Your Heart Belongs to Me

from the tender hearts of a few sweet girls. And they’re all still livin’, aren’t they?”
    In an adjacent prep room, he stripped to his undershorts, stepped into a pair of disposable slippers, and wrapped himself in a thin, pale-green, collarless robe with short sleeves.
    Back in the diagnostics laboratory, Dr. Gupta had arrived, as had the radiologist.
    The examination table was more comfortable than Ryan expected. Samar Gupta explained that comfort was necessary because during this procedure, a patient must lie on his back, very still, for at least an hour, in some cases perhaps for two hours or more.
    Suspended over the table, a fluoroscope would instantly project moving x-ray images on a fluorescent screen.
    As the cardiologist, assisted by Nurse Whipset, prepared for the procedure, Ismay Clemm monitored Ryan’s pulse. “You’re doing fine, child.”
    The sedative began to take effect, and he felt calmer, although wide awake.
    Kyra Whipset scrubbed Ryan’s neck and painted a portion of it with iodine.
    After applying a topical anesthetic to steal the sting from the needle, Dr. Gupta administered a local anesthetic by injection to the same area.
    Soon Ryan could feel nothing when the physician tested the nerve response in his neck.
    He closed his eyes while something with an astringent smell was swabbed on his numb flesh.
    Describing his actions aloud, Dr. Gupta made a small incision in Ryan’s jugular vein and introduced a thin, highly flexible catheter.
    Ryan opened his eyes and watched the fluoroscope as it followed the tedious progress of the catheter, which the cardiologist threaded carefully into his heart, guided by the image on the screen.
    He wondered what would happen if in the midst of this procedure he suffered a seizure as he had on the surfboard, his heart abruptly hammering two or three hundred beats a minute. He decided not to ask.
    “How are you doing?” Dr. Gupta inquired.
    “Fine. I don’t feel anything.”
    “Just relax. We’re making excellent progress.”
    Ryan realized that Ismay Clemm was quietly reporting on his heart rhythm, which evidently had become slightly unstable upon the introduction of the catheter.
    Maybe this was normal, maybe not, but the instability passed.
    And the beat goes on.
    Once the primary catheter was in place, Dr. Gupta inserted into it a second catheter, a bioptome, with tiny jaws at its tip.
    Ryan had lost all sense of time. He might have been on the table a few minutes or an hour.
    His legs ached. In spite of the sedative, the muscles in his calves were tense. His right hand had tightened into a fist; he opened it, as if hoping to receive another’s hand, a gift.
    Long he lay there, wondering, fearing.
    The jaws of the bioptome bit.
    Inhaling with a hiss through clenched teeth, Ryan didn’t think that he imagined the quick painful pinch, but perhaps he was reacting to the brief frantic stutter of his heart on the fluorescent screen.
    Dr. Gupta retrieved the first sample of Ryan’s cardiac muscle.
    Nurse Clemm said, “Don’t hold your breath, honey.”
    Exhaling, Ryan realized that he expected to die during the procedure.
     

 
    TEN

    I n just seventy minutes the biopsy had been completed and the incision repaired with stitches.
    The power of the sedative was at its peak, and because Ryan had endured a sleepless night, the drug affected him more strongly than anticipated. Dr. Gupta encouraged Ryan to lie on the narrow bed in the prep room and rest awhile, until he felt fully alert and capable of driving.
    The room was windowless. The overhead fluorescent panels were off, and only a fixture in a soffit above the small sink provided light.
    The dark ceiling and shadow-hung walls inspired claustrophobia. Thoughts of caskets and the conqueror worm oppressed him, but the phobic moment quickly passed.
    Relief that the procedure had gone well and exhaustion were tranquilizing. Ryan did not expect to sleep, but he slept.
    To a discordant melody, he walked a dream road along a valley toward a palace high on a slope. Through the red-litten windows he could see vast forms that moved fantastically, and his heart began to pound, to boom, until it beat away that vision and harried in another.
    A wild lake, bound all around with black rocks and tall pines, was lovely in its loneliness. Then the inky water rose in a series of small waves that lapped the shore where he stood, and he knew the lake was a pool of poison. Its gulf would be his grave.
    Between