Your Heart Belongs to Me

the centerpiece of the enchantment.
    By the time the waiter served the steaks, Sam had found the lighter mood that had characterized the rest of the day, and Ryan joined her there.
    After the first bite of beef, she raised her wineglass in a toast. “Hey, Dotcom, this one’s to you.”
    Dotcom was another nickname that she had for him, used mostly when she wanted to poke fun at his public image as a business genius and tech wizard.
    “Why to me?” he asked.
    “Today you finally stepped down from the pantheon and revealed that you’re at best a demigod.”
    Pretending indignation, he said, “I haven’t done any such thing. I’m still turning the wheel that makes the sun rise in the morning and the moon at night.”
    “You used to take the waves until they surrendered and turned mushy. Today you’re beached on a blanket by two-thirty.”
    “Did you consider that it might have been boredom, that the swells just weren’t challenging enough for me?”
    “I considered it for like two seconds, but you were snoring as if you’d been plenty challenged.”
    “I wasn’t sleeping. I was meditating.”
    “You and Rip Van Winkle.” After they had assured the attentive waiter that their steaks were excellent, Samantha said, “Seriously, you were okay out there today, weren’t you?”
    “I’m thirty-four, Sam. I guess I can’t always thrash the waves like a kid anymore.”
    “It’s just—you looked a little gray there.”
    He raised a hand to his hair. “Gray where?”
    “Your pretty face.”
    He grinned. “You think it’s pretty?”
    “You can’t keep pulling those thirty-six-hour sessions at the keyboard and then go right out and rip the ocean like you’re the Big Kahuna.”
    “I’m not dying, Sam. I’m just aging gracefully.”
     

     
    He woke in absolute darkness, with the undulant motion of the sea beneath him. Disoriented, he thought for a moment that he was lying faceup on a surfboard, beyond the break, under a sky in which every star had been extinguished.
    The hard rapid knocking of his heart alarmed him.
    When Ryan felt the surface under him, he realized that it was a bed, not a board. The undulations were not real, merely perceived, a yawing dizziness.
    “Sam,” he said, but then remembered that she was not with him, that he was home, alone in his bedroom.
    He tried to reach the lamp on the nightstand…but could not lift his arm.
    When he tried to sit up, pain bloomed in his chest.
     

 
    THREE

    R yan felt as though concrete blocks were stacked on his chest. Although mild, the pain frightened him. His heart raced so fast that the beats could not be counted.
    He counseled himself to remain calm, to be still, to let the seizure pass, as it had passed when he had been floating on his surfboard.
    The difference between then and now was the pain. The racing heart, the weakness, and the dizziness were as disturbing as before, but the added element of pain denied him the delusion that this was nothing more than an anxiety attack.
    Even as a small child, Ryan had not been afraid of the dark. Now darkness itself seemed to be the weight on his chest. The black infinity of the universe, the thick atmosphere of the earthly night, the blinding gloom in the bedroom pressed each upon the next, and all upon him, relentlessly bending his breastbone inward until his heart knocked against it as if seeking to be let out of him and into eternity.
    He grew desperate for light.
    When he tried to sit up, he could not. The pressure held him down.
    He discovered that he could push against the mattress with his heels and elbows, gradually hitching backward, three feather pillows compacting into a ramp that elevated his head and shoulders. His skull rapped against the headboard.
    The weight on his chest forced him to take shallow inhalations. Each time he exhaled, a sound thinner than a whimper also escaped him, offending the black room like a nail drawn down a chalkboard.
    After he had hitched into a reclining position, not sitting up but more than halfway there, some strength returned to him. He could lift his arms.
    With his left hand, he reached blindly for the bedside lamp. He located the bronze base, and his fingers slid along a cast-bronze column with a bamboo motif.
    Before he found the switch, the ache in his chest intensified and swiftly spread to his throat, as if the agony were ink and his flesh an absorbent blotter.
    The pain seemed to be something that he had swallowed or was regurgitating