Words Maggie Tiojakin Illustration Budhi Button

When Nina arrives, the young receptionist hands over a piece of green paper for her to fill out and tells her, without looking up, to sit on a folded chair across from the doctor’s office, inside which Nina imagines Dr. Firdaus, a man in his late forties who has never been married and is known — in his circles — to possess nerves of steel: pressing the head of a stethoscope against the chest of a patient, while listening to the beatings of a heart pumping six quarts of blood across the great terrain that is the human body and the sloshings of air moving from the lungs to the heart and back again.

Nina writes her full name, provides her date of birth, her current weight, height and the last time she has had her heart examined in the past twelve months: Nina Handoko, April 19, 1952, 68 kg, 172 cm, dash. One column is left empty where her religion should be. She finds it offensive, mostly because she doesn’t believe in god. God. GOD. Which is it? Why does it matter?

She looks at her handwriting, the letters eerily anorexic, slanted to the left, bunched up the way lines on a barcode are strung, but orderly, adhering to a certain formation she is not aware of, and Nina wonders what it says about herself. She tries to remember what she read in a journal once, of the science that analyzes human penmanship, of psychological interpretations that hide behind each squiggly line, each stroke, each cursive letter, thinking now how interesting it must be to possess the ability to see what most people are oblivious to.

Nina writes her husband’s name, Banari Handoko, as the main contact person in cases of emergency; adds her three children’s names — Ditta, Ambar and Heni — as the next people to contact should her husband be unavailable; then makes a note for whoever is in charge of making the call to start with the eldest of the three, proceeding downward in the order of the children’s seniority. First Ditta, then Ambar, then Heni. They would prefer it to be done in order, because families are peculiar that way, without order there is nothing, and no matter how modern they consider themselves to be, in matters of family, everything is old-fashioned, outdated, untouched by the elusive movements of time. Some call it tradition; Nina considers it a nuisance.

“Dr. Firdaus will be with you in a moment,” announces the young receptionist, whom Nina observes can’t be more than twenty-two years old, with her long dark hair tied in a ponytail, her breasts still firm and perfectly round, her body commanding the kind of vivacity one only finds in youth, the dark trenches of her sexuality unexplored, waiting for the promises of love, or desire in spite of it. Nina smiles, places the green form on the desk and returns to her seat.

On the wall inside the clinic, posters of health are abundant, most of them related to the human heart, all of them printed in colors, warning against coronary diseases: avoid cigarette-smoking, avoid alcohol, avoid high-calorie substances, avoid any activity that may cause the body to overwhelm itself.

Nina focuses on a poster that provides a quick list of amazing facts linked to the human heart: how in a single lifetime it beats no less than two-and-a-half billion times; how it helps blood to travel twelve thousand miles a day; how the valves open and close at short intervals for more than there are seconds in a minute without overlapping even once; how it never rests, its load of work rarely lightens, only burdens.

Nina puts her hand on her chest, feels her heart, recognizing the lub-dub-lub-dub vibrations coming from beneath her touch, and wonders how much of herself is in there, the millions of moments she has lived through, heartaches and joy, fear and loneliness, anguish and relief. She imagines people, places, faces forming microscopic clots in and around the center of her heart, leaving traces of existence, reminding her of the things she can never retrieve, of the things she has become, of the things she still wants even when she knows they are not possible.

“Your heart isn’t there,” says the young receptionist, her dark eyes boring into Nina’s. “It’s actually here.” The young receptionist points to a spot right above her own cleavage, in the middle of her chest, where people always point to when addressing themselves. Nina consequently moves her palm away from the left side of her chest to a new spot the young receptionist has shown her, thinking this spot, where her heart is, where everyone’s heart is, should be named the “I” spot: I want, I need, I feel, I am.

“Don’t worry,” the young receptionist chuckles gleefully. “Almost everyone gets it wrong.”

Suddenly, the door opens to reveal a thirty-something woman in a brightly-colored summer dress and an equally bright pair of sandals that give the impression she has just returned from a beach, or is on her way to one. Dr. Firdaus follows her to the doorway, finishing a joke that began when the door was still closed, drawing a muster of laughter from the thirty-something woman, and, upon parting, once the woman has thanked him, briefly touches her arm and tells her to be careful on her way home, which the woman appreciates, returning the gesture by shaking his hand and acknowledging the young receptionist with a quick nod, then Nina with a curious yet empathic look, then straight out of the clinic, out into the world.

The doctor approaches the young receptionist’s desk, cluttered with charts and agendas, runs a finger over his left eyebrow and gives Nina a courteous smile before the young receptionist hands him a clipboard. Dr. Firdaus reads through the green piece of paper, lifts his eyes to meet Nina’s and, clearing his throat, calls out to her.

“Nina, is it?” he says, walking back to his office, holding the door open for her as she stands on both feet and crosses the room toward him. “Come on in.”

Inside, Dr. Firdaus places a cuff around her upper right arm and, while staring into her eyes, tells her to think happy things. He begins to pump, cutting the blood circulation in her right arm. She thinks of the day her father had taken her horseback riding for the first time when she was ten. She chose the smallest, youngest horse at the ranch, named him Tutu and, although she didn’t actually ride the horse, a young ranch hand was walking next to Tutu and leading it about the ranch, with her on it, she pretended to be a cowgirl on a mission to tame a wild beast. Her father was watching from a distance, his face proud yet riddled with fear. Don’t let go, he seemed to say. She waved at him, her small hand moving sideways in the air.

Dr. Firdaus averts his eyes toward the vertical bar in the center of a manometer, releasing the pressure on her arm systematically. Nina thinks of her wedding night with Banari, making love for the first time: the awkward touches, the clumsy kisses, the weight of her husband’s body against her, the look on his face when she told him to stop, and later, to start again. He was patient with her, and in that moment of strange encounter, they forgave each other’s failures.

Dr. Firdaus uncuffs her arm, Nina shakes it a little until she can move her hand. He counts her pulse, presses two fingers under her wrist, stares at his watch. He checks her heart, using a stethoscope, first her left side, then her right. He feels around her abdomen, applying pressure to where her liver, kidneys and stomach are. She thinks of the day Ditta was born, how tiny everything looked from where she had cradled the baby in her arms, how odd it was to be a mother for the first time, to watch those little fingers reaching for hers, wondering how it was possible that a creature as beautiful as this had come out of her body.

“Are you familiar with Mitral Regurgitation?” asks Dr. Firdaus, leaning back in his chair. Before Nina answers, he continues, “It’s a heart defect which, most likely, you have been living with since you were born.” She looks at him, empty.

He opens a drawer, reaches for a plastic heart the size of a mango. He places the plastic heart on his desk, pulls it apart, chamber by chamber, until all that’s left is a hollowed display of what used to be a plastic heart.

Dr. Firdaus doesn’t stop talking for five minutes, pointing out the different elements that a human heart consists of, the function of each element, and why he thinks one of those elements is not working properly in her heart. A hole near the left ventricle of her heart has caused a disruption in her blood flow, further damaging her heart muscles and stretching her valve. Mitral Regurgitation, he says, is not a common heart defect, but it is not unheard of. Some people live a long time without knowing they have been living with an imperfect heart, so there is no need for her to worry.

“A hole in my heart?” asks Nina, touching the spot in the middle of her chest and imagining the hole grow bigger by the second. “How could I have a hole in my heart?”

“Well, to be honest with you, we don’t have the answer to your question,” says Dr. Firdaus. Nina finds it interesting that the doctor should use “we” instead of “I”, as if he were representing a group of people, instead of himself; as if the white coat proved he was a member of something larger than the office he occupies, the clinic he runs, the people he sees; as if she were an object to be studied, not a person to be cured. “There are a number of reasons,” he continues, “but we can’t be sure.”

Nina rubs her “I” spot, slowly, cautiously, thinking that, perhaps, the wound in her heart can be soothed by a comforting gesture, the way a heartache sometimes is. The doctor says she’s welcome to get a second opinion, but he wants her to be properly examined at the laboratory, to be sure.

“Does this mean my heart has a leak?” she asks.

“An MR is sometimes referred to as a leaky heart, yes,” replies the doctor. “The leak is harmless in most cases, but I can’t give you further assurances until you have it examined.”

“And what will you do?”

“Excuse me?”

“To stop it from leaking?”

“How do you stop anything from leaking?”

“A patch?”

“A patch.”

“What kind of patch?”

“Let’s not worry about that, yet,” he says, leaning forward, his fingers interlocked, his eyes glancing restlessly toward the clock on the wall. “Let’s get you tested and then we’ll see what we need to do.”

Nina leaves the doctor’s office finding her world changed, seeing holes everywhere, moments in her life leaking out of her memory, her body, her heart, like water balloons punctured at the bulge. She thanks the young receptionist, who cheerfully wishes her a good day. She looks at other patients, waiting to be called in, and wonders if they know what she now knows, if they too feel time slipping away from them, drip by drip by drip.

In the car, on her way home, Nina doesn’t call her husband or children. There is no need to ruin their day, too. At the light, she stops and stares at other cars, the people inside them waiting for a sign to move on, talking, singing, kissing, hugging, loving, breathing, and she envies them, pities them, empathizes with them. There is a hole in your heart, she wants to tell them, and everything is leaking out: this moment is not coming back, ever.

Then, it happens: tears pouring out of her, traces of mascara running down her face, her body convulsing in hysterical sobs, her fingers trembling at the wheel, understanding that it is not suffering she fears the most, but the absence of certainty, that for the first time in her life, all 57 years of it, she has come to a crossroad where she will have to choose, not between life and death, but the reason she is here at all, the reason for what she has become, the reason for being, thinking, believing that gives her the right to question the universe, as it is, full of holes not unlike her own. How do you stop anything from leaking, the doctor has asked her. A patch, she says. No, not a patch. Something else. Something more permanent. Something she can live with. And with this, she looks up into the great blue skies and, through her tears, begins to pray.

____________________

We are looking for contemporary fiction between 1,500-2,000 words by established and new authors. Stories must be original and previously unpublished in the English language. The email for submitting stories: shortstory@thejakartapost.co

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