Planets full of bronzed healthy clean-limbed individuals merrily
prancing through their lives meant that the only doctors still in
business were the psychiatrists, simply because no one had
discovered a cure for the universe as a whole – or rather the
one that did exist had been abolished by the medical doctors.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

THEY MADE ME bionic in 1988. I still don’t know why. A machine, round and smooth as a flattened pebble, sits under the skin of my right breast, just below the collarbone. Its wire travels through the blood vessel to a chamber of my heart. By now, I’m told, the wire is well encased with cardiac tissue and cannot be removed. The machine itself, a pacemaker, has outlived its allotted lifespan and continues mysteriously to do something in there, like one of those spacecraft launched when you were adolescent, still surviving somehow in deep space, beeping away regardless into your middle age.