Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life by Thomas T. Thomas

still did not know what they meant.

4. … And Then You Live
    After two weeks, John Praxis was able to contemplate the tubes entering his abdomen without feeling squeamish and wanting to gag with thinking about what was going on inside his chest. And when he didn’t actually look down at the gently pulsing curves where they slid under the incisions in his skin, he could forget the whole degrading experience. Except that he was still trapped in bed, flat on his back. The only good thing was that the doctors now trusted him enough to remove the restraints on his wrists and ankles. They even let him get out of bed, under supervision, and stretch the mechanical heart’s air hoses to their maximum length to use the bathroom. That was the highlight of his day.
    He looked across to the visitor’s chair where Adele sat. She was leafing through a magazine without really reading it. The pages flipped by faster and faster. With her legs crossed at the knee, Adele’s free foot was bobbing up and down, and it, too, was moving faster and faster. Some minutes ago, maybe half an hour, it had kept pace with the click and whirr of the machine under the bed. But now her fidgeting was accelerating.
    Dear Adele. … She had stuck by him for forty-three years of the hardest life a woman could face: following him from one jobsite to the next, usually in those out-of-the-way places in undeveloped countries where a major dam or aluminum smelter complex was under construction. She had coped admirably with strange languages, strange foods bought in rural markets, sullen and inadequate domestic help, and sometimes primitive sanitation and medical conditions. Through it all, she had borne and raised three children, watched over them in sickness, taken a hand in their education, and then sent them off to boarding schools in Europe or the States when the time was right. And she never said a word against that life.
    But the strains were there and the scars remained. Praxis could smell one of them now, whenever she came to visit. By ten in the morning Adele would have taken her first and maybe even her second drink of the day. And after an hour by his bedside, when she had exhausted the possibilities of small talk and magazines, as her fidgeting became more and more pronounced, he knew she was itching for a chance to get up, go outside, light up a cigarette, and take a nip from the flask of bourbon she kept in her purse.
    He couldn’t blame her for these vices. They had once been his, although he had curbed them some years ago on doctor’s orders. Adele had never seen the point of such abstinence for herself, nor had she made a personal commitment to it, and he certainly didn’t want to nag. After all, she’d done her job with an uncomplaining will and a straight back. She could indulge herself now, when it didn’t matter.
    However, the irony wasn’t lost on him. He was the one who had made the healthy decisions and changed his life. And he was the one whose heart had died, while Adele continued to soldier on, resolutely drinking and smoking, tough as an old pair of work gloves, virtually immortal. But this was not the time for him to mention the unfairness of life.
    Praxis looked down at the tubes again. The best he could manage was the lament from a dimly remembered situation comedy in the golden age of broadcast television. He uttered it softly now: “What a revoltin’ development this is!”
    “Dear?” Adele asked, looking up. “Do you need something?”
    “Nothing. I’m just commenting on human mortality.”
    “I know … and when you’ve done everything right,” she said, echoing his thoughts. “You watch your weight. You take your vitamins. You play golf. And you’re still the man I married—a strong and vital man.”
    Who has to wait for another man to die so he can get a new heart, Praxis thought, although he refrained from saying it. Almost three more months of this waiting, on average, they had said. He could already feel