Less than two weeks ago a robot changed my heart.
The robot’s name was DaVinci, I saw DaVinci when I was lying on the bed waiting for my surgery, waiting to put my heart in the white creatures’ metallic hands. It made me realize how Dr. Frankenstein and the monster had changed position.
Someone rolled my bed into DaVinci’s room, I didn’t see who because I had tears in my eyes. Inside two nurses put four needless into my veins and said: “You just concentrate on your breathing, then we do the rest.”
I guess I did breathe.
10 hours later I woke up in paradise: a light room full of women, I could not really see them, but I could hear and feel their presence, notice their movements—they were dancing to the music.
Celebrating life.
My first memory with my enhanced or repaired heart was the pleasure of puking, the warm liquid that ran down my cheeks and chest, it ran down like a heated conscious stream.
It was the leftovers of my former self that I puked out.
The first three days, I lived in David Lynch’s world. I could see bacteria’s move in the blankets and walls, I saw myself in a forest as a figure carved in wood, another time I was a Buddhist monk befriending a snake, I could not distinguish between dream and reality.
On the fourth day, I urinated for the first time consciously, realizing, I had been being tubed in and out like a metro station on the yellow line between death and living.
I took a taxi home. No more tubes.
The day after my blood pressure was nauseatingly low, I returned to the hospital where I waited for ten hours at the hospital until a doctor looked at my heart with some equipment, and said: “You’re tall”, and added, “Raise from the bed slowly and eat some salt.”
It was spiritual in way, except for the salt.
Now, more days have passed, I stopped counting, I am changed. Another is what I am. I died in there with DaVinci. A substitute doctor told my wife—in a kind of Freudian slip that was later denied, sealed, and buried somewhere in the consciousness of DaVinci—that something went wrong. Apparently DaVinci did not do the job properly the first time, the white monster had to enter again.
I guess saving me was worth repeating.
Did I learn anything? Of course, the self that I poked out was smarter than me, but he is no longer here. Maybe that is why my wife left me, or maybe the fault is DaVinci’s. I am in love with a robot called DaVinci.
Falling in love with the robot that saved your life is not like the Stockholm syndrome, it’s called the DaVinci syndrome. There is a world of difference. Fake love is plastic, real authentic love is made from stainless mental.
Finn Janning grew up in Denmark, but ended up living in Spain. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Copenhagen Business School in Denmark with the aim of writing fiction. His nonfiction and fiction work has been featured in Epiphany, Under the Gum Tree, Philosophy Now, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, among other publications. Currently he works on a novel about infidelity.