Only days earlier, Adam laboured to distract and reassure Natalie during a brief getaway to Jerusalem. Each night and every morning he kissed and traced the soft skin between her breasts, over the still‑intact bone shielding a faulty valve somewhere within. He touched her as if skin could cast a protective seal, instilling in them both—the mortally afraid lovers—the belief that all would be well. He wished to keep her as she was, as he would always remember—come scars, harm, or complications. Even though scalpels would part frail flesh, a saw would grind through blood‑spattered bone, and strangers tinker with her red machinery— he still assured she would be well. Well, and granted another decade to forget the ever‑looming threat of death. At the end of each day, Adam didn’t know what to offer of himself to counterbalance a terror unknowable to him.
After nearly six years together, he still felt like a provisional addition to Natalie’s life. What were a few years of loving her compared with her lifelong struggle with that aortic valve? It had, however imperfectly, imbued her with life since before she first drew breath. The day of the incomprehensible surgery was to be an intimate matter between Natalie and her valve, mediated by those endowed with the gift of mending hearts. He’d known that the day would come, without knowing whether he’d be by her side to see it through. Some days he feared he’d vanish, as punctual first boyfriends often do, and wouldn’t be the one to carry her through it. Besides, he’d always felt his roots belonged elsewhere. He didn’t know whether Natalie would want to follow, nor what he’d do if she refused. And so, unknown compounding the unthought, their future lay in perpetual fog.
On the day of the surgery, her family drove her to a Tel Aviv cardiology ward in the early morning. The only ones from her expansive family that day were her doting father, her anxious mother, and older sister Michelle. The surgery would take place at 14:05. Adam made his way separately and alone on a series of buses, with his family relaying strength, belief, and love from a cautious distance.
Though the day defied expression, he woke feeling strangely ordinary. The muted, mundane feeling kept him company through the commute and the walk to the hospital complex. It was as though his being had not yet woken up to what would transpire. His own heart, keeping a level beat, did not yet understand the task ahead. Thoughts stuttered awkwardly, sending out the half-formed that peter out without conclusion. Perhaps his essence that day straggled a few paces behind his corporeal form in a kind of soul-lag. Once at the hospital, he navigated through the floors and corridors until he reached—he checked the number—Natalie’s door. She lay in a light-blue speckled hospital gown that matched her weary eyes. Her golden hair was up in the bun he always beamed at the sight of, the one that signaled lazy Saturdays and ceaseless lovemaking. The sight of her family forming a crescent of stern, worried love around her bed sobered him. Out of awkward deference to the couple’s bond, her parents and sister broke encirclement to allow him access to their ailing, beloved daughter.
When he embraced her, he felt the unfamiliar texture of the gown and Natalie’s precious, comforting softness underneath. He gave her a self-conscious, brief kiss—rigid‑lipped. He hoped she would not mind, but knowing her, of course she did. He pressed on with formalities:
“Wow, look at you! You look like you’re still on vacation!” he tried to smile, despite how serious he felt compelled to be in front of her family. Her father offered commentary, delaying Natalie’s own estimation of her condition.
“We’ve been sitting here laughing, and she’s in a good mood. Right, honey? Are you feeling okay? Want me to get you some water?”
Her mother—picking up on the father’s cue—automatically got up to reach for a nearby bottle, her face pinched with anxiety.
“Alright, I’m gonna go out for a smoke; be back soon,” Michelle said, slipping out—never one for unmasked affection.
“I’m good, thanks. Please, let’s just all relax. I just want a couple of moments with Adam, alright?”
Her parents agreed and convened in the far corner of the long room, as if out of earshot. Adam remained seated by her side and had a moment to try to grasp the weight of what approached. He didn’t know whether to try to stay on the formal surface, or to take the plunge into honest fear. Which would be the mistake? He then simply focused on Natalie’s face—so close and stripped of the sharpness of her daily makeup, and all blurred in a quiet, intimate exchange. Were he to try to recall what was said any year thereafter, he would only be able to come up with estimations and shameful guesses, for how could he not remember?
All he knew was that at that moment, he may as well have given her his own heart—perhaps defective in some other way—as replacement. The transfer left him reeling. The next vibrant image in his memory was of her small hands and her soft cheeks, so incongruent in that hospital, in that ward.
The next moment that made its mark over almost all else in that dreaded room was when Natalie’s father cut everything short with his phone raised high. A distant, unfamiliar voice crackled from it and waited for instructions to continue.
Her father explained:
“I called a rabbi to bless you! Listen—listen. He will say a prayer that is tailored to the very letters in your name!”
Natalie groaned, but without much choice, she agreed to sit in silence while the unintelligible, distant voice drew the attention of all those present in the room, as well as the returning sister from her smoker’s reprieve.
The prayer seemed to go on for at least ten minutes, though Adam knew it only felt that way due to the strange sight of her father standing there, hand raised in dignity, with the phone turned into the very conduit of God’s will being woven to match the size of Natalie’s heart. Then, not willing to allow her—potentially final—moments to be hijacked by some unknown rabbi, she snapped at her father.
“Dad, I get it! Please hang up the phone, don’t do this now. They might take me any minute!”
Rising urgency and barely restrained panic filled her voice. Adam felt his heart pick up the pace at the suddenly acknowledged prospect of Natalie’s departure. He didn’t notice how strongly he’d been holding her hand, or she his, from the moment he sat down next to her. She drove her nails into his flesh, and he welcomed it. Their nervous sweat, a panicked balm, made their palms feel as though they never existed apart. A crevice in his mind whispered otherwise. He slammed it shut.
Her father then grumbled about the importance of the prayer and the eminence of the revered rabbi. Though, sensing it wasn’t the day to wield his usual authority, her father terminated the call and fell silent. Adam sat breathless, and before the air in the room had time to revert to its previous, quiet shape, a tall, blue nurse announced himself and stood in the entrance to the room.
“Natalie, we’re ready for you,” he said cordially, but the announcement his arrival heralded made time feel as though it lashed out at each of those present—indignant that they allowed the final moment to be wasted. In an instant Adam felt his eyes well with tears, and a lump launched itself into his throat. Before he could come to his senses, Natalie spoke plainly, as if the nurse merely arrived to offer some amenity at a hotel, “Okay, so we’re going now?”
He could barely follow the next blur of motion. All hurried along a blinding corridor as they followed the nurses and the gurney that transported Natalie. Adam walked and could not tear his eyes from the girl without whom it was impossible to conceive not only of a world, a future—however vague—but also of himself. In that excruciating moment only two things existed: the swarm of warm tears trailing golden-haired Natalie, and her back inexplicably still, sitting there, resigned to whichever way the nurses in blue wheeled her in. And as the masked figures stopped before an elevator, the silently following family members and a disoriented boyfriend were told that they’d reached the final threshold, beyond which none could follow. Then came the final, helpless glimpse, and the sliding doors of the elevator.
Staff led Adam and the family to a hall of monitors tracking surgery progress. Inside, countless others congregated, some sitting on steel benches, some with their eyes glued to the monitors, while others passed the time in idle chatter. All awaited results and their names called. The ordeal would last six, maybe seven, hours. The hall and its more banal atmosphere allowed Adam to regain some composure. Natalie’s father took charge and spoke with familiar assurance about what to watch for. He spoke, likely convincing only himself, of how it would all be over before they knew it, and of how Natalie’s exceptionally rare and dangerous surgery was rather commonplace.
Her mother and sister seemed to be quietly haunted and barely able to entertain the father’s prattling. When Adam tried to gauge his own condition, his own hope, he could only see a howling white void. He was kept operational and somewhat steady solely by the body’s automatic motions: the habit to nod in approval or understanding, to grunt in response to speech directed at him, and the cycle of steps necessary to follow, turn corners, ascend and descend stairwells.
Still unthinking and only able to take in the technicalities of the new space they occupied, Adam felt that her father’s voice was a kind of dubious beacon to keep his focus. He would need to keep his eyes on him, lest his mind run aground and wreck itself in the awful, tumultuous white.
“Adam, hey, don’t worry. How’re you holding up? They should be done by 20:00, and then they’ll immediately let us know.”
“I know, I know. It’s this monitor, right?” He replied dryly as he prepared his body to stand deathly still, unflinching, as though on guard duty until news arrived.
“Yeah, this one. Hey, listen—you don’t have to stay here until then. Go on, take a walk outside, get on a bus, go home. We’ll call you once she’s out. We’ll take care of it. Thanks for coming.”
Adam did not know why her father’s voice compelled him to simply agree and cancel his planned vigil. He followed his suggestion—not even thinking to offer any resistance. Instead, his eyes simply focused on his brown boots as they took him away from the hall, further from the lobby, outside and towards a bus station, —only the boots; don’t look ahead. Brown boots. Don’t think.
Adam rounded corners until he arrived at the stop just in time to board a bus that was there, as if just to take him away. By pure, unconscious instinct, he found himself seated by a window, viewing a rushing black road speckled with white traffic markings. There, his mind pleaded: Please let her live. Will she live? How will I breathe until I know she lives? And should I? Sitting there he felt as if cold metal seemed to bore through his insides, hollowing out his chest, thereby somehow causing the forbidden to leak out from a place unknown in the inner reaches of him.
Please let her die.
The call came about six‑and‑a‑half hours later.
Nearly five years have passed, and his chest still creaks whenever he lies in bed. He sleeps.
*****
Alexei Raymond is a writer whose work explores post-Soviet diasporic lives, moments of threshold, and fractured identities. Originally from the Middle East, he is currently based in Belgrade. His stories appear in The Bloomin’ Onion, Lowlife Lit Press, and The Crawfish. Connect with him at x.com/enemyofcruelty.
