call it broken heart syndrome.â
Sometimes I spend too much time wondering what Alex might be like if his brain werenât supporting the weight of a koi pond.
The Heart-Hole Children
Enja, Dasha, Vlad, Alexa, and Nick all have holes in their hearts. Apparently, this is the most common affliction at the asylum. These kids are relegated to the Red Room (itâs actually a scuffed-up pink), where they all lie in an assortment of beds and cribs with plastic wires that leave their chests and arrive at machines whose cold and impersonal intelligence fills me with existential nausea.
The heart-hole children donât last here for very long, and certainly not long enough for them to reach an age where theyâve developed a deep enough sense of personhood for me to see them as human beings. Actually, they feel more like a miniature alien species with humanoid features than actual people. And, contrary to conventional wisdom, the heart-holesâ brief tenancies are not due to cardiac arrest but to a miracle of God. Within ten months, their hearts are fixed, and they are released back to their families and out into the world, presumably to live a normal life filled with candy, sex, and voting.
Actually, God is not responsible for fixing any heart-holers, so far as I can tell. I used to wonder why He, if He were to exist, wouldnât make it easier to know itâs Him doing all the fixing. Then I realized that itâs probably because we would also blame Him for all the rest of us, who, incidentally, are much less fixable. So until I have some evidence that God is the one making the heart-hole children better, I will give all the credit to Dr. Ridick.
When I was about eight years old, Ridick started showing up in Mazyr with an entourage of assistants carrying boxes of medical supplies. Included in these boxes were a few pieces of technologically advanced medical fabric, which are apparently the perfect substitute for heart stuff. Currently, Ridick visits about twice a year, once in June and once in December, and during his stay, the good doctor sews up as many hearts as he can. The newly patched heart-hole kids wake up the next morning with a smile that comes with the feeling of their hearts beating properly for the first time in their lives. I know this because Iâve camped out and waited patiently to watch their eyes open. Then, two days later, an unfamiliar vehicle rolls up to the front door and picks up one of the newly patched kids. The child saunters down the front steps and wobbles into the backseat and then drives off into a new life where he eats real food cooked by a mother who takes proper credit for birthing him and makes friends who are capable of uttering words and courts a mate whom he can learn to love and copulate with.
For most of my life at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children, Iâve resented the heart-hole kids, but this has changed recently. Not because my situation is any different but because Iâve met Ridick.
Like most people, I hated Ridick at first. The first few times he and his entourage arrived, they were accompanied by a team of cameras and audio equipment that followed around the good doctor as if he were, in fact, the God of Old Testament notoriety. They filmed the bloody open hearts of the heart-hole kids, careful not to omit any detail of the carnage, for the enjoyment of thousands of faceless viewers who wanted to feel warm and gushy over the prospect that happy endings are real. I observed from a good safe distance as Ridick, and then the nurses, and then the newly functional heart-hole children were interviewed by glib international journalists. Itâs not that I wanted the attention (maybe I secretly did). It just lit my mutant fuse to see the cameras put a pretty ornate frame around the affable doctor and happy heart-holers as if they were some island isolated from the rest of us. One abrupt 360-degree panoramic revolution would expose the fact that