Talking himself into a heart attack, Moses found, was easier than bending a spoon with his mind, which he’d tried without success to do for months in his youth. His mom had bought him Uri Geller’s book on psychokinesis as a consolation prize for not receiving a letter to Hogwarts on his eleventh birthday, and he’d spent hours in his bedroom, attempting to visualize the spoon on the rug before him as nothing but a collection of atoms. He’d strain until he thought he might shit his pants. The book remained on the shelf when he left for college.
The night it happened, he was lying in bed next to his wife. It was 3:33 a.m., a time that felt vaguely evil. He tried to focus on his breathing, but his thoughts wandered to the sound of the blood pumping in his ears against his pillow, then to the wooden fence groaning in the wind outside, then to his son, Michael, eight, cowlicked, snoring in the room opposite. Then on to the time his dad walked in on him dancing to “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” wearing only his briefs and his older sister’s crop top as she laughed and banged a tambourine. When focus came back to his body, Moses envisioned the whooshing blood cells in his chest as red Volkswagen Beetles, barreling in and out of the ventricles of his heart. At the entrance to one of these tunnels, he saw an unexpected swerve, smelled the acrid stench of burnt rubber. A screech, a pileup.
His arm prickled with pinpricks, and a trash compactor churned under his ribs.
“Deb?” he said.
“Hm?”
“Does the car have gas in it?”
In the hospital, the fluorescent lights above washed out his retinas, reminding him of being at the dentist. A pinch in his arm, and he was out. When he awoke, his son was asleep, curled like a cat, in one of the plasticky aquamarine chairs against the wall, and his wife was looking at her phone.
“Oh God,” she said when he stirred.
“I did that,” he said. “I did that.”
“You did what?”
“I did that. I did that to myself.”
Back home, on a diet of Baer aspirin and flavorless strips of tilapia, he sat in his leather office chair each day, trying desperately not to consider his heart. What if Deb was right, and it had only been a coincidence? Maybe he’d been thinking about his heart because his body in some internal quiet way already recognized he was undergoing the initial symptoms of cardiac arrest. To think too much about it was to risk it happening again.
He spent the afternoons sipping room temperature 7-Up and silently naming all of the ninja turtles, the Silver Age X-Men, every Kevin Costner movie.
One evening, he stopped in Chipotle with the intention of indulging in a barbacoa burrito with extra sour cream and a large Coke. Enough time had passed, his empty stomach had begun to occupy his thoughts more than his heart.
As he waited in line, he heard shouting near the pick-up counter.
“Do you speak English? Is there anyone here who speaks English?”
“Sir, we’re doing all we can.”
The man yelling was bald and wore a purple COEXIST T-shirt. He pointed a finger at the Hispanic cashier.
“Don’t call me sir,” he said. “I’m not a sir. I’m not a sir to you.”
“Sir, sir, sir.”
The man broadened the scope of his invective to include the kitchen staff behind her, who ceased the scraping of their stovetops.
“Which one of you lost my order? Hm? Was it you?”
Several of the line cooks glanced at each other, trying to hold back grins. A splotch like Pangaea developed in the center of the bald man’s head.
“You’re all animals!” he screamed. “You’re no better than the swine you grill!”
It occurred to Moses: he could assign this man a heart attack. In a flash, there were the red cars rushing out of the daylight and into the artificial illumination of the tunnel. The honk, the screech, the clamor.
“Argh!” said the man.
“Sir? Sir? Sir?”
The ambulance that took him away had purple lights. Moses had never seen an ambulance before that had purple lights. He tried to convince himself this odd detail meant the entire event may have been a dream.
His wife asked why his foot was always tapping these days. Perhaps he was taking too much aspirin? Too little? Should they ask the doctor?
“Moses,” she said. “You’re worrying me to death.”
The COEXIST man was survived by his two adult children, according to an online obituary. He’d worked as a vibration eliminationist, building shock mounts for industrial furnaces. He was widowed and had spent his entire life on the north side of Indianapolis, not too far from where Moses and his family lived.
Did the man’s children know he was an asshole? Did they know he was a hypocrite? Would they accept that as a justifiable reason for why a stranger saw fit to kill him?
Moses stopped visiting his elderly parents. Ignored his mom’s calls, responded to her texts with elaborate excuses as to why he and the family were unavailable that weekend. Provided only vague suggestions of more suitable dates in the future. How about March. No, on second thought, March is no good.
He bought books on Buddhist philosophy, Tibetan traditions. Downloaded a meditation app. Input his credit card information. But all the new thinking about thinking made him worry: what if what he had in his head right now was a butterknife? Was he whetting it into a machete?
He donated the books, deleted the app.
At work, Moses explained to his boss that recovery was taking longer than expected and he’d like to start working from home, please. He didn’t mention how thunderous the beats of his coworker’s hearts were, and how thin his cubicle walls felt, separating him from them.
“Sorry to hear that, Hank,” his boss said. “Everything OK?”
“Fatigued, mostly,” Moses answered, watching nervously as his boss scratched his chest through his dress shirt.
Leonardo. Donatello. Michaelangelo.
“And headaches,” he added.
Physically, it wasn’t hard to avoid Deb and Michael. Their house was large enough to accommodate much empty space between the three of them at any given time. It’d been built to spec in the country. The contractors had knocked off a corner of the stone back patio with a backhoe and never made good on their reassurances to fix it. This blemish provided a welcome source of focus for Moses as he spent his mornings and afternoons and nights out there, calculating yield to maturity.
“You’re getting sunburnt,” his wife murmured one evening as he tiptoed into the dark bedroom. He’d thought she’d been asleep.
“Doctor said fresh air would be good.”
Cyclops. Beast. Iceman.
She rolled over. From the faint light spilling in from the hall, he could tell she was wearing a shimmery lilac nightdress he’d never seen before. Had she bought it to attract his attention? He wished she hadn’t. What he wanted her to do was to encase herself behind a wall of granite.
“What’s going on, Moses?”
He read the ridges in the ceiling as he unbuttoned his shirt.
“Tired. You know.”
“Michael wants to tell you about his report card. Do you even know my mom picked up smoking again? Why’re you avoiding us?”
“Um.”
“Jesus Moses, would you look at me when I’m talking to you?”
He forced his eyes onto hers.
Jean Grey. Angel.
She clicked on the lamp and sat up, squinting. “What’s wrong with you? You look constipated.”
Ignore the wailing of horns. Do not watch the rise and fall of her clavicle. Breathe in. Professor X. Breathe out.
She sighed, threw herself into her pillow, violently bunched the sheets around her shoulders.
“Fine. Great communication, Moses. Just what the doctor ordered.”
As he settled in beside her, his mind hissing steam into the sudden dark, she whispered.
“Just buy your son a goddamn Blizzard, OK?”
The next day, Moses focused on the long, thin white scratch like a blonde hair etched into the faux-stained polymer of the Dairy Queen table between he and Michael. He tried not to visualize his son’s heart. What size it was, how many beats it achieved per minute.
There was a time when he’d thought about nothing but his son’s heart. Deb and he had tracked the size of all his organs when he was just a small thing growing inside her. They’d woken up early on Saturday mornings to consult an app, which gave them weekly updates on the development of their little boy’s brain, his lungs, his toes. They could choose to have the size of his body be represented by fruits, animals, 90’s toys. In the months and years after he was born, Moses gradually stopped seeing his son as an assemblage of parts. Now, once more, he was forced to reckon with the individual components. Their fragility.
“There were only 106 McLaren F1s ever built,” Michael was saying. “And it’s supposed to be, um, the fastest naturally aspirated car ever made. But I still think I prefer the 718 Spyder—”
He gagged, prompting Moses to look up for the first time all meal. Fluidly, he took in his son’s heaving chest, the panicked look behind those dark eyelashes, the strands of blond hair floating up toward the ceiling vent.
Then, he hacked a loud, dry cough, a tear forming instantly in his right eye.
“Butterfinger,” he smiled apologetically.
Mere avoidance was unsustainable. That was obvious, Moses thought, playing Call of Duty that night on the projector in his basement with the volume turned so loud in his headphones it was like static in his ears. A thought had troubled him for weeks: could he consider a heart from afar? If so, distance alone would do nothing to save his wife and son.
Another test was necessary.
Pulling open his laptop, he googled “most hated person on Earth.” Frustratingly, there was no consensus, but a South American dictator popped up on more than one list. The case made on Reddit was compelling. Secret gas chambers hidden in the steamy jungle, disappeared journalists, children with cleft palates and ribs visible through their dirty, torn T-shirts.
He cracked open a Monster Energy drink and absorbed the atrocities like Duolingo lessons, taking only occasional breaks to slay the avatars of strangers online.
The man had suffered health issues already, it seemed. A stint in the hospital his state media seemed eager to move on from. In the more recent photos, Moses saw the man had lost weight. Gained some yellow in the eyes.
Around midnight he felt justified in focusing his gaze on this sick man’s heart.
Studying the New York Times photo, Moses imagined the little red cars swarming deep under those military fatigues. In his mind’s eye he saw them come to a sudden, shrieking halt.
Onscreen, Moses’ character collapsed. The camera zoomed in to find the sniper in the nearby ruined tower who’d felled him. The player did a glitchy little dance that meant he’d modded his controller.
Ding.
Moses took one glance at the Washington Post notification, set his phone on the carpet, got up from the couch, walked to the sliding glass doors, stepped outside, and laid face down in the lawn.
In the morning, he returned, his clothes damp and stinking of mown grass. His eyeballs felt like concrete; the bags under them were the texture of leather. He tried to walk with the swagger of a war hero. But it was impossible to muster any confidence in soggy pajamas, alone in one’s basement, having to piss.
Picking up his phone, he scanned the dozens of additional news notifications. Confusion, protests, looting, arson. Clicking, he found a drone video of a tank worming its way through a crowded street, like a water bug skimming along the surface of an algae-crusted lake.
Awash in the pink light of dawn, Moses found himself standing before the cool mist of the open refrigerator door.
Over the next few weeks, he discovered that, with the assistance of one beer consumed every two to two and a half hours, his thoughts could be dulled enough as to almost not be heard. With the anxiety deadened, he could allow his attention to wander safely to his wife, sitting there on the bleachers beside him, or his son, diving off the blocks into the cold, chlorinated water as the buzzer echoed. He saw the glances from the other parents. He hated the stench of beer too. But for all of their collective safety, he made regular trips to the bathroom throughout the meet to crack open Busch after Busch, concealed in the canvas messenger bag Deb had bought him for his first day of work, years ago.
Each time he returned to the bleachers, he cheered louder and louder, until eventually, during Michael’s final lap in the 200, his voice cracked and Moses could scream no more.
“You need to see someone,” Deb said to him from across the marble kitchen island. Her voice was muffled in his ears, which meant she was safe to engage with.
“About what?”
“About what?” she repeated, then held up the mesh wastebasket he kept under the desk in his office. The cans inside jingled like a windchime.
“I’ve been reading,” she went on. “Lots of men go through this after a heart attack. You’re depressed—”
“I killed someone,” Moses said. She lowered the trash can, her face expressionless. He felt his own pulse pounding in his neck and tried not to think about it. “Maybe several someones. What I did to me I can do to others, but worse. Do you remember that guy who had the heart attack at the Chipotle down the street last winter?”
“No.”
“I think I did that. And Raoul Cortez?”
“Who?”
“Him too. I thought about him hard enough and he died. He was already sick, but … And now, the power vacuum that’s happening there, and all the people that have been killed … they’re maybe my fault too. By extension. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know. I don’t …”
“OK,” she said. “OK.”
She set the wastebasket down, then came around the counter. Moses thought for a moment she was coming to embrace him and was prepared to push her away. They hadn’t touched skin since the heart attack, and he wasn’t about to place his head anywhere near her beating chest.
But she strode right past him, toward the stairs. Minutes later, she came down, leading a hunched Michael in his Star Wars pajamas. She ushered him past Moses, toward the front door. She was deliberate not to make eye contact, but Michael bore his groggy eyes into his father as they moved.
“What’re we doing? Where are we going?”
Moses watched as she helped Michael slip his sneakers onto his bare feet.
“Deb?” he said. “Deb?”
“Call me when you’re willing to get some help,” she said. Then, she pushed Michael out the front door. The headlights from the Traverse shined in through the mist, meaning she’d remotely started the engine from upstairs.
Moses felt a puff of cold air bring with it the scent of pine needles and wet concrete as the door slammed shut.
He listened to the refrigerator whine. When the humidifier in the basement beeped twice, he stood, went upstairs, rifled through his kid’s drawers, and put his nose in the White Sox cap he found, breathing in the smell of his son’s scalp. He sat on the twin bed and clutched a Sonic-shaped pillow to his face.
As he drifted to sleep, his mind wandered to the summer his dad decided to get skinny. He’d quit drinking, cut out carbs, started running with the high-school cross country team. Moses remembered feeling embarrassed, driving to the movies with his friends, passing his dad shuffling along the side of the asphalt baked road in a drenched cut-off sweatshirt, lagging miles behind the team. That summer, his dad also booked a standing weekly appointment at Sun City Tan, so that his complexion could help motivate his weight loss, and vice versa. By September some of his poker friends were saying he looked like Robert Redford. He began to act more aloof, like a Midwesterner’s idea of how a movie star might behave. Talking about servers at restaurants as if they weren’t standing there, demanding someone else grab a rag and clean up when he spilled a glass of milk. One morning, while Moses and his older sister were getting ready for school, they’d heard their parents shouting in the living room.
“If you want to be an ass, you can be a lonesome ass,” he remembered his mom saying before slamming the front door and driving away in the station wagon.
She came back that evening. Floated in through the front door and silently joined the three of them at the dinner table, where they were sharing a greasy bag of McNuggets.
By the next summer, Dad had regained the weight he’d lost, and his skin was again pale as an unused pillowcase.
Moses awoke to his phone buzzing. The Sonic pillow crackled under his cheek with dried tears. A gray sun shined in through the rain-splattered window. He answered the call without looking.
Instead of Deb’s voice on the other end, he heard his mother’s.
“Moses,” she gasped. “I don’t know what happened. Your dad … he just … he won’t …”
If she’d been in a more rational state, she might have wondered why Moses didn’t need to ask more questions. As it was, he simply said he’d be there within the hour.
Racing down the highway, his skin felt hot, combustible, unstable. He saw the drivers of the other cars and he wanted to laser into their chests, send them screaming off the road, weld their bodies into the machinery they traveled in.
Ahead, a Prius put on its blinker and pulled onto the exit, slowing down.
Should he blast through the barricades to his right, he wondered? Do society a service and aim his vehicle squarely for the base of one of those wind turbines? His grip whitened on the wheel. What would it do to his mom to lose her husband and son in the same morning? And what if he didn’t die on impact? People in comas dreamt. What if he existed as a vegetable, offing people indiscriminately in his sleep for years, decades, the guardrails on his thoughts removed entirely?
The color returned slowly to his fingertips.
Tin Cup. Dances with Wolves. Waterworld.
When his mom opened the door and saw his face, she gasped, like he was the corpse.
The wake was held in Moses’ childhood home. People set drinks on the bar cart his father had made from a pine he cut down himself in the neighboring woods. As his mom hugged his old neighbors, Moses noticed in the wall behind her the hole where his dad had punched the plaster after hearing his sister was planning on dropping out of college to move to Hollywood and become a screenwriter. His mom had hung an empty glass frame around the crater, attempting to alter it into a piece of art.
When he heard the bathroom door wedge as it tried to open down the hall, engorged due to the moisture in the air, he felt a hard punch in his chest, realizing it wasn’t his dad about to round the corner.
“A heart’s not meant to be yo-yoed,” his mom sighed into her plate of barbecue meatballs beside him. “It’s all those diets I had him try. I mean, paleo? Jesus.”
Moses hadn’t had a drink in three days. Nausea moved through him like a ghost, and there was a point of pressure building behind his left eye. He knew it was dangerous to speak in the state he was in. But the words flew out of him like dry leaves bursting up out of a bonfire.
“Mom,” he said. “I can do this thing where … If I think about someone too hard … I didn’t think I was thinking about it with Dad, but he’d been on my mind, and … so it had to be me. Maybe I’m getting better at it. Whatever it means to get better at it. I don’t know. But I’m afraid. I’m … I did it. I did it to—Christ.”
His mom lifted another meatball and popped it into her mouth, eyeing him as she slowly chewed.
“June?” she called over her shoulder. “Come here a sec.”
Moses’ sister wore a dark gray cardigan over a knee length orange dress. He, Deb, and Michael had visited her at her apartment in Studio City once. Michael had been five and quickly grew obsessed with the La Brea Tar Pits. They went back three days in a row. He preferred the dead mastodons to the beach, Deb observed on the airplane on their way home, as Michael snored into her shoulder.
They used to worry back then about his obsession with death. But like all fixations, it passed.
“Tell your brother what you told me this morning,” said his mom.
June laughed snot into the crumpled Kleenex she held clutched to her nostril.
“I told her I killed Dad,” she said. “The night before he passed, I’d written a scene where the main character’s dad dies of a heart attack.” She frowned at Moses and her eyes welled behind her horn-rimmed glasses.
“I raised a couple of nutjobs,” his mom said, squeezing his and his sister’s arms, tightly. “We raised a couple of nutjobs.”
Driving home, Deb’s breath whistled through her nose in the passenger seat beside him and Michael played a loud racing game on his phone in the backseat. Moses eyed the passing billboards, marketing weight loss drugs and clearance sales on hot tubs and the promise of salvation at a new, non-denominational church downtown.
The trouble was, the trick didn’t work in the other direction. He couldn’t will his mom’s arthritis away, unbend her stiff, curled fingers. He couldn’t convince the fat cells in the spare tire around his waist to disintegrate. He couldn’t think his asthmatic wife to clearer nasal passages, or his boy to more muscular legs, better suited to backstroke, or himself to better morning breath. He couldn’t think a heart awake again.
What a sad god he made. Only one tool in his belt with which to answer all the prayers that could be prayed. Desperate to protect, but able only to pay attention.
“You’re tapping again, Michael” Deb said, glancing behind her. “It’s shaking the car.”
“It’s not me,” Michael said without looking up. “It’s Dad.”
Deb glanced at Moses. He forced himself to look into her eyes, the color of a power-washed deck, brilliant against the washed-out white sky in the passenger window behind her. He felt his left heel bounce again and again into the rubber floor mat. Ahead of them, a tunnel loomed.
“Sorry,” he said to Deb. “I can’t help it.”
She didn’t break the gaze.
“Try,” she said.
Andrew Graham Martin’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, HAD, Post Road, SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and baby daughter. You can find him at andrewgrahammartin.com.
Image: pschubert, morguefile.com
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Heavy Feather Review 