She understood that she was better off than any number of other people in the city. Take Luka, for instance, who hadn't seen either of his parents since he had died, or at least since she had met him – just the two or three neighbors he had known and the handful of students he had taught during the one short summer he had spent with Laura.
Minny heard him mumble something in his sleep, and she turned over onto her other side. Her ear was resting on the palm of her hand, which was wedged between her head and the pillow. For a moment she thought she heard someone knocking on the door. Then she realized it was only the sound of her heart beating. And then she realized that it couldn't be the sound of her heart beating.
She had never been one of those people who went around the city with an invisible heart keeping time in her ears. She had always assumed that such people were undergoing some sort of mass hallucination. They had fixed their minds on something they either wished for or remembered (Luka would have teased the pun out: something they had learned by heart). And then, abracadabra, they imagined it was actually there.
But the beating she heard was unmistakable. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
She lay there listening to the sound for what must have been hours, and when finally she opened her eyes again, the light had risen outside her window and it was just as unmistakably morning.
The heartbeat did not go away. Several days passed and still Minny could not stop listening to it.
As it turned out, she wasn't alone. No one in the city failed to notice it. It seemed to fill the air like a soft rain of ashes – so abundant that it revealed the smallest motions of the wind, yet so light that it barely tingled as it touched their skin. Everywhere she went, Minny saw people reflexively putting their hands to their chests as they waited alone in the lobbies of movie theaters or sat talking to one another in crowded restaurants. She knew that they were feeling for that old familiar rhythm.
Luka wrote about the phenomenon one day in the Sims Sheet. He headlined the article, HEART BEATS, PEOPLE LISTEN. It was a man-on-the-street piece, profiling some half dozen people he had confronted with a pair of questions on the subject: What did the heartbeat mean? And, Where did it come from? As usual there was no consensus of opinion. A man who identified himself as Martin Campbell said that the pattern of the heartbeat was familiar to him, but he couldn't figure out where he remembered it from. He was only sure that it made him want to go to sleep. A woman named Linda Terrell said, "Don't you know? There's a giant heart buried beneath the subways. Take your shoes off. You can feel it beating in your toes." One man claimed that the heartbeat was his own, though he would not explain how he knew this to be the case.
"Whatever the answer," the article concluded, "this reporter refuses to believe that the sudden rise or recurrence of the sound is insignificant – though what its significance may be I leave it for you, the reader, to judge."
One thing was certain, and that was that everyone in the city was interested in the topic. For the first time since Minny had met Luka, they handed out every single copy of the paper that morning and found only a few of them balled up in the trash cans as they left.
Afterward, before they went home, they decided to share a late breakfast at Bristow's. The restaurant was full, and Minny left Luka standing in the lobby while she went to the restroom. When she came back, he was talking to a woman about the condition of the roads.
"I would say I've seen at least one traffic accident a day ever since the ice started falling," the woman told him. "Why, just on the way over here, I watched someone run smack into the side of a mailbox. That crumpling sound! Have you ever been in a car accident?"
He had, of course. The night they met, when they believed they were the only people in the city – the two of them and the blind man, that is – he had told Minny the story of how he had died in a highway accident. He said that he had lost control of the wheel and felt himself being jarred loose from his body. She had never forgotten the tingle that ran over her skin as he described it. But he answered the woman with, "Never. I guess I've been pretty lucky."
"See, for me it's been one accident after another," the woman said. "One time my accelerator went out, and I could only get my car to drive in reverse. I literally can't tell you how many traffic citations I've gotten. And then I rear-ended somebody once just trying to see how fast I would have to go to get a grasshopper to blow off my windshield. You know how sometimes you've got these questions in your head? Well, the police officer was sympathetic, but he said he had to give me a ticket anyway."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Luka said.
A table emptied out, and they left the woman waiting at the door. Bristow, the owner of the restaurant, showed them to their chairs and filled their water glasses. After they had placed their order, Minny asked Luka, "Why didn't you tell her about the accident?"
He stirred the ice in his glass. "She's a complete stranger, and mostly crazy would be my guess. I died, remember? That car accident was one of the three most important things that ever happened to me – probably a close second, right after my birth. I'm not going to tell just anybody about it."
"But you told me about it the same day we met. And I was a complete stranger."
"You were a complete stranger," he agreed. "And you're also mostly crazy. But you were never just anybody."
This was the kind of thing he would say every so often, a tight little knot of sentences, like the coil of rubber at the center of a golf ball, that would burst open in a spray of contradictory implications as soon as she tried to pick it apart. What did he mean? Did he have something serious in mind? Or was he just being cryptic for the sake of being cryptic, clever for the sake of being clever? She could never tell. He himself seemed to see such conversations as a kind of affectionate game. Sometimes she would try to play along with him, but she was not very good at it, and they both knew it. She felt clumsy, thick-witted. Usually, instead of joining in with him, she would try to come up with a topic that would shift the mood of the conversation onto a slower, steadier course, one she was sure she could follow. A walk instead of a dance, was how she thought of it. This was just one of the many reasons she couldn't stop asking him why he loved her.
"Or how's this?" he amended his answer. "You were a stranger, but you were never complete." He laughed.
"Did I tell you I saw the blind man yesterday?"
It had the effect she wanted: his smile sank back into his face, and his eyes took on a look of simple curiosity. "No, you didn't. Where was he?"
"He was having an argument with a ticket vendor. I stopped and asked him if he was all right, and he said he was tired of remembering everything he wanted to forget and forgetting everything he wanted to remember. Those were his exact words: 'remembering everything he wanted to forget and forgetting everything he wanted to remember.' I think I might have been on the forgetting-everything-he-wanted-to-remember end of the spectrum. When I told him who I was, he said he was pleased to meet me."