Open Heart

The nurses read aloud excerpts from The Happy Prince while the doctors sharpen their metal implements. The fairytale is meant to be soothing, but it only sets you further on edge. More spectators fill the operating theater than ever before, every curving tier and seat occupied. Sold out, the doorman shouts, sold out. You can hear the excited chatter, but the spectators themselves remain out of sight even when you lift your head as far as the padded restraints around your neck and torso will allow.

Even so, the scene unfolds behind your closed eyelids with harrowing clarity.

“The Prince gave himself away, piece by piece, gold-leaf skin by sapphire eye, to help those in need,” one of the nurses says, shutting the book with a final thud. Her fish-hook smile looks like it must hurt her cheeks.

“That’s right,” another continues. You would bother to learn their names if the nurses didn’t vanish every few surgeries, new faces appearing in their stead. “The Swallow helped the Prince accomplish his heart’s truest desire. Is it the bird’s fault it had to pierce the Prince’s body in order to pluck his offerings of gems and gold?”

You close your eyes against the relentless whiteness of the overhead lights. The doctors––and those remain unchanged, behind their black-beaked masks––tell the nurses, “It’s time.”

The storytelling ends, and the real show begins. The crowd around the elevated amphitheater claps and whistles. You hear them munch on popcorn and bonbons, slurp their drinks noisily through paper straws. This is only the first course, an aperitif, and everyone in this room knows it.

On days of exceptional agony, it’s hard to remember that you chose this.

The Prometheus heart in your chest has just finished regenerating beneath its haphazard sutures. You can breathe with ease again, if only for a second, when keys scratch against your room’s heavy-duty lock. The nurses are here to take you away as they do every morning. They bind you to a gurney even though you’re not resisting.

“Just a precaution,” they placate.

The hospital corridors are a drab, dim-lit beige. The nurses talk inanely. The masked doctors’ anesthetic hasn’t worked in… well. A long time.

You’re getting tired of this, and fast.

“When will my replacement arrive?” you ask, rattling your chains as you’re strapped onto the operating table.

The doctors are unreadable behind their leathery avian masks. “Any day now. We’re screening all the applicants with your particular condition. A lot of paperwork, you understand.”

An unruly line has formed outside the anatomical theater today. Everyone wants a piece of you. After all, aren’t you the rarest, most fertile tree, growing a new fruit each day that will gift the eater with youth, health, and vitality?

“No one is coming to relieve me, are they?” you ask a nurse.

He pats your shoulder and asks which story you’d prefer today before your open-heart surgery.

“Enough with the statue and the swallow.”

“Of course, of course,” the nurses say absently.

They read to you The Giving Tree instead. The apple tree gave away fruit, branches, and bark until nothing remained. And yet the tree was happy by helping others. Simple as that.

“You’re happy,” the nurses say as the doctors’ scalpels cut your marker-drawn chest open. Their gloved hands crack your ribs apart to get to your precious, pulsating core. “Aren’t you happy?”

“Hello, there,” you tell the nurse who dumps your half-unconscious, half-delirious body back in your––no, not your room. Your cell, although you chose this. You wanted to help people, heal the sick and poor. Instead, all you do is be consumed. The doctors lie about so much. What other truths have they withheld from you?

The nurse is a scruffy-bearded young man. You don’t know his name, or anyone else’s. Each nurse leaves the hospital after only a few shifts. You don’t know where they go, what happens to them afterward. All you know is that this one lingers and stares at you like there’s something he wants, while all the rest avert their eyes if they can help it. As though the sight of you alone were enough to contaminate their consciences.

“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” the young nurse says. And yet, he doesn’t leave.

“No,” you agree. “Only read me books that teach martyrdom.”

The young nurse looks down at his hands. In discomfort, you think, seconds before noticing the glinting edge of his smile.

“You gotta get me out of here.” This is your first, and possibly last, chance. You grasp it. “What if I gave you my heart in exchange for my freedom?”

The young nurse looks up, enthralled. A whole heart like yours costs millions. The doctors never remove the whole thing, always leaving half a ventricle or atrium behind. Easier to regenerate this way. But you’ve gone without a heart before. You can do it again, if it buys your freedom.

“That’s right,” you say, the bitter words honeyed with temptation. “No outrageously priced little nibbles. An entire heart just for you, fresh from my chest. You eat it whole and transcend somewhere better and brighter, or you pop it in the freezer and, voila! A lifetime supply––and what a long, healthy life it will be.”

The young nurse backs away, but his eyes betray his interest. “Let me… Let me think about this.”

The key turns in the lock. You’re all alone in your prison cell with a legion of stitches across your chest, an empty void where the entirety of your heart should be. So many things could go wrong. The young nurse could tell a doctor or supervisor. He could decide helping you is not worth the trouble. Even if everything else works perfectly, your heart may never grow back again.

And yet, its shredded remains beat with ferocious hope.

No one comes to collect you today. No nurses milling about the hallway outside your cell or preening doctors hidden behind their avian masks. Does that mean, no spectators on the edge of their seats in the anatomical theater either? You toss a rubber stress ball against the far wall while lying upside down on your bed. The stitches are still healing, still sore. Your heartbeat grows exponentially louder as your heart knits itself back together, red and full of boiling blood and anger.

You can’t tell if it’s day or night, in this perpetual, artificial half-light. There’s no one here to read to you fairytales, so you tell yourself a story you read long ago, about a shimmering city called Omelas, where summer festivals were rich and glorious, where every citizen was happy and healthy. All but one.

When the door of your cell screeches open, you jump to your feet, dizzy with fear. However, it’s only the young nurse with the scruffy beard.

“Did you think about my offer?” you ask, even dizzier with hope.

The skittish nurse carries what looks like a body bag overflowing with colorful scraps. “Yes. But we’ve got to be quick, so just do as I say.”

“The heart I promised you hasn’t fully regenerated.”

The nurse’s mouth twists into a wince-smile. “Let’s worry about that later.”

Perplexed but uncomplaining, you strip off your white hospital gown. The nurse doesn’t look away.

“Here, we’re about the same size. Put this on and keep close to me.”

The outfit he offers you consists of pink breeches, a frilly emerald shirt, a floor-length cloak, and an ornate mask of black, curving horns. The mask, you realize hides all but a sliver of your face. The young nurse wears a matching outfit, mask, cloak, and all.

“Are we going to a costume party?”

The nurse smiles wryly. “There’s a fundraiser underway in the main hall. We’ll have to go through the banquet, and look like we belong among the benefactors. It’s the only way out.”

It feels peculiar to walk out of your room and down the long, narrow corridor on your own two feet. You wobble, almost expecting to be guided onto a gurney, but no one comes. You straighten your back and take advantage of the flowing cloak to hide the unsteady sway of your gait. The heavy mask makes your face itch and your vision tunnel, but it’s the only thing keeping you from being discovered.

The young nurse pulls you through a side exit, following the distant strains of violins and flutes. How long has it been since you last listened to music? Since you attended a party or festivity of any kind? Soon, you’re in a glass-domed, marble-floored room you’ve only seen once, when you signed your own admission papers a lifetime ago.

The hall has been turned into a dancefloor, the walls lined with white-linen buffets where people can nibble on canapés as they elegantly mingle. Couples swirl on the dancefloor, billowing cloaks and plumed masks concealing everyone’s identity. Even so, you can tell these people come from money, just from the way they carry themselves through this masquerade. You can also tell, by the glow of their skin, the effervescence of their dance, that these are the same people who have been ingesting pieces of your heart for who knows how long.

“What’s the fundraiser for?” you choke out through a rapidly constricting throat.

The young nurse shrugs by your side. “Some children’s hospital across the country.”

The same hospital that should have been getting your flesh-and-blood donations all this time. Although you suspected before, you’re certain of it now. You’re not healing the poor and sick, only prolonging the already full lives of the rich and privileged.

No happy prince or giving tree. Just a fool. This entire building isn’t a clinic at all, only a gilded theater, a polished dancefloor.

Eternal prison.

You can’t help it. The laughter caught in your chest rattles loose from the horrid irony of it all. Coughs replace it, your hand pressing over the throbbing stitches to keep yourself from flying apart.

“Drink?” asks a black-clad waiter carrying a tray of champagne flutes.

“None for us––” the young nurse begins.

You grab a glass and down it in a greedy gulp. How you’ve missed alcohol. But some strange taste is laced through the champagne, more metallic than bubbly. You inspect the pink-tinted liquid and gag.

“I tried to warn you,” the nurse says with an apologetic shrug. “All these people? They’re the hospital’s precious benefactors. The catering is supposed to show our appreciation.”

You stumble toward the buffet, stomach a raging tempest, and not only because it’s become unaccustomed to drinks outside of an IV bag. The buffet is laden with gourmet cold cuts, glistening sauces, and velvety soups. But what at first glance appears like animal meat is actually much redder, much more familiar. Foams and reductions of molecular gastronomy, candy-apple-red.

They’re eating you.

“They’re eating me.”

The nurse claps you on the back. You dimly wonder if it’s supposed to be encouraging. “It sucks, but try not to make a scene and blow our cover.”

A young girl in a princess dress and a matching bejeweled mask makes grabby hands toward the buffet. Her mother chuckles, then plates a piece of your heart for her daughter. The tender morsel sits on a wheat cracker, drizzled with balsamic cream.

The nurse is talking again. Does he ever stop? “You wait right here, I’ll make sure our getaway car is ready.”

With another clap, he’s gone. Your skin alternates between chilling and sweating. You face the dancefloor to distract yourself before you lose what’s left of your mind, but someone else clasps your upper arm. They lean against your back, breath heavy and alcohol-sour in your ear.

“Can’t wait for those gold-mine hearts, eh?” the man behind you says before slipping away into the horde of graceful dancers. He called you by a different name, just now. The young nurse’s name, you realize, as every terrible thing slots into place.

You suppose you and the nurse really are the same size. Nearly identical in your velvet cloaks and horned masks, any differences softened through a haze of alcohol and tasteful lighting. So much for escape. The familiarly bare and antiseptic prison cell, even the hospital’s anatomical theater, must be better than whatever moldy basement and makeshift operating table the traitorous nurse has prepared for you.

But you don’t have to go back. The realization hits you harder than the taste of your own blood mixed in champagne. You can walk away. With the anonymity provided by your disguise and the diversion of the banquet, you can escape into the night.

You inch away past the tittering, intoxicated patrons, slowly, oh-so-casually so as to remain undiscovered. Prey who runs is always caught. The double glass doors leading to the outside world remain unlocked. You can almost taste the fresh, non-sterile air when the young nurse that betrayed you steps in your way.

“Where do you think you’re doing?” he hisses, panic evident in the luminous whiteness of his eyeballs behind the ornate mask. “What about my payment?”

“I know.” You allow yourself to be pulled into a side hallway so as not to attract the crowd’s attention. “I know everything.”

And you do. Once more, laughter bubbles up your parched throat. All the secrets of the world are actually quite simple. Quite filthy, too.

“Keep quiet, or we’ll both get in trouble,” the young nurse spits out. His hand slams over your mouth, pushes you against the wall. The music is so far away here, yet loud enough to drown out your exchange.

Your tongue darts out to lick the nurse’s hand. It tastes like the rusty nails holding your prison’s bed-frame together. How strange, to be the one tasting someone for a change.

He squeals in disdain, disgust. “That’s it, I’m taking you back.”

You neither protest nor resist. The nurse’s hand is a vice around your bicep. Yet it’s obvious how scared and jumpy he is. Careless, too. The young nurse lost his mask sometime during your earlier scuffle in the hallway. His eyes glow wild the calmer you remain.

Once you reach your cell, he fumbles with the ID pinned to the underside of his cloak’s collar. The ID card that is as faceless and nameless as everything else about the ever-changing army of nurses.

“I tried to help you, I did, but you don’t know how to appreciate––”

The nurse’s self-righteous tirade is cut short by the kick you land to his back, hard enough to send him stumbling against your cot. The force of the blow rips the cloak––the ID card––out of his grip; you pull it into yours.

“What are you doing?”

The cell door slams shut. Locked, while the young nurse remains inside. You toss the cloak in through the food slot. Nights are cold under your old scratchy blanket that now belongs to him. The young nurse will need his cloak in order to keep warm until he’s discovered in the morning, once the masquerade is over. If he’s lucky, the nurses that prepare him for surgery will have been in the hospital long enough to recognize him. If he’s very lucky, he won’t make it into the anatomical theater––under the knife––at all. But luck or no luck, you’ll be long gone by then.

You affix the ID to your own cloak and walk away. The young nurse pounds his fists against the door and screams himself raw. No one will come. They never did for you.

The party is still in full swing. The benefactors dance and swirl, clinking champagne flutes, carefree as only those not required to worry about their health and longevity can be. You glide through the loathsome revelry, as unseen as a specter. Masked, velvet-cloaked, you walk away. Your heart is silent. The regeneration process halted sometime between the terror of the buffet and the realization of the young nurse’s betrayal. Perhaps your heart has withered away altogether.

You’re not worried. By now you’ve seen how only the heartless remain unscathed.