Pierpont lurched forward in his chair. “So you’ll let your father die!”
“Damn it, Dad, don’t do this to me. If you were a Congressman you could cut through the red tape, but you haven’t got that kind of pull.”
“So it’s ‘pull’ that determines who lives and dies, instead of cash? I’ll get you money, and you can buy some pull for me.”
The son slammed his fist onto the desk, knocking over the family picture. “No! I won’t corrupt the system, even for you!”
The office door creaked open and a secretary appeared. “Is everything all right, sir?”
The son had tears in his eyes, but gave the secretary a grim nod. “Please show him the door.”
So Pierpont was allocated aspirin and death. He wasn’t worth saving, and he hated having to sob into Dottie’s shoulder and rely on her strength. “It’s like a judgment on my life,” he said. “If it were that I couldn’t afford it, I could understand, but to be told I’m not worth saving…!”
Dottie’s breath was warm on his ear. “Jarvik Pierpont, snap out of it! You’re not going to give up. I won’t let you.”
“What can I do? It’s decided.”
“We’ll find another way.”
Her voice was so certain, it gave him a little hope. They’d had this sort of conversation before, when their little hotel had seemed like a failure. “When?”
She held him tightly. “Later.”
Their decision hurt. They gave up full ownership, to mortgage the business that they’d spent so many years building up from nothing. The long, low rows of tile-roofed buildings were physically unchanged, yet it seemed there was a pall over them from the mere act of signing. Suddenly the place felt foreign, not his own. Snow dusted the roofs and the cars in the parking lot. Pierpont spent long hours snuggled with Dottie beside the fireplace that the bank now controlled, talking of how they’d earn it all back when he was well again.
They flew to Brazil for the surgery, making a vacation of it. If you greased a few palms there, you could buy anything, and wonders were for sale. Pierpont looked long and hard at the array of alleged doctors before finding one he was pretty sure wouldn’t kill him by ineptitude or a desire for easy money. He breathed the gas and sank into darkness.
He woke slowly, coming back in waves. Dottie smiled at him. When he realized where he was, he nearly leaped up but was too weak to do more than twitch. He licked his crud-covered lips and said, “Time to start again.”
It took a while before he noticed the sensation of absence. Dottie saw him patting his sore, scarred chest and said, “Are you all right?”
“Ssh. Wait.” Pierpont kept his hand over his new heart, then pressed his fingers to his wrist. “No pulse!”
“That’s the design, remember? A rotary pump.” The device had a continuous flow strong enough to open the natural valves in his blood vessels. Only one moving part, very low-maintenance. Better than the living kind, really.
He lay there listening, as though the thing in his chest would start beating any moment.
When they got back to the hotel he returned to work right away. He climbed stairs outside, needing to rest only a little with his hand on the cold railing. Everything felt empty when he looked across the parking lot and along the rows of identical doors. The place wasn’t his anymore.
He kept thinking that way as the fall deepened into winter, until one day Dottie found him by the sealed pool, shivering, shirtless. “Dear, what are you doing?”
He felt pale and flabby, useless. The cold wind gave him goosebumps. “I wanted to feel something, anything.”
She whipped off her coat and draped it over him, hugging him in the process. “You’re starting to worry me.”
He looked up at Dottie. “None of it’s real. I’m not even alive.”
“Of course you are. Is this about the heartbeat?”
“Yes.” He sighed and thought for a while. “Not just that. I have no heart, I have no hotel. I have no son.”
Dottie sat with him by the concrete hole of the pool. “The boy was trying to be honest. It’s not his fault he had to tell you that.”
“He would have let me die!”
She held onto him. “If you want to blame someone, blame the system.”
“The ‘system’ is made of people,” he said. “I thought it was in good hands, that I could trust him. But I had to leave my country, to lose my business and my heart. What’s left?”
“I told you to stop moping. This isn’t you.”
“What am I, then? Everything has failed me. I thought I was safe.”
She was in his face, shaking him by the shoulders. “Stop it! Get yourself together and work!”
He still had her, anyway, and could do his job even as an undead thing. He sat there ashamed, then stood to start vacuuming the carpets of the bank’s hotel.
She left little reminders of their success lying around. His award from the Cornell hotel management program. Newspaper clippings from when he’d worked in Las Vegas and Redmond. A letter from an “apprentice” they’d had, a gal named Sonia, who’d gone on to run hotels herself. Notes on the strange guests they’d had, the fire they’d rescued people from, and the day they’d finally owned their own hotel free and clear. Dottie was trying to make him out as some kind of hero for doing an ordinary job.
But that was another life, before the new heart. His place in the world — a healthy, hard-working man with his son protecting him and everyone else — had been his identity. Now the heart whirred in his chest and he went through the motions of the job, feeling numb. He looked at Dottie and felt shame for letting her down. Now she was smiling and hugging him even more often, trying to rouse some kind of passion in him, but the world was cold and grey. He needed to be alone but she was constantly in the way, hounding him. Finally he locked himself in one of the rooms all morning, ignoring her pleading and staring blurrily into the television. His resentment was like a fire in a cold room; it was something he could rely on, better than no feeling at all. It was vile of him to make Dottie sad and he threw the vileness and self-loathing on the fire too. It would warm him for a while.
The TV spoke to him. It said that somewhere, there was a place in the world where it was hot and dangerous, where a gang of American criminals were trying to live as farmers in the wilderness. There was a tiny concrete island ringed with nets floating in the ocean, where even tinier people swarmed about and lived lives of chaos and wickedness. The island glowing on the screen was the only light in the room. He crawled across the bed on his hands and knees to approach its brightness. It was there for only a minute before the light dimmed and went back to a news alert about the national Four-Year Plan. Pierpont slumped on the bed, prostrated before the idiotic box and wishing it would grant him another vision of that place where people were alive.
He shut the TV off and slumped again, wishing he could feel something but loss, or that someone would make his life meaningful again. He could go to Dottie; she would tell him what to do.
Dottie wasn’t waiting for him, wasn’t still peeking in through the curtain. Wind whipped past him as he went down to the main office, making him feel he was running instead of slinking along like an old man.
Her truck wasn’t in the parking lot; her coat wasn’t on the rack. But there was a scrawled note on the counter: “Gone to the lake.”