Signals from a Lampless Beacon: Their Burdens Lifted

JOSH TOOK from behind his desk the light but sturdy chair and placed it in the passageway connecting his sitting room and bedroom, his back to the bath, facing the tall window. Here still hung the immense globe of mistletoe, still fresh, still trailing its comet’s tail of colored ribbons. It had until January fifth. Josh sat down and looked out. The view was overlaid by a faint reflection of himself and the chair. With a long draught, he began to ponder things. How is it I felt this morning that I was walking through my own, pitch-lined heart? A distinct voice, to his surprise, came from somewhere outside himself: “That is really two questions. First, you have diminished your being, are so much less than yourself; that is why you seemed to be moving inside yourself. And the pitch? It was not so much lining the passageways of your heart as sealing them, letting very little either in or out.” Has my heart then become a heart of stone? The clear voice answered, “It is well along the way to becoming like stone. You know that pitch, unless you set it alight and make a torch of it, gradually sets up, hardens, and becomes brittle. And at that point, it may as well be stone.” How have I diminished myself so far? Now the sun was low, shining from under the clouds. With greater light outside, the reflection of a man sitting in the chair grew faint…faint to disappearing. “By dulling your senses, and your ability to integrate them, with drink, and with grief and doubt; by fixing what attention you’ve left yourself upon a single misfortune; by edging out of your thoughts any but some scraps of your good fortune. That is how.” What has taken me over? “You’re not a half-wit. Or, you didn’t start out as one. You think you’ve lost Mary. And you think you love her. But you haven’t, and you don’t—at least, not to the extents or in the ways you suppose.” And now the sun was beginning to set; the windowpanes were ablaze, whether seen from inside or out. It is true. I haven’t lost her. She won’t become my “life’s companion,” but she loves me just as she did. She said so. The light—not heat—seemed to liquefy the windowpanes. Blazing, consuming, revivifying, silent. Let this burn the pitch away, out of me. If I loved Mary truly, then I would want her to have what is best for her. I would pay in money for anything that could make her life good, and I’m going to have to pay in another way for this. Edward is best for her. It hurts me to have to think it, but the man better for her has won her. When the sun had gone down and darkness was falling outside, the lighted passageway transformed the windowpanes practically into mirrored planes, allowing Josh to recognize his interlocutor. With a heavy hand he replenished the glass, but with a heart—Was it possible?—grown lighter. A little more supple? A spark held to the fuel? He returned to the chair. He didn’t want to sit in his arched window on display. Particularly not beneath an enormous ball of mistletoe. So he put out the light in the passageway and sat down again. The lighting in the garden below had come on automatically. It was dim, and it balanced closely the light spilling into the passageway from the bedroom to Josh’s right and from the sitting room to his left. The reflection was thus nearly transparent, but it was there again. Or still? “Here,” it seemed to say, “is a heart of stone,” exhibiting a pale, smooth river rock, about the size and shape of a human heart. “And here is a heart of flesh.” Beside the stone, Josh, or his reflection, laid a human heart. It was a recently resected one, red mostly, covered with tissue-fluid. Josh-of-the-Chair recoiled a little, and took a walloping slug of whiskey. He had never seen a human heart cut out of the body. He had not seen any heart, for that matter. Not from the outside. “You can see a difference, of course. But do you know the difference?” The stone one has pitch inside? “No. There’s no inside to it—stone, stone all the way through.” Then what is the difference...at least, the difference you’re looking for? Reflection-Josh took up a short staff, no longer than eight inches. It was copper-colored, and it had a curious sheen. Josh-of-the-Chair saw, bending forward for a closer look just at the moment when Reflection-Josh in his turn bent forward to proffer, that the staff was wrapped in a close coil of fine copper wire. It was sparkling, burning densely within a minute spheric space at the end of the rod. Reflection-Josh then bent down over the hearts, just as Josh-of-the-Chair bent over them to look more closely. When the intense fire-fountain was held to the stone, a glittering webwork of sparks flickered over the surface, weaving and twisting in bright threads among each other, and this continued until the stick was withdrawn. “Electrons, applied to what won’t conduct them, repel each other, out onto the surface. There, they keep repelling each other, but the repulsions cause collisions, and that’s what we’ve seen scuttering all over the rock, like sand-fiddlers when the tide is dead low” I’ve seen things like that before. “We all have. Now the same charge applied to a living heart….” That’s a living heart? “Yes. It’s on loan.” A normal living heart? “Yes.” With nothing inside it? “Not anything that doesn’t belong there.” And he applied the charge to the heart of flesh. After a short time, it began to beat. Josh-of-the-Chair thought blood might spurt out, but none did. “When the charge enters what will conduct it, then it flows along in a little bustling, regularly bumping sort of current. Current electricity, when there’s a dependable flow of it, can make things that are sensitive to it do their work. But you’re still wondering about something.” Yes, I am. What if the living heart had got something viscous—or even brittle--inside it? Would it still work? “The current travels through the muscle-tissue, which is particularly formed to conduct it efficiently along specialized pathways. It would work, but it would work less well.” One-Josh had nodded off to sleep, and awoke, startled, only just as he was about to spill the contents of his glass onto the floor. He drank it, instead. There was no more reflection. Had the lights in the garden got brighter? He ambled off to bed, and, again and finally falling asleep, thought: ‘…Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you…then will I cleanse you.’ …Less well, but it will work.