The Heart Interpreter

On the wall of his cubicle, if it can be called a wall, Pharoah had put up two decorations. He tacked up a color photograph of a human heart, all bloody and functional in someone's chest. And on a white note-card beneath the picture, he printed the word LIFE with a big, black marker. The other decoration was a plainly drawn, black and white, hallmark-card heart, with the word LOVE spelled out beneath it.

He placed them side by side on the far side of his cubicle, the side opposite the cubicle's opening. This way the two hearts would be as visible as possible to people going by.

When he put them up, Pharoah expected to get some comments on his choice of decoration.

He saw his co-workers looking at the pictures as they walked by his desk. And he noticed the looks on their faces, as if they had just smelled something odd and were trying to tell if it was good or bad. But no one said anything. In fact, the people who used to always say hello in the morning stopped saying hello. Now they just stared past him at the hearts on the wall, LIFE and LOVE.

Not even his supervisor said hello anymore.

During the first week the pictures were up, Pharoah formulated his response to what had then seemed an inevitable question, "What's with the decor, Pharoah?" The person asking the question would lean over the cubicle wall to share a moment of confidence. Pharoah would lean in also to answer.

He would give a concise statement. There is a difference, he would say, between biological life and the lives that we conceive of as human. The real, important heart is hidden and dark, where this abstract, Cupid's heart is touted all over Christmas cards and chocolate boxes as life's principle meaning. What does life mean, really, he would conclude, pointing a clean stubby finger, is it's meaning this bloody, beating desperate thing, or is it this soft pillow-shape tattooed on cupid's ass?

The person leaning in listening would look Pharoah in the eye appraisingly, straighten up, and smile with a tentative, momentary knowledge - not of the meaning of human life, but - of the human personality as demonstrated by a man with two hearts on the wall of his cubicle, and then would walk away, distracted, to sit down in the third of fourth cubicle of the next row over and start to work.

As the weeks went on and this prepared response remained uncalled for, Pharoah began to look at the images differently. Gazing at them while on the phone and spying them from the corner of his eye as he worked on the computer, he thought about the romances of mankind and the romance this species had with "life", a dangerously ideal lover.

The distance between the ideas expressed by each picture, each heart on the wall, became painfully clear at one point. The delusions attached to the black-and-white, caricature heart seemed to explain so much about the change in attitudes that went on during the holidays. Delusions that were centered on a calendar's time-table, scheduled dates for the most elevated of human emotions, love. Whenever the heart was drawn on the calendar, there was an opportunity for love. Even more so, there was an obligation. People depended on that love to survive. Families were held together by that time-honored, calendar sponsored love. There was ritual in that black-and-white outlined heart.

Somehow, this picture of the heart had come to define humanity, despite the degree of abstraction it presented. How far was it from pen and ink, smiling hearts to a beating, thumping purple thing in the chest? By using the same name for both the fist-sized organ pumping in our chest and for the cupid's-cushion on a piece of paper is to stretch the mind to a tenuous point, he thought. To believe that these two images are somehow the same is to truly believe in neither.

As these thoughts occurred and the pictures continued their vigil on the cubicle wall, Pharoah felt a real pain for his species. Not pity though. What he experienced was the echo of guilt for not sending his mother a Mother's Day card. A pang of sadness for not calling his Grandmother for her birthday. And he wondered why these things could make him suffer, even slightly, if one heart was truly separated from the other. A pulse of agony swelled in him at these moments.

Pharoah was taken by surprise. The symbolic heart was the one in him feeling the pain. And he could see it before him, pricked by conscience, dripping one sugary tear-drop of blood.

I can't deny this heart as a human heart, he told himself, if it's real for me. I don't want it this way, but it is this way. What am I supposed to do about it? What does anyone do? Just go on knowing that this is how life is, and try to be satisfied not knowing why.

But not knowing why, Pharoah continued to feel real pain when he saw the pictures next to each other, LIFE and LOVE.

If someone came by today and asked him what the pictures meant, he didn't know what he'd say. Maybe, you've got to take the one and then you take the other, or, they're two of the same, or, one is the inside of the other. Pharoah really couldn't see any longer which one was which.

He decided to switch the words beneath the two hearts.

Now, LIFE was LOVE, and LOVE was LIFE. At this change, his angst was mollified. Whether it was the change of wording or just time, he couldn't say. Immediately though, he stopped thinking of the pictures, stopped looking at them. He stopped noticing them entirely. Coincidentally, the people who had not said hello to him in the weeks that the pictures were up came around again. They said hello again in the morning, all on that same day too. Out of nowhere, Pharoah thought.

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