I rested my hand on the cooler. “Is this yours?”
“Don’t touch it, please.”
I withdrew my hand. He looked out the window. I looked past him to the field: there was no one out there. I could see the parking lot but not the 88. My seatmate wore a short-sleeved shirt in the kind of broad plaid you don’t see anymore, a pattern to be found at Sears some years back but not even there now. His arms were very white and hairless, and he rested his hands in his lap, corresponding fingers of each touching at their tips. He sighed.
Perhaps I felt rebuffed at being asked not to touch the cooler and wanted to provoke him a little. In any case, when he returned his gaze to the back of the seat in front of us, I said, “What’s in it?”
He turned and looked straight into my eyes. “It’s a miracle on ice.”
At that moment, the pilot made an announcement. It was quite startling to hear the intercom come alive, having had no prior assurance there was anyone in the cockpit. “The original cabin crew is not going to join us on today’s flight. I’m sure all of you will understand. FAA regulations require us to have cabin crew before we fly. We’re waiting now for new cabin crew. When further information is available, you will be informed. I’m sure you understand.”
My seatmate, looking out the window, said, “Nice.”
The passengers were extraordinarily docile. You would expect some sort of outcry, sarcastic remarks about skipping the peanuts and flying the plane, the perennial expressions of dissatisfaction, but today: silence. It made the passengers appear, when I looked back, like a sea of disembodied souls. I had not yet entered their world, but I knew that soon I would. I was afraid of it.
An hour passed.
“When you say the cooler contains a miracle on ice, what do you mean by that?”
“You couldn’t stand it, could you?”
After a moment, I said, “The cooler has its own seat.”
“Yes? Well, that’s how we do it.”
“That’s how you do what?” I said sharply.
“That’s how we transport a human heart.” I had nothing to say and little to feel beyond a general sense of my impertinence. I must have communicated that because my seatmate softened immediately. I suppose he required some show of respect from me. “Let me correct myself”—yes, it was conciliatory—“This is how we used to do it before the cryonic shippers, the nitrogen drums, and so on. But things aren’t like they used to be.”
“I’m finding that out.”
He looked at me oddly. “We have less time is what I’m trying to tell you. There’s no pre-alert for the pickup in Salt Lake. I’m supposed to get this door-to-door. It wasn’t a good day for the stewardesses to sleep in.”
I suppressed an urge to say something.
“You harvest the heart, let the family decide if they want an open-casket funeral or not. You get through the elimination of blood, the rapid cooling, the packing, and the trip to the airport. It goes well, the heart’s in a viable state. It’s one hour to Salt Lake, the patient is on the table with his chest propped open, you’ve got a four-hour window from harvest to transplant, no ifs ands or buts, and the stewardesses slept in.”
“I don’t think it’s that they slept—”
“I got it! Look, this thing has another hour left and it’s getting to me.”
“I understand.”
I’m not sure I did, but that’s what I said. The outburst from my seatmate was over and he fell silent again. So did I. Time now had a terrible weight. We heard nothing from the cockpit for an interminable period, then the door opened and the pilot appeared to tell us directly that we weren’t going. He got off the plane. The copilot appeared and looked at the passengers with perplexity, unable to identify what species we belonged to, and he got off the plane. I turned and spoke to the back of my seatmate’s head.
“What’s going to happen now?” He seemed not to have heard me. I wondered if he would just ignore my question, and in fact he never looked back my way but continued to gaze at the empty runway.
He said, “What do you think happens when the heart dies?”
I drove toward the mountains. It didn’t matter that the Oldsmobile barely ran. I was glad to be in it. It was an 88.
9
WHEN YOU IRRADIATED A PLACE as we did Nagasaki it didn’t come back in quite the same way as a failed homestead, whose proprietors could move on to other hopes — unlike the pedestrians of that Asian city, who perhaps melted. I faced up to this being a different world and to the fact that we were ill equipped to absorb some of the newer differences. The New York catastrophe that greeted my return from fishing was one such alteration to our view of life. As a doctor, I had been kept aware of the changing threats to our health, which seemed to be macro adjustments to our environment — greenhouse gases, holes in the ozone layer — to which we made reasoned response — use sunblock, turn down the thermostat, etc. The destruction of the World Trade Center seemed akin to this; it was an environmental change of the kind that few understood but most could not stop talking about. Our exemption from the cyclone of world forces was over. As they said in Mexico, “We have seen the tips of the wolf’s ears.”
Awareness of larger themes was something we didn’t much go in for where I lived. We tampered with ignorance to keep our lives miniaturized; the Internet made us feel like ants. We worried that we would no longer care about weather. I treasured my most rural and ignorant patients for the way other humans loomed for them. When someone died, they never said, “Poof!” It was always a good-sized tree that fell.
Jinx said that a special meeting of our board of directors had been convened in the wake of the attacks, and that our board chairman had made some remarkably inane remarks. “He told us it was a day that would live in infamy.” Al Hirsch had said, “That rings a bell, Mr. Wilmot.”
I asked her, “Is this like Pearl Harbor?” Jinx’s hot water tank had failed and help from the plumber was several days off, so she was using my bathtub and if she couldn’t get to it until late in the day, she stayed over in my downstairs guest room. It was probably not the best arrangement, as it fueled gossip, but more importantly it kept either of us from getting a good night’s sleep because we talked late into the night. She sat at my kitchen table, a towel wound around her thick, damp hair, her face scrubbed clean of any makeup so that her green eyes seemed brighter.
“Pearl Harbor was the beginning of a war we knew was coming,” she said. “We didn’t know this was coming.”
“I don’t think we knew Pearl Harbor was coming.”
“We knew war was coming. I think we knew that war would require a great effort but that it would be elsewhere.”
“But is ‘war’ the right word? My father was in a war, but it wasn’t consciously directed against civilians.”
“I think in religious warfare differentiating between soldiers and noncombatants is considered a nicety, something superfluous. Look how the Christians went at it in the Thirty Years’ War.”
“The victims in New York were well outside the zone of conflict. It’s hard for me to understand why anyone would do something like this. I hope you’re not making excuses for these people.”
“No, I’m just trying to picture the advantage they might see in waging war this way.”