Lavelle’s Heart

By Michael Oatman and Jackson Smith

Because every brother man’s life is like swinging the dice, right?

Pearson stretched out at the hospital picnic table. His eyes forward. His hair slicked back. His new heart pumping, pumping, pumping. He had done well over this handful of months, and this little field trip was his reward, a treat from his medical overseers—a rare attaboy during this most difficult time in his relatively young life. His blood ran smoothly; it no longer clung to the inner walls of his arteries like toothpaste. The wind whipped across his face, cutting, asking “does this muthafucker deserve to even still be here?” There was no question that Pearson had squandered many of the gifts that God, luck, the fates, or whatever the fuck, had bestowed upon his broad and knowing shoulders. But here he was. Alive. His heart—freshly minted; undulating away inside of his wide, barrel-chest, just as if nothing had ever happened.

That is what the uninitiated did not know: in the end, this life, this world, was broken up into two simple categories: winners and losers—and Pearson was a winner. No judgment entered, just a simple evaluation of the facts. He was young, broad chinned, carried a devil-may-care smile, and had alabaster skin that tanned in summer. A modern-day Viking in a world without warriors. The heart thing . . . the rarest of setbacks in his near three decades of living. A bump in a victory lap of a life. Catastrophic heart failure, low cardio refraction rate . . . blah, blah, blah . . . cardiomyopathy was a word that slithered in one ear and oozed out the other. The doctor might as well have looked into Pearson’s deep-set blue eyes and uttered: “Hey playboy, your heart is fuuuuuucked up.”

But Pearson had taken the news like he had taken life—by the horns, no self-pity and no bullshit. It was what it was. With the help of his doctors, Pearson followed an endless parade of steps culminating in a nightmare descent into the morass of the American Healthcare System. What many didn’t know about Pearson was that his easy, frat-boy persona was a mask—the thinnest of coverings; Pearson was strong in ways that could only be tested through love or total war. The high cheekbones, the straight nose served to camouflage the steady pulse of his rib-banging, chest-beating heart, the gnashing teeth of a human thresher.

This was Pearson’s favorite time of year: the end of summer, easing into fall. The gentle rocking of the wind and faint dusting of a July rain shower in the distance. He was built for this. Pearson pitched his head back and slurped in the blue sky. When his head pitched back down, Pearson’s eyes settled onto a woman standing on the other side of the street. A stump of a woman. Her leathery skin bunched at the edges. Her round body strained at the seams of her clothing. Blue cloth. A nurse? A house cleaner? Pearson turned away, turned back. She still stared. Pearson stood, wobbled as he ascended. His body still searched for its post-surgery equilibrium. Despite this instability, Pearson could feel a certain magnetism coming from the woman. He felt his heart wiggle and flip inside his chest. Hospital gown bunching at his knees, Pearson took a step in the woman’s direction. And in that moment, the woman broke her gaze. She turned, stomach straining against her cheap clothes, and fled. Pearson stopped. He was not up for a low-speed foot chase.

“Mr. Westin, Dr. White would like you to come back now. How are you feeling?” the pencil-thin nurse said as if she’d sprung from the soil.

“Get me the fuck out of here,” Pearson said, as Nurse Ann nestled her arm under his and guided him back toward the hospital entrance.

Within a few minutes, Pearson was back in his bed swimming in a sea of whiteness—white walls and sheets, white ceiling, and white, implacable faces. It had become impossible to measure when he nodded off—each day was a mash-up of dreaming, rousing, waking, dipping back into syrupy unconsciousness. As he slumbered, images danced passed his eyes like sugar plums—strange images, foreign.

In a flash he is running—peering through eyes that are not his own, some unremembered landscape rushing past. By the look of the trees, it is winter—the foliage has departed, leaving only the trees’ naked skeletons. In the spectator box of his mind, Pearson can hear heavy breathing, see the fog escaping the lips. He feels the looping, awkward steps of an uneasy runner. And this is not a normal run. It’s a desperate run. A run that measures life and death in its balance. Suddenly, the runner slows as they come to a door. A thin black fist crashes violently into the frame and pounds on the wood. No answer. A foot kicks in the door frame—a body crashing through the wooden remains of the door. Running again, dashing. Upstairs. Down a hallway. Into a bathroom. Now stalk still.

Observing.

Heaving.

Observing.

Heaving.

Observing.

Crying.

Observing.

A death scream that brings thunder.

The girl. Is. Not. Moving. Her face is totally foreign, yet oddly familiar. And so, now I know, Pearson thought to himself. Black skin loses color, too, when death comes to visit. The black body gathered in loving black arms—a dead girl, drowning in vomit. And then Pearson hears the nurse’s voice.

“Mr. Westin?” the voice gently asserts. Pearson stirred and woke. Back in the whiteness of the hospital.

“I was dreaming.”

“We heard,” the nurse said with a smile. “Are you ok?” Pearson was on his feet by the time the nurse finished her question.

“Am I out of here yet?” Pearson knew the answer. He’d been counting down the days.

“Well, the doctor has to officially discharge you. And you have to be released to someone.”

Pearson turned his back and began to remove his gown. Wondering if the nurse was staring at his ass, Pearson put on his underwear, his shirt. “Go get the doctor, would you?” He turned back. She did not look bothered.

“You said your mother is coming to pick you up?”

“Not anymore. Get the doc, will you?”

“We have to release you to someone, Mr. Pearson.”

“Yeah? Call me a cab.”

***

This may have been the first day that Pearson felt normal—it was a day where his body was functioning as it should and not like a run-down restoration project. Usually he loved bars like these, but he found no solace in the young, upwardly mobile women around him. Pearson was a good PM, but his team, a cadre of coked-out new graduates, could drive even Gandhi to pimp slap someone. He had a promotion, a presentation on the line. And those kids were his backup. So he sat there alone. In a predator bar—the nearest to his office—sipping. All glass inside. All blondes. A body came and flopped next to him. Pearson barely offered a scant sideward glance. Some black chick, twenty years his senior, giving off every sign of working in a slaughterhouse. In a bar like this? he thought to himself. Whatever. Either way, he wasn’t hunting.

“You Pearson?” the cleaning woman asked. Pearson did not turn his head. The evening crowd had begun to shuffle out and was being replaced by a trickle of hard drinkers, divorced execs, overpaid accountants.

“Yeah,” Pearson tossed off.

“Pearson Westin?” she continued.

He turned to look at her more fully. “Who’s asking?”

“Dee Perkins is asking,” she said.

Pearson nodded his head, pressed his lips into a thin smile. He widened his eyes as if to say, “You found me. Congrats.”

“You a pretty one,” she said. A statement, not a compliment. Pearson smiled at the ridiculousness of a cleaning woman trying to pick him up. His heart wiggled and thumped.

“Good genes,” Pearson responded.

Her eyes scanned his body. Toe to head. “Got nice shoes. Nice shirt. No tears in your jeans.”

Pearson felt his attention fading. He turned his head forward. “You can get some at Nordstrom’s.”

She put her hand on his arm. Again, it did not carry flirtation. Her grip was tighter than he’d expected. “You need a drink.”

Pearson raised his small glass. Sipped it. “Lady, I’m not feeling that social tonight.”

“Bet I can guess your favorite.” She still had her hand on his arm. If it got her out of there faster, then what was the harm in a free drink? “You can buy me a glass as long as you know I’m drinking it alone.”

The cleaning woman snapped her fingers like a Roman emperor calling for a platter. “Bar keep, bring this lovely man a Kir Royale with rosé instead of Prosecco. Is that right, Mr. Pearson Westin?”

Pearson’s head shot around, and he stared eyeball-to-eyeball with the intruder, their faces inches apart. For the first time, he was looking at her, really looking at her. He knew this woman—yes, he knew her indeed. But from where? He raced through the confines of his mind. And then he found the memory just sitting there haphazardly. She was the woman from across the street. The woman from a few months ago, staring holes into his body.

“Who are you?” Pearson said.

“Dee Perkins. The real question is, who are you Mr. Pearson? I mean who are you really?” she said.

Pearson’s drink arrived and he stared at the small flute. He didn’t drink it.

“I’m Pearson Westin,” he said.

“But is that all of who you are?” she gently reached forward and placed her hand onto his chest, just over his beating, pumping heart.

“Or maybe you’re just a little bit more than that.” Pearson felt suddenly protective, as if he was worried she was going to tear open his chest. “It’s mine.”

“It’s Lavelle’s. My son’s.” There was a stone-cold silence, as the pair stared at one another.

“It was Lavelle’s.”

But Dee Perkins didn’t seem to hear him. She was transfixed, one hand on Pearson’s arm, the other on his chest. “I can feel him inside of you. LaVelle always had a strong heart.”

“What do you want from me?”

There was a short pause as Dee pondered the question.

“I want everything.”

Pearson took out his wallet. He slipped out three crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. “It’s all I have right now. Take it and go.”

“Money,” Dee said as she shook her head. “You folks always think it’s about money.”

Pearson started to unclasp his watch. He would have given her anything to leave. Almost anything.

“People act like because a man’s life is done . . .” her voice carried off. “That everything they were responsible for dies with them. My son gave you your life. Reached into his chest and placed breath in yours. I would say that that means that you owe him.”

“This is a Chopard. You could get six grand for it tonight. It’s worth twice that.”

“No, but nigga. You owe him. Owe me.”

“You should go to grief counseling. I’ll pay for that too.”

She grew quiet. “Yeah, that’s the thing.” She told him what she wanted.

Pearson could feel the frown on his face, the anger that formed it. He could have killed her then.

Before she left, she said, “Keep your fucking watch. I know what time it is.”

Car windows down, McDonald’s parking lot: Pearson ate like a pig. He could feel the juice of the hamburger dripping down his chin, falling on the naked rim of his chest. He’d worn his shirt with the top buttons undone that day. Any day he wore a button up, really. What good was a body, his body most of all, if you couldn’t show a little skin? And that chest, what a chest it was, filled with a rich and powerful heart. Fuck the heart for right now, he thought as he chomped another bite of his burger. Fuck that kid Lavelle. See how his arteries liked that.

And fuck his mom, too, coming at Pearson like that. Asking him for shit, like he was the government, like he had her welfare check.

Swig of diet Coke. Munch of a French fry.

It wasn’t like he’d killed her son. Hell, Pearson hadn’t done anything more than put his name on the list. God, luck, the fates, or whatever the fuck had taken care of the rest. Because he was Pearson, and that was how shit worked. Now this chick wanted a piece of his winnings, like his life meant her son’s death and not the other way around.

Pearson polished off the burger and threw the wrapper out of the window.

Of all the things she could have asked for. If she’d wanted money or drugs, he’d have hooked it up in a second. But treating him like an absentee dad? Staking claim to his body? You don’t fuck around with Pearson’s temple.

He held the fry trough to his mouth and tapped the remaining crisps down his gullet. If only Lavelle’s mom could see him now.

He turned on his car and headed home. Her demand was lunacy, straight loco. Visitation. She wants to visit her son, she should go to the graveyard, Pearson thought. He had sixty, shit, maybe even seventy years left, and he planned on seeing that chick exactly zero more times. What did she really want from him anyway? A court appearance on Judge Joe Brown or Maury?

This man stole my son’s heart!
Anything to say, Mr. Pearson?
Check the envelope.
Mr. Pearson . . . you are not the father!!

Gradually, Pearson’s thoughts wandered, his mind soothed by the fast-food onslaught. He really should be eating better. That shit would catch up with you. For now though, everything was easy. Possibility of promotion. Brand new ticker. Best of all, he was still Pearson.

The wind blew through Pearson’s hair as he thought about girls he wanted to fuck, girls he had fucked, his legacy, his two-year stint with the Frisco Rough Riders.

His new heart, Lavelle’s heart, beat on. Ceaselessly. Pumping and pumping and pumping, completely unbothered by calories or cholesterol or the white machine it kept alive.

That night, Pearson’s dreams were powered by meaty ventricles and the lub-dub lub-dub of a black man’s internal timepiece. Pearson dreamed of places he had never been and people he had never met. In his dream he has thin, brown arms and a fuzziness at the edge of his vision. The arms labor under the weight of a female body, a body he remembers from a past dream but also from a place deeper than conscious memory. Vaguely, Pearson realizes that it is cold outside. Ice coats the streets as whoever powers his legs struggles not to slip on the porch steps of a brick apartment building. Pearson realizes that the body is out of breath, and he realizes that he is sprinting toward his car, still desperate not to fall. The steps are foreign to Pearson; they lack the athletic security that he has been endowed with. The woman in his arms, the girl really, is his girlfriend. Front brain Pearson, the observer in his dream, realizes that milk-colored vomit is seeping down her chin. Her lips are blue. Her pupils like pin pricks.

Then they are driving. In the passenger seat, the woman is slumped like someone suffering from airsickness. Her head drags against the dashboard, fighting gravity. Lizard-brain Pearson, the driver as it were, knows the problem with bringing Keisha to the hospital. Black man bringing a coked-out near corpse to the emergency room? It’d be easier to spell five to ten. And after he got there, what then? Just drop her? This was Keisha. His Keisha. The tires almost spin out of control as he takes a left. But he steadies them. This driver might not be a physical specimen but shit if he can’t drive.

He speeds through a light, and Keisha’s head loses the battle with gravity, falls between her knees. Does he hear her vomiting? Unsure. The hospital is only seven, maybe eight blocks away. He speeds harder and presses his hand against Keisha’s forehead. It’s damp and cool. Her cheeks are the same.

Six minutes later he pulls up in front of the emergency room doors of Our Lady of Divine Light Hospital, stumbles out of the car, almost slipping on dark ice. Pearson sees the mist of his breath, but the cold is not present. He knows that it is well below freezing, can see the gooseflesh on his wiry, dark arms as he picks up Keisha—his Keisha?—from the passenger seat. The front brain does not deal with physical sensation. It watches, powerless in a prison of commentary, waiting as the story plays out.

Screams echo in the open air as the emergency room doors slide open. Men in navy cargo pants shoot through the door with a red-leather gurney. The men look more like paramilitary soldiers than EMTs, Pearson muses. The gurney looks more like a coffin than an instrument of healing. There should be wires, tubes attached to it. Beeping things that measure waning vitality. Something more than just red leather and metal bars. Was that all they had for Keisha? Didn’t she deserve more?

Pearson is stepping backward. Whoever is piloting this body knows that he has minutes, if not seconds, to jet. The fuzz must be incoming by now, and Lav—Pearson knows that he stands no chance without his ride. He spins on his heels to run, his ’93 Cutlass mere feet away. And then the sky and ground switch places. Pearson himself doesn’t feel panic or disorientation, but he’s sure that the body’s lizard brain must be hissing in fear and confusion. A crack, so audible that Pearson is sure it must be a gunshot, rips down the sidewalk. The head turns, that sonofabitch gravity back in play, and Pearson sees pavement stretching out before him.

This is how death comes? Pearson thinks to himself. Not a drug deal gone wrong or even a wannabe gunslinger, but a Chris Farley slip on black ice? A crack on the fucking temple?

Darkness creeps from the edge, but it does not signal a lack of consciousness for front-brain Pearson. However, lizard Pearson chirps and rails and spits. Then it is quiet. Pearson is alone in the dark, aware of a lub-dub lub-dub. Lub-dub. The sound of his heart spilling blood from a severed artery. Lub-dub. The sound of blood pooling around brain. Lub-dub. The silent scream of a brain crying out for oxygen.

Pearson slept poorly in the week leading up to his presentation. More dreams of black arms and legs. Dreams of Keisha and his mom, of Star Trek marathons and Saturday nights spent glued to his mother’s television watching Toonami. He’s a nerd, Pearson realized one morning after waking up exhausted. The man’s IQ was higher than his fucking weight.

The dreams continued, ignorant or uncaring of Pearson’s protest. He dreamed of waiting for Uncle Andre to be released from Folsom, of playing chess with Uncle Andre at his welcome home party. “Everyone plays in there, Lavelle. Even the guards.” Pearson was in awe of how easy Andre seemed. It was like he’d never lost control.

Pearson dreamed of Lavelle’s mother, with her house cleaner’s hands and permanently furrowed brow. The unceasing Dee Perkins. He gathered quickly, from his own experiences and Lavelle’s memories (what else could they be?) that she was not a woman to be fucked with. Lavelle’s mother was a woman with sea urchin energy. When she was mad, you did all you could to stay out of her way. He dreamed of Dee Perkins trying to literally whip his nineteen-year-old ass when she found out how much he’d paid for the Cutlass. “You want to live here forever, Lavelle? Fuck a down payment, you just busted nine month’s rent. On a ’93? On a Cutlass?” And Lavelle backing up, hands around his waistband like he was a little kid again.

She didn’t take shit from anyone. Not Dee Perkins. Not from anyone. She’d lost her job the day Uncle Andre got out of the joint. Her manager wouldn’t give her time off, so she said, “Fuck you and fuck La Quinta. I can get a job at Days Inn if I want it. Fuck you. I’m picking up my brother.” Pearson saw the aftermath of this. Lavelle’s mother recounted it all on the phone to one of her friends. Uncle Andre smoked a cigarette on the porch and laughed to himself.

More than ass-whoopings and sea urchin spikes, she was Lavelle’s mother, and he loved her for that. Lavelle could not remember feeling so loved as when his mom sat on the couch with him, their fraying, cigarette-stained couch, and watched Toonami with him. He explained the Straw Hats’ trip through the Florian Triangle in One Piece. “So, they’re pirates? Japanese pirates?” She asked.

He nodded. She lit a cigarette.

Each morning when Pearson woke, he would smell menthol cigarettes or gunpowder from fireworks at Fourth of July cookouts. He would eat his oatmeal and do his pushups, pining for a woman he’d never met. A Keisha that loved Lord of the Rings and Akira and dressed up as a lady Itachi Uchiha one year for Otaku Con because fuck gender roles. Itachi was a baddy.

When Pearson had these thoughts, he touched his hair, his face, felt the muscularity under his shirt. Rolled up his sleeves to let the sun ricochet off his white forearms. His heart, if it really was his heart, led the charge against the battlements of Pearson’s mind. No matter where he went, he could not escape the pulsing generator in his chest that grew more wild with each passing day. At work, on dates, in his bed, Pearson could not shake the feeling that his heart, Lavelle’s heart, was trying to escape its bony cage. When he walked to his car each morning, thoughts clouded by the smell of Uncle Andre’s Elsha cologne, full of anxiety surrounding his presentation, he felt as if his heart was an angry and powerful dog trying desperately to escape the leash in Pearson’s chest. A dog like his Uncle Andre’s pit bull, RZA.

However, Pearson woke peacefully on the day of his presentation. He dressed carefully for work, opting for a slim fitting white shirt, a calm, blue-striped tie, and a pair of navy-blue chinos. He looked in the mirror, waited for a twang of foreign memory or burst of smell. None came. Hesitantly, he began to marvel at his own appearance. Thick, Disney-prince biceps. Calm, daring blue eyes. He began to feel like himself again. The world danced at his fingertips. Before he could waste any more time, he walked out of the front door.

The ride was easy and full of sunlight. His office was full of sunlight, too, and his secretary waited for him. All smiles. “You’re going to do great today, Mr. Pearson,” she said. But Pearson couldn’t hear her. As he walked toward the conference room, he ran through the talking points in his head, the noteworthy figures, and points of interest. He knew the presentation by heart and could recreate the graphs from memory if needed. One of his cokehead underlings cheered him on from his cubicle as Pearson walked down to the presentation room. Outside of the door, Pearson held his breath for a moment. He ran his hands through his hair. Then he entered.

“Gentlemen, I’m not going to waste any of your time. I know you’re all very busy, so let me show you what my team and I have been working on this quarter,” Pearson said as he walked toward the white screen at the front of the room.

The spectators, all white men wearing some variation of the same suit, eyed each other approvingly. Pearson passed out a bundle of papers to each man and clicked the central button on a small remote. The projector hummed to life.

“Now, there are a fe . . .” Pearson started. He paused when he felt his heart give a singular thump. A knock on the door. Pearson opened his eyes wide, then coughed. “Excuse me. Over the last three periods, we’ve seen tremendous—” Pearson paused again and pressed a hand to his chest.

Murmurs in the room. They knew Pearson had had a bad ticker. Come on kid, they seemed to say with their eyes. Then, a change in the room: a hollowing of the eyes and the suits and papery white skin. In the blink of an eye, they were no longer Pearson’s betters. They were Uncle Andre and Keisha, Lavelle’s mother, a whole cadre of cousins and aunties that Pearson did not recognize with his front brain. But he felt as though he knew them. Again, his heart pulsed against the inside of his ribs. “Go to them,” it seemed to say.

Pearson tried to form words but could not shove air through his larynx.

“Do you need five?” Uncle Andre said with a white man’s voice.

But Pearson was already stumbling out of the room. Somehow, the office seemed foreign. He was unfamiliar with the light, the pale faces staring at him just ghosts. Not real people at all. The sounds were foreign too. The bubbling of a water cooler, the private murmurs that hid wealth and status. Pearson felt his lizard brain whirring into motion, his heart like a magnet being pulled to life.

He felt a coming wholeness as he sat behind the wheel of the car. Driving was a comfortable exercise, something he could do better than most people. It was a nice car too. Well- tended leather and a sunroof that he opened immediately. He opened the phone, realized he didn’t know the password, then let Face ID work its magic. He turned on Logic’s newest and let the expensive speakers bathe him in the rhythm. He was happy then: the music, the soft breath of wind through the sunroof.

He put the car in drive and left the office building and the pocket suburb it occupied in the rearview. The air seemed cleaner as it blew through the sunroof. Fresh. He took it cool for a few miles until he hit the highway, then he let the engine roar. It handled easily, and he relished the vibration of the steering wheel. As he took the off-ramp, he noticed that the car didn’t corner well, the way those American muscle cars never did, the back end trying to shake loose on the turn. He kept it in check though.

Fifteen minutes later he pulled up in front of a well-kept yellow ranch house in a neighborhood full of poorly kept ranch houses. This house was one of the few that had a lawn free of scrap metal, dumpsters, crabgrass, or motorcycles. The car door shut with a finality that seemed fitting to the man. In front of the door, he paused before knocking. After all that time, he had no idea what he was going to say. Nothing seemed fitting.

He knocked. His fist pounded a one-two, like the beating of a heart. He reveled for a moment in the power of his arms.

A woman opened the door. Her fists pressed against her hips. She pursed her lips, waiting. “Didn’t think I’d see you again, Mr. Pearson.” She said the name like it tasted bad.

“Some things never change,” the man said as he smiled. “You greet Uncle Andre like this when he come back?”

The color seemed to drain from the woman’s face. “Lavelle?”

Lavelle said nothing but walked forward and embraced her with his strange new body.

After the embrace, she took him inside, sat him at the kitchen table, and began to cook spaghetti.

“Hey, Mom?” Lavelle said. “I just wan—”

She smacked her wooden spoon on the pot. “Nu-uh. There’s time for that later. You got to eat something, boy. Did I tell you Keisha’s mom’s pregnant again?”

She talked about her friends at the Days Inn, then she served him spaghetti on a plastic plate, and then she talked about Uncle Andre’s new job at Tyson. Despite his protestation, she served him seconds after he cleaned his plate.

“Hey, Mom,” Lavelle said.

“What?” she said.

“I got to talk to you.”

“Just a second.” She took him by the hand and led him to the living room where they had once watched Toonami. How silly they must look together, Lavelle thought. Big ass white dude and an old black lady. People would think he was some kind of salesman or missionary.

He sat on the couch and watched her as she began to fumble with a stack of papers on top of an old storage bench near the front door. “You want to sit down with me?” he asked.

“Just a second,” she said, still fumbling. “April came by the other day. You know April? She works over on 56th? Well, she brought some samples of—”

Lavelle stood up and walked over to his mother. He grabbed her gently by the shoulders and took her back to the couch.

He sat next to her and said, “I have to go soon, Mom, but I wanted to let you know that I love you. It wasn’t your fault, and I love you.”

A point of light shone in her eyes, and Lavelle could not tell if it was sadness or rage. For a moment she was just a mother again, reacting to a child’s willful disobedience.

“You just going to leave me like that?” she asked. “Right after I got you back?”

“It wouldn’t be right to stay.”

“You’re better than he is. I know it.”

Lavelle stood. “Because every brother man’s life is like swinging the dice, right?”

“He ain’t a brother.”

“Don’t I know it.” Lavelle looked at his body. “I’m ugly as hell.”

His mother laughed a choked little sound.

Lavelle leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “Tell Keisha’s mom I hope she alright with the baby.” Lavelle stood, walked over to the door. He looked out at the car. He was surprised no one had broken into it yet. “Better yet, don’t. She’ll think you’re crazy.”

Pearson awoke from the passenger seat of his own mind as he was rolling to a stop outside of his house. He checked his texts. Close to sixty missed calls and messages. None from anyone that mattered. He thought about walking inside but decided against it. The idea of so much empty space unnerved him. He looked back at his phone. A text from his boss, the phantom Uncle Andre. “Hey, Champ. We looked at your Presi. All great. Figured you walked out due to heart issues. Promotion’s yours.”

Pearson turned off his phone. He thought about people to call. Someone to get dinner with, maybe a movie. Someone to celebrate with. No one came to mind. He turned on AM radio, so that he could hear the sound of another voice. He was sure that he couldn’t sit in his car forever, but he couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to do. After the talk radio became unbearable, he said, “Hey.”

No response.

A beat punctuated by life advice from a talk show host. A long commercial about dishwasher detergent.

“Lavelle?” Pearson did not like the way his voice sounded in the silence. “Hey, man, are you there? I just want to talk.” He said it like he was trying to disarm a gunman.

Still no response.

Pearson thought about reaching out again, of falling asleep to see if he could inhabit the other man’s memories. But he knew Lavelle was gone. All that was left was silence. And the quiet, steady sound of Pearson’s heart.

This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.

Photo by Moritz Kindler.