Read The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel Online
Authors: Fred Venturini
I had a whole, functioning leg back in three weeks. The world was amazed, but I was concerned, since I was reasonably sure that if I’d lost a leg in high school, I would have had it back in half the time.
After episode two was finished taping, I had enough of a gap to take a little break. Turns out, chopping my leg off entailed a pretty straightforward recovery. Mack and I ate dinner at a trendy steakhouse, because that’s where we always ate now. Sometimes I’d even get a few photographers outside, waiting for me and Mack to hit the sidewalks. Not many. Usually because I answered their questions politely and didn’t mind if they took my picture. Mack hammed it up for them most of the time. We weren’t difficult.
Tracy hated this. Hayes didn’t mind, since I never broke his prescribed protocol, refusing to comment on the subjects he was concerned about. I said awkward things to the paparazzi. Mack was no better. On addressing the rumor that I was gay: “Only on Sundays,” I said. “And Arbor Day,” Mack added. “The best day to bury the old root.” The quote ran. No one paid much attention. No sponsors threatened to pull their ads. I could have gone all Courtney Love batshit and no one would have budged. Really, Coca-Cola, you going to pull your support of a guy who donates organs? Of a show that saves lives?
The paparazzi get a bad rap. They’re rather simple, hounds that smell fear. They feast on it. They thirst for lies. They hope for cowardice and denial. They never got it from us. So we went about our business, and Tracy scrambled to keep us away from open mikes, interviews, and cameras.
Over a steak that cost more than one of my old Wal-Mart trips, Mack asked if I was holding up okay.
“Why do you continue to worry?” I said. “If I don’t hold up, you’re my lone heir. How’s that.”
“Relax. It’s just that I noticed something.”
“The waitress has tippable titties?”
“Yes. And also something else. Heart transplants. You never do them.”
I couldn’t remember if I ever told him anything about my Internet research on my condition. He was that kind of friend—I could have a secret but be comfortable enough to tell him, and then later forget that I told him. From what I could tell, I had vascular regeneration, the same as starfish and salamanders and other creatures with similar healing abilities. The healing was heart-based, the one organ those creatures could not regenerate.
“They never approach me with them,” I said.
“That’s the weird thing I’m noticing. It’s a pretty frequent transplant operation. People writing in, maybe half of them are begging for a heart. Yet they never even consider it.”
“I wonder why,” I said, but I already knew the answer.
* * *
The taping of the third episode dissolved into catastrophe, all caught on film. In any other world, it was an episode that would never air, but the coverage was so thorough on the tapings themselves, they canned and aired an episode that showed everything in the best possible light. It didn’t matter. Everyone would know the details of this episode before it even aired thanks to the reliable publicity of disaster.
Marvin Randle was going to die without a bone-marrow transplant. He was forty, a country boy from Tennessee, the kind of guy who had a white fossil ring in every pair of pants from where tobacco tins ground into his pocket. He wasn’t television material, with black hair that looked wet all the time, greasy stubble sprouting unevenly on his face, shirts with holes—not intentional holes, like the trendy stores have, but unintentional ones, the salt of his sweat eating through the fabric over the years, decomposition taking place at glacial speed. Yet he wasn’t poor and he wasn’t stupid, and he didn’t want to die.
He came from a big, loving family. I met most of them during the taping. His brothers. His one sister. His cousins. His father, Carl. All of them had the welcoming slur of a Southern accent. They offered to feed me all the time. They treated me not like a savior or a celebrity, but as a family member. “I hope my boys learn something from your visit, Mr. Sampson,” Carl said. “They need your heart.”
I assured him that they most certainly did not need my heart, and it was lucky for them that they didn’t. He scratched the bald spot on the top of his head, which was glazed with sweat, making the gray curls that surrounded it cling to his scalp at awkward angles. “One of them does,” he added.
The one he was referring to was the ostracized son, Jonathan—Marvin’s brother. He was forty-five with two full-grown sons of his own. The entire family had all taken a compatibility test to see if their marrow could save Marvin’s life, and of all the cousins and nephews and brothers and sisters, one lone compatible donor was found by the testing. Jonathan.
After the initial “praise Jesus” had passed, Jonathan decided he wasn’t going to go through with the donation. To call it a rift is an understatement—the fractures of hurt and fear left Jonathan alone to stew in his healthy marrow. By ignoring him, the family hoped he would reconsider his position. The expulsion of Jonathan was supported by his own two sons. I spoke to both of them, and neither could contain their disgust for their father.
“Uncle Marvin taught me how to fish,” one of them said. “My father isn’t just killing his brother, he’s killing a good person.”
Killing. In America, the organ-donation system is based on altruism. Nothing can be forced. Yet here was a man being accused by his own blood of murder, not through activity, but through inactivity. I knew a little something about inactivity.
As Marvin neared death, a lawsuit followed, hoping the court would force Jonathan into donation. They didn’t have a legal case, save for embarrassing Jonathan and relying on the power and pity of a judge. The ploy worked, in roundabout fashion. The judge ruled in favor of Jonathan. His body, his rights. Altruism could not be forced. Yet the judge said, “You have legal defense but no moral defense. Your family’s opinion of you is justified. I find the act disgusting and you are now the very definition of a Bad Samaritan.”
A beat reporter for the local paper got the quote into the
Tennessean
. And that one quote turned it into a national story, because it was just so damn clever to say “Bad Samaritan” in news bites while
The Samaritan
had just come off a hot first season.
Once it hit the wires and Tracy and her gang got hold of the story, I was on a plane to Tennessee to tape an episode. The angle was for me to save Marvin’s life, and with the pressure of donation out of the way thanks to my intervention, we could reunite the family as Jonathan learns the error of his ways. Or pretends that he does, at least. Tracy was saying things like “two time slots, season finale, and in the long run, we’ll end up syndicated as fuck.” Everyone smelled jackpot. I didn’t.
Despite being classified as a “universal donor,” my antigen count did not match Marvin’s for bone marrow, just like the rest of his family. This was a Samaritan first that concerned our medical team. I chalked it up to my slowly fading gifts. Healing slows, antigens start fucking everyone. I figured the endgame was that something didn’t grow back and I’d be stuck either dead or crippled.
Just like the rest of Marvin’s family, I sat around their dinner table eating casseroles and trading anecdotes, the cameras rolling, getting their background footage for an episode that was either going to be a dud or not get made because I couldn’t jump to the surgical rescue.
Tracy’s idea to salvage the taping was for me and Jonathan to have a sit-down talk. In this talk, I would relay to him the gift of giving, of saving people, what it felt like, how it changed me, and it would inspire him to change his mind. My legend would grow. And it would be a cheap episode without the need for surgery.
Jonathan agreed to the sit-down. Seems that for guys, television has the same allure as unprotected sex and cold beer—hard to say no, even if it’s bad for you.
We went to his home. His sons were gone. A stuffed bass was on one wall, a deer head on the other. Jonathan’s wife had been dead a long time, but her pictures were on tables and on the entertainment center, which had a dinosaur of a television that sat on the floor and had an actual dial, with curved glass that offered black reflections of the crew’s lighting and sound equipment and cameras. Chairs were not set up; there was just the sofa and a recliner. Just two guys having a talk, according to Tracy.
I was supposed to break the news I wasn’t a match, news that Jonathan already knew, but we would cut up the footage for dramatic effect. So I was told.
I stood outside Jonathan’s house, waiting for the crew to finish up their preparations. Tracy kept trying to give me talking points. “Make it real to him. Make him know that you’ve seen death and he doesn’t want to see his brother dead. But don’t badger him.”
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?”