by Diana Kiesners

As soon as she gave it to him, he had misgivings.

"What is it you want, anyway?" she had said.

Your heart.

And now it made him squeamish, almost, the thought of it: a raw thing, fascinating and repellant. Now it was his because he had, just to make conversation, asked for it.

"Look," she said, "you've already dropped it."

It was true. The instant it was in his hand he had forgotten about it, had started thinking instead what a lot of trouble it might be.

"You'll get dirt on it," she said, stretching out her hand. "If you're not going to take care of it, give it back."

But he wouldn't. In the few moments it had been in his hand, he had come to think of it as his. Though he had no use for it, he wasn't willing to let it go.

Over the next few days he discovered that there was something not quite right with it. Though he cared for it according to schedule and even devoted some extra time to it, it only sat mewling reproachfully in a corner -- just as though he had not looked after it, had not followed the instructions to the letter. He tried to ignore it, but it was disturbing him in his work. He was forced to call her up to see what could be done.

"Yes," she said, "it tends to whine. Maybe it wants to go out?"

Heartless, that was what she had become.

And so he took it out, resentfully and not at all sure it would work.

If it didn't work, if it turned out to be an investment of energy with no return, he would waste no more time. He would call whatever agency it was that looked after pathetic spineless things that sat in the corner and would not move.

But in the park it perked up and even gambolled a bit with others of its kind. He enjoyed this, and for a while he was content to watch it as he sat with his head against the bench. It was the first real sun of the year and it was warm on his face.

Something -- a policeman's whistle or a distant screech of tires -- woke him, and he was immediately impatient. Where was it? Off in the bushes somewhere, doing who knew what. And his enjoyment shrivelled and became a poor thing, not to be classed with the greater and more measurable kinds of enjoyment that life had to offer. No one could see it as something magnificent, worth working for or writing about or paying money to see. A single heart was a meagre everyday thing. Almost everyone had at least one; some people had several, far grander, he suspected, than the one he was (temporarily) committed to.

He could imagine himself with a much better class of heart, perhaps two sleek ones, walking them down a boulevard, pretending to be unaware of the envious stares of less well-endowed passersby. The boulevard was full of paparazzi but he would steer his two companions to a table in a café , leaving instructions with the maître d' that they were not to be disturbed. The whispers would rise around them like a cloud of incense. He would take no notice, and then -- but the bench he was sitting on was decrepit and worn and the paint was flaking off. A piece of trash blew against his foot. He went and yanked the heart out of the bushes where it was sniffing at dead leaves and took it home.

He would not pay attention to it, resenting it for the fact that it was so obviously his. It was always underfoot. He couldn't knot his tie without finding it tangled in the fabric, getting in the way of his fingers, so that he had to relearn motions that had become mechanical long before he came into this accidental ownership. He had been tricked into responsibility. It was unacceptable, and he stayed out of the house as much as he could. When he came home, there it was at his feet, tripping him up and making disgusting noises.

All the same, a few days later he was panicked because it had grown listless. He gathered it up to take it to the park, but it would not play and lay barely thudding on the bench beside him while children ran by with balls and dogs sniffed curiously at it. Terrified, he bundled it up in some old newspapers and took it home again.

He read everything he could find related to its care but all his information seemed contradictory and inconclusive. One book recommended one thing, the next said the opposite. All of it was stated with such authority that he lost a lot of time trying to make sense of it. He began to hang around newsstands reading women's magazines but, though these contained handy checklists, nothing seemed to work.

Although he didn't like to, he was forced to call its owner for advice.

"You want me to write you a manual," she said. "Well, I don't have the time. I'm starting a new job. You'll have to struggle along on your own."

And he could not provoke her into taking any more interest than that. As though he were some sort of kennel.

He made the usual mistakes but did not commit anything too serious. Sometimes he misinterpreted its needs and a couple of times dropped it on the floor. Though it didn't flourish like some he had seen (enviously observing other people's in the park), it didn't die either.

He would take a trip, he decided. Alone. It was business, he explained to its pink lassitude. It didn't bother to respond. Never mind, he would soon be rid of it. He whistled as he packed, thinking of his carefree future. Then at the last minute he threw it into a corner of his suitcase together with some balled-up underwear and grimly closed it. The extra weight made the suitcase heavy as a stone, and he had to pay for it at the airport.

The flight was terrible. The jet bounced and dove like a paper airplane and all around him people were being sick or praying. He sat with his head in his hands, thinking that he should have provided some air holes and hoping that the flight would be short. A crash seemed no worse a possibility than having to live through the aftermath of his neglect.

After the harrowing landing, he tore open his suitcase before an astonished customs official and rummaged until he found where it had worked its way into one of his socks. Then he tossed it aside again, embarrassed, as though he were quite indifferent to it, even surprised to find it there. He hadn't thought to declare it, and there might possibly be some regulations about quarantine. But no one seemed to be in the least interested in it or to care that it was there. Once again he saw that it was probably not worth having and felt tricked and angry.

He had thought he would resent having to share his hotel room, to make space in the closet, alter his routine. But he seemed to have lost the habit of habit. He no longer observed any schedule in his dealings with it, having left his books at home. In spite of himself, he came to accept its idiosyncrasy. And, gradually, he came to understand its various communications and to respond to them, not stopping any more to question their logic or look at his watch. He still ate his dinner with a book in his hand but his concentration hadn't the density it used to -- it was riddled with peepholes and permeable to the slightest sign of the heart, which might be sitting on the table, eating off his plate. Once in a while he would push it off the table, and it would crawl back up again.

It had grown independent. He watched it with apprehension in the places they frequented (in each new city, accommodation had to be made for it; suitable locations were scouted out, evaluated, and later compared to those in subsequent cities). It liked green places, disliked crowds. But it could no longer be counted on to stay close at hand. Once, after he had dozed off, hypnotized by the sparkle of sunlight on the waves of a pond (and what city had that been, what place?), he woke suddenly, feeling as though someone had poked him with a sharp stick. It was gone.

He started around the park at a slow jog, scanning the bushes as he ran along the road, his blood beating in his ears. He thought of all the terrible things that could easily happen to it, particularly on this road where people drove so fast and where so many others lay bruised and perhaps dead by the side. When at last he spotted it, not injured or upset but playing quietly by itself in the fountain he had left, he was furious. He walked into the fountain without taking his shoes off, meaning to tell it off once and for all.

The water was shockingly cold, so cold that for an instant he forgot everything. Then he felt a grief so boundless and true that he dropped to his knees. It will kill me, he thought. It was not that he was old but that he suddenly saw what a great love might do, particularly one so inobtrusive and ordinary: how it might slowly eat away at the base of you so that, when it left, you would find yourself old. And he did not any longer (as he had been lately) reproach himself for not having wanted to take it in. His misgivings had been legitimate, a form of self-preservation.

Eventually there was nothing to do but go home. This compulsion to test a new love in an old surrounding: it occurred to him that this was love feeding on itself, eating its way to its own demise. But there was no choice. Every other place was worn out, used up, and the motion of an airplane had become a standing still.

By now he had only half a suitcase to himself. The other half was chaotically stuffed with sentiment -- small pendants with lockets, museum postcards of lovers entwined and a paperweight of Niagara Falls shaped like a heart.

Of course it didn't travel in the suitcase any more but came on the plane with him, where he gave it a window seat. He still looked around at others with vague discontent, thinking that what they had was more polished, more attractive, than his own. But the memory of his grief stayed with him, and he was cautious how he thought about it.

His home felt empty after all the strange places, which had been full of the energy of unfamiliarity. Here it was as though all the silence of things not happening had accumulated and grown solid, an echo frozen into substance. Although his mail had been redirected, there was a pile of envelopes by the door -- not postmarked, so they must have been hand-delivered, perhaps a long time ago. He didn't like to open or even look at them for they must contain some kind of solicitations that were now beside the point.

***

She came the same night, wearing a more expensive coat than anything he remembered her owning. In fact, he had altogether forgotten what she looked like and had trouble placing her. Even the doorbell had an unfamiliar sound, a familiar word spoken in a foreign language, and it took an effort to convince himself that he must answer it.

"I'll take it back now," she said, and immediately it came bounding out. There was no question of ownership and nothing he could say. In fact he could barely remember that it had been given to him. Now here she was, collecting it again, like some misdirected magazine finally retrieved from a previous address. And she had several others on a string. He only remembered her having one before, the one she had given him.

After she left, he found he could not go upstairs. He was terrified of his home, its size, its emptiness. Each room warned against entry. Where could he go? And there was his suitcase, still parked in the entranceway, festive with airline tags. He knew he must not open it and wondered if he might not leave immediately to travel again. Leave the suitcase, and the house, forever. He paced the foyer, trying to make up his mind. In the end he went to bed. It had become too late to go anywhere.

The next day he dressed in the same clothes and went to the park. It was spring. The ice had receded from the pond and the water had been turned on in the drinking fountains and in the Japanese garden, where it created an illusion of life in the dead landscape with the little pagoda and carefully-placed rocks.

He walked restlessly around the children's playground. The children seemed noisier than usual (maybe this was just in contrast to the quiet of his house), their mothers impossibly young. He watched the children fighting for a place at the top of the slide, uncertain whether they looked the way they did because of some optical illusion, or whether the world had actually become so small and busy. He climbed the hill to get a better perspective, stopping halfway up to catch his breath. When he reached the top of the hill, he didn't turn back to look after all but went on home.

The next day the cherry blossoms were in bloom. He wished he could bring himself to open his suitcase; he was unaccustomed to wearing the same clothes for more than one day and felt his skin was crawling. The day after that, there were carloads of Japanese who walked arm in arm viewing the cherry blossoms. A group of very old people practiced tai chi in a pavilion, thin bodies waving like seaweed in a weak current.

As he walked up the hill his pants chafed his legs and he thought again of the unopened suitcase, how it was not possible to open it and how he ran into it and bruised his shins every time he opened the door even though he knew exactly where it was. Soon he would have to change his clothes. Even the breeze on his face felt abrasive.

It was spring. He was unprepared. Every inch of him had been sandpapered, each layer of skin rubbed away until there was only this last fragile membrane left against which everything -- the shrill voices of children, the shrieks of gulls -- grated. And it, too, would go. He wondered if he could get used to this feeling, this nakedness.

Now that it was getting dark, the breeze bit and hurried him homeward. The hill was steep, all hills were. A dead leaf blew up his pant leg, scraping. He bent down and it was like that, upside down and unbearably chafed, that it occurred to him: this was how air might feel to a newborn, sand to an oyster.