Your Heart Belongs to Me

poem titled “The Haunted Palace.”
    He could think of no chain of sound reasoning that would explain Ismay Clemm or those dreams that had been inspired by the work of her favorite writer.
    As for diving into unreason and conjuring some supernatural explanation, Ryan had no practice swimming in seas of superstition. This seemed to be a dangerous time to take the plunge.
    He did not believe in ghosts, but if Ismay had been a ghost with a message to impart, he could not puzzle out her meaning.
    He almost put the book down without paging to the end, but he remembered how he had put aside the ring binder in Barghest’s study after finding Teresa’s photo—delaying for sixteen months the discovery of Ismay Clemm’s photo, twelve sleeves later.
    The next-to-last poem in the book, titled “The Bells,” called to mind something else Ismay had said to him. He heard her admonition now almost as clearly as if she had been here in the hotel room with him.
    If you hear the iron bells, you come to me.
    Poe’s “The Bells” had four sections, and Ryan read them with growing disquiet. The first celebrated the merry bells on Christmas sleighs. The second dealt with the harmony of wedding bells. The third part took a dark turn, describing fire-alarm bells and the human tragedy they could foretell.
    The fourth part spoke of iron bells rung by ghouls high in a church, the melancholy menace of their tone.
    “‘For every sound that floats,’” he read aloud, “‘From the rust within their throats / Is a groan.’”
    Hearing the words spoken disturbed him more than reading them from the page, and he fell silent.
    The extraordinary rhythms, rhymes, and repetitions of the rest of the poem brought back to him the cacophony and the chaos of the ringing bells that had awakened him in the hospital bed on the night before his transplant.
    He could see, he could smell, he could hear the room again, Wally at the window, looking down, down, down, into waves of rising sound, a gloss on every surface, even shadows with a shine, and the shiver of the bells in his bones, in his blood, ringing thickly in his blood, and the smell of rust, a red and bitter dust, washing wave after wave, after heavy warning wave.
    Finally he put the book aside.
    He did not know what to make of any of this. He did not want to know what to make of it.
    He knew that he would not sleep. Not in his current condition.
    But he was desperate for sleep, for dreamless sleep. He could not tolerate being awake.
    He did something then of which Dr. Hobb would not have approved, not for him or for any heart-transplant recipient. He raided the honor bar and hammered himself into sleep with a series of gin-and-tonics.
     

 
    FIFTY

    I n the Learjet, Ryan at first sat apart from Cathy Sienna. Because he had awakened with a hangover and had needed time to chase off his headache, to settle his stomach with bland food, and to pull himself together, they were late leaving Denver. The runway rush, the lift-off, and the big banking turn across the Rockies had the potential to bring up his breakfast, and he preferred to ride out the start of the trip by himself.
    Safely airborne, he went to her. The jet had conference-style seating. He sat facing her, and after concluding a paragraph, she looked up from a magazine.
    “You have exceptional self-control,” he said.
    “Why? Just because I made you wait ten seconds while I finished reading?”
    “No. You’re self-controlled in every sense. Your pretense of being without curiosity is particularly impressive.”
    “Mr. Perry, each day, life presents us with much more than we can understand. If I chased after everything that makes me curious, I’d have no time for the part of life I do understand.”
    The flight attendant arrived to ask if they would like a snack or anything to drink. Ryan ordered a bit of the hair of the dog in the form of a Bloody Mary, and Cathy asked for black coffee.
    “Anyway,” she continued, after the attendant went away, “an understanding of what’s important comes to you if you’re patient.”
    “And what’s important to you, Cathy?”
    She had been holding the magazine, one finger marking her page, as if she expected to return to it in a moment. Now she put it aside.
    “No offense, but of the things that are the most important to me, there aren’t any that I just talk about with a stranger on a plane to pass the time.”
    “Are we strangers?”
    “Not entirely,” was the most that she