Reassembly

Mahan swept the broom along the dim and dusty attic, pushing the same clump of dust around that he had been for several minutes. The late evening sunlight poured in through the thick windows, painting the attic with dark and light tiger like stripes. Mahan turned his shoulder to the sunlight and pushed the clump of dust into the darkness. He then joined it there, brooding. 

After a while, his mother noticed what he was doing. 

“Hey,” she said, pausing in her own sweeping. “I see you there. You’ve been pushing that same dust ball around for ten minutes. Will you finally throw it away?”

He dropped down with a sigh and picked it up in his hands. 

“Ew,” proclaimed Neha. 

This one word from the girl was enough to provide him a flush of warmth, much needed after his foray out of the sun. He flashed her a toothy smile.

Neha was his friend from his new school; him and his mother had moved to this small town only weeks ago after realizing that they simply did not have enough money to live in the city anymore. His mother cleaned homes and he helped after school and on the weekends. Neha had showed him around on his first day and offered him a spot at her lunch table. They had grown close quite quickly, and he found himself searching for her long brown hair and faded blue bag more than he cared to admit during the long school days. After making several excuses for missing weekend plans with Neha and her friends, Mahan had finally mentioned his weekend duties to her. To his supreme delight, she had not only been understanding but offered to help. Unfortunately, however, none of his romantic daydreams of sipping lemonade in the attic with her had come true; she had rolled her sleeves up and cleaned and he had been cast out of her and his mother’s whirlwind of brooms, dusters, and sprays, to herd dust melancholically on their outskirts. 

“Are you guys hungry? Or thirsty?” He asked with feigned nonchalance. He turned away, squeezing his eyes shut for their answer. 

Neha made an ambiguous noise. 

“Maybe…we should call it a day” his mother said, and her son crumpled in relief. “We’ve been here a while, and there’s only that one corner left that we can finish tomorrow.”

On their way down out of the attic, Mahan paused as he noticed something glinting in the last rays of light. He pranced over some bags and files and crouched down, inhaling sharply as he studied the object. Neha and his mother had already descended the ladder, their voices ringing distantly. 

Pressed for time by the rapidly fading sunlight, he reached a shaking finger out to brush what appeared to be a human heart.

  It was metal. He exhaled in relief.

He wetted a cloth and wiped the dust from the metal heart, noting that its true color was gold and that it was constructed with incredible complexity, just like the pictures he had seen in his school textbooks. Its surface had the luster of a real organ and thin vessels snaked up its walls to great vessels that ended abruptly above. It was two halves, he realized, and when he slipped his fingers into the small groove and pulled, the heart split in two with a puff of dust, revealing a few ancient coins, hair pins, and buttons. He frowned, closing the box, and turning it over in his hands. The family who owned the attic had told them to keep whatever they wanted, as they’d already been through everything up there. He wondered if they’d seen the heart. 

The sun winked merrily below the horizon and plunged Mahan and the attic into darkness. He scurried away, tucking it under his jacket and keeping his finding a secret until his mother prepared some meager snacks for them back home; he brandished the gold heart from his jacket, laying it in on the counter. 

“Wow! Did you find that in the attic?” His mother picked the heart up and weighed it in her hands. 

“Yes,” Mahan said proudly. “Right before you guys left.”

“It’s so cool,” Neha breathed. “It looks just like a real heart.” She studied it closer, wondrous at the minute vasculatures engraved in the metal. “What is it?”

“It’s some kind of box,” said Mahan, pointing out the small groove that unclasped it. “It just has some buttons and stuff. The people must have used it for storage.” 

Neha let the coins, buttons, and hairpins fall onto the counter. She sifted through them, and Mahan watched her, pleased that he had finally caught her attention.

“One of those pins would look nice in your hair,” he said abruptly. He grew bright red, and his mother’s lips pursed. 

Neha was thankfully too absorbed with the heart to notice. Her eyes were millimeters from the gold. “Thanks,” she smiled.

Mahan’s mother slipped around the counter and wrapped her son in a side hug, letting the redness of his face leak into her cool linens. When she released him to his normal shades, he stepped away with a grateful nod. 

“Good job finding that,” she said. “Maybe it’s worth something.”

Mahan nodded with even more pride. Maybe it was, and he knew how much his mother would appreciate that. 

“Neha,” his mother continued. “You can stay the night if you want. We have an extra futon. It’s getting late, and you mentioned that your family is out of town?”

Neha’s glanced up as if exiting a trance. “Oh. That’s very nice, thank you. I do get scared when I’m home alone…”

“You should stay,” Mahan said indistinctly, beginning to glow once more. “My mom and I were going to cook dinner together. You can join.”

Neha smiled at him and his mother and nodded before heading to the bathroom to wash up. Mahan pretended to be absorbed with the heart, sure that his mother was watching him. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he turned and shared with her a big grin. She patted the top of his head and left him in the twilight to turn the golden heart over in his hands.

*************************************************************

Sometime that night, Mahan woke up abruptly, blinking into the darkness. He touched around and felt his thick comforter over the top of his head. His heart was beating urgently, and he rubbed his chest to soothe it. 

He curled his knees up and squeezed his eyes shut, willing the bad dream to fade into absurdity. With time, his limbs relaxed, and his breaths slowed, and his cheek fell deeper into his pillow. As he drifted in the space before sleep, he felt that though his heart had slowed, he could somehow still hear it. And quite loudly as well.It seemed to be coming from near his dresser. 

Very cautiously, he emerged from his comforter, cast a sweeping glance across his room, and froze. 

The golden heart was beating. 

Glowing in a spot of moonlight on his dresser, it contracted and expanded like a real organ of flesh. The veins and arteries pulsed and relaxed, expelling puffs of air through the great vessels. It beat with amazing regularity, as if pumping vital fluid to some invisible organism. 

Mahan crept out of his comforter and across the cold wood to the dresser. He stood before the metal organ, its moonlight glow reflecting on his face. 

There was a knock on his door. He opened it to find Neha, her eyes wide. “I could hear something. Are you okay?”

He led her inside without a word and she gasped when she saw.

“Is that- “

Suddenly, it began to beat faster. Thum thum thum thum thum. 

The two took a step back, but the heart’s pace only increased. Thumthumthumthumthumthum. The pens and marbles nearby began to rattle, and the heart pumped so fast that its individual beats were indistinguishable. The dresser began to vibrate, and its drawers opened and closed fluidly. Panicked, Mahan reached a hand out. 

The room was suddenly flushed with glaring white light, brighter than the sun. 

“Oh!” Neha and Mahan fell back to the bed. They scurried under the comforter and pulled it around their heads. The light remained, blasting through the threads in the sheets. 

“Sorry,” came a deep voice, and the lights dimmed at once. Neha and Mahan cautiously emerged, gasping at the windowpane where a sharp metallic face and eyes that were two orbs of blinding light greeted them. The marvelous face was constructed of many different parts, with wires and traveling particles of pure golden light linking them all together. 

“May I come inside?” the being asked, and Mahan nodded, incapable of doing anything else. He gaped as the being entered nimbly through the window. Though he filled the room with an ocean of shimmering white and golden hues, the being's movements were absolutely silent.  His head brushed the ceiling and where he gazed, his eyes shone like lanterns. 

“Sorry,” the being offered once more, dimming the eyes further. “I’m still getting used to the eyes. I’ve only just found them again. One of them was underneath a very vicious hen in Peru. She was guarding it like an egg.” He displayed a long scratch in the metal of his arm. 

“Who are you?” Mahan breathed. “What are you?” 

“Someone from very long ago.”

“Like the dinosaurs?”

The being frowned. “That was quite recent. Much before that,” he said, resting against the back wall with the exhaustion of a long and drawn-out journey.

Neha blinked out of her paralysis and let the comforter fall from her face. “Do- do you have a name? What are you doing here?”

“No name. Not in your language. You can call me what you like.”

Neha and Mahan contemplated for a moment, staring at a poster of animals above Mahan’s bed. “Bird,” blurted Mahan.

“Fox,” suggested Neha. 

The being scrunched his nose. “I’ll choose Fox. A nice fox in Russia helped me track down a group of hunters that had found my fingers. They thought they were fancy bullets, had hung them around their necks.” He wiggled his hands and the golden particles within them fizzed. 

“Are you- are you searching for your body parts?” And then, Mahan gasped. “Is that yours?” He pointed to the heart which he had momentarily forgotten. 

Fox smiled at the beating organ. “Yes. That is mine.” He pointed at a great hole in his chest through which a thin web of wires gently pulsed. His voice softened. “I’ve been looking for it for a very long time.”

Mahan nodded. He observed Fox’s thigh near his bed frame and suddenly reached out to poke it, just to make sure he wasn’t still dreaming. The metal was only warm to the touch, but supple as if it had just exited a furnace. 

“How did you lose all of your body?” asked Neha.

The smile left Fox’s face for the first time since he’d arrived. The particles slowed in their orbits and his eyes dimmed further, allowing moonlight to shyly enter the room once more. “It was a very long time ago. I was with some people. I don't remember who, though I've tried. And suddenly there was light and an explosion and everything disappeared. I know it was near when your universe began, I suspect an aftershock.” A circle of golden particles whizzed around his head like a crown and then sadly winked away. “For a few billion years I was only a brain on an asteroid held in an arm that had landed next to it, hopping about trying to locate the rest. Can you imagine living like that?”

Mahan shook his head haltingly. 

“I found my leg floating in a gas planet, which helped greatly with mobility. It became a little easier after that, but not by much. About thirteen billion years, it’s taken. This is a big universe.”

There was silence in the room as the two humans ruminated over the length of time. 

“That must have gotten lonely,” the girl said, staring up sorrily at the being. “How did you keep going for so long?” 

“Thirteen billion,” Mahan whispered as the true sense of Fox’s journey came to him. He imagined Fox, a point of light in deep space, utterly alone and in search of himself for so long. 

Fox frowned. “I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. I did come close to giving up many times. Once I found most of my limbs, I spent a few million years at a time in comfortable orbits or planets. But something always…always led me to keep searching. I never could stay for too long.” 

Neha’s fingers interlocked into Mahan’s, and he glanced down at them and then up at her. A tear shone on her cheek.

Fox’s orbs narrowed into crescent moons as he thought. “Thankfully, much of me was here on Earth, and my organs usually help out when they can sense I’m nearby. Like that one there,” he said fondly to the beating heart, as if it were a pet. His skin was solid but with a translucent quality; Mahan could see the organs assembled neatly inside, bathed in a glowing matrix of wires and sparks, and he imagined all of the nebulas and galaxies each may have been in. 

“It was easy without the stomach,” explained Fox, sensing Mahan’s gaze. “I was never hungry. Now that it’s back, I need to eat all the time, which is quite annoying. By the way, do you have any food?”

“For you?” Mahan asked, surprised. 

Fox’s eyes flared as he nodded. 

The boy reached to his nightstand where half a bowl of oatmeal lay from the dinner he hadn’t finished. He handed it to Fox who gulped the whole thing down, bowl and all, with the soft hiss of liquid meeting fire. 

Neither Fox nor Mahan and Neha spoke for a while afterwards. Fox was focused on his beating heart, leaned on the bed frame, his white eyes as pensive as they could be, while the two humans were focused on him. Mahan had so many questions, but he couldn’t form a single one out of the crowd in his head. He glanced at the heart, thinking briefly of his mother’s excitement at it helping their situation, but pushed the thought away. 

He sensed Fox’s gaze on him in a swath of light and the being gestured toward Mahan’s window. “The sun will rise soon. I should be gone before then.” He stepped around the bedside and stood before the golden heart on the dresser. Neha and Mahan joined him, watching the pulsing organ. 

“A very long time,” Fox whispered gently. He seemed hesitant to pick it up. Mahan watched him, trying to imagine the breadth of his journey through the loss of his friends, through explosions, asteroids, gaseous planets, and space. He thought suddenly of losing his mother and Neha in the kind of event that Fox had undergone, of experiencing such isolation. He squeezed Neha’s fingers tightly as a knot developed in his throat. 

Fox still hadn’t moved. Mahan gazed up at the great golden being, who appeared almost frightened even after going through so much, and then guided his metallic fingers with his own. 

Fox halted right before the surface of the heart, and then with a deep grating breath from his shining lungs, scooped it up in his hands and deposited it into the hole in his chest. The wires glowed and strummed, wiggling around the organ as if delighted to see it again. The heart beat proudly, pumping pure golden light through Fox’s body. It became too bright for Neha and Mahan who fell onto the bed, shielding their eyes once more. They drifted in and out of consciousness, aware of pulsing lights and cosmic sounds as Fox’s heart pumped to its full ability, 

When they came to and shakily sat up, Fox appeared different. The wires and particles were thicker and faster, moving like liquids, and the most serene smile painted his previously gaunt and hesitant facade.

“I remember now. I remember it all." 

“What do you remember?” the two breathed.

“Why I kept going for so long. It was her. I didn’t know it, but she pushed me all along. She’s out there searching for herself just like me.” A shower of white sparks fluttered to the ground from Fox’s eyes, forming a brief carpet. “She’s who I was with before this all happened. I’m going to find her and help her.”

He was crying, Mahan realized. Him and Neha rose simultaneously and without a second thought, embraced the golden being. They stood together, soundlessly covered in a fountain of warm white sparks. 

“Thank you,” Fox said. “I have to go now.” He stepped away and the sparks winked out of existence. After a gaze up at the stars and then back at the humans, his eyes grew bright, once again brighter than the sun. Mahan could only reach for Neha’s hand in the shuddering room and squeeze it tightly before everything zipped out of his vision into blackness.

************************************************************

Many hours later, Mahan woke up when the sun was firmly in the sky and birdsong rang through the open window. He realized instantly that Neha was gone and worried for a moment that he had dreamed it all. 

But then he saw that the golden heart was gone. 

It had happened. Fox had completed his first search and began his second. 

Mahan fell back onto his pillow and soon the light sounds of Neha and his mother conversing in the kitchen came to his ears. He exhaled with a smile, sending his well wishes to the stars and grateful that he wouldn’t have to search very far himself.