The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel (25 page)

We went straight through the night, enduring rug burns and chafed skin. We had sex half-asleep, and then I woke up with her mouth on me, limp, trying to suck-start me into another roll and by Christ I was game.

She had to fly home in the morning and she still hadn’t asked whatever it was she wanted to ask. I didn’t press her, but I wanted her to hurry up and get to it. I wanted her away from Harold. I wanted more of her, all of her, nights and days filled with nothing but her.

We lay in bed as the sun rose, waiting for our bodies to oblige us one more time.

“So when are you leaving?” she asked.

“Leaving?”

“Leaving’s the only word I have for it. Going on hospital tour. Doing your Samaritan thing again.”

“Another week or so,” I said.

“What are you going to do with your little interview episode now?”

“I don’t know. Propose?”

She held up her hand—she still had her wedding ring on. I hadn’t noticed until right then.

“Bad form,” she said.

“Well, maybe I’ll just use it as a platform to retire. As long as your ring is gone by then.”

She didn’t say anything. Her hands did the talking and the rest of the early morning was panting and light sleep. Finally, deep sleep took over as the sky outside turned gray. When I woke up, she was gone. Full sun peeked through my drawn shades and I suddenly wasn’t sure what day it was.

I shambled into my living room and Mack was sitting on the couch, holding the remote in one hand and a beer in the other.

I froze.

“I had to make sure you were breathing,” Mack said. “I pounded the fuck out of the door before I used my key. You look positively post-coma, and that’s coming from a guy who’s actually seen you post-coma.”

“What time you get here?”

“Not long ago,” he said. “Two beers ago? Shit, son, it’s almost dinnertime. We going out or what? It’s almost season-two time. You better get your strength up.”

“Yeah. Let me get ready. Hey, you see anyone?”

“Like, where? Here? You holding out on your boy? Some hot call girl or something? They usually run a two-dick discount. You should have called.”

“Never mind,” I said, and got ready. We did our normal steakhouse thing, and I waited for Rae to call and ask me whatever it is she came to ask me, but she never did.

TWENTY-ONE

By the time the first season was done airing its limited run,
The Samaritan
was the number-one show of the summer, and the number-three show overall. The next step was to crush the singing competitions, and by measure of publicity and buzz, even I could see that when the next season finally hit the airwaves we’d be number one.

The strategy of keeping me from doing interviews had some unintended consequences. I became the Holy Grail for the paparazzi, and I barely left the house, making pictures of me even more in-demand. I was a mystery, a blank slate allowing columnists and bloggers to flood the Internet with ruminations about my motivations, my personality. To some, I was a humble man using one of the only outlets modern society could offer—television—as a platform to share my gift with the world. Others thought it was a disgrace to besmirch my gifts on a reality TV show. Then there were the extremists, the religious nuts who either thought I was Jesus or a conniving Antichrist looking to influence the world with my black magic.

The debate also included how we were manipulating the donations system. Purists correctly detailed how we were violating the law by getting “valuable gain” in the way of TV ratings and publicity, two things that translated directly into mountains of cash. The false-flag nut jobs actually came up with the right answer for once—that the government was turning a blind eye in exchange for my cooperation in testing. They even had unique ways of coming up with conspiracies of my power being weaponized. One blogger wrote a jarringly specific article about an unstable chemical weapon that caused a fast, fatal necrosis, arguing that I was the key to stabilizing the compound for military use.

My defenders came back strong, citing the increase across the board in altruistic donations—blood donations, organ donations, directed donations—all at record highs. More people were checking their driver’s licenses to make sure that they were donors. I even filmed a PSA urging people to donate.

The final debate was more specific to me: What was my responsibility? Should I give and give forever? What if I stopped? What if I wanted to retire and stop enduring the surgeries? That was a messy one for even me to consider.

At the very least, the hoax angle died out. Our network put up a million-dollar reward for anyone who could prove that I was a hoax. The other networks had a more vested, monetary interest than just the reward—everyone craved having the number-one show on their channel, and if the other network had it, tearing it down was just as effective as beating them with programming of your own. I bet that Hayes secretly hoped the hoax rumors would persist, but he signed off on a live Internet stream of one of my surgeries and recoveries—the double-lung transplant. They time-lapsed it on television, but that particular surgery had dozens of in-person medical witnesses and millions of viewers livestreaming online, via the network’s website, which was a pretty cutting-edge thing at the time. I guess Hayes and his superiors wanted the world to know that what America had in its possession was one hundred percent legit, but streams can be doctored and those who didn’t believe still didn’t believe. The skeptics were a vocal minority, drowned out by my various champions in the media. But that was it for live streams—both Hayes and I figured once was enough, and the network didn’t want to water down the show itself by broadcasting the footage from the tapings.

All of this resulted in the tapings of season two getting as much coverage and buzz as the episodes themselves. The tapings were like nested dolls from which the smaller, more concentrated version of reality would emerge—heavily edited, of course.

*   *   *

In the first taping of the second season, Patrick Debrobander, an eight-year-old burn victim, was the star.

Patrick had no parents. He lived in an orphanage in the desolate, corn-fed state of Iowa. One of the boys at the orphanage was a couple years older and was a known bed wetter and animal torturer, leaving him just one merit badge short of the serial-killer trifecta. He earned it on a Friday in September, rolling up Patrick in a blanket and setting it on fire. He called the game “human log” and they found him putting a marshmallow on the end of a coat hanger while Patrick thrashed and screamed to escape the flaming blanket.

Third-degree burns on his arms, straight to the bone. Second-degree most everywhere else. Barely a patch to harvest a skin graft to get his cheeks one bit closer to flesh-toned. His blue eyes twinkled in a mess of pink and red, his nose, luckily, had shape, but no flesh. His hair, scalp, forehead, and eyebrows were all fine, making him the perfect makeover candidate for our show. Obviously. I wouldn’t have met the boy if the story editors couldn’t deliver a happy ending.

Dr. Reynolds tested my ability to regrow skin by removing a patch on top of my thigh. In three days, it returned, no scars, just a barely visible line where the incision was made. “You scar,” he had told me, “but barely. It’s imperceptible.”

This episode would definitely need a “Warning: Graphic Content” voiceover after every commercial break. Seeing Dr. Reynolds pull out a pink glop from my guts, as he had in past surgeries, looked neat compared to this massacre. Two surgical teams worked, my skin getting yanked off in big patches still orange from iodine, then getting carried to another surgical room, where they shaped Patrick back into a flesh-colored human being.

Considering the amount of blood and gristle that was spilled, the outcome startled even me. He had suture lines and the shape of his lower face wasn’t quite right, but the world could be his again. He smiled and hugged me at the end. This hug took place a month after surgery, after I had recovered in a sterile environment, protected from the media, while my skin slowly crawled and expanded over craters of itching rawness, making me new again.

After I checked out, Doc Venhaus insisted on driving me home in his rented Chevy Cobalt. Rae had gone silent. I could do nothing but wait. For once, I knew what Hollie felt like. But Doc knew something about Rae and Harold, and the more I hammered him for information, the more he kept his distance during the tapings of the surgeries.

“So what’s your complaint of the day?” I asked him.

“Did you tell them about your healing timeframe, compared to your healing in my office when you first met me? Not that it matters. I can’t be so stupid as to think someone as sharp as Reynolds hasn’t noticed.”

“I think he’s noticed. He just doesn’t care. Without me there’s no show, and he lives for the show.”

“So
you
know. You just don’t care.”

“What’s your family think of you being attached to my hip in L.A. for six months?” I asked.

He turned up the radio and we didn’t talk again until he pulled up at the curb in front of my apartment.

“Why did you bring me out here, Dale? Did you think I’m another person you need to save?”

“If you aren’t, then why the hell are you here?”

“Same as you. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You left and didn’t tell me where you were going, so I didn’t have any information to give them when they finally came on strong.”

“They?”

“It seems that Hayes is a proper representative of ‘they’ in this affair. The surveillance was keyed in on me at the time, like I was the one laying the foundation of some massive hoax. It’s a lucky break for you it was that way, otherwise they probably would have sniffed out your plans to come out here with your friend.”

“You would have told them I was out here, if you knew. Right?”

“You’re goddamn right,” he said. “Anything they had planned is better than this carnival you built out here. They would have treated you better than you’re treating yourself. Better than they treated me.”

“Which is how?”

“Hostile. Evasive. Even though I wasn’t either myself. I gave them everything on you, every piece of data I had. Detailed statements about my evaluations of you. I signed affidavits. I passed lie detectors.”

“And they still wrecked you,” I said.

“First, they took my license because I gave you prescription lidocaine with no legitimate medical purpose.”

“That’s bullshit. How did they even know?”

“Because I told them in a statement. But don’t worry, if it wasn’t that, there’s only a thousand other reasons they can conjure out of thin air to revoke a medical license. Without the license, my practice was quite obviously gone. My income. Then our credit cards went dry. My bank accounts were frozen. My house descended into foreclosure. Lucille tried, and wanted to stay, but I was damaged goods. The divorce was my idea, to keep her from circling the drain with me. Samantha went to live with her mother.”

“So what did you do after all that?”

“Government aid, if you can believe it. They gave me an apartment and a monthly stipend. All I had to do was sit by the phone and wait for you to call, and when you did, I had to cooperate.”

“So you’re spying on me right now?”

“Yes,” he said. “And I’m supposed to put pressure in the right spots because you trust me. But I say fuck ‘them,’ and fuck Hayes. When I became a doctor, I took an oath and I’m going to keep it for once. You’ll get nothing but the truth from me. They can’t do anything more to me than they already have.”

“Sounds like you do need saving,” I said.

“You more than me, Dale. Did you know surgery causes depression? Have you been given psych evaluations?”

As a matter of fact, I had. Weekly. A psychologist traveled with us. I had a clean bill of mental health, proof positive that the psychologist was either incompetent or knew where his bread was buttered. Like the team doctor on a pro football team, the goal is to keep the star player in the game.

“You seem to be the only one who cares about my psyche. Let’s hope it’s in good working order. I need to figure out a way to get the heat off of you, and I’m beginning to think there’s no clean way out of this for me. Not without a toe tag. And Rae Stillson—she was out here, you know. She had to ask me something but never got around to it. How’s her husband doing? Do you still treat him?”

“Not anymore,” Venhaus said. “He’s dying.”

*   *   *

Episode two was the first living-donor, full-leg transplant in history. A Spanish doctor had performed the first full-leg transplant just a few years before. But living donors weren’t apt to give up their leg—and no one insane enough to want to would get past a psych consult. Luckily for me, the playing field was rigged in my favor.

Chop-chop.

Jack Bryson ran a family farm of three generations. He got his leg caught in a hay bailer. The hay bailer won. The story editors played up his desire to play baseball with his young son one day. “I can’t show him my fastball from a wheelchair,” Jack tearfully confessed to the camera. “I can’t train him to work his great grandfather’s farm. My boy needs all of me.”

Jack, like most people, figured losing a limb was a guarantee he’d never be the same. He didn’t know the full capability of modern prosthetics. However, for the purposes of the show, we never drove this point home, heightening the drama of
Jack will never be the same without the Samaritan.

I assumed Jack’s marriage wasn’t in good shape because we didn’t see much of the wife during the taping and she was all but invisible in the episode, save for a few testimonial comments. But the boy was cute, and it was nice to see a boy who wasn’t burned up after Patrick Debrobander’s heart-wrenching ordeal in the first episode, so this one got slotted into week two even though everyone thought Farmer Jack was a colossal asshole who thought God owed him a leg. But there weren’t many legless, tough-luck stories with kids out there, so Jack got his wish in the form of my right leg.

My leg’s progress was a daily news bite. The anchors gave a quick update, as if my leg was a rare, just-birthed zoo animal. Then they’d go off script, sharing synonyms of the word “unbelievable” while shaking their heads.