, 103,680 per day.

You hold your breath long enough to feel the soft timpani in your chest. So you continue to hold it, longer and longer. Your chest burns as you swallow another breath, chirrup with each inhale, each one smaller and smaller as you fill and fill. You swell until your pulse becomes one body of vibration, until you hang on one great breath held too long, on the swell of a breath that waits.

When you press your palms to your chest to hold each beat, you wonder how many fewer you already have, how many are left.

*****

You cannot feel the metal casing or the leads that tendril through the muscle into the new walls. Yet you know your flesh trembles within the implant that pulses in what the surgeon calls pericardial whir, each beat perfect, rhythmic, stable.

Although you live another six years, two months, three days, four minutes without feeling anything but your own body, the moment comes when gravity shifts and all within you seems to slant into collapse.

The part that was perhaps the most you simply ceases to be, preceded in death by two billion beats.

Yet here you are, upright and breathing, with a palm to your chest, the little hummingbird of hearts beating on. You begin counting heartbeats in reverse, all that survive you. Minus 1 … minus 2 … minus 65 … minus 143 … You breathe a little deeper, lengthen your stride, fold your hands behind your head to open your chest and expand your lungs as you step across the line of demarcation into your own living afterlife.

If shimmer was a sound, the new heartbeat sings in this high voice.

*****

The surface of the water ripples as you lower yourself into the warm bathtub and let the water slip up, over your ears. You close your eyes, float, let all air seep from your lungs, until the only sound is the pattern of small whooshes, like an unborn child on an ultrasound.

The soft pulse grows into a heavy gallop, reverberating, pounding until it feels as though it might split your bones. And you wonder how to be, without being, how to be, while being, a body.

*****

Hours lean into days as the all-consuming pulse throbs within your ears, and you search for something calm, reach for the earth to still you.

You walk in bare feet, palm the base of a tree, trace the corrugations of bark down to the tops of the roots. You turn to press your back into the trunk, nestle into the tangle of grass, as you watch the birds overhead, beaks opening and closing without a sound.

You hold onto the calm, the pulse unspooling from you until birdsong and breeze uncoil from the branches above. And you can hear again. The thrum fades as sound returns from each feathered voice, from wind that lifts and catches through the leaves in whispers.