He knew how to make the heart sing and yodel and howl with joy, could coax from it creaks and croaks and murmurs. He seemed to be able to make it confess its secrets, its hopes and desires, fears and needs.
His performances were uncanny, the stuff of growing legend, and would leave audiences spellbound. He had the ability to make people believe that what they were hearing was an expression of the universal heart, yet in a way that felt both ancient and painfully real and personal to each individual who heard it. Some people proclaimed him an expert in the mysteries of the human heart; others believed that he literally had the ability to channel these mysteries.
In what was left of his own battered heart, however, he knew that he was at best a mimic or a conjurer, at worst a complete fraud.
The heart’s ventriloquist was a solitary and broken man. His work exhausted him. After each show he would retire to his dressing room and lock the heart in a metal trunk. And then he would go back to his motel room and spend the night drinking, smoking, and reading novels.
He recognized that many of the words the heart spoke came directly from the novels he read, and he often felt like he was trapped in a past that not only wasn’t his own, but, more pathetically, wasn’t even real.
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