[fabrastings. spencer-centric, the summer before college. because sometimes things take time and there's heaviness in wanted referentiality. references from jeanette winterson's written on the body. listen to ellie goulding's 'i know you care.']

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let me hold up my lantern (it's only the blood)

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at the post-mortem they'll find an enlarged heart and no guts.

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The saw doesn't work. That's the first thing they tell you when you start your summer job selling surgical instruments: The saw doesn't work, and they hand you the sturdy plastic and the smooth metal, and then they explain, It's just a model.

You nod and take steady stock of other instructions (e.g., dress code, along with Spencer, only speak when spoken to, and DO NOT DATE THE SURGEONS.)

This makes you smile because you're not in the mood to date anyone at the moment, not now and maybe not ever again, and you only have this summer job because it sounded grotesque and something you'd never adore and because your mother plays tennis with the wife of the owner of the company.

The saw, used to cut open sternums, is the newest, most advanced version the company sells, and you are to familiarize yourself physically with its features, tangibly, like a lover learning their beloved's still, sleeping body for the first time. The working-saw runs for hours and hours uninterrupted on rechargeable, environment-friendly battery power. You discover that night, in your small apartment in the city that your parents are paying for, that the model-saw has an empty cavern: space for the batteries, even though they won't ever work—The circuitry is unfinished, they said.

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Blood flows through the heart in one direction only. It is prevented from backing up by a series of valves at various openings: the tricuspid valve between the right atrium and right ventricle; the bicuspid, or mitral, valve between the left atrium and left ventricle; and the semilunar valves in the aorta and the pulmonary artery.

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There is, you decide after your fifth time in an operating room, a vivid sensuality to the glistening mass of muscle of a beating heart after the working-saw divides the wasteland of desert bone, suddenly fertile with blood. It pulses, throbs, plummets and shivers, raw and begging.

And what then of the saw? What then of you, and lovers, and Spencer, I won't hurt you so you spread your legs wider and closed your eyes and yes, it hurt.

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It's a Wednesday afternoon. You eat lunch in the doctor's lounge at the Philadelphia Children's, which is bright and straining.

'Their chests are so small,' you say, tugging apart the two sticky ends of your peanut-butter and jelly.

Dr. Nichols nods. 'But fully functioning, complete and yet still growing.'

You take a drink of very burnt coffee, black.

'Do you want to be a doctor, Spencer?' he asks.

'No.'

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In the flicker of The Big Sleep you think about Lauren Bacall rather than Humphrey Bogart. Perhaps you should call Emily; perhaps you should be honest out loud. Perhaps you should want, and you should take your fingers and your lips and explore and hurt and heal.

Perhaps you are merely tired. Perhaps you are reading too much into 1950s American commentary on German Expressionism.

Hanna puts her feet on your lap with a yawn. 'What is that?' she asks, pointing to the model-saw in the center of the kitchen table.

'Simulacra,' you say, then laugh.

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You go running one morning, thinking about school and whether or not you will sleep with any professors, which is not something you've quite decided yet. Sweat slithers down between your breasts and at some point around mile seven, everything aches, and you wonder if this is the measure of femininity.

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A wall of muscle divides the heart into two cavities: the left cavity pumps blood throughout the body, while the right cavity pumps blood only through the lungs.

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You like to wander around the hospitals. In a way, it's remarkably comforting to see the collective unconscious manifest itself latently the so many cubicles of singularity, although occasionally it bothers you that often the only way people express this is through material things. However, between the crinkle and shine of silver Get Well Soon balloons and plush stuffed animals that possibly will lose all of their fur and possibly an eye or a nose—when your blood sugars are low, maybe Lacan somehow agreed with Biblical mutilation—one day and become Real, and crossword puzzles half-completed lying dormant on the sticky residual jello on the fake wood-grain while Law and Order reruns comment in the background, 'That's just a load of rehearsed crap,' there are people. Humans, in very sensed pain, whether they have a white bracelet around the wrist or not.

If this care is not the root of love, then what?

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On the first of July you sneak away from the operating room for five minutes to pee, which is a lie, because you want to explore. You like the grotesque, the fugue, because there is a breathtaking quality to a stripped, bloody existence that sometimes you indulge in glimpsing.

In the PACU, you glance at a few beds until you see a girl about your age, with blond hair and closed eyes and her gown pulled back and a line of stitches on the left side of her chest that reminds you very much of Picasso, and she is the most beautiful thing.

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Her chart says Quinn Fabray, 4/17/1994 and thoracotomy and possibly farther down on the chart you glimpse Current Medications: Celexa, 40 mg daily.

You have seen lungs many, many times by now. Next to the shiny mass of oblique heart, lungs are pink and unassuming.

As soon as the nurse isn't looking, you step closer to the bed. You place your cold hand against her warm skin, against her soft-hard ribs and the hollow-bird-thin bones of your hand press down. She doesn't stir, so you trace over the barbed fence of stitches.

'I'm Spencer,' you tell her, 'and sometimes the things that don't work are the most interesting.'

She still doesn't wake up, but you feel her chest move as she breathes. You wonder about the monsters inside her lung and why she needed a thoracotomy, and you sense that, like you, she might be the type of person that spends too much time in her head.

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If you had a chart, it would read, Current Medications: Klonopin, 1 mg per day.

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The next day, during a coronary artery bypass graft, you leave the OR again and get a nurse you brought a machiato to that morning to find what room Quinn Fabray is in for you; 'We're friends from school and I just wanted to wish her well,' you say.

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In Quinn's hospital room on the sixth floor and left down the first hallway and then right, right, right, she's sitting up, her left arm in a sling and wearing a Yale sweatshirt, holding up Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, pressing the pages apart with her fingers and furrowing her brow and licking her lips.

Her eyes are hazel and a blond woman who is most likely her mother is sitting beside her, immersed in an US Weekly.

'Hello,' you say.

They both look at you; you don't know how this conversation is supposed to go and you have no plan, really, and although you're taking your meds like you're supposed to you're starting to panic because she's beautiful and you've read Written on the Body and, in Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland isn't it? and you are by no means Alice so that makes Quinn—

'Hi,' she says, and closes the book. 'I'm Quinn.'

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Quinn is here from Ohio because her surgeon from OSU transferred to this hospital and, He's the best, and, They took out my left lung because it wasn't working, and, Can lungs break?, and, It's so strange, because I can breathe better now.

You nod.

'To acknowledge the gap allows for nihilism without anxiety,' she says.

You laugh and laugh and laugh and she looks shocked for a second and you say, 'Shut up,' and then she smiles very beautifully and you take her hand.

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Proponents of the artificial heart hope that technological advances will allow the permanent replacement of human hearts with artificial ones.

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You don't work on Saturday. Quinn wants to hobble to an atrium you pretend to know the location of—left, left, left, right, elevator to the second floor, 'Yeah, the kids always get the coolest places'; 'For two months I couldn't walk'—and then you miraculously (Quinn is Christian; sometimes the belief that people believe in a God is the most beautiful and absurd thing you know) you find an outside playground.

You look young enough to be there, you suppose, and you help Quinn sit on a bench. Even in a sweater and boxers and TOMS you want to kiss every inch of her, and this is strange because you met her while you were sneaking around in a hospital to witness the bones of the collective unconscious manifest through capitalism. But Quinn makes you think of spring and the life of objects and the richness of rainstorms.

'Did you almost die?'

'Yes.'

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On Sunday you pray with Quinn.

'This is never going to work.'

A shrug. 'Who knows. Stranger things have happened.'

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You tell Emily about your crush—although you don't prefer the obvious linguistic complications of the trace of that word; Emily laughs and chides, Spencer, I know what you mean—and you feel much better when she then says, 'Wanting someone is sometimes a very wonderful thing. You deserve to feel that, with Quinn or with a guy or with a different girl, someone good who wants you back.'

You've moved the model-saw onto the counter, next to your toaster. Electrical outlets.

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'I leave tomorrow, back for Ohio.'

'You're going to Yale in the fall,' you say. You play with her fingers.

She takes her hand away. 'Yes. And you're going to Penn.'

'I don't want anything to do with you once I'm there.'

'Bullshit,' she says. Her eyes flash. 'It's never then, Spencer. Even language is lying.'

'I have plans which do not involve you. And who in their right mind believes in Romeo and Juliet.'

'Kiss me. Now.'

You lean across the short distance of air—some oxygen and carbon and some pollution—and suck in a breath in time with her exhale. You suck on her bottom lip and then bite it, and she moans and her hand moves into your hair and her blunt nails scratch along your scalp and you touch her spine harshly because jouissance is supposed to hurt her too.

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That night you get past the nursing station after visiting hours because you present your badge. Quinn's mother has gone to the hotel and so Quinn is alone, ethereal and ephemeral in the moonlight through her dirty window. She's so beautiful it scares you, because she's a conglomerate—a collage—of everyone she's ever known, and no one is this beautiful without being very broken.

'There's a story trapped inside your mouth,' you whisper.

She starts to cry. 'Please don't quote that.'

'A crashed and a smashed windscreen.' You look her in the eye. You kiss her. You pull her cashmere sweater over her ceiling-spread arms. You skim your finger along The only witness is the scar, jagged like a dueling scar where the skin still shows the stitches.'

'Love me, please,' she says.

You tell her, 'Thank you.'

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You leave before the morning. Lovers leave, and this you feel you must understand.

Quinn is asleep, very alive in the hospital bed, sprawled and her hair is messy and maybe your anxiety disorder is a proponent to Stendhal Syndrome, because it's very possible you're going to start crying and you can't breathe and you wander until you reach the Emergency Room and a family has been in a car accident and the little girl is crying because her arm is broken and she can't hold the popsicle in her right hand, and dislocation is dependent on referentially and who are you to leave and who are you to not be good enough and in a modern day of technology what is distance supposed to mean but you hate waiting and why do you deserve good things.

None of these things are questions because they're not a matter of answers.

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You're very sad. You are not ready to be happy although you deserve to be, as everyone does. You sleep with your Heidigger and Language professor—a pretty young woman from Colorado who drinks coffee at six in the evening—a few times when you're a sophomore and texting Quinn makes you cry, even when she talks about having good days.

'Do you ever wonder if we didn't just focus on language what we would emphasise more?' she asks during your junior year over the phone.

It's late, so you mumble, 'Go to sleep, Quinn,'

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Both sides of the heart contract, empty, relax, and fill simultaneously.

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Four years and one month and one week and two days later, you see her as you get set up in your office in the philosophy department.

'I thought you wanted to go to law school,' she says, bright and new, her hair in a little gold bob and a simple blue dress floating around her thighs.

'I thought you failed the math portion of your GRE.'

She leans against your doorframe. She laughs. Her shoulders shake. The room implodes upon itself, and you set the model-saw on the top of your desk and walk over to her and close the door and kiss her gently, so that the strings from you core to your feet and up and down your spine and compressing your chest electrify.

'Will you leave this time,' she says.

It is not a question, and you slip her dress over her head and she unbuttons your jeans and takes off your blazer and tanktop, and you turn and press her against the desk so that she lies back, her hair fanning gold. You pick up the model-saw and her eyes grow wide and you smile.

You put it to her chest and her eyes close and she stops breathing.

'Quinn,' you say.

She doesn't flinch.

You press a little harder, then kiss her. 'It's only a model,' you whisper into her mouth.

Her lips curve into a little smile. 'Simulacra.'

'Not quite. It'll never work. The circuits were never finished.'

She fists her hand in your hair. 'Spencer,' she says.

You feel her vertebrae scatter along the desk like marbles and you fill your lungs with air and this has taken so long and why are you like this and why is Quinn like this and why did you meet and why did you wander and was it so bright always and what were you trying to find and you did, you did, you did. You drop the model-saw on the floor and maybe it breaks and you think this is a happy ending as you touch her scar with burning palms.