The Heart Does Not Grow Back Read online

  On and on and on she went. “This is quite a risk,” I said, “coming from a woman who doesn’t want me talking too much in public.”

  “No offense, Dale, but you’re not warm and fuzzy, and you’re not even a cool antihero. You’re just awkward. But I’m hoping that you’ve smoothed out a little. Consider this practice for your miserable and ill-advised interview episode. Show me something. Make me less alarmed about you killing your own brand.”

  “When have I seen death?” I asked.

  “Huh? Oh, that’s just figurative. You’ve seen people that are going to die without your help. Death hovering over them. That kind of crap. See what I mean? You’re so literal sometimes.”

  She had no idea how literal my thinking was.

  * * *

  Jonathan and I shook hands. He squeezed really hard and didn’t smile, a handshake of duty, fingers calloused from a life of work that required pumiced soap.

  “Glad to be here,” he said, because that’s what people on TV said.

  “This isn’t Wheel of Fortune,” I told him. The cameras weren’t rolling yet. I looked at the director, Mick, a skinny, surfer type who wore hemp bracelets and never made small talk with me.

  “Shoot everything,” I said, my eyes darting over to Tracy, who was on her cell phone. “Don’t stop, even if she begs you to stop. Just get the footage.”

  He looked the crew over, nodded once, and we rolled.

  “So you’re dead,” I said. “And I can’t save you. But you knew that. We wouldn’t be sitting here if you didn’t know that.”

  “He’s sick, he ain’t dead.”

  “I didn’t say him. I said you. Dead. He’ll get buried and get flowers and tears and you’ll get jack shit.”

  Crew eyebrows popped up with the use of a swearword. I heard Tracy’s phone clap shut, but didn’t look away from Jonathan.

  “Everyone hates you. It’s not about him anymore. It’s about you. You’re on TV. Don’t you want to be loved? We’ll cut all this out. Everything I’ve said. You just look at me and very slowly nod and say, ‘I realize how much I love my brother, and I want to try to save him,’ and it’ll run on TV and you’ll be the man who succeeded where I have failed. You may get a spot on another reality show. You’ll get your own news crawl when you die one day. Do it for you, Jonathan. Fuck your brother. Right? I’m with you on that.”

  “That’s enough,” Tracy said. “Christ! What are you doing?”

  “You’ll get the footage,” I told her. “You’ll slice it up. Make it nice. You always do. Sit.”

  She crossed her arms and stayed silent the rest of the way.

  “Where was I?… Oh. Yes. Fuck your brother. Are you with me on this? We on the same page?”

  “I love my brother,” he said softly.

  “Bullshit. He did something to you, am I right? Something so bad that you can’t bring yourself to save him. Even if it makes you into a true-blue hero, you just can’t bring yourself to do it. You’d rather die a villain than cut yourself for him. Why? Just say it. Disarm it. Aloud, it’s going to sound stupid, Jonathan. You know this. Nothing in that little head of yours, nothing he did is bigger than death. Nothing. So just say it.”

  He said nothing.

  “This girl and I, we had this little thing when it came to talking about hard stuff,” I began. “We’d say anything and if we didn’t want to talk about it anymore, we’d call ‘fuck it,’ and it would get dropped. So just say it, say what happened and say ‘fuck it,’ and that’ll be that.”

  A long silence. I looked at Mick. Thumbs-up. Still going. Jonathan fidgeted, staring at his hands. Then, he looked at the crew, at the cameras. “Does this all have to be on?”

  “What happened?” I said again.

  “My wife died in love with him,” he said. “I don’t think they ever had sex, but Marian loved him more than me.”

  And like that, like all good release, crying chased it right out. Good revelations always get sealed with the wet kiss of tears.

  “So your wife—Marian—she loved you enough to sacrifice her love for him. You don’t find that noble? She could have walked out and followed her heart. Instead, she stayed with you. Died with your ring on her finger, vows to you on her lips. You sure she didn’t fuck him?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Absolutely not.”

  “Then what the fuck is the big deal? Man, you’re a shithead. Not only are you killing your brother, you’re shitting on your dead wife. Let’s do this scientifically: your master plan is to let your brother die so he can go into the afterlife and fuck her for all eternity? That it? Nice plan, dumbass.”

  “Fuck you,” he said, looking poised to jump out of his chair. But I had been battle tested by then. Curb-stomped. Ribs snapped. Now I was ignored by Rae after we’d finally connected, after I finally knew the truth. I fucked Venhaus’s life up, and I was stuck as the Samaritan or conscripted into the life of a guinea pig. I had been hurt and come back and pain was a reality. If nothing hurt, I’d search for something to hurt.

  “Fuck me. Yes. Fuck me who has spread my innards to the four corners of the universe. You suspected your wife was in love with him, but you have a family, and kids, and you know what sleeping next to someone every night feels like. Not only do I get cut up every few weeks, I watched the contents of an innocent girl’s head get blown into the blacktop of the only high school party I ever got invited to. I’ve screwed up every meaningful relationship in my life just because I’m full of fear and awkwardness and I’m cursed with the intelligence to know it. So fuck me. I have no right to talk. Yes or no, Jonathan. Are we doing this? Or am I packing up these cameras and crew and burning the footage and leaving you and your marrow here to rot all alone? Yes or no?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll do it.” And I clapped once, stood, and shook his hand. This time, I got the limp fish. He looked down into the faded green carpet, where there were worn-down spots from walking to the recliner, his favorite spot while watching wrestling or the news or fishing shows.

  “We’re done,” I said, and brushed by a silent Tracy on my way out the door.

  * * *

  Two days later, Mack broke the news. Jonathan gave himself a mouthful of shotgun and popped the trigger with his big toe.

  Wouldn’t you know it, he wasn’t an organ donor. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since it took two full days for anyone to find his body, which was by then attracting flies and half eaten by his own dog.

  A week later, the footage spilled. The entire interview. I got all my juicy bits quote-mined out in the media, who built me into a villain who pressed the guy into killing himself. Bad Samaritan, indeed. Images of Regina popped up on newscasts. All of what I had done, stripped and frayed by a guy with enough balls to blow his own head off, killing himself and his brother in the process.

  I know the feeling of putting a gun barrel in your mouth. Your muscles get awfully tired. You start finding reasons to live real quick. I could call Jonathan a lot of things, but a coward wasn’t one of them.

  Critics called me a sad-sack messiah who was fighting depression and internal demons. They forecast eventual tragedy for me, a slow self-destruction, inflicted by culture’s thirst for sacrifice. They predicted that anyone watching the episode would be an accomplice. They proclaimed that I was naïve and being protected and used up.

  Tracy begged me to issue an apology. I didn’t. They were left cobbling together an episode that was so desperate for positive spin that you could smell the bullshit through the television.

  Naturally, the overnight ratings for this episode made a lot of network suits crap their expensive slacks with glee, and the anticipation for my live interview episode began to take on a life of its own.

  * * *

  In wrestling and boxing, the main event is buffered from the rest of the card with a shitty match that precedes it. In framing up season two, that episode was the fourth one I taped, in which I donated my corneas to a lady who was mostly blind. We were going
to tape the full six-episode order, but after the Randle fiasco, the pressure was too high to shut it down. Tracy slipped in the cornea surgery by saying it was already scheduled and it wasn’t fair to prevent an innocent person from getting her sight back.

  Takes a special kind of blindness to be cured by donated corneas. Her name was Anna, a middle-aged MILF who could still perceive light but couldn’t make out any objects. Me? All I can say is that once your corneas get sliced out, it’s pretty much dark. Until they start growing back. Then it’s like getting born again. For a few days, the world was pretty and bright, a blur of colors, spilled paint, more light added each day, the sharpness coming slowly, two weeks of slow-motion autofocus.

  The season wrapped and I went home. Mack visited regularly, letting me know how post-production was going, but I always changed the subject.

  “This is it,” he said. “This season is going to air and it’s all over, whether you want to do a third season or not. It really does feel like fifteen minutes,” he marveled.

  “Maybe when it doesn’t hurt,” I said. “Two seasons felt like two decades to me.”

  He got quiet. He would bring over beers and drink most of them, the façade I’d known for so long becoming more fragile with each visit. Maybe it was guilt. Maybe it was finally realizing that there’re some really sad moments between empty orgasms.

  When Mack wasn’t over, doctors were. The Reynolds team had Venhaus hovering in the background, the only man I trusted. They did backflips to keep up the illusion that I was still at the peak of my health and abilities.

  The other medical team, led by Hayes, was far more intrusive and far more blunt.

  We were past the formalities, and I knew Hayes cared more about me than Reynolds did, if only because he was more dependent upon my survival than Reynolds was my fame. I would sit down and give them my trained vein and tell them to sample away. I didn’t want to fuck things up before the big show.

  Rae was still gone and I needed the interview.

  TWENTY-TWO

  When season two premiered, I didn’t go to the party. I watched every single episode alone. I watched the fourth episode with a bag of Doritos and a tall glass of milk. Teasers galore for my live interview the following week—details of which I hadn’t gotten yet, or asked for.

  A rhythmic knock battered my door. No need to answer, since the knob turned instantly after the knock—Mack letting himself in.

  “So here we are,” he said, jumping over the couch, landing on his ass, sinking into it.

  “Here we are.”

  “A week away.”

  “A week away, sure.”

  “And you know I carry with me the torch of Tracy’s wishes.”

  “And probably her scent.”

  He looked shocked, found out, and guilty.

  “Christ man, we really are brothers. You knew I was hitting that the whole time?”

  “I know what a wink means,” I said. “You’re the blind one. You can’t see that she’s not above banging my handler so she can hold the leash.”

  “Ouch,” he said. “Really, man. Fucking ouch. Handler?” He got up and went to the fridge. “I’m going to say what’s going on, and give you my advice, and then I’ll leave you be. But first—”

  He grabbed a beer and popped the tab, and didn’t ask if I wanted one.

  “Skunky beer, man. Imports for me nowadays. And this is a fuckin’ dump. Are your checks bouncing or something?”

  “What were you going to say?”

  “Tracy quit,” he said. “Quit as long as you’re part of the show.”

  “I would think that’s the same as quitting, unless you found another regenerating dude out there. I mean, there’s still a show? The ship has sailed. You said it yourself.”

  “Not exactly. Of course your doctor friend, Venhaus, has been telling anyone who will listen that you’re breaking down. Reynolds can only stiff-arm him with bullshit for so long. People are unhitching their wagons. Lots of people hate you. Have you seen what the religious fucks are doing? You were proof of God, now you’re proof of deals with the devil. You know how little it takes to go from God to Satan in this town?”

  “This town. Like you’re a native. We’re from Southern Illinois. Have you forgotten that?”

  “Same as you have.”

  “For the record, Satan was created out of an argument. A disagreement.”

  “Yeah, I saw the cartoon—listen, the psych guys are moving to deem you unfit for a season three. You’re on your way to being blackballed.”

  “Season three?” I was stunned it was even on the table after the shitshow that was the season-two tapings, but ratings were ratings. Buzz was buzz. Controversy was better than not getting buzz on Facebook.

  “I came up with the perfect plan. Just go on your interview, keep it short, keep it under control, and tell them that your gifts are diminishing. Admit that you’re in pain. Get some sympathy. But tell them you already agreed to one last operation. We film the footage. We present it as if you’re not a match because your gifts are fading, but suddenly, I step in. I’m the match. Your best friend. I give a kidney up, inspired by you. The Samaritan season three is then shot with volunteer donors. Sure, it’ll dry up quick with redundant donations, but we can get the juice of one more season. Cash a few more checks. And you go out with grace—”

  “And you get the spotlight that you’ve always wanted.”

  “It ain’t about that, it’s about protecting you. You’re my friend. I’m the one who told you no season two. Don’t forget that shit.”

  “I’ll handle my interview my own way.”

  “Fuck!” He paced the room. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in an extra fifty grand?”

  “Carlton Franks?”

  “Fuckin’ A. He’s got a different angle for you now, a different offer. This is at least an interesting one: Take the Lord Jesus as your savior, mention it during the interview, and tell the world that Franks is your spiritual adviser, that he advised you to retire and go with God, and bank the cash. Admit that you found forgiveness for what you did to the Randle family.”

  “Nope.”

  “Figured. Fuck him.” He collapsed into the couch again. “You’ve got me a little freaked out. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “We’re in L.A.,” I said. “Famous, just like you wanted. Just like you always wanted.”

  He took a long breath. “What’s on TV?”

  We stared at reruns for almost an hour, without speaking. He drank two more beers, waiting for me to talk. I didn’t.

  “Well,” he said, clapping his hands against his thighs, the punctuation on his pending departure. “I’ve got to get some sleep. So when Tracy asks me ‘What’s Dale gonna do?’ I’m going to tell her to…”

  “Tune in,” I said.

  He lingered. “So that’s it.”

  “Yep.”

  “This is about Raeanna, isn’t it? That’s what this is all about. Badger her into calling you on national television. Ruin her marriage. That about right?”

  “Fuck you,” I said. I hoped he would come at me, get that hate gland flexing, leave me bleeding on my living room floor. I wanted a fight, as if a fight would let him know that I really did love her. Did I love her, whatever the fuck love was?

  “I know she was here,” he said. All this time, I figured he knew but wasn’t going to bring it up. Then, he took an envelope out of his back pocket, folded in half. I recognized Raeanna’s handwriting immediately. He must have lifted the note when he came over the morning Raeanna left.

  “This is some great television, right here,” he said, tapping the note. “The best episode in Samaritan history is in this envelope.”

  “And you kept it from me, why? Because you’re still trying to protect me?”

  “Yeah, and doing a horrible job at it. Same way I let Regina suck my cock to protect you. I’m a complete failure at the protecting-Dale shit. Thanks for noticing.” He threw it onto the coffee table. “
No matter what happens Sunday, Dale, you’re done with The Samaritan. I’ll see to it that the show moves on without you. One way or another. And I couldn’t be happier. You need to figure some shit out, and I can finally sleep at night knowing you’re not getting cut on anymore.”

  So it was just me and the envelope and the television. I peeled back the lip of the envelope—torn and frayed, the glue worn down. Mack had opened it, of course. She left it behind after our last night together, and Mack found it. She was expecting a response from me, and she probably took my long silence as a no. I knew her cursive from the note in my locker, and as I read, the blueprint of my interview began to take shape.

  When Mack was gone, I called Doc Venhaus. I didn’t want to tell him my plan over the phone, so we met at the entrance to my apartment building. When he arrived, I joined him on the sidewalk. Once we were around the corner, he said, “Well, what is it then? I have to be honest, when you say you have a plan, I can’t help but get a little concerned.”

  “It’s not my plan,” I said. “It’s our plan. I can’t do it without you, so listen.”

  Doc listened.

  * * *

  The set was ready. Two chairs. Lighting. Familiar crew. Tracy didn’t talk to me. Mack wandered backstage, trying to look important.

  “You read the letter, then?” he asked.

  “You shouldn’t have stolen it,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you’re going to say out there, but you’re a big boy. You’ll either survive, or you won’t.”

  “Now, that’s a best friend,” I said.

  He smiled. “Well, I can’t say we’re not going out in a blaze of complete and utter chaos,” he said. “Go light up the world. And for the record, Tracy likes to fuck wearing nothing but her fake glasses.” He wrapped me in an embrace so forceful I knew I’d wake up sore.

  Doc Venhaus visited a few hours before live show time. “Well?” I said.