The Unremarkable Heart

disproportionately fascinated with the minutiae of his job, had described in great detail where the fatal flaw had occurred. Condensation had rusted the coil. The Freon had leaked, depriving the system of coolant. The hose to the outside unit had frozen. Inside the house, the temperature had continued to rise rather than fall, the poor thermostat notunderstanding why cooling was not being accomplished. Meanwhile, the fan had continued on, whirring and whirring until the motor burned out.
    Cause and effect.
    And yet, while June could easily find a semi-literate HVAC repairman to explain to her the process through which her air conditioner had died on the hottest day of the summer, there was no medical expert who could reveal to June the minutiae of death.
    Finally, on one of the last days that she could leave the house unaided, June had discovered a book in the dusty back shelves of a used-book store. June had almost overlooked it, thinking that she had found some new age tripe written by a pajama-clad cultist. The cover was white with the outline of a triangle inside a solid circle. The title was an idiotic word-play she could do without – How Do You Die? – but she found comfort inside the pages, which was more than any living being could offer her.
    ‘The following text will serve as a guide to the physical act of dying,’ Dr Ezekiel Bonner wrote. ‘Though every human being is different, the body only dies in one way.’
    ‘Well,’ June had mumbled to herself. There, finally, was the truth.
    None of us are special. None of us are unique. We may think we are individuals, but in the end, we are really nothing at all.
    June had taken the book home, prepared a pot of tea, and read the book with a pen in her hand so that she could make notations in the margins. At points, she had laughed aloud at the descriptions offered by Dr Bonner, because the physical act of the body shutting down was not unlike that of her dying air conditioner. No oxygen, no blood flow, the heart burning out. The brain was the last to go, which pleased June, until she realized that there would be a period of time in which her body was dead buther brain was still alive. She would be conscious, able to understand what was going on around her, yet unable to do or say anything about it.
    This gave her night terrors like she’d never had before. Not believing in the afterlife had finally gotten its own back.
    How long would that moment of brain clarity last? Minutes? Seconds? Milliseconds? What would it feel like to be suspended between life and death? Was it a tight wire that she would have to walk, hands out, feet stepping lightly across a thin wire? Or was it a chasm into which she would fall?
    June had never been one to surrender to self-pity, at least not for any length of time. She considered instead the day ahead of her. She had always loved making lists, checking off each chore with a growing sense of accomplishment. Richard would come soon. She could already hear him downstairs making coffee. His slippers would shuffle on the stairs. Boards would squeak in the hallway. The hinges would groan as the door was pushed open. Tentatively, he would poke his head into the room, the curiosity in his eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses.
    Her eyes were always open. The morphine wore off in the early morning hours. The pain was like thousands of needles that pricked her skin, then drilled deeper and deeper into the bone as the seconds ticked by. She lay in bed waiting for Richard, waiting for the shot. She would stare at him as he stood at the door, his hesitancy a third person in the room. He would not look at her face, but at her chest, waiting for the strained rise and fall.
    And somehow, she would force air into her constricted lungs. Richard would exhale as June inhaled. He would come into the room and tell her good morning. Theshot would come first, the sting of the needle barely registering as the morphine was injected into her bloodstream. He would change the catheter. He would wet a rag in the bathroom sink and wipe the drool from her mouth as she waited for the drug to take away the gnawing edge of pain. He would ignore the smells, the stench of dying. In his droning monotone, he would tell her his plans for the day: fix the gutter, sweep the driveway, paint the trim in the hall. Then, his attention would turn to her day: Are you hungry this morning? Would you like to go outside for a while? Would you like to watch