They’re letting me type again, which is good of them. The doctors have told me that I should remain lying down for most of the day, but during those periods when I feel well enough to sit upright, I can type for as long as I wish. Fortunately, I don’t want to do much; just get this last little bit out.

It’s been two months since the last time my fingers touched a keyboard, and even though the soft keyboard doesn’t match the feel of the old Underwood, it feels good to be banging away again. My weapons are gone, sold for scrap, my canisters and my scalpel destroyed in the hospital trash rounds. So the typing is all I have left, really. It’s what sustains me. That, and the crappy hospital food.

I went to kiss Bonnie good-bye. That was the plan, and that was what I did. I pulled the last sheet of my manuscript from the Underwood, placed it atop the others, and bound them with a rubber band inside a faded yellow file folder which I left in the middle of my cot. Knelt by Bonnie’s side, watching her sleep, listening to her breathe, marveling at the steady, even tones of her artificial respiratory system.

I leaned in to give her that kiss, my lips touching the cool sweat beading on her forehead, and suddenly, I realized that my hands were caught, held. I looked down to find my arms in Bonnie’s tight grasp, her eyes wide open, a soft smile on her face.

“This is for the best,” she whispered to me, letting her lips come up to touch mine before retreating again. “You’ll understand in time.”

And that’s when I felt the arms behind me, grabbing me, slipping the mask over my head, around my mouth, my struggling only bringing in deeper breaths, deeper gasps, sucking down the ether that I’d evaded for so long. The last time I saw Bonnie, she was fading into the darkness, disappearing behind a creeping black fog that spiraled in and finally obscured the only woman I loved who never divorced me.

I awoke in terrible pain, my chest burning from the inside, as if someone had replaced my heart with a pile of smoldering coals. Tried to lift my arms to check it out, to inspect, but I was too weak. Barely able to turn my head. Sitting up was not on the menu, either.

After a time, a doctor entered the room. Tall, assured. It was the surgeon who had found us the broom closet at the hospital, the friend of Bonnie’s ex-husband, and he put a hand on my arm as I tried to speak.

“Shhh,” he said. “It’s better not to talk right now. You’ve been through a lot.”

I wanted to ask what had happened, how it happened, where I was, when Bonnie was coming to see me, but the doctor had it all mapped out. He nodded as I tried to work the words out of my throat, nothing but gurgles emerging, and pulled a chair up beside my bed.

“I know you’ve got questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them,” he said, and launched into a detailed explanation of what had happened.

But I’m too tired to give a blow-by-blow analysis, so I’ll stick to the bottom line. It’s sustained me in the past, and it will sustain me now.

Bonnie gave me her heart. Our jigsaw puzzle was complete.

She left me a note, a short message on one of my scraps of paper explaining everything and nothing all at the same time. I’ve got it tucked away in the folds of my hospital gown; I read it once every few hours.

I’m not going to reprint it here; it would be pointless to do so. But it explains why she instructed the doctors to take out her organic, perfectly beating heart and replace it with my Jarvik–13, why she chose to make herself completely biomechanical while leaving me fully natural.

And it didn’t have anything to do with keeping me safe from the Union—though I am safe, now, according to official Union doctrine; they can’t touch me any more, though I doubt they’ll reinstate my pension—or with the fact that an extra artiforg in her own body is just one more legume in an artificial hill of beans. As I’ve said before, they can’t leave you any more dead.

No, Bonnie said that her gift was all about proving me wrong.

People can change, she wrote, in part. And people can sacrifice, even if they never have before. But they shouldn’t have to. You, of all people, shouldn’t have to.

Jake came by the hospital to say hello. Pay his respects. I must have been sleeping when he came into the room, because when I awoke in the middle of a dream about a ladder climbing up a field of white irises, he was hovering over me, his soft grin inches from my face.

“Hey,” he said, placing a bouquet of irises on my bedside table. The smell of them must have infected my dreams.

“Hey,” I replied.

Jake took a look around the room. “Back in the hospital again. Getting to be a habit.”

“Yeah. Hopefully, it’s the last time.”

“Sure.”

He sat down on a chair next to my bed, and we didn’t say much. The television in the corner was playing a repeat of an old, famous football game, and we watched the score rise to the numbers we knew it would eventually reach.

After about thirty minutes, a nurse came in to give me lunch, and as she bent over my table to adjust the height, Jake raised an eyebrow at me. Without another word, he took the plastic straw from my tray and loaded it with a saliva-soaked piece of napkin. As the nurse headed out of the room, he placed the straw in his mouth and blew hard, launching a spitball fifteen feet away. It landed in the nurse’s hair and stuck there.

“Same old Jake,” I said.

“Damn right.”

I couldn’t help but grin as I took the straw from his hands. “Double or nothing I make the next shot.”

As for Bonnie, I don’t know where she is. They won’t tell me. They probably don’t know, themselves. The doctors said she saw me through the operation, ensured that her organic heart wouldn’t be rejected by my body, and, once her own short recovery time had been reached, checked herself out of the hospital and disappeared into the city streets.

I do know that the Underwood was missing from the broom closet, along with a ream of blank paper, and the thought of it is the only thing that makes me smile. Wherever she is, she’s typing, taking up the recording duties where I left off. That’s one manuscript I would love to read one day, preferably with the author by my side.

The night before I shipped off to San Diego for basic training, my father called me into his den and sat me down on the wide-backed chair. The party guests had all gone home for the evening; Sharon Cosgrove had rebuttoned her dress and kissed me good-ye. Mother was in the kitchen, washing dishes and cleaning up.

“Son,” he said, “you’re going to work in this life, and you’re going to play. And when the last days come, you’ll look back and find that that’s all there was, an endless stream of days going back to today. But if you can find the thing you should be doing, the thing that makes you you, and if you can make that thing yours, then you’ve beaten the game. I haven’t. Most men don’t. You probably won’t, either, but the point is to try, and to never give up, even when you think it’s over. Do you get me, son?”

I said that I did. I said that I did and then I left and I didn’t see him again until he was gone. But I didn’t understand, not a wink.

Today, right now, I might. I know I haven’t found that thing yet. I don’t know if I ever will. But I’m young, in a relative sense. I’m young, and I’ve got my health.

Yet every once in a while, I miss the old ticking of my Jarvik–13, the feel of the remote welded onto my hip, the reassuring beeps that told me the device was still on top of its game. I miss the comforting assurances that high technology brought to the complex machinery of my body. It’s a reassuring feeling to know that your involuntary processes are being taken care of by a force higher than yourself, by a time-tested technology honed to a fine art.

But it’s even better to lie back in my hospital bed, place my hand over the long, wide scar rippling across my chest, and feel Bonnie thumping away in there, like she’s just dropped by and is knocking on the door to say hello.