C-Mac’s father, Dr. Mac, was a surgeon in town. We’d had few interactions up to this point, and I’d never witnessed any outbursts. He’d come over one Saturday morning and sat in the kitchen with me for an hour as the girls played down in the basement, which I’d cleared out to make room for their rehearsals. Fisher had put down rugs across the concrete floor, tacked tapestries to the walls, and bought lamps at the Goodwill. The bass shuddered up through our feet and legs like a million staticky insects crawling across our bones. I offered Dr. Mac a cup of coffee, and he blew ripples across the black surface for a few minutes before finally taking a small sip. He winced and placed the mug on the coaster. I asked him if he wanted any milk.
“Do you know where coffee comes from?” he asked.
“All over?”
“Yes, but do you know where it comes from on the plant itself? The coffee bean isn’t really a bean at all. We just call it that because it resembles one. The coffee bean is in fact the pit of a dark purple cherry. The pits are removed and dried out and then roasted, et cetera. But the cherry flesh, it gets thrown out, which is a real shame because it could be put to good use. You can use the cherry flesh to make flour. Actual, usable flour. Coffee flour. Did you know that?”
I shook my head.
“We waste so much. You can judge a civilization by its trash, and we are the biggest wasters in the history of the planet.”
I tried not to glance over at our trash can, which I’m sure was overflowing.
“It’s best never to buy anything new,” he continued. “It’s a demand problem, not supply. If we stopped buying things, they’d stop making them. It’s as simple as that. Thinking about all the junk people buy, it just makes me so sad. Our culture is sick, that’s the problem. It’s a cultural illness. We fill the hole in our hearts with curtain rods and phones. We’re killing this world. Don’t you ever wish we’d never settled these mountains? That we’d left them wild? Wouldn’t it be great if the Shawnee still lived here in the Blue Ridge and not us?”
“I thought it was the Cherokee.”
“That was later,” he said, very academically. “First it was the Shawnee. ‘Shula’ is a Shawnee word. Or is rooted in one, I mean. Shu-lah-weh, or something like that. Means buzzard. People of the buzzard. They offered up their dead to the buzzards and vultures and only after the bones had been picked clean did they bury them.”
“Nothing wasted.”
“Exactly. The planet would be much better off if the Shawnee had won and not the British, believe me.”
“More buzzard-people, less people-people.”
He nodded.
“Be the buzzard,” I said. “Waste not. Pick the bones clean.”
“Claudine’s guitar, for instance. I bought it used off a guy in Asheville. Supposedly he bought it from the guitarist from that band Horse Logic.”
I told him I wasn’t familiar with that particular band.
“I’ll bring over one of their CDs next time,” he said.
Next time. Fisher being in a band, I realized then, meant that I was in a band now, too, a band of parents. And this guy, whom I hardly knew, in his V-necked merino sweater and jeans, was my guitarist. I was his bassist. We’d be sitting in each other’s kitchens for years to come talking about coffee pits and anti-consumerism and Lord knows what else. I didn’t disagree with him about consumption and waste—not really—but then again, I didn’t especially like being lectured in my own kitchen. My primary impression of the man was that he was a know-it-all, not to mention a tad sanctimonious. He was very calm, very quiet. I had trouble imagining him yelling at the girls.
—
STILL, I DROVE OVER TO HIS HOUSE for a chat. Dr. Mac invited me in for a glass of wine. They’d just finished dinner and his wife—a malpractice attorney, if it can be believed—was loading dishes into the washer. The two of us sat down together in the living room with our red wine.
“You look like something is troubling you,” he said.
“Yes, unfortunately,” I said, and as coolly as possible explained that it had come to my attention that he, Dr. Mac, had something of a bad temper and that I would prefer if, going forward, he could please abstain from any future conniption fits when in the presence of my stepdaughter, Fisher. About halfway through my little speech, which I’d rehearsed on the way there, the man’s jaw clenched tight and his face reddened, and I wondered if I was about to personally experience one of his tantrums. But when I finished talking, he sat there quietly for a moment, seething, regarding me with what seemed like total disdain. I waited for him to pounce. I realized then that his wife, Terry, was standing behind the couch, that she’d come in from the kitchen and had probably overheard most of what I’d said. I turned to acknowledge her.
“Well, first of all, I don’t know where you’re getting your information from,” Dr. Mac said.
“So you’re saying it’s not true?”
“This is my house,” he said, his voice loud but squinched. “My house.”
“No denying that,” I said.
Something quaked in my chest. A deep-down tremor that radiated outward from my heart. Feeling dizzy, I set my wineglass down on the coffee table and, dumbly, tried to stand, my vision already purpling. It was the parking garage all over again. Was I dying? My phone hadn’t chimed, though.
I woke up on the floor. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Terry was standing over me.
“He okay?” came Dr. Mac’s voice from somewhere behind me.
When Terry nodded that I was, Dr. Mac strode past me and out of the room. I could hear his footsteps receding. Terry went into the kitchen and poured me a glass of water. I sat up and took it from her. I’d slumped forward and fallen to the floor, she explained. I’d barely missed hitting my head on the coffee table. She asked me if I felt okay, and I told her I was fine.
“No one’s ever passed out in my living room,” she said. “That was a first.”
“I have a fainting disorder. Not a big deal. Comes and goes. Had it all my life.”
A few minutes later, I felt well enough to stand and say goodbye. Terry walked me to the door. She crossed her arms and gave me a funny look, her jaw shoved forward. “Well, it won’t happen again, okay? No more tantrums, no more yelling. Trust me.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate it. Fisher doesn’t know I’m here. She’d hate me for being here, but”—I shrugged amicably—“a parent’s job, right?”
“You don’t need to worry,” she said.
In the car I whipped out my phone. My HeartNet had not detected or recorded any usual activity. No skipped beats. No restarts. Nothing.
Like always the doctor’s waiting room was full of White Hairs. They sat quietly, hands in their laps, their many documents and medical histories arranged in folders. They fussed with insurance cards and forms. They breathed heavily. A man in a tight red shirt and suspenders coughed fiercely into his hands, then smeared his hands across his pants. A small Indian woman with giant reading glasses asked her husband, who was standing by her chair with his arms crossed, to please sit down and relax.
Because of my heart condition, I sometimes felt as if I’d been inducted into their ranks prematurely. Here I sat, an honorary White Hair.
Eventually I was shown to an exam room. I changed into a paper gown and sat on the table for an hour before Dr. Westervelt finally made an appearance. He was a short, balding man with a look on his face that suggested never-ending indigestion. When I described to him the quaking I’d felt, the dizziness, the loss of consciousness, he nodded solemnly. He ordered the usual tests and later that afternoon returned to the exam room to tell me my heart was doing just fine, as far as he and his million-dollar machines could tell.
Perhaps, he said, all the recent headlines about HeartNet had even made me a little paranoid? I told him I wasn’t aware of any such headlines, and he arched his ey
ebrows at me and took a step back, toward the door, as if positioning himself for a speedy exit.
“Oh,” he said. “I thought surely you would have been keyed into all that. I didn’t mean to alarm you, if I have. I only wanted to discuss it with you, in case it had been on your mind.”
I buttoned my shirt while the doctor pulled up an article for me to read on his tablet.
“Ignore the headline,” he said, handing it to me. “It’s way too sensational.”
Man’s Heart Hacked to Death Remotely, it said.
“Good Lord,” I said.
According to the article, a Chinese hacker—a teenager, mind you—had broken into the HeartNet network—and figured out a way to instruct one of its devices to explode the heart of a random man who lived in London. This poor British gentleman had been on his way to work when it happened, when the onion-bag tech had squeezed his heart until it stopped beating. The hacker was only sixteen years old, and he’d hacked into HeartNet-Net simply for the challenge of it, inadvertently exposing major weaknesses in the company’s cyber security systems.
I was astounded. I had never really considered the implications of my device being wirelessly connected to the company’s network. Why had I never thought about this until now? What I imagined then was a bony hand clutching my heart, a tight grip that would never let me go. Did I need to have my device removed and replaced with an old-fashioned pacemaker? Did I need to take action?
Dr. Westervelt shook his head. Certainly not, he said. He counseled me not to worry, not to stress. The chances of another hacker exploding my heart was something like 1 in 350,000. How he had arrived at such an exact number, I wouldn’t think to ask until I was in the parking garage searching for my car. Perhaps he’d made up the statistic on the spot to calm me. It did, in fact, have a calming effect, initially. His surety could be so soothing.
As for my recent episodes, as he called them, he wondered about the possibility of anxiety attacks. They’d cracked me open after all, and it was normal to feel more vulnerable after such an operation. He suggested the name of a therapist in town.
“A hypnotherapist, actually,” he said. “I’m a big believer in avoiding meds whenever possible. More often than not the side effects are just as bad as the original symptoms. Take a pill and feel relaxed but maybe now you can’t maintain an erection, which leads to—”
“More anxiety.”
He touched his nose. “And more pills. Try the hypnotherapist first. I’m writing her name down here. A very nice lady. She helped my son quit smoking.”
Back at work that afternoon, I couldn’t keep myself from digging up and reading more articles:
Wi-Fi Heart Goes Die-Fi.
Man’s Heart Explodes, Chinese Teen Blamed.
Can a Hacker Re-Code Your Heart?
The headlines were endless, though as far as I could tell, there’d been only a single instance of an exploded heart.
Scanning through an online forum for people with HeartNets, I discovered there was talk of a class-action lawsuit against the company that manufactured the device. From what I could gather, there were two basic camps of HeartNet recipients: those who thought we needed to sue the company and keep our devices and those who thought we needed to sue the company and have our devices surgically removed, immediately, lest we meet a similar fate. People were afraid, obviously. They didn’t want to die, especially not in this ridiculous manner, and they were reaching out to others in the same predicament, hoping to find some degree of solace in the knowledge that their worries were shared by almost a hundred thousand others.
I hadn’t spent this much time before on the Web forum. I realized that some of the discussion threads were as old as the device itself. One of the more popular threads, I saw, was called Anyone else obsessed with their heartbeats? I clicked on it and discovered that I wasn’t alone; there were hundreds of people just like me, who, at least for a time, had been preoccupied with the heartbeat function on their HeartNet app. One woman wrote that for almost an entire year she’d kept headphones plugged in her ears. Cooking dinner, working out, researching her dissertation—her heartbeat had been the metronomic soundtrack of her life.
Another man, a retiree in Florida, wrote that he’d listened to it for so long that he heard it all the time now, every un-amplified beat forever booming in his ears.
I mentioned none of this to Annie or Fisher when they got home that night. I didn’t want to alarm them, or perhaps, more accurately, I didn’t want them to know that I was alarmed. Ever since marrying Annie I’d stopped obsessively listening to my heartbeat. I no longer fell asleep to its quaky rhythms. It wasn’t a habit that I would have expected her to approve of or understand. And with her around, I didn’t need the comfort of my own beating heart.
She’d always done me the courtesy of not fussing over my condition, though by no means would I say she lacked empathy. We talked about my heart, certainly, from time to time, but she’d never once asked how I was feeling after a run or a hike or, thank God, during sex. Maybe after losing one husband, she simply didn’t want to focus on her second husband’s fragile health. But no, that’s going too far; my health was not fragile. My HeartNet was doing its job, Dr. Westervelt had said. I had no reason to fear the unlikely assault of a bored teenager on the other side of the globe.
The story of Anthony’s death as told to me by Annie was a simple one: He’d been out kayaking on a river with some friends one afternoon and had drowned. I’d heard the whispers about him having been drunk or stoned at the time, of course, but I’d never felt comfortable pressing her for more details. What did it matter? I suppose I never would have learned much else about it if not for Annie’s brother, Kurt.
Not long after the wedding, I’d flown up to New York to visit a friend and while there I’d had lunch with Kurt in a Cantonese restaurant in Chinatown. To reach the restaurant you rode an extremely long escalator to a fourth-floor ballroom where waiters in red jackets served you dim sum from squeaky carts as a woman screamed, pleasantly, in Cantonese over a PA system. What she was screaming, neither one of us had any idea, but it was an endless source of entertainment. The food was excellent, and the ballroom was incredibly large and grand, the size of a basketball court, red carpet floors, white cloths on all the tables, a giant chandelier at the center of the room. Riding the escalator up from the grimy streets below and discovering yourself in a place such as that—it was easy to think you’d entered a heaven sprung from the mind of David Lynch.
“Try this one—crazy fucking good,” was Kurt’s refrain as we ate. He’d ordered us far too much food. Kurt—tall, brown-maned Kurt, the pride of Annie’s family, denizen of the Upper East Side—managed assets and liabilities in the international operations division for Bank of America.
He’d been living with the same woman, a vegan chef named Kitra, for the last eight years but had given his family no indication that he intended to marry her or produce any offspring. “Children are boring,” I’d heard him say once. Annie and Kurt were not especially close, though it was easy to see the family resemblance, plus they had the same airy laugh and busy eyebrows, always moving and bending and contorting, an eyebrow code that I’d never been able to entirely crack. But other than that, they were very different people. Kurt despised the fact that he was from a town like Shula, and he visited as rarely as possible. He seemed to care about his sister but considered her a bit of a bumpkin—and by extension, me, too. Not that he’d ever said so explicitly. I detected his condescension primarily in the way he studied me when I talked—a look of amusement, I guess you could call it, the same expression one might wear when regarding an especially smart chimpanzee at the zoo.
Somehow, during this lunch, Kurt and I got onto the topic of Anthony, who was still something of a mystery to me. From pictures, I knew he’d been a slim but athletic man with shaggy blond hair, a closemouthed smile, and deep-set eyes. A troubled face. His go-to
expression in photos suggested a self-seriousness; the angle of his chin, cockiness. He and Annie had met during her first year at the College of Charleston, through their dealer, a white guy with dreadlocks who made deliveries all over downtown on a Schwinn.
I hadn’t been entirely surprised to learn that Annie had smoked in college—she’d grown up in what I’d call a semi-repressive environment, after all, plus she’d fallen deep into the college theater scene, a world I can only assume is widely populated by weirdos and potheads—but I admit that I was sometimes intrigued at the thoroughness of Annie’s transformation after high school: the incense, the wall tapestries, relics that now live in a plastic tub in our basement. During her freshman year at college she waitressed at a hippie pizza place on the weekends and lived in a small apartment with another girl, both of them theater majors, their shelves filled with the plays of Albee, Dürrenmatt, Stoppard, Brecht, and so forth, books that had not gone into a plastic tub but had instead found a shelf in her office at Thrill Arts!
She and Anthony had been on-again, off-again for about a year. She was nineteen when she got pregnant, and I gathered—this is me reading between the lines—that only for the quickest of seconds had she considered not keeping the baby. Anthony was a few years older and was able to graduate before Fisher arrived. They married, and she dropped back to part-time at school, while Anthony went to work for his father’s construction company.
I often worried about the fact that Annie was a widow as opposed to a divorcée. She hadn’t decided to end the marriage. When I thought of her relationship with Anthony, I sometimes imagined a knife trying to slice through something that couldn’t be separated—water, perhaps. She and Anthony had only been together for a few years when he died, and it seemed possible to me that they’d never experienced any of the challenges or problems that can arise between two people who are in love. If all she had were good memories, then was it truly possible for her to move on?
The Afterlives Page 14