The Man With No Pulse
by Nicky Pessaroff
Class did not go well that day. Professor’s subject matter was supposed to be the use of the frame in fiction. His thesis, I believed, was that the frame had fallen into disfavor because of a splintering media landscape. When frames are used so literally in visual media, how can they still find utility in the metaphorical realm of the page? There was a solution, he told us—a combination of the thought and the felt that could cut through the irony, the readerly self-consciousness, and the historical use of the technique to make a new, “revolutionary” frame in the mode of Nabokov or Roth.
Unfortunately, Professor never got past the first sentence before breaking into sobs once again, lamenting the recent separation from his wife and the express desire of his two adult children never to speak to him again. His lover, alas, was still stuck in Peru, and when her visa would clear, no one seemed to know, including the Peruvian government.
We children—he called us his children although we all were in our 20s or older, one of us older even than him—we children gave up on the running of the class and led Professor to our favorite bar, a Fosse amoeba jazz-handing our way to oblivion.
Seeing as I worked part time at the restaurant/bar, I edged out the evening bartender and pulled beer after beer for my comrades. In a martini shaker, I combined a number of potent ingredients that I then poured into a salt-lined margarita glass and garnished with a cherry and a wedge of orange.
With his first sip, the dark circles around Professor’s eyes disappeared, the arthritis in his fingers abated, and he found his voice.
“Come here, children, come circle around me beneath this scraggly bison head, and I will tell you the story of the Man with No Pulse”:
All good folk tales begin in ambiguity, and this is a good folk tale. The Man was a mystery. He had no name, no identification, no written past, no family tree. It was rumored that he was born in Mesilla, the illegitimate son of a Mexican prostitute and Henry McCarty, a.k.a. William H. Bonny, a.k.a. Billy the Kid. Others believed he was the illegitimate child of an Apache warrior and the wife of a Methodist minister and that he grew up in the foothills of the Organ Mountains. Some believe he held the first land title in Las Cruces. One old man I knew a long time ago told me he had seen the Man at the Ludlow Massacre, but whether he was a miner or a regulator, my friend could not say. Everyone says that he is the only man who knows for certain how this city got its name.
What is indisputable is that by the time the Great Depression truly devastated this fledgling state, around 1930 or ’31, the Man was destitute as everyone else, the taste of dust in his mouth like a congenital disease. Already, he was an old man—that is, if you consider me old! In truth, he could not have been older than 50.
It happened on Dia de los Muertos. In this area of the country, how could it not? The Man had brass in pocket, and so he went to the local saloon. Conventions of the story type dictate that I must tell you that this is the land upon which that very saloon sat, and so I tell you: this is the land upon which that very saloon sat.
It was days since his last beer, which the Man needed much like the living need breath. He sat alone at a table—let’s say this table, and let’s say that chair across from me where my child Darla currently sits. Perhaps it was the lack of alcohol in the system of a man who depended upon it, or perhaps the expectation of that first sip was too much, or perhaps he was simply old and tired, but for whatever reason, when the Man brought the glass to his lips, the first sip set off in him a massive myocardial infarction.
Fortunately, there was a physician just across the way, and so four men lifted the chair by each leg, hoisted the Man above them, and brought him to the Good Doctor. There was no time to lay him supine. The Good Doctor heard no beating in the Man’s chest. He felt around his wrist but could find no pulse. The Man, still seated, was rigid and white, his lips blue. The Good Doctor sent one of the bearers to notify the mortician, another to notify the sheriff, and another to locate any next of kin. The last man was left with the body. No one knows why he did it—superstition, perhaps, or the need to reassure himself that the Man was dead, that the body was inert, that there was nothing to fear—but when he brought a mirror to the Man’s nostrils, there was the faint fog that denoted breath, and thus life.
This last bearer was a religious man and believed he had witnessed the work of the Devil. He let the glass slip from his fingers and shatter to the ground. He bolted like a spooked horse and ran for the anonymity of the desert. Some say he remains there to this day, but this is not his story.
This is the story of the Man with No Pulse, the body that was left in that doctor’s care.
The Doctor did not know what to do. Nor did the Man. He could talk, you see. He could move, even. Rigorous testing then and through later years proved that the Man with No Pulse could speak, could spit and swallow, could piss and shit. But he couldn’t—or he wouldn’t—do any of these things, and the Doctor could not disagree. The Man was in quite the precarious situation: with no pulse, he was medically dead; but with breath, he was spiritually alive. Any rupture to the scenario might give the Man his pulse again and thus his agency, yet it also might send him on the final passage, with Charon as his only companion.
And so the Doctor did something unusual. He bought this land—this land right here. He built a small shack and equipped it with an iron stove. He found four willing men, and they carried the Man with No Pulse—chair and all—into the shack. There, for years, the man lived and yet did not live.
Being of a good nature, the Doctor allowed the residents of this blighted land to see and interact with the Man with No Pulse. Being of the entrepreneurial nature, he charged a fee. When the Good Doctor passed away after a few years, his son, also a doctor, moved back from the uranium mines and took charge of his father’s practice. With his ties to Los Alamos National Laboratory, this second Good Doctor was able to further the research behind the Man with No Pulse. Using a specially made conveyor with the most shock absorbers ever used in a single vehicle, the Second Good Doctor transported the Man with No Pulse up the winding roads to the fir-covered mountains where the Father of the Atomic Bomb and his Merry Assistants toiled. But being a nuclear physicist, the Father had no insight into this mysterious condition, and the Generals saw no military use for a man who was somewhere between dead and not dead and too paralyzed by permutations to move.
Doctors far and wide came to see the Man with No Pulse, but no one could offer an explanation. An interesting side note: some locals believe that this story inspired a Natalie Merchant song, but this is patently absurd for reasons I cannot go into at this moment.
The Man with No Pulse stayed in a state of stasis. He only communicated with his eyes, using them to answer yes or no questions by moving his eyeballs horizontally or vertically. He took no food or drink, passed no urine or fecal matter. His pulse remained steadily nonexistent. As the years passed, a new wrinkle emerged that the Second Good Doctor could not deny. The Man with No Pulse did not age. He remained in a strange stasis, stuck in the beginnings of his elderly years.
And this city was built up around him. A university was built, grade schools and churches, local grocery stores and taquerias. Bordellos became law offices. Law offices became bordellos. Lohman became a main thoroughfare. The Second Good Doctor died, leaving no heir. The city continued to grow, but the shack remained, becoming Gothic and haunted in the minds of children. They conjured devils and witches, La Llorona and Chupacabra, but not even the most creative and psychotic of those children came close to imagining the horror that lay behind those walls. With no concrete fear yet of death, how could they?
Eventually, a fire consumed the shack. Most assumed that the Man with No Pulse perished in the fire, but by that point, the vast majority of people believed that he was merely an urban legend. Those people were wrong. The Man with No Pulse was real, and he did not perish in the fire.
The fire, it was told to me, was set by an unscrupulous man of entrepreneurial bent who absconded with the Man with No Pulse, chair and all. He left this city with a procession of migrant farm workers and settled the Man with No Pulse deep in the desert. You can find him still, if you look for the signs.
At that point, Professor nodded off in his chair. Being lovers of rhyming action, we, his children, carried him on his chair to the pay-by-the-week motel in which he temporarily lived. Tenderly, we disrobed him and slipped him into bed. I returned the chair when I went to work the next day, but Professor, we never saw again. It is rumored that he moved down to Peru, where he writes bad Spanish poetry.
As my comrades moved on, I remained here in this city, tethered to this land in ways I don’t understand, indentured to this restaurant and bar. I forgot the story until recently, when I embarked on a road trip to Los Angeles. As I headed west on Interstate 10, I finally understood the sign.
“Have you seen The Thing?” a highway sign asked me. Twenty miles later, another sign: “The Thing? A sight to behold.” And, most common, simply, “The Thing?” and a highway exit number.
I found it in the mountains of Arizona. It was no mystery: it was a rest stop right off the highway with dozens of gas pumps and a fully stocked rest area. Three metal buildings housed a medley of artifacts: old saddles and guns, vintage autos, farm equipment, horrific wood carvings, and more. “The Thing,” they say, is a mother and her child who crossed the border illegally and were slaughtered by cowboys during a shootout, their mummified bodies found years later.
This is patently absurd. The real attraction is deeper: the Man with No Pulse, still in his chair, still unmoving. I saw him there, accidentally—the only way one can meet the Man with No Pulse. He is ageless, naked and hairless as a baby, his clothes long ago dissolved into atoms. I wanted to ask him a question, but the words dried up on my tongue. Instead, I ran.
Where the Man with No Pulse is now, I cannot say. In 2018, the conglomerate Bowlin Travel Centers built a new Shell station and constructed a new museum to house the original curiosities. “The Thing” is still there, according to a friend of mine who saw the new museum on a recent road trip. The mummified mother and daughter are still the supposed highlight.
But I have heard that there is a basement to this shiny new Shell station—a room of reinforced concrete near the underground oil tanks. I have it on good authority. And if you ask the question that I almost asked him—that I believe he still heard, even though I did not speak it—then you may see what I saw, what made me run. In answer to my simple yes-or-no question, the Man with No Pulse’s eyes seized in his head vertically-then-horizontally-then-vertically-then-horizontally.
And that is why I am rooted here.
Nicky Pessaroff is editor-in-chief of Pen World Magazine. His fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in NonBinary Review, October Hill Magazine, The AutoEthnographer, and Audience Askew literary anthology