joke.
It is too manic, too breathless.
“You made a deal,” he says again.
She swallows. “Look, I know how it sounds but—”
“I believe you.”
She blinks, suddenly confused. “What?”
“I believe you,” he says again.
Three small words, as rare as I remember you, and it should be enough—but it’s not. Nothing makes sense, not Henry, not this; it hasn’t since the start and she’s been too afraid to ask, to know, as if knowing would bring the whole dream crashing down, but she can see the cracks in his shoulders, can feel them in her chest.
Who are you? she wants to ask. Why are you different? How do you remember when no one else can? Why do you believe I made a deal?
In the end, she says only one thing.
“Why?”
And Henry’s hands fall away from his face and he looks up at her, his green eyes fever bright, and says—
“Because I made one, too.”
PART FOUR
THE MAN WHO STAYED DRY IN THE RAIN
Title: Open to Love
Artist(s): Muriel Strauss (design) and Lance Harringer (manufacture)
Date: 2011
Medium: Aluminum, steel, and glass sculpture
Location: On loan from the Tisch School of the Arts
Description: Originally displayed as an interactive installation, in which the aluminum heart, perforated by small holes, hung suspended over a bucket. On a table beside the metal heart, jars of varying shapes and sizes contained different-colored liquids, some water, some alcohol, some paint, and participants were encouraged to select one of the glass jars, and empty the contents into the heart. The liquid instantly began to leak out, with a speed dependent on the viscosity of the substance poured.
Background: This sculpture formed the central piece of Strauss’s senior portfolio, a collection of work on the theme of family. At the time, Strauss did not specify which member of her family was paired with which piece, but insisted that Open to Love was designed as “an homage to the exhaustions of serial monogamy and a testament to the dangers of unbalanced affection.”
Estimated Value: Unknown; work was given to Tisch by artist for permanent installation
New York City
September 4, 2013
I
A boy is born with a broken heart.
The doctors go in, and piece it back together, make it whole, and the baby is sent home, lucky to be alive. They say he is better now, that he can live a normal life, and yet, as he grows up, he is convinced something is still wrong inside.
The blood pumps, the valves open and close, and on the scans and screens, everything functions as it should. But something isn’t right.
They’ve left his heart too open.
Forgotten to close back up the armor of his chest.
And now he feels … too much.
Other people would call him sensitive, but it is more than that. The dial is broken, the volume turned all the way up. Moments of joy register as brief, but ecstatic. Moments of pain stretch long and unbearably loud.
When his first dog dies, Henry cries for a week. When his parents argue, and he cannot bear the violence in their words, he runs away from home. It takes more than a day to bring him back. When David throws away his childhood bear, when his first girlfriend, Abigail, stands him up at the dance, when they have to dissect a pig in class, when he loses the card his grandfather gave him before he passed, when he finds Liz cheating on him during their senior trip, when Robbie dumps him before junior year, every time, no matter how small, or how big, it feels like his heart is breaking again inside his chest.
Henry is fourteen the first time he steals a swig of his father’s liquor, just to turn the volume down. He is sixteen when he swipes two pills from his mother’s cabinet, just to dull the ache. He is twenty when he gets so high that he thinks he can see the cracks along his skin, the places where he’s falling apart.
His heart has a draft.
It lets in light.
It lets in storms.
It lets in everything.
* * *
Time moves so fucking fast.
Blink, and you’re halfway through school, paralyzed by the idea that whatever you choose to do, it means choosing not to do a hundred other things, so you change your major half a dozen times before finally ending up in theology, and for a while it seems like the right path, but that’s really just a reflex to the pride on your parents’ faces, because they assume they’ve got a budding rabbi, but the truth is, you have no desire to practice, you