Heart Device: A User’s Manual
The monitor is designed to automatically gather information from your implanted heart device.
Your espion, your spy. Under cover of skin, darkness and duvet, it observes the moonlight streaming through the window of the root cellar, the ratty notebook and the thick pencil stained with olive oil, how you cope with the punishment by writing about the lone donkey baying outside. It measures the heat of the desert, the warmth of the sea, the depth of the snow, the thickness of the ice. It registers the bruises on your shoulders, the scars on your wrist, the tremor in your hand, the house on your back.
Place the monitor near where you sleep, preferably on a nightstand or table.
The bed is too big so we jam the door open. Indian beads hang like cartoon rain from the door frame, thundering as we move in and out of the bedroom. You want the same for the den and I yield to your desires. After you cook up a storm, I back into the beads like a waiter passing through a service entrance to protect the bounty on our plates.
We place the monitor on the floor behind the door that won’t close, next to the unhinged door from the den, and two accordion doors you don’t like. There is little room to manoeuvre around the contours of the mattress. We negotiate space as we do everything else.
Do not use the monitor near water, near a bathtub, wash bowl, kitchen sink or laundry tub, in a wet basement, or near a swimming pool.
I put the monitor on the bed, pulling the power cord taut so it hovers safely in empty space while I mop the hardwood. I’ve heard that British sailors took broken monuments from churchyards, using grit from the sandstone to scrape bacteria from the deck. You told me of pathways in Berlin embedded with fragments of Jewish grave markers, and I wonder how they wash out the dirt.
The process is silent and invisible.
We rock cautiously, fearing a sudden move could disrupt transmission, dislodge our feelings. Then we forget our fear. After, we pull up the duvet. Love is colder than death, Fassbinder said.
The date format shown on your monitor will depend on which country you are in.
At security, your silver bracelets and Tunisian birthplace always set off alarm bells and scowls. The agents treat you gently now, their hearts melted by the espion in your chest. They send you around the scanner because of your difference. You are still Other.
Your monitor is capable of receiving signals from your heart device up to ten feet away.
If the monitor can read through beads, walls and closets, it follows as we move from the bed to the salon to the den to relieve pressure on your broken ribs. You puff a dose of Ventolin before breathing into the apparatus to strengthen your lungs. I swing into the den with chicken soup because it’s all you can hold down and I want to believe in its restorative powers.
The expected service life of a monitor is five years.
We are out of range now, but they have other monitors. The second day you tell me you were dreaming of swimming in a warm sea. The third day I hold the oxygen mask a few inches above your mouth because you cannot tolerate restriction and I cannot win an argument, even with your unconscious.
My sleep apnea machine sits on a chair on your side of the room. The mask slips during the night, blocking my breath, and I tear it off and think of you. Your monitor still glows, casting light on the ceiling. Too far to see well enough to write, but close enough for comfort. The bed is still too big.
Save this manual.
Le Songe de Michka, Oolong tea scented with sweet citrus fruits
Certificate of Canadian Citizenship
Receipt, $20.00, Frida Kahlo Museum, Coyoacán, Mexico
Prière pour les voyageurs, Centre Chabad, Montreal
Longer Ago, Poems, Spoon Jackson
Heartbeat, scenario, unproduced feature film
Le Livre des Questions, Edmond Jabès
En attendant Godot, Samuel Beckett
La Vie mode d’emploi, Georges Perec
The Story Behind the Story:
I stumbled on the user’s manual in a drawer while cleaning the bedroom. Why did I keep it? I flipped through it, struck by the odd juxtaposition of “heart” and “device”, the one word evoking warmth and love, the other clinical detachment. I saw the potential for a segmented essay that would provide enough distance to explore grief in an unsentimental way. The title also winks at Georges Perec whose novel Life A User’s Manual is the final item in the list of objects saved. Yes, I still have the manual.
***
F-Words
When I bring my dinner into the TV room I end up with two forks or none at all. I’m thinking about doing the brain test you did, the one where you have to name the three animals. You knew camels from the loveless desert of your childhood in North Africa. I knew them from comics and movies, the Sahara a vast tract of unknowable dunes that plays tricks on the mind. Clutching their empty canteens, parched treasure hunters peer through shimmering heat waves, convinced they see palm trees and a natural spring on the horizon. You never left our apartment without a flask of zero calorie water, but even then, it was hard for you to swallow your pills. By the time of your test, you were losing more and more weight. With a mortar and pestle, I crushed your pills into fine grains and mixed them in a variety of foods, certain the right formula to save you was just around the corner.
forks, fine, flask, foods, formula
We both got lost easily, even on familiar streets, so I liked to keep you within eyesight, especially as your balance grew worse. I feared for the orientation component of the test, but you identified the date, month, year, day, and even the place. After your nomadic years ended in Canada, you would still wake in the middle of the night and wonder where you were. I do that for you now.
familiar, feared
On the worst days of your childhood in Tunisia you took solace in the kindness of Madame Bergeron, your English teacher. As she walked by your desk, she would tap her ruler discreetly on your test to point out a small mistake. Because you were so good already she wanted you to be perfect. In the neurologist’s office, you sat at a corner of the desk, ready to tap the pencil when you heard an “A” in the list of letters he read aloud. From my chair behind you, I could not tell if your hand shook from lack of medication or stress. I could only see the care in his eyes as he read slowly to give you time to find the right answers.
find
On the dating sites, I swipe left at the first sign of cheap thrills or cats, although my allergies are mild compared to what yours were. Your summer job assembling paintbrushes near Marseille exposed you to fumes, dust, and trash talk on the factory floor. It offended your lungs and sensibilities, pushing you toward more rarified air. On those trips back to Tunisia to research your films, Arabic words from childhood were shaken loose from your brain. Was your Sickness also lying in wait? The neurologist asked you to repeat a phrase about a cat’s behavior when dogs were in the room. You could only imagine it would flee at the first sign of vulgarity.
first, fumes, factory, floor, films, flee
I had my first cup of coffee in thirty years this week because I read caffeine is good for cognition, although my mother drank instant for years and it didn’t ward off Alzheimer’s. She liked Maxwell House for the elegance of Ricardo Montalban in the TV commercials with his “good to the last drop” catch phrase. He was also pretty suave as Khan, the Star Trek villain who gets awakened after two centuries of suspended animation. Mostly I think of his crazed and frenzied look in The Wrath of Khan movie, how grief over the death of his wife found expression in revenge. I could not finish the coffee before it got cold, but enough had reached my system to keep me up most of that night. In the morning, sensations from violent dreams hovered close to the surface before the rage went dormant again. I vowed to drink a full cup next time.
frenzied, found, finish, full
I don’t pay much attention to passing days except as the anniversary approaches. I like having two dates, with the Jewish one changing every year. The funeral home gave me a special calendar to keep track of the Yahrzeit until 2034, but after that I will be on my own. The doctor will ask me to draw the hour and minute hands on the face of a clock, as if time were fixed and not fluid. He will ask me to connect a handful of numbers and letters in sequence, as if I could propel myself from A to E without a map. You once told me the desert has routes for those who could read them.
funeral, face, fixed, fluid
I’ve been practicing F-words, thinking a good score will make up for failing other parts of the test. Mostly, it’s the recall question that worries me, how the doctor will say five words and ask me to repeat them five minutes later. It’s the act of remembering that counts, but I fear my mind will try to find meaning where there is none, and I will get hopelessly lost.
failing, five, fear
I’ve decided against the test. Instead, I’ve been playing Concentration to smarten up, a card game from the rainy days of my childhood. I recall the sweet scent of the talcum powder sprinkled on the cards, how the softened backs shuffled so easily into a bridge. The new cards are stiff and unyielding with the smell of an assembly line. Yet I spread them out in all weathers, inviting in the chaos of memories while I search for a missing pair.
The Story Behind the Story:
I first came upon the pen-and-pencil “brain test” in the mid 2000s during the visit of a geriatric team to my parents’ home. I took the test myself in 2011 as part of a YMCA study on the effects of exercise on memory. Then, in 2014, as a freelance writer/editor, I was asked to develop an article about the test. Ironically — since I live in Montreal — I discovered the test was developed by three local experts. Known as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCa, the test has become the gold standard around the world for identifying mild cognitive impairment. So, when my wife’s neurologist asked her to take the MoCa in 2017, I knew what to expect. I had all this in mind when I started taking “two forks or none at all” to the coffee table in front of the television. Did I still believe there were two of us? Was I simply in a permanent state of distraction? Or was I losing my mind? The “f” in “fork” probably made me think of the “f-word” test in the MoCa. From there, it was a small step to identify “f-words” in each section to create a segmented essay that would comment on the narrator’s obsession as it went along. Yes, I still do the fork business more often than I would like.
Based in Montreal, Mark Foss is the author of two novels and a collection of stories. His creative non-fiction has appeared in Lost Balloon, Pithead Chapel, JMWW and elsewhere. He has also been awarded a residency by the Marble House Project and nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his CNF. Apart from his own writing, he is the co-editor of The Book of Judith (New Village Press, 2022), an homage to the life of poet, writer, and teaching artist Judith Tannenbaum and her impact on incarcerated and marginalized students. Find out more at www.markfoss.ca.
“Heart Device: A User’s Manual” was published in carte blanche.
“F-Words” was published in Hobart.
Image by Leonie Schoppema from Pixabay.
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