Pacemaker Of The Heart

At night in bed, data pours in and out through the machine in her chest, above her heart. It comes from the box the doctors said to keep on her night table, plugged into the wall outlet, connected by satellite. When the box is working, a green light blinks.

Her children say she’s dreaming, but she knows what happens: a ringing sound, some clicks, then the green light on the box blinks quickly, a visual Morse code. That’s when it starts. The flow of data thick as blood.

She’s 87, widowed mom, grandma, soon to be great-grandma. After high school she married and worked in politics, for a governor who fought racism, another who championed public mental health. She campaigned for JFK, raised three children in a racist southern town, helped Black friends and neighbors find good jobs with sick leave, paid vacation, retirement and medical benefits.

She doesn’t tell everyone, but she’s had two close encounters with UFOs. The first time before dawn, delivering newspapers, a side job for easy money, the friend said. She was driving the route when she heard a strange sound and looked up to yellow spinning lights. The next time was at home on her deck, a bright white light that held her transfixed inside its circle.

Her daughter makes her tell these stories over and over, once when they were in the mountains, her grandchildren in the back seat asking if she’d seen ET. Her daughter so caught up in the story she got pulled over for speeding, so flustered by getting pulled over she handed the officer a credit card instead of her driver’s license. He got such a laugh out of it he let them go.

That was before the surgery. When her heart started beating so slow at night she might not wake up again, they said she needed a valve replaced. She put it off to vote for Hillary - what if she died on the operating table and couldn’t vote! - but then Hillary lost. She wanted a woman president, but got what, a lunatic. She got the valve and the pacemaker so she could live long enough to see him voted out of office. Now she’s hanging on through a pandemic, glad there’s a Democrat in the White House again, not a woman, but at least she got to see a Black man, and now a Black woman in the White House too.

But the poison. No, Mom, her children insist, it’s called COVID. She’s getting the second shot next week. She wants to visit her children again, pet their dogs, see her great grand-baby get old enough to call her gi-gi-mom.

Sometimes she wishes she’d gone to college. They said she was smart enough. Her mama offered to buy her a convertible if she went to college instead of getting married.

She wants to see her daughter become a grandma, this daughter who dreamed when she was little that she’d been left on the earth by aliens, that they came back to get her. She’d cried when she woke up and realized it was a dream. This daughter was a handful but she went to college, got married, had two kids, now has a grandson on the way.

She’s raised her children, daughter included, lived a good life, and now, thanks to the pacemaker, she knows everything in the entire world. Her children explain things to her like she can’t hear good, like her brain has deteriorated, like she’s dumb. She just goes along with them. She doesn’t reveal that she knows every spoken language, computer language, numbers, math, raw data, quantum data. Dark matter, the life cycle of the honey bee, protozoan diseases of the horse, cryptocurrency, solar electricity battery manufacturing. The chemical make-up of MDMA, how it might heal depression and other maladies of the brain. Recipes for every kind of cake and pie. Non-fungible tokens.

She doesn’t tell them how the pandemic will end, whether the man whose name she hates to say will be convicted of his crimes, how the political parties will shift and reform. What the little one will be when he grows up. All this comes through the box while the green light goes crazy, passing details through the pacemaker, riding the beats of her heart, a thing of muscle and many years, on a highway to her brain. Neurons, synapses, an interior world she never knew existed: electrical, lightning bright, so much knowledge.

She lies awake, eyes open wide, listening.