A Short History of Richard Kline Read online

  He said nothing. Bandaged his toe. Poured himself a whisky and went and sat in the darkness of the living room. The toe throbbed all night.

  Each day his anger bit into him more corrosively, like an acid train, stopping all stations: lungs, heart, liver, spleen, kidneys and the whole messy labyrinth of his guts. And then the chest pains began. This is it, he thought. I’m going to be one of those men who drop dead in their forties.

  Zoe booked him in to their GP, David Wang.

  ‘It could just be stress, Rick,’ David said. ‘I’m seeing a lot of people lately who are affected by the recession.’ He paused. ‘Although you do have a bit of a heart murmur. Did you know that?’

  No, he didn’t.

  ‘It could be nothing to worry about, but then again, you do have chest pain.’

  That night in bed, he thought: I’m not ready to die.

  But what would ‘ready’ mean?

  On any day death was a possibility. He might need to have a bypass, or a valve replaced. He had heard that repairs to the heart could be more complicated than a transplant. Surely that couldn’t be true? For one thing, the after-effects would be fewer. And what did the murmur sound like? A whisper? A slight rumble in the rhythm? A click? A trill? Was it some kind of electrical fault?

  That night he lay in the dark and mentally rewrote his will. He began by working through a series of bequests, revising them in his head from hour to hour. He allocated mementos to friends, drafted farewell notes (including a long letter to Luke) and gave instructions for his funeral: the venue, for a start (not in a church); who he would want, and not want, to be present; the music he would like played; where his ashes should be scattered – the last gasp of the control freak.

  At first his mind raced, covering the bases on an imaginary spreadsheet, so that he multi-tasked, issuing instructions on several points at the one time, flicking from one provision to the next. After a while this contemplation of his demise had a curious effect: it was unexpectedly soothing. His mind began to slow, his concentration to falter, and with this his breathing deepened and he became aware of the rise and fall of his chest. Having planned his death in great detail, he was at last able to fall into a deep and untroubled sleep.

  The following Saturday he walked with Luke to the university’s medical library to do some research. But once through the door of the Bosch building, he was overcome by his old library claustrophobia with its memories of enforced tedium, of the brain in an institutional harness. He had always felt a resistance to books en masse; stolid, musty little rectangles of the arcane. Still, he was there now, so he might as well get on with it.

  Using the keyword ‘murmur’ on the medical library database, he scrolled through a bewildering array of titles: Clinical Disorders of the Heartbeat, The Disorders of Cardiac Rhythm Vols I and II, Interpretation of Complex Arrthymias, Electrasystoles and Allied Arrhythmias, Intraventricular Conduction Disturbances, Frontiers of Cardiac Electrophysiology and Ventricular Tachycardia. Proceeding on the intuitive principle that the right book would jump out at him from the shelves, he strolled through the aisles of cardiac books while Luke rode his bike up and down the concrete terrace outside.

  The books were more dryly technical than he had anticipated, and there seemed to be two hundred varieties of heartbeat, each characteristic of a different syndrome and carrying a different name, not one of which spelled out Software Analyst Programmers in Mid-life Panic. After only a few frustrated and increasingly desultory minutes, his eye was caught by the title of a slim black volume, Sudden Death in Athletes, written by a man with the improbable name of Jokl. Taking it from the shelf, he slumped into a reading chair and read a lurid chapter on ‘Collapse Syndromes’: hypothermia, effort migraine, mountain sickness and cataplectic loss of muscle tone (athletes collapsing of shock when informed of their win), the Mexico Olympics in ’68 proving to be of special interest.

  This was absurd. He stood up, walked outside and whistled for Luke, who was careening down a long path into the trees.

  A week later he presented himself for an echocardiogram. It was somewhere around six o’clock on a rainy Thursday evening, and there he was, sitting in the antiseptic waiting room of one of those private pathology centres that smell of money and death.

  He was the only one there. Waiting his time. Within an hour everything in his life could change.

  It was a heavy old house, a Victorian mansion converted into medical suites with cheap chipboard partitions subdividing what were once grand and gloomy salons. Eventually a woman appeared and beckoned him over.

  ‘Richard?’

  ‘Rick, it’s Rick.’

  ‘Hi, Rick. I’m Helga.’

  Helga was a large, Nordic-looking woman in her fifties, solidly built with cropped blonde hair streaked with grey. ‘Ever had an echocardiogram before, Rick?’

  ‘Never.’

  She pointed to a cubicle. ‘Strip from the waist up.’

  ‘Shoes?’

  ‘No, you can leave your shoes on.’

  This summoned up the notion, both comic and macabre, of dying with his boots on. Draped in a clinical wrap made of pale green paper, he opened a padded door and entered a room where the ultrasound machine was waiting for him, a block of gun-grey metal, six feet at its highest point, with two video screens at the top. Helga, he realised, was its technician, its high priestess.

  Lying on the surgical bed, his head resting on a pillow, he felt as if he had been taken up into a spaceship. There was a certain warm gravitas about Helga, even in grey track pants and ugg boots which on anyone else would look shapeless and woolly. On her, they looked stylish and high-tech, like she was an astronaut in a lab. Helga had a comfortingly androgynous quality, a cross between high-tech angel and Nordic Hausfrau, and it was clear she could read the heart like an old invoice, like the back of a cereal packet. There were no mysteries there for Helga, but nor was she jaded, for she had a quality of intense concentration, of low-key command: rapid, efficient, absorbed. She worked the machine the way that competent women cook, with the familiarity and ease of having done it all before, but also the relaxed alertness of one who knows that at any minute it could all go wrong: something malignant or fatal could appear up there, some squiggle or smudge on the screen could signify a death sentence for the hapless figure on the surgical bed. A flaw might manifest, some warp or hole, some blockage or malformation; some enlargement or tissue damage, or clot or calcification; a startling arrhythmia, like a code that’s been scrambled; an electrical fault running malign interference.

  Ah, but here was another alien. A man in his sixties came in and introduced himself as Dr Cullen. He was thin, grey and dry-looking, and Helga called him ‘doc’.

  So here he was, Richard Kline, lying in his green paper gown on a white surgical bed, reclining on his left arm like a model posing for a life class.

  On the wall opposite was a print in the abstract style, a large red funnel with smaller funnels at one end. In this room everything was circuits, even the token artwork. Helga rubbed a warm gel on the end of a tube, like one half of a stethoscope.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s the traducer,’ she said, and he smiled.

  The name itself conjured up trespass and violation, and Helga was placing the instrument, this traducer, firmly against his chest, just under the left nipple, pressing hard against his ribcage, so that it hurt. Without fanfare, his heart appeared on the right-hand screen.

  Just like that.

  He was gobsmacked. There it was, in black and white, a slightly blurred image of heaving muscle, working away with such ferocious energy that he was in awe. Even more awed than he had been when he first saw his son’s foetal form on the ultrasound screen. In awe of himself? Well, that made a change. Nothing, he thought, prepares you for the experience of seeing your own heart, and he continued to gaze at it in frank arousal, almost expecting a round of applause.

  Helga, of course, was disinterested. Sitting on her high st
ool, leaning in towards the machine, she began matter-of-factly to scan the image from different angles and cross-sections, adjusting the dials to give close-ups of certain features, like the valves, reading numbers to Cullen, who sat behind her on a low chair and repeated her observations, muttering comments in corroboration or dissent.

  Helga was reeling off the numbers. ‘27, 28, 47 … good functioning of the left ventricle … 28, 40, 8 … 7, 21 … A good set of numbers there, doc,’ she said, and winked at Rick, letting him know she was mocking the economic pundits.

  Cullen looked up from his notes and peered at Rick over the top of his half-moon glasses. ‘It’s all numbers these days, isn’t it?’ he said dryly.

  Rick smiled politely, thinking: it’s like watching the Keno machine on TV. This was his life’s lottery, his flesh-and-blood poker machine.

  Suddenly there was a noise, and with a start he realised that Helga was adjusting the sound dials on the machine, and this, now, was the sound of his heart … whoosh-whoosh! it went, whoosh-whoosh! Like a loud, emphatic washing machine. Look at that pump, that manic, heaving pump – rhythmic, implacable – could that really be him? All those times in his life when he had suffered from lassitude, from negativity, from doubt and despair, all that time this heart had been oblivious … whoosh-whoosh! … Here it is, he thought, the prosaic soundtrack of my self. Indifferent to the dreary thoughts of my brain, it pumps on regardless. And he was moved. Yes, he had been told about it, had seen other people’s hearts in TV documentaries, but let me tell you, he thought, it’s different when that heart is yours.

  Helga and the doc were still muttering to one another, swift matter-of-fact statistics and appraisals. By now all fear had left him. He wanted to ask a dozen questions but he didn’t want to disturb their concentration in case they overlooked some small but fatal flaw. So he gazed at the wall opposite his feet until he heard Helga say, ‘17, 21, 28 … a murmur there …’

  A murmur! He jerked his head up. This was it. This was the death sentence.

  ‘… but I’d say that was trivial, doc. I wouldn’t say that constituted a prolapse.’

  Cullen was gazing up at the screen, his glasses having slid down to the end of his beaky nose. There was a horrible pause, and then he said, ‘No, not a prolapse.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Rick asked.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ replied Helga, still staring at the screen. ‘I’ll explain in a minute.’

  Then Cullen left the room, unceremoniously, with only a dry nod at Rick, who was no longer of concern, who had failed to produce an interesting set of numbers. Helga switched off the machine.

  Just like that.

  No more heart. Heart put away, back in its ribcage, back in its box.

  Helga leaned forward on her stool and adjusted her glasses. ‘There is a murmur,’ she said, ‘which is what your GP heard, but it’s an innocent murmur.’ She said this quickly, so as not to alarm him. She called it ‘trivial’.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  She brought her two index fingers together. ‘This is the normal valve,’ she said. Then she moved one finger up an almost imperceptible fraction over the other, ‘and this is yours. There’s just a very slight misfit, if you like, an infinitesimal gap or cusp. A slippage. If bacteria get in through this, into the bloodstream, they like to congregate there and breed.’

  He had heard of this condition. He had heard (but didn’t like to say) that the bacteria eat away the valve and then you’re in big trouble. Yes, he would say it.

  ‘They can damage the valve?’

  ‘It’s rare. Very rare.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  The verdict: innocent. But still he couldn’t quite accept it, still was holding his breath.

  ‘I just don’t understand,’ he said, ‘how any murmur, any deviation from the norm, can not mean something.’ How could a murmur be innocent?

  At which point Helga put her large reassuring hands on his shoulders. ‘There is absolutely nothing,’ she said, ‘wrong with your heart.’

  Back in the cubicle, he put on his clothes. He felt he would like to shake Helga’s hand, or kiss her on the cheek, but that would be inappropriate. It was all routine to Helga. Helga saw eight hearts a day.

  Outside. He was outside and walking down the winter dark of Macquarie Street, past the Catholic bookstore with its sombre crucifixes, its painted statues of the Virgin, its gilt candles. He paused for a moment by the window and looked for a statue of the Sacred Heart. There wasn’t one. Perhaps it was out of fashion, that lurid icon of blood and fire. There had been no blood and fire on the machine, just the blurred black and white smudges, the rhythmic pulsing, the whoosh-whoosh. And Helga, the high priestess.

  It was four blocks to the underground car park and he walked them in a kind of alert trance, breathing in the cool, damp smell of rain, taking in the world around him; the all-but-deserted city, the shiny wet road, the traffic lights, the grey drizzle – and all the time in his mind’s eye that surging, inexorable mass of muscle and blood, his heart.

  ‘So long as the heart is doing its work it may be pardoned for its innocence.’ He had read that in a book in the Bosch library; a thing may not always be perfect but that doesn’t mean it can’t do its job. And it was nothing personal, not something he could take credit for: if they took it out of him and put it in someone else, it would go on in exactly the same way, like the rhythm of the universe, like the movement of the tides. And he felt humbled: his heart did all this work for him, without pause or rest, twenty-four hours a day for forty-two years. Such a long time for a muscle to pump without missing a beat.

  Suddenly it seemed almost beyond credible. No wonder they called it the miraculous pump. The cyclonic funnels, surging and throbbing like storm channels. Relentless, that was the word he was searching for, the quality he was awed by: the sheer relentlessness of it. He knew his other organs were working hard but not so dramatically, so noisily, not with the same unabated, day into night, night into day rhythm. And what he felt was gratitude. He was grateful and he must show his gratitude. He must not take this heart for granted. He must find a way to exercise more. And to relax. He had his heart, and his heart was good to him, so why wasn’t he good to his heart?

  For some time after the echocardiogram he existed in a state of simple-minded gratitude. He felt good, almost invincible. Small pleasures ambushed him. Spring arrived and he began to feel that the worst of his anger had passed.

  It was a Wednesday morning. He was feeling off-colour, and he rang the office to say he had the flu that was on the rampage that spring and he would not be coming into work. Zoe was late and frazzled and sharp-tongued with Luke. He hated it when she spoke to the boy like that, even though, increasingly, this was the way that he, Rick, spoke to her. It was one of those hateful mornings of family dissonance, although he couldn’t for a minute blame her for what was to come.

  ‘I’ll drive him to school,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop you off at the station first and you’ll save twenty minutes.’

  She shot him a glance almost of truce. ‘Thanks.’

  By this time he had lost the knack of patient endurance in peak hour, if ever he’d had it. Cars were banked up along the high street like a line of tin beetles, while the humidity, already rank, seeped into the car like a noxious gas and he felt he was bumper-to-bumper in thick cotton wool.

  A block before Luke’s school he pulled into the kerb by a small park opposite a frantic intersection. Cautioning Luke to be careful, he watched as the boy glanced from side to side, waited for the lights to change and then ambled across the zebra crossing with his distinctive bobbing walk, his backpack dangling awkwardly from one shoulder, his right arm raised in a laid-back wave.

  He waited until Luke had disappeared through the school gates and then he turned the key in the ignition. And turned it off again. There was a convenience store on the corner and he would get the paper and some milk; they were out of mil
k and he was looking forward to coffee. He walked to the edge of the corner and stepped off from the kerb, and at that moment a flash of white metal swerved with a screech of tyres and almost ran over his foot.

  The car, a dilapidated Datsun with a dent in the driver’s side and a smashed headlight, stalled on the turn into the main road, and suddenly he was standing there looking down through the driver’s window – it was rolled down as far as it would go – and into the glinting brown eyes of the driver, and he leaned in and with his open hand slapped him across the face – registering in a split-second that the face he was striking was black. He was a young Islander, twenty-two, twenty-five, maybe, who stared back at him with eyes of molten rage. And next to him, another face, his friend, whose mouth was open in hostile shock, though only for a second, before it widened into a spray of growling obscenities.

  Not that he heard them. Or, rather, he heard but didn’t register them, because his attention was focused on the driver, who had flung open the door and was lunging at him.

  For a moment he considered turning and running, but his pride would not allow this. The first blow he felt against his upper right temple. The second caught him on the shoulder. Positioning his feet instinctively to maximise his balance, he ducked from side to side as the blows came, one after another. At some point he heard himself utter a sharp laugh of derision; he was laughing at the failure of his assailant to land his punches. At the same time a part of his brain looked on in horror. Who was this self-destructive fool laughing at his tormentor?

  Not for a second did he consider fighting back. For one thing, he was in the wrong, and his heart was a black hole of stupefying foolishness, a sunken galleon in his chest, and for another, if he managed to respond with even one halfway decent punch then he’d really be done for: there was no way he could beat the two of them, and probably not even this one, who was younger and fitter and heavily built. The blows came at him in a flurry, and any one of them might have smashed his jaw or broken his nose if he hadn’t been ducking and weaving so that they glanced off him in jolting grazes and he scarcely felt the lacerations of his skin, the bloody contusions on his scalp. But with the fifth blow he felt the hard bone of knuckle against his skull and he fell to the grass, almost in slow motion, for a moment on his knees and then keeling over onto his side, so he felt that the green blades of grass were in his eyes, the dank earth in his nostrils.