Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart

4. Imo Pectore

39 4. Imo Pectore Unto me and my wife one day two sons are born, a minute apart. Two boys lifted mewling from the salt sea of her uterus: one darkhaired, one light; one small, one large; one with a healthy heart, and the other, Not. * Heartache, heartsore, heartsick, heartbroken. My heart is hammered. My heart moans. My heart is splintered and ragged and shattered and shuttered. My heart is cold. My heart is heavy. My heart is hard. My heart is a stone, flint, iron, a fist. We knew that one of the babies would have a flawed heart, according to sonograms taken while they were in utero, and we’d been told that it was likely that that one would have to have surgery right away, but we hoped against hope that it wouldn’t be so. But it is so. I wake my wife and tell her. Her eyes go gray. * We give the boys names to carry all their lives: the small darkhaired darkeyed one, the fox-boy, a tiny coyote, a child the size and color of mink, his eyes wide, his attention laser, this lean droplet of boy lifted from his mother’s torn belly, this the wet engine 40 one, the firstborn, is given the name Joseph, an ancient sturdy name, from the Greek Iosephos, from the Hebrew Yoseph, meaning: God adds him to the world. The name worn by the brawny muscled silent stepfather of the Christos. And the second boy, the lighthaired cheerful round large one, with a chamber missing from his heart: his name takes a while to arrive, which worries us, because it seems bad luck to leave him nameless, especially with knives hanging over his heart, but we had only agreed on his name if he was a girl, which he isn’t, so he cannot be Gina, so my wife suggests Henry, and I suggest Liam, and we mull this over for a while, and then sleepily she says Liam, and so he is given the name Liam, an ancient Irish name, thought to have meant helmet or protection before the English came to Ireland and savaged that green rocky world and so many of its green liquid words. I whisper his new name into the boy’s ear, whisper a prayer that it will protect him from pain, that it will be a helmet of a name, for he will always be at war, he will always be wounded, he is wounded right from the first minute he enters this bruised broken blessed world. * The days pass one by one and the doctors watch the second boy with sharp eyes and they say every day no, no surgery yet, no, wait and watch, no, there’s a hole in his heart that if it closes we will do the surgery immediately, but if it doesn’t close there’s no immediate hurry, and it doesn’t close, day after day, and every day the sweet quiet nurses help my wife as she tries to nurse her two new sons, the dark jittery first one who cries every time he is removed from the warm country of her chest and the light calm second one who is accompanied always by a web and thicket of tubes and wires and sensors, and the hole in the calm one’s heart doesn’t close and doesn’t Imo Pectore 41 close and finally after a week we are all sent home, my wife and our two new roommates. * A week later we meet Dave for the first time. He’s in his green scrubs. He crouches down again and again and draws for my wife and me the architecture of Liam’s heart, and she and I pay ferocious attention together so our two brains will maybe together understand what Dave is saying, and he says Liam’s heart is perfectly balanced physiologically with the right amount of pulmonary blood flow, and he explains about fenestration and pressure, and valvular function and oxygenation and malfunction, and he has a blue pen and a red pen and he charts flow and flaw, he shows us where the surgeon will eventually build a shunt, and reroute veins, and we watch absorbed, with complete and furious attention, we must understand, but I understand nearly nothing, for the veins and arteries swirl and whip before my eyes as Dave draws, and...