Icarus w-2, page 9
part #2 of Westwood Series
The anchor was on the phone with the police.
The mayor and governor were heading toward the front door.
The two men were in a brutal rage. Three servers were bleeding, one profusely, his nose clearly broken. Several tables were overturned now. Food and silverware had spilled onto the floor. The violence seemed to have frozen everyone in the restaurant.
Jack was about to reach the fight, about to join the melee and try to break it up, when he turned. An instinct. A protective instinct. And as he turned he saw Caroline, just the back of her dress and her right leg, disappearing up the stairs. Right behind her was someone dressed in black. That person, too, disappeared. But there was something odd about the person's face. What was it? It seemed hidden, strangely faded, like there was something pulled over his head, a kind of gauze. And there was something in his hand. Jack definitely caught a glimpse of something in his hand.
Something metallic.
Jack turned from the fight on the floor and sprinted through the dining room.
He reached the stairs, no one even noticing his mad dash because the fight had escalated, had turned into two raging animals engaged in battle.
Jack ran up the stairs, two at a time. He reached the door to the office, grabbed the doorknob, threw it open…
8:36 p.m.
Yes, yes, it was going to work.
No one had seen them. No one had noticed. And she was scared now. Oh, yes, she was. She'd do anything. Anything at all that needed to be done.
The gun waved and she moved into the corner. Now everything was for the taking.
But what? What to take?
What was that noise? Running. Yes. Someone running upstairs. Don't worry. It won't matter. You're in control. It will be easy. This will be easy.
The other thing will be easy, too. No need to think too hard over what to take. Not really. It was very easy.
There was only one thing to be taken.
8:37 p.m.
Jack threw himself through the door and the first thing he saw was Caroline. She was standing in the corner and she looked shrunken, devastated, as if someone had yanked her entire life away from her. Then he saw the figure at the desk, but only for a second. He saw the gun. And he saw the mask. A stocking, not gauze. A stocking pulled tightly over the face. The features were a blur. And then the whole world was a blur. Before Jack could turn, before he could react, the gun slammed down over his head. The blow was extraordinarily strong and he stumbled back, fell onto the love seat. He tried to get up, to offer some kind of attack, but he was overwhelmed by a spasm of nausea. He tried again to raise himself, knew he had to do something, couldn't just stand there, not again, then the room spun around him, faster and faster now, and the pain made him fall forward onto the floor.
"We don't keep any money up here."
That sounded like Caroline. Yes, it had to be Caroline. But everything was so fuzzy. Even the sound was distorted. The voice sounded like a record played at the wrong, slow speed.
"This kind of restaurant, we don't keep very much cash."
Still Caroline. That should still be Caroline talking. Then a jumble of words, some came fast, some seemed so slow.
"The bar… cash register… only place we have money."
Then he thought he heard, still Caroline: "…get it… two, three thousand… get it for you…"
And then a roar washed over the room. Was this Caroline? No, it was deeper. Angrier, He heard this word: More. And again, deeper and angrier: More. Ruin. Why.
And these words: Bitch. Whore.
Cunt.
Jack tried to get up. He turned his head and the movement was excruciating. More words spewed out now. But they were nonsense. Nonsense from a madman.
Tear down the wool.
What did that mean?
Wooly here… the will is strong… wool candy broken…
What did it mean! Why couldn't he understand?
Wooly… candy… forever…
He saw the person in the mask move toward Caroline. Saw him reach for her. Saw him grab the necklace, the beautiful diamond necklace, rip it from Caroline's neck. Saw his hand flash forward again, heard the noise as his fist cracked against Caroline's face. Heard her scream. And Jack threw himself upward now. He had to move. He had to. The pain sliced through him. It rocked his head back and he saw a flash of light. He knew there was no light like that, not in this room, it had to be pain that was blinding him, but he could fight the pain, he had to fight the pain, so he kept going and his arms found flesh, he knocked the robber back, he was sure he did that. And then there was an explosion. Loud. Right inside his head. And there was more pain. A new pain. It frightened him. Then there was another explosion. This one quieter. And a third, immediately after. Quieter still.
And then his fear was gone because suddenly there was no pain. Just a softness. Like some sort of pleasant dream. And no more blinding light. Instead, a gentle white cloud. He heard Caroline again. Why was she screaming? It was over now, wasn't it? There was nothing to be frightened about. There was no more pain.
He reached for her, to show her that it was all right. To show her that she was safe. But he couldn't seem to grab hold of her. She seemed to melt away from him.
Now he felt something strange. It was as if something was seeping out of him. He couldn't tell what it was. It felt good, though, that's what was so strange. He knew it was bad but it felt so very, very good.
And suddenly he knew what it was that was escaping from inside of him. What it was that was leaving, rushing away in a flood now, never to return.
It was his life itself that was deserting him.
He heard one last thing as he slid limply onto the floor. One final explosion. This one didn't frighten him at all. It was too distant. Too quiet. So he figured he had to be wrong. It wasn't an explosion. It was just a dream.
Just a nice, quiet, painless dream.
In his dream Jack reached again for Caroline. But she was gone. Jack closed his eyes.
And the dream took him into a deep, still, never-ending darkness.
TEN
Okay, everybody. It's time to put our Humpty Dumpty back together again. He's lost four liters of blood, mostly in the pelvis and hip. If we're going to keep him alive, first thing we've got to do is keep his fluids replenished. We're going to make the switch from the plasma expanders and saline tubes to the large bore. Now! This mother needs some blood and fast. He's leaking all over the fucking place."
Those were the last words spoken for the next several minutes while the large bore tubes replaced the smaller emergency tubes that had been frantically administered by the guys in the ambulance. Bigger catheters were sutured expertly into the arteries and neck. It was like a circle of serious and flawless quilters doing repair work on a worthless and torn rug. Hands moved nimbly up and down, weaving almost in unison, sealing the lifelines into place. Once the stitching was done, the catheters were hooked up to IV's and soon blood was flowing back into the unmoving body instead of just out.
The room was awash in the blood that had escaped, as were the doctors and nurses flocked around the table. The lead surgeon, Dr. Harold Solomon, shrugged his left shoulder up to wipe a splash of reddish brown from his cheek. He took a long, deep breath, exhaled through his nose as an athlete might, about to expend one last great burst of energy, and spoke quietly, quickly, and emotionlessly to the now still room. He could have been a dock foreman detailing cargo contents and shifts for union members.
"All right. We've got multiple gunshot wounds. One shot took out the right pelvis. Another the right hip. The third got the left knee. In the hip we've got a high-velocity fracture. We're gonna put in a reconstructive plate. Nothing unusual, we've all done it before. The pelvis is potentially life-threatening. We've got a communuted superior rami fracture with extension into the iliac wing. The bullet hit in the midpelvis and, besides shattering the bone, it's screwed up a lot of other things. The most crucial is that the bladder's been ruptured and that's where we've got the massive bleeding. We're going to work there first because, frankly, I don't know if he's gonna survive it, so why waste everything else. For the knee, there's a super condular fracture of the left femur. If he's still around, we'll do a similar type of reconstruction at the hip with plates and screws. All set?"
They were.
The initial surgery took eight hours and forty minutes.
The first step was to build an external fixater for the pelvis. It looked like an old-fashioned toy Erector set, a complex layering of pipes, joints, and hinges. It was a means of both elevating the pelvis – propping it up – and preventing it from splintering completely. Its essential function was to provide enough room for the bladder surgeon to go in and repair the punctured organ. If the external fixater didn't hold, the patient was dead.
The group hovering over the patient were remarkably relaxed and casual. As they worked, a stream of chatter replaced the initial quiet. There were questions about the Redskins front line and the sexual orientation of an orthopedic nurse who was not present for this surgery and there were complaints about the new vending machines in the cafeteria – there was general agreement that the hot whipped mocha concoction tasted like a combination of chalk and urine. This part of the surgical procedure was no different from the way a master carpenter put up shelves. It was done confidently, skillfully, and purely mechanically, with no thought of error. There was no science involved and zero room for interpretation. Once the decisions were made on how to proceed, this was hammer-and-nails stuff, no more emotionally involving than gluing a broken piece of china back together. The pride came from how seamlessly the pieces were restored.
When the external fixater was in place and stable, the bladder surgeon, Dr. Mugg, moved in for his turn. He was not the most popular person in the local medical community. He tended to lecture while he worked – his nickname in the halls was Dr. Smug – and several months ago he'd managed to patent a particular technique of suturing. No other surgeon in the country could now use this method without paying him a substantial royalty on each operation. As a result, Dr. Smug was not only more arrogant than ever, he was driving a new Ferrari and buying a six-bedroom weekend house on the Maryland shore. But his hands moved smoothly and surely, and however much his mouth motored, his eyes never wavered. In just over two and a half hours, Dr. Mugg turned his back on the patient and said, "It's as good as it gets. It'll take about a week to heal, then we can go back in and do an open reduction and internal fixation. He's one lucky bastard that I was in town." Without saying anything else, he left the room. The abdomen and bladder were, for the moment, whole and stable.
Now it was time for the orthopedic traumatologist, Dr. Solomon, to step back up to the table and begin to reconstruct the hip.
The bullet had completely reshaped the bone. At first, Dr. Solomon thought it might be necessary to do a replacement, but enough of the original structure around the acetabulum of the hipbone had survived so that a combination of plates and screws would suffice.
The doctor had, before entering medical school, considered becoming an architect. He was a visual person and also tended to concentrate on the way things functioned. So when he looked at an object, his mind would take him below the surface; he concentrated on structure, viewing most things as blueprints. This vaguely Platonic overview – he more often than not saw the way a thing worked rather than the thing itself – not only helped him focus when operating, it kept things on a much more objective basis. It allowed him to disassociate from the human element and concentrate on the structural work at hand. So while he went through the process of repairing this nearly destroyed hip, his eyes did not see the tissue he was slicing through nor the bone he was breaking and remaking. He saw, instead, a precise, neatly drawn architectural plan of the body.
Working from that plan in his mind, he drilled two holes into the head of the femur, inserted two screws, and attached a reconstructive plate that spanned the entire fracture. When the plate was finally in place and immovable, he looked up to see the admiring eyes of his coworkers. The blueprint faded from his mind and the reality intruded. He saw the patient, immobile on the operating table. He wondered when he'd get the details of the shooting, began to imagine the scenario that had led to this kind of destruction, then immediately shook the thoughts out of his head. It was no time to personalize. The left knee still had to be reconstructed.
Although Dr. Solomon had been operating for almost twelve hours that day, there was no hint of exhaustion in his body or his mind. So, with a blueprint of the new area firmly in place, he again began drilling, this time into the expanded distal end of the femur that articulated with the tibia. When that was done, more screws were inserted and another reconstructive plate was attached.
At 6:35 in the morning, the operating team was done.
One nurse had to rush immediately into another surgery – a misaimed bullet in a family feud had passed by the spinal cord of a fourteen-year-old girl. The doctors did not yet know if the cord was bruised or ripped. If bruised, the chances for complete healing were good. If ripped, the girl would never walk again.
One intern made it as far as the first chair he came to in the hospital hallway. There he sat, stretched out, and fell soundly asleep.
Dr. Solomon's first act, when leaving the emergency room, was to head to the cafeteria, put seventy-five cents into the coffee vending machine, get himself a Styrofoam cup of the godawful mocha concoction, then go to sit on the curb outside the side door of the hospital and smoke a cigarette. After fifteen minutes and a second smoke, he stood wearily and headed to his car. By that time he'd already been informed that if the patient lived through the next week – a fifty-fifty chance at best – and the bladder healed properly, Dr. Mugg would, as he'd announced, perform the open reduction and internal fixation of the bladder and then he, Dr. Solomon, would return with the patient to the operating room for a formal plating of the pelvis. That meant, literally, lining him up like a jigsaw puzzle and making sure the skeletal structure was back in the proper place. After that, a balloon would temporarily be placed inside the bladder, the patient would stay several more days in their care, until he was hemodynamically stable, and then he'd be helicoptered back to New York City and the Hospital for Special Surgery, where he would be placed under the care of his own orthopedic surgeon.
Dr. Solomon knew he would never see the patient again after that. Knew he would never find out what his life would become. That didn't particularly bother the doctor. He'd done his job. And if the man lived, the next six to twelve months of his life would be about one thing and one thing only: pain. Harold Solomon was not much interested in pain. He much preferred the contained and docile sterility of the operating room to the prolonged agony of the recuperation period. No, his job was basically over, and so was his involvement. But he did stop walking about fifty feet from his car, turn, and briskly return to the hospital. He went to the newsstand, bought the morning paper. He might never know about his patient's future but he decided he wanted to know about his past. Wanted to know what had brought him to the brink of destruction. At the very least, before he went home to his comfortable three-bedroom house with the little brick patio in the backyard and the toilet that wouldn't stop running and the neighbor who was without question a Peeping Tom and his fiancee who would most certainly be annoyed that once again he'd been out all night, Dr. Harold Solomon wanted to know whose life he'd just done his damnedest to save.
ELEVEN
Jack Keller often thought about the exact moment when he realized he had not died. It was when he heard four short and simple words. The most basic and unpoetic of questions:
"Can you hear me?"
And, yes, of course he could. It was a woman's voice, clear and sweet as could be. A tiny bit hoarse but so soothing and gentle. The voice warmed him, made him glow inside. But he didn't know who was speaking. He couldn't see her. And she sounded so far away. Who was she? That's what he remembered wondering. She seemed so nice. So familiar…
"Can you hear me?"
He thought he'd answered but maybe he hadn't. Yes, he said, I can hear you. But who are you?
"Jack, please tell me you can hear what I'm saying."
Yes, yes, yes. I said I can hear you. Why can't you hear me?
"Then just listen to me, Jack."
Why are you doing this to me? Why can't you understand what I'm saying? And even as he screamed the words, he knew the answer: Because I'm saying nothing. It's all only in my head. I'm not speaking, I'm thinking. I'm not making any noise. But why not? How can that he? What's happening?
"You're going to be all right, Jack."
That's when he recognized the voice. The wonderful voice that comforted him as strongly and physically as if it were a cool hand pressed against his feverish forehead. It was Caroline. How could he not have recognized her? And why couldn't he see her? Where was she? Where was he?
Suddenly the voice became a whisper, and it was so close by he could feel her magical breath warming his ear.
"You have to be all right, Jack. Do you understand? I need you to be all right."
He felt her holding his hand, squeezing it in hers. He couldn't feel any other part of his body, it was as if the rest of him didn't exist, but he could feel the pressure on the back of his hand, feel her thumb digging urgently into his palm.
"I love you. I love you now and I will always love you and I need you to be all right so I can show you just how much I love you."
He tried once again to answer her but he couldn't. And then he couldn't hear her anymore either. It was as if he were being covered in a thick fog. He tried to reach for her, tried to bring her back, but there was nothing there. She was gone and he was alone.
It was only much later that Jack Keller decided there were just two things that had kept him alive.
One, of course, was Caroline. Of that he was absolutely certain.
The mayor and governor were heading toward the front door.
The two men were in a brutal rage. Three servers were bleeding, one profusely, his nose clearly broken. Several tables were overturned now. Food and silverware had spilled onto the floor. The violence seemed to have frozen everyone in the restaurant.
Jack was about to reach the fight, about to join the melee and try to break it up, when he turned. An instinct. A protective instinct. And as he turned he saw Caroline, just the back of her dress and her right leg, disappearing up the stairs. Right behind her was someone dressed in black. That person, too, disappeared. But there was something odd about the person's face. What was it? It seemed hidden, strangely faded, like there was something pulled over his head, a kind of gauze. And there was something in his hand. Jack definitely caught a glimpse of something in his hand.
Something metallic.
Jack turned from the fight on the floor and sprinted through the dining room.
He reached the stairs, no one even noticing his mad dash because the fight had escalated, had turned into two raging animals engaged in battle.
Jack ran up the stairs, two at a time. He reached the door to the office, grabbed the doorknob, threw it open…
8:36 p.m.
Yes, yes, it was going to work.
No one had seen them. No one had noticed. And she was scared now. Oh, yes, she was. She'd do anything. Anything at all that needed to be done.
The gun waved and she moved into the corner. Now everything was for the taking.
But what? What to take?
What was that noise? Running. Yes. Someone running upstairs. Don't worry. It won't matter. You're in control. It will be easy. This will be easy.
The other thing will be easy, too. No need to think too hard over what to take. Not really. It was very easy.
There was only one thing to be taken.
8:37 p.m.
Jack threw himself through the door and the first thing he saw was Caroline. She was standing in the corner and she looked shrunken, devastated, as if someone had yanked her entire life away from her. Then he saw the figure at the desk, but only for a second. He saw the gun. And he saw the mask. A stocking, not gauze. A stocking pulled tightly over the face. The features were a blur. And then the whole world was a blur. Before Jack could turn, before he could react, the gun slammed down over his head. The blow was extraordinarily strong and he stumbled back, fell onto the love seat. He tried to get up, to offer some kind of attack, but he was overwhelmed by a spasm of nausea. He tried again to raise himself, knew he had to do something, couldn't just stand there, not again, then the room spun around him, faster and faster now, and the pain made him fall forward onto the floor.
"We don't keep any money up here."
That sounded like Caroline. Yes, it had to be Caroline. But everything was so fuzzy. Even the sound was distorted. The voice sounded like a record played at the wrong, slow speed.
"This kind of restaurant, we don't keep very much cash."
Still Caroline. That should still be Caroline talking. Then a jumble of words, some came fast, some seemed so slow.
"The bar… cash register… only place we have money."
Then he thought he heard, still Caroline: "…get it… two, three thousand… get it for you…"
And then a roar washed over the room. Was this Caroline? No, it was deeper. Angrier, He heard this word: More. And again, deeper and angrier: More. Ruin. Why.
And these words: Bitch. Whore.
Cunt.
Jack tried to get up. He turned his head and the movement was excruciating. More words spewed out now. But they were nonsense. Nonsense from a madman.
Tear down the wool.
What did that mean?
Wooly here… the will is strong… wool candy broken…
What did it mean! Why couldn't he understand?
Wooly… candy… forever…
He saw the person in the mask move toward Caroline. Saw him reach for her. Saw him grab the necklace, the beautiful diamond necklace, rip it from Caroline's neck. Saw his hand flash forward again, heard the noise as his fist cracked against Caroline's face. Heard her scream. And Jack threw himself upward now. He had to move. He had to. The pain sliced through him. It rocked his head back and he saw a flash of light. He knew there was no light like that, not in this room, it had to be pain that was blinding him, but he could fight the pain, he had to fight the pain, so he kept going and his arms found flesh, he knocked the robber back, he was sure he did that. And then there was an explosion. Loud. Right inside his head. And there was more pain. A new pain. It frightened him. Then there was another explosion. This one quieter. And a third, immediately after. Quieter still.
And then his fear was gone because suddenly there was no pain. Just a softness. Like some sort of pleasant dream. And no more blinding light. Instead, a gentle white cloud. He heard Caroline again. Why was she screaming? It was over now, wasn't it? There was nothing to be frightened about. There was no more pain.
He reached for her, to show her that it was all right. To show her that she was safe. But he couldn't seem to grab hold of her. She seemed to melt away from him.
Now he felt something strange. It was as if something was seeping out of him. He couldn't tell what it was. It felt good, though, that's what was so strange. He knew it was bad but it felt so very, very good.
And suddenly he knew what it was that was escaping from inside of him. What it was that was leaving, rushing away in a flood now, never to return.
It was his life itself that was deserting him.
He heard one last thing as he slid limply onto the floor. One final explosion. This one didn't frighten him at all. It was too distant. Too quiet. So he figured he had to be wrong. It wasn't an explosion. It was just a dream.
Just a nice, quiet, painless dream.
In his dream Jack reached again for Caroline. But she was gone. Jack closed his eyes.
And the dream took him into a deep, still, never-ending darkness.
TEN
Okay, everybody. It's time to put our Humpty Dumpty back together again. He's lost four liters of blood, mostly in the pelvis and hip. If we're going to keep him alive, first thing we've got to do is keep his fluids replenished. We're going to make the switch from the plasma expanders and saline tubes to the large bore. Now! This mother needs some blood and fast. He's leaking all over the fucking place."
Those were the last words spoken for the next several minutes while the large bore tubes replaced the smaller emergency tubes that had been frantically administered by the guys in the ambulance. Bigger catheters were sutured expertly into the arteries and neck. It was like a circle of serious and flawless quilters doing repair work on a worthless and torn rug. Hands moved nimbly up and down, weaving almost in unison, sealing the lifelines into place. Once the stitching was done, the catheters were hooked up to IV's and soon blood was flowing back into the unmoving body instead of just out.
The room was awash in the blood that had escaped, as were the doctors and nurses flocked around the table. The lead surgeon, Dr. Harold Solomon, shrugged his left shoulder up to wipe a splash of reddish brown from his cheek. He took a long, deep breath, exhaled through his nose as an athlete might, about to expend one last great burst of energy, and spoke quietly, quickly, and emotionlessly to the now still room. He could have been a dock foreman detailing cargo contents and shifts for union members.
"All right. We've got multiple gunshot wounds. One shot took out the right pelvis. Another the right hip. The third got the left knee. In the hip we've got a high-velocity fracture. We're gonna put in a reconstructive plate. Nothing unusual, we've all done it before. The pelvis is potentially life-threatening. We've got a communuted superior rami fracture with extension into the iliac wing. The bullet hit in the midpelvis and, besides shattering the bone, it's screwed up a lot of other things. The most crucial is that the bladder's been ruptured and that's where we've got the massive bleeding. We're going to work there first because, frankly, I don't know if he's gonna survive it, so why waste everything else. For the knee, there's a super condular fracture of the left femur. If he's still around, we'll do a similar type of reconstruction at the hip with plates and screws. All set?"
They were.
The initial surgery took eight hours and forty minutes.
The first step was to build an external fixater for the pelvis. It looked like an old-fashioned toy Erector set, a complex layering of pipes, joints, and hinges. It was a means of both elevating the pelvis – propping it up – and preventing it from splintering completely. Its essential function was to provide enough room for the bladder surgeon to go in and repair the punctured organ. If the external fixater didn't hold, the patient was dead.
The group hovering over the patient were remarkably relaxed and casual. As they worked, a stream of chatter replaced the initial quiet. There were questions about the Redskins front line and the sexual orientation of an orthopedic nurse who was not present for this surgery and there were complaints about the new vending machines in the cafeteria – there was general agreement that the hot whipped mocha concoction tasted like a combination of chalk and urine. This part of the surgical procedure was no different from the way a master carpenter put up shelves. It was done confidently, skillfully, and purely mechanically, with no thought of error. There was no science involved and zero room for interpretation. Once the decisions were made on how to proceed, this was hammer-and-nails stuff, no more emotionally involving than gluing a broken piece of china back together. The pride came from how seamlessly the pieces were restored.
When the external fixater was in place and stable, the bladder surgeon, Dr. Mugg, moved in for his turn. He was not the most popular person in the local medical community. He tended to lecture while he worked – his nickname in the halls was Dr. Smug – and several months ago he'd managed to patent a particular technique of suturing. No other surgeon in the country could now use this method without paying him a substantial royalty on each operation. As a result, Dr. Smug was not only more arrogant than ever, he was driving a new Ferrari and buying a six-bedroom weekend house on the Maryland shore. But his hands moved smoothly and surely, and however much his mouth motored, his eyes never wavered. In just over two and a half hours, Dr. Mugg turned his back on the patient and said, "It's as good as it gets. It'll take about a week to heal, then we can go back in and do an open reduction and internal fixation. He's one lucky bastard that I was in town." Without saying anything else, he left the room. The abdomen and bladder were, for the moment, whole and stable.
Now it was time for the orthopedic traumatologist, Dr. Solomon, to step back up to the table and begin to reconstruct the hip.
The bullet had completely reshaped the bone. At first, Dr. Solomon thought it might be necessary to do a replacement, but enough of the original structure around the acetabulum of the hipbone had survived so that a combination of plates and screws would suffice.
The doctor had, before entering medical school, considered becoming an architect. He was a visual person and also tended to concentrate on the way things functioned. So when he looked at an object, his mind would take him below the surface; he concentrated on structure, viewing most things as blueprints. This vaguely Platonic overview – he more often than not saw the way a thing worked rather than the thing itself – not only helped him focus when operating, it kept things on a much more objective basis. It allowed him to disassociate from the human element and concentrate on the structural work at hand. So while he went through the process of repairing this nearly destroyed hip, his eyes did not see the tissue he was slicing through nor the bone he was breaking and remaking. He saw, instead, a precise, neatly drawn architectural plan of the body.
Working from that plan in his mind, he drilled two holes into the head of the femur, inserted two screws, and attached a reconstructive plate that spanned the entire fracture. When the plate was finally in place and immovable, he looked up to see the admiring eyes of his coworkers. The blueprint faded from his mind and the reality intruded. He saw the patient, immobile on the operating table. He wondered when he'd get the details of the shooting, began to imagine the scenario that had led to this kind of destruction, then immediately shook the thoughts out of his head. It was no time to personalize. The left knee still had to be reconstructed.
Although Dr. Solomon had been operating for almost twelve hours that day, there was no hint of exhaustion in his body or his mind. So, with a blueprint of the new area firmly in place, he again began drilling, this time into the expanded distal end of the femur that articulated with the tibia. When that was done, more screws were inserted and another reconstructive plate was attached.
At 6:35 in the morning, the operating team was done.
One nurse had to rush immediately into another surgery – a misaimed bullet in a family feud had passed by the spinal cord of a fourteen-year-old girl. The doctors did not yet know if the cord was bruised or ripped. If bruised, the chances for complete healing were good. If ripped, the girl would never walk again.
One intern made it as far as the first chair he came to in the hospital hallway. There he sat, stretched out, and fell soundly asleep.
Dr. Solomon's first act, when leaving the emergency room, was to head to the cafeteria, put seventy-five cents into the coffee vending machine, get himself a Styrofoam cup of the godawful mocha concoction, then go to sit on the curb outside the side door of the hospital and smoke a cigarette. After fifteen minutes and a second smoke, he stood wearily and headed to his car. By that time he'd already been informed that if the patient lived through the next week – a fifty-fifty chance at best – and the bladder healed properly, Dr. Mugg would, as he'd announced, perform the open reduction and internal fixation of the bladder and then he, Dr. Solomon, would return with the patient to the operating room for a formal plating of the pelvis. That meant, literally, lining him up like a jigsaw puzzle and making sure the skeletal structure was back in the proper place. After that, a balloon would temporarily be placed inside the bladder, the patient would stay several more days in their care, until he was hemodynamically stable, and then he'd be helicoptered back to New York City and the Hospital for Special Surgery, where he would be placed under the care of his own orthopedic surgeon.
Dr. Solomon knew he would never see the patient again after that. Knew he would never find out what his life would become. That didn't particularly bother the doctor. He'd done his job. And if the man lived, the next six to twelve months of his life would be about one thing and one thing only: pain. Harold Solomon was not much interested in pain. He much preferred the contained and docile sterility of the operating room to the prolonged agony of the recuperation period. No, his job was basically over, and so was his involvement. But he did stop walking about fifty feet from his car, turn, and briskly return to the hospital. He went to the newsstand, bought the morning paper. He might never know about his patient's future but he decided he wanted to know about his past. Wanted to know what had brought him to the brink of destruction. At the very least, before he went home to his comfortable three-bedroom house with the little brick patio in the backyard and the toilet that wouldn't stop running and the neighbor who was without question a Peeping Tom and his fiancee who would most certainly be annoyed that once again he'd been out all night, Dr. Harold Solomon wanted to know whose life he'd just done his damnedest to save.
ELEVEN
Jack Keller often thought about the exact moment when he realized he had not died. It was when he heard four short and simple words. The most basic and unpoetic of questions:
"Can you hear me?"
And, yes, of course he could. It was a woman's voice, clear and sweet as could be. A tiny bit hoarse but so soothing and gentle. The voice warmed him, made him glow inside. But he didn't know who was speaking. He couldn't see her. And she sounded so far away. Who was she? That's what he remembered wondering. She seemed so nice. So familiar…
"Can you hear me?"
He thought he'd answered but maybe he hadn't. Yes, he said, I can hear you. But who are you?
"Jack, please tell me you can hear what I'm saying."
Yes, yes, yes. I said I can hear you. Why can't you hear me?
"Then just listen to me, Jack."
Why are you doing this to me? Why can't you understand what I'm saying? And even as he screamed the words, he knew the answer: Because I'm saying nothing. It's all only in my head. I'm not speaking, I'm thinking. I'm not making any noise. But why not? How can that he? What's happening?
"You're going to be all right, Jack."
That's when he recognized the voice. The wonderful voice that comforted him as strongly and physically as if it were a cool hand pressed against his feverish forehead. It was Caroline. How could he not have recognized her? And why couldn't he see her? Where was she? Where was he?
Suddenly the voice became a whisper, and it was so close by he could feel her magical breath warming his ear.
"You have to be all right, Jack. Do you understand? I need you to be all right."
He felt her holding his hand, squeezing it in hers. He couldn't feel any other part of his body, it was as if the rest of him didn't exist, but he could feel the pressure on the back of his hand, feel her thumb digging urgently into his palm.
"I love you. I love you now and I will always love you and I need you to be all right so I can show you just how much I love you."
He tried once again to answer her but he couldn't. And then he couldn't hear her anymore either. It was as if he were being covered in a thick fog. He tried to reach for her, tried to bring her back, but there was nothing there. She was gone and he was alone.
It was only much later that Jack Keller decided there were just two things that had kept him alive.
One, of course, was Caroline. Of that he was absolutely certain.
