Paper Sun

These were her present choices: Get clean, stay in a program so that a clean lifestyle could be documented, and then maybe with some luck and a lot of hard work she would get a new heart. Somebody else's.

Which she needs rather desperately. Ejection fraction of ten percent. Well, that depended on who you asked. Some people said it was only six percent. A tenth of normal.

Try driving to work in a tenth of your car. Try maybe this: Notre Dame takes the kickoff from USC, but with one-tenth the players.

She has one-tenth of a heart. Dobutamine does the rest.

Methamphetamine sucks. That's not the only thing, the heart weakness, because she still has that keen every-cell-in-her-body craving for crystal going again. Nothing else in her life, not her child's warmth, not the taste of Godiva chocolate, not her boyfriend's erotic caresses, will ever feel good at all. Only the draw of crystal will ever entice her to pleasure, of any kind, ever again for a very long time.

Yet her personality is not yet completely ruined. She's still herself.

Not a drug-seeking machine-whore, like the Washington talking heads we see nightly on Fox news and the other mainstream television channels. Talking heads that have somehow supplanted the humans; round speaking pixellated visages spouting off in two-dimensional propaganda festivals in between regular feedings. Hannity. Savage Wiener Dog. Man Coulter. Bat Boy Malkin. Scary bunch.

One can maintain a kind of hope for her yet, because it's not too late. She's still human and can maybe get over it someday.

Or, if she foregoes the program and lapses yet again, no new heart. No waiting up late for her daughter to return from her Senior Prom. Just that sour and frail connection, and an early death.

I am so looking forward to voting this year. Is it too early to send in my paper ballot?