The problem was that when Caleb was born, his heart was too weak and too small to circulate properly. And so his parents spent a few years hoping and praying and finding religion in hospitals before it became clear that Caleb's heart was never going to grow to the right proportion. His fingers would always be cold and purple, he would always be shivering in the summer. Caleb would never be a boy of strong constitution. His parents wept and gave up their hope. Caleb, who had never known any other way, picked up chess instead of baseball and wore gloves inside.
And then a miracle, the very answer to the question they had stopped asking, reached the ears of Caleb's parents: a surgery had been invented, a perfectly safe procedure (or so they were assured), which could strengthen even the strongest ventricles. The Robot Heart, the media called it, a metal contraption only slightly larger than the normal human heart, could keep Caleb's ticker ticking well into tomorrow and beyond.
The parents caught an infectious happiness that infected their six year old son. He relished the idea of being a robot, very much in the spirit of a young boy. Once it became a possibility, the pull of baseball was irresistible, and chess a waste of a pastime. He wanted one glove made of leather, not two of wool.
The surgery was covered on the local news, then the national six o'clock. There was nothing a human interest reporter loved than showing an old picture of a smiling child with sad, purple hands and the after picture, a robust, grinning child, with no negative effects except a spiderweb of scars and perhaps a slightly unhealthy obsession with the Baltimore Orioles.
And so Caleb grew, much like other boys grew. He more or less forgot his immaterial fame, forgot his woolen gloves, but still was always very good at chess. However, much like other boys, Caleb was, in his teenage years, much inexperienced in the ways of girls, and quite wont to fall for one of them, despite his relative preoccupation with games of skill.
She was pretty and redheaded, and he was quite blind to the fact that her nose was had a slight bump. He found her absolutely perfect because he was fourteen and gawky and had bad hair and she laughed at his stupid jokes. When he found out she had a boyfriend (another boy of fifteen, older and worldly, but unable to hold on to her for long) he also found a bruise on his upper thigh. It was unsightly and purple and hurt like a series of curse words Caleb was too young to feel comfortable saying.
A young boy with a healthy heart, healthier than most, Caleb was fit, and yet he found that his physical misfortunes and his emotional misfortunes always seemed to coincide. His mother, still nervous and jittery from years of fear, scolded him profusely--he mustn't let his thoughts get the better of him, she admonished. Just because he was upset didn't mean he could be careless--just think what would happen if he got hurt! His father tried to calm her as Caleb protested: he didn't know how his fingers (last two on his left hand) had gotten broken, he'd just noticed that they were purple and sore. (There was nothing that terrified Caleb's mother more than purple fingers.) He stretched before running--pulling that muscle wasn't his fault, promise, Mom, promise.
Then, close to Caleb's twenty-third birthday, the study came out. The self-same human interest reporters from all those years ago came back on the local news, then the national six o'clock,with a practiced look of shock and horror carefully pasted on. The Robot Heart pumped more than blood through the body, they informed the public more robotically than the machine they discussed. It pumped love.
Scientists filled up television stations debating this truth, this possibility. Couldn't happen, most of them said. This was just hysterics. But Caleb understood: his broken fingers weren't broken fingers at all. They were heartbreak.
It was Caleb's mother most of all who was upset by this; his father sided with the scientists. But at twenty-three, with a machine ticking coldly inside his chest and love pumping rhythmically through his veins, Caleb was too much to be impressed by hysterics a second time. He politely declined every interview, and took a job teaching high school Biology, moonlighting as the coach to the chess team.
All of this may have been just fine until he met her. She was wonderful, redheaded just like the first, with a nervous habit of spinning her left earring when she talked. She taught English, was a new teacher the same year as Caleb, and they became friends, the kind of friends you become when one is falling more and more deeply in love with the other. Caleb's robot heart was bigger than most, and his capacity for love had had a lifetime of activity racing through every piece of him and when he met her, he was absolutely ready and perfectly willing to fall in love.
But she? She was not, she apologized, twisting her earring frantically and chewing her lip the day he asked her out, as she worried beyond worry that she would lose a friend. Neither of them really knew that this was it, that she was ruining the chance of her lifetime, ruining his lifetime likewise, and neither of them thought that he had a robot heart. All she thought was that his timing was terrible, how much she could have loved Caleb if she hadn't just met someone else, someone wonderful who she knew loved her, despite her slight trust issues left over from boyfriends past. And all he thought was how much this hurt.
What we never realize about machines is that they are delicate contraptions indeed. Because they do not live and die according to our principles of living and dying, we consider them tougher than we are, easy to repair with just the right knowledge. A machine, gifted with longevity akin to magic, is wholly dependent on a reliable source of power. And so when that kind of pain reached Caleb's heart, the robotic element could not sustain itself with such erratic power.
The entire contraption failed, and for one half moment, Caleb felt all the pain of the heartbreak of his entire life, before the metal bits of his heart exploded, exploded bits of robotic heartbreak.
On the local news and then the national six o'clock, horrified human interest reporters couldn't help but cry as they showed pictures of a smiling boy with purple hands and a chessboard and reported his broken heart.
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