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for twenty-three hours straight. She’s gone home to rest.”
    “Tell her …” He struggled with the thought. What could he say? I’m sorry? I love you? I didn’t mean to almost die on you?
    “You can tell her yourself in a little bit. Why don’t you go back to sleep now?”
    He decided to go back to sleep. The whirr and click were becoming just a white noise that no longer meant anything. The pressure buildup and release inside his chest were like the impacts of his feet on a carpeted floor. No longer the focus of his awareness. There wasn’t even any pain.
    The third time he awoke, it was to a bright light shining into his right eyeball. Flicking to one side. Flicking back. A large pink thumb was holding his eyelid open.
    “Don’t do that,” he muttered. He tried to push the nuisance away but his hands were still cuffed to the bed.
    “Pupil response is good,” said a voice.
    “Are you a doctor?” Praxis asked.
    “I’m Doctor Jamison, from your OR team. I’m just checking vital signs.”
    “That means I’m still alive, does it?”
    “Yes, very much so,” the man said.
    Praxis looked around. The head of the bed was even higher now. On one side was a window, drapes drawn, dark outside. On the other side a wall with a credenza-thing and a couple of straight-back chairs, now empty. No sign of an enclosing curtain, so he was in a private room, not recovery, not intensive care. That would be good news, wouldn’t it? No sign of Callie or the boys, either, so there was no death watch—another good sign?
    He looked down at his chest to see what all the whirr ing and click ing were about—and saw that the thin front of his hospital gown, lower down below his stomach, was pushed out by strange shapes that pulsed in time with the muted sounds and distant thuds. It took him a minute to interpret those shapes as loops of hose that came up over the edge of the bed, went under his gown, and stopped somewhere … inside his chest.
    “What is that?” he asked, nodding at the hoses.
    “Ah … we need to explain that,” Jamison said.
    “So explain,” Praxis said, using his CEO voice.
    “You suffered a major infarction with irreversible end-stage biventricular failure.”
    “In English, that’s a heart attack,” Praxis said.
    “No, in English, your heart had already died.”
    So that was to be his epitaph: Your heart had already died. Well, truth to tell, John Praxis had secretly been expecting it for a long time. Ever since a bout of rheumatic fever as a child, the doctors had been urging him at the annual checkups to take care of his heart. Then he had experienced a couple of “episodes,” ten and eight years ago, that seemed to be the consequence of all that concern. But those events had been nothing like the Thunderbolt. He’d felt tired, weak, short of breath—and had some discomfort in his chest, like heartburn or a spell of indigestion. The doctors had called them “silent” heart attacks and said they were a warning. So he quit smoking entirely, cut way back on his drinking, and started taking exercise—ironically, most of it on the golf course. The doctors had prescribed nitroglycerin pills for him, but when Praxis started feeling so much better, he stopped carrying them. Instead, he paced himself, and whenever he felt weak or tired, he just sat down. The “heart condition” just hadn’t been that big a deal. It wasn’t as if he was going to die.
    “That explains my falling over at the Olympic Club,” Praxis said. “It doesn’t explain those tubes and the whirligig going on inside me.”
    “When we couldn’t get your heart back to a stable rhythm through either stimulation or percutaneous intervention,” Jamison said, “we had to open your chest. We found multiple and extensive blockages and areas of previous necrosis. In laymen’s terms, your heart was beating on will power alone. We had no alternative but to remove most of the ventricular muscle tissue.”
    Praxis tried to relate