Dark Architecture
Dark Architecture
Hannah Hinsch
On the Heart’s Electricity and Home’s Eternity
Dad remembers nothing about dying—only a lake of nothingness. Not even a dream’s silver echo.
His heart stopped unceremoniously one evening. Mom was in the kitchen (maybe doing dishes, warm suds over her hands, or pouring another glass of dark wine). When her words were left suspended and unanswered, she looked to find him slumped where he sat and screamed for my brother.
After they’d lifted all 6’4’’ and 300 pounds of him off the couch and rested him flat on the floor, my mother pressed the heels of her hands to the hull of his chest to the rhythm of her own pulse to answer for his. There was a faint flutter by the time the EMT’s got there. Shirt torn. Pulse found.
I’d been driving home from a movie, streets slick with night rain. Red and blue slid like water over our closed garage door when I pulled into the driveway. He was blue, my brother said later that night as we stood outside of the entrance to the emergency room, our breath woven in the cold air.
Since he’d been without oxygen for several seconds, dad was on ice to preserve brain function, blue packs pressing him in on the gurney. He’s moving, I’d think when his hand twitched, alert the nurse, but it was only a shiver.
“I didn’t see anything,” he’d say in dismay, long after his thoughts had gained order and the neurons re-aligned. As doubt collected in his eyes I, too, wondered of a heaven incalculable, a place we could not yet enter. I shiver now to think of the dark stretched out before him. And yet, there remained, even in his tomb not yet cold—a current orchestrated to music long familiar, organs called to move, blood to sing. A heart in answer.
*
Often, I feel the defibrillator’s lump in his upper left chest, pat it lovingly as though to say I’m glad you’re alive and I don’t care that you hung the cubby crookedly at my old apartment (he hung it straight at my new place, nailing it in at perfect eye level so I don’t have to reach to put my keys and glasses inside). The defibrillator shocked him once since, as he sat in his home office one morning and his heart rate grew dangerously slow—he woke seconds later to find he’d fallen out of his chair, hot coffee spilled on his pants. But he’s here and breathing, strange machinery surging with his own to test the fault.
A couple of weeks ago, he went with me to get new tires on my car and check its engine—shock, strut and suspension—and I couldn’t help but think of the piece of equipment in his chest amid the smell of new tires in the bright-lit waiting room.
In her book Lightning Flowers, Katherine Standefer details a years-long search for the origins of the defibrillator. After her own had malfunctioned and shocked her in error, she began to question the cost of saving a life. This quest took her from Wyoming to Colorado to Madagascar and Rwanda to see metals separated from sand by magnets and gravity, landscapes bleeding red, rice paddies glossy with oil—yet her focus always returned to what was making its home in her: both the device and the disease.
We can read the heart—thrusts and jolts of sound that set paths to meaning like blood to vein, word to sound. When the heart is disordered or diseased, syncope occurs—temporary loss of consciousness caused by a descent in blood pressure, a heartbeat improper. In phonics, the word syncope has a double meaning—it can be the omission of either sounds or letters. An absence within the word.
“The heart is a muscular machine driven by current,” Standefer explains. Atrial fibrillation, the condition dad has, is what one doctor called a “problem with the electricity, not the plumbing.” A-fib causes the heart’s upper rooms—the atria—to beat out of coordination with the lower, the ventricles. Misfires in the chamber of the upper atria cause the heart to quiver—hence the term fibrillation. He remembers laying in his bedroom as a teenager, looking at a shadowed ceiling, feeling the familiar flutter, the surge and stutter.
Forty years on from that dark teenage room, after dad died and came back, surgeons made small incisions at the collarbone to run leads—thin wires pioneered in the 1970s with borrowed technology from undersea telephone cables—that laced through his veins to the heart to sense a lapse and deliver a shock. They made a door in the muscle of the chest and corkscrewed steroids into the vein; scar tissue grows around the device to hold something once unfamiliar, where once a space was unmade.
After he could breathe on his own and had fully woken up, dad’s short-term memory was gone. He couldn’t remember anything past a couple of minutes. He grunted and grasped his chest. I will never forget how vulnerable he was. How near holy.
“So, what happened?” he’d ask over and over, like a child, and my brother would stand beside my father’s bed and tell him the story again and again, dad’s eyes sea-blue with the murk and mystery of what no eye has seen.
*
Lightning Flowers describes Standefer’s experience of living in Wyoming, camping at Snow King Mountain as a young girl, watching dew freeze on her sleeping bag and deer move toward winter ground. How that place made her pay attention to what made her come alive, “opened me, brought me to myself.”
I’ve lived in Gig Harbor, Washington for only a few months now, but it feels like home. I rent a single person cabin on a beachside property a ten-minute drive from my parents; the silence is loud at night, so loud I can hear my own breathing, a change from my Seattle apartment’s rattling windows and night trains. My days feel hidden in a way that prepares for the opening, a subtle line slender as smoke down the center of my chest—a beach path in salt air, a hummingbird feeder filled with crystalline nectar, a silver pothos that traces my bookcase, a candlelit table, a bed I make each night with white linens not unlike the one he once lay in, a tube down his throat, breathing for him when he couldn’t.
My grandfather grew up here—the garage his father Ralph owned, across the street from Finholm’s grocery store downtown, has long since been replaced by touristy cafes and boat yards. But even still, there’s something of a return for me. An anchoring. Tissue that forms around the old scar. I can imagine them bent over spent engines, bottles of vodka rolled into tire racks, the scent of motor oil, the smell of tires.
Broken vessels wind their slow way down dad’s ankles, caused by medication that thins and unclots the blood. His slightest scratch bleeds like a wound. No two thousand volts rolling in to revive him; just his heart and its everyday miracle, quivering and fragile, an engine turning over.
Some nights, I return home from the library night shift to find the moon shining through the rib slats of skylights, so bright I can see the place in the cubby, perfectly made, to slide my keys within. Other nights there is no moon; I feel in the dark for what I know to be there.
*
There was no light, no tunnel, no end. Only a syncope’s omission of sound. Did my dad dream a face and let it fade? Did he float in amnion? Or was he held there, mind awash in innocence, the shock’s current spidering like broken glass toward a heart revived?
In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape writes to his nephew, Wormwood, working daily to sway a “patient” to their “Father.” When the patient, recently converted, dies in a German air strike and steps into heaven, a ravenous and soul-deprived Screwtape describes with disgust what—as he can only imagine—the patient would have felt upon entering heaven, where he would meet not only them, the trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, but him:
Recognition made him free of their company almost before the limbs of his corpse became quiet… This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, wears the form of a Man… his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door.
Lewis’s words speak the Father’s heart aloud for me—they let me press my hand to his chest to feel the heart that beats there, the heart of a risen Lord.
I learn the rooms of his heart, its chambers and pathways, each breath an expanding tide that never leaves the blood unchanged. Maybe, until we are ready, we are left outside that cool, clear revelation of him, like rain just outside the door. But for now, we only breathe. And wait.
*
Standefer gets the name of her book from the phenomenon that occurs when someone is struck by lightning: “thin branched burns where electricity follows water in the body.” They bloom beneath skin, cauterized and stilled, streaks like roses in the shape of sweat or rain as it falls.
It strikes me that the current, white-hot, rivering through flesh, abrupt and unfamiliar, follows something it has known before—that the water that collects in the ozone, in rain or snow or faintest shiver, lives, too, in us.
Standefer recalls that, due to the rapid and constant regeneration of cells, the device “had become one of the oldest parts of me, more me than me. Its fingers had grown into my heart, its surface covered in waves of clots; my tissues reached out to hold it.”
These stories, like twin leads, rest in my memory: the pulse of a story, remembered and retold; the goodness that flows over years. Even now the story of God flowers like lightning in a body that has been struck, electricity that does not lead to death, but, in its stead, keeps us alive.
*
A wandering path to water, and I sit on the slope of the boat launch below my home, eyes open, a heart’s rhythm tested and found amid the predictable tide. The moon hits water the color of dusk, comes in like a sigh at my feet. I don’t have to see how it ends—my heart will falter but will always return to the one whom it has known before, flesh of flesh and bone of bone—the kind of meeting when panes of glass slide cool into the window’s frame. Held fast. Come home.
Hannah Hinsch
Writer & Poet
Hannah is a Seattle-based writer who has published essays in Cultural Consent and Ruminate, poems in Amethyst Review, and has written for Image journal's ImageUpdate. She was the editorial intern at Image for two years. Hannah finds that writing has always been a conversation—her work emerges in response to the word He has already spoken. She writes to witness, to be caught up in Him over and over again. She writes to be well. Find more of her work at hannahhinsch.com
Photography by Allec Gomes