Absolute Zero (14 page)

Allen, almost jaunty, swung
a black satchel bag in his left hand. It was an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, and he was on the kind of professional errand that surgeons never perform. Certainly not these days.

He was making a house call.

The bunched clouds threatened rain and the air was the color of damp cardboard. But the day was easy on his eyes. Every needle in every soggy spruce tree punched up bright as miniature green neon.

Allen crossed the Timberry Trails Hospital staff parking lot and walked toward his car, thumbed his remote, and heard the door open with a snug chirp. It was a light-paperwork morning and he had offered to sit with Hank Sommer while Jolene went into St. Paul for her first office meeting with Milton Dane so they could restart their bumpy relationship and get Hank into a full-care nursing home.

Seat belt. Ignition. He tapped the CD console as he steered his three-year-old Saab out of the lot into the tangle of midmorning traffic. He hummed and moved his shoulders experimentally along with the earthy cross-rhythms of Ladysmith Black Mombazo.

He could learn to loosen up.

Yes, he could.

Toward the end of his surgical residency at the Mayo Clinic, Allen had a recurrent fantasy that he would go into the hospital one day, walk across the red line, and never return. The red line was a literal line painted across the corridor that marked the boundary between the germ-infested world of the patients and the blue, sterile, controlled world of surgery.

In this fantasy his life would be one long procedure, and when it was over he would have operated on everyone who’d ever lived.

Allen saves the world. The End.

Now he was amending his fantasy.

Allen saves Allen.

He identified his problem and appreciated the irony. In surgery he space-walked on a tether of pure clinical knowledge. He manipulated precision instruments to fix the broken parts of the people who lay motionless under his hands. But when he took off the blue clothing and stepped back across the red line he returned to earth and was warped by G’s. By the time he reached the sidewalk he was a fallen medical astronaut. He and the patients had traded places. On the street, he was the one anesthetized. Numb to the world.

Since Hank’s accident he was obsessed with learning how to leave his work brain in the OR and just go out and live. And he was on his way to take his daily dose of the risky treatment he had prescribed for himself.

In a few minutes he’d cleared the traffic lights and was streaking down a secondary road between fields of standing corn. Beyond the corn, the tree lines hovered in a damp Impressionist mist. The chlorophyl dipstick was way down, the carotene was up, and the leaf change was in full glory.

Then he rounded a turn and his pastoral vision disappeared as the Timberry development blob munched its way through the woods, vomiting out rib cages of blond timber and farting out concrete cul-de-sacs.

He had joined the Timberry Medical Group to escape this very congestion. He only had to park his car once a day. He could walk from the clinic to the hospital, and to the health club. Some docs he knew had to commute all over the whole Minneapolis/St. Paul metro to three of four different hospitals a day.

Allen veered and accelerated past a queue of cars lined up for a left turn. Too many people were moving in. On his right, bulldozers scuttled like maggots on the remains of the forest and the fields. Lowball Mexican carpenter crews banged away, roughing in more new homes.

He disdained traffic. They should have a two-tiered road system, he mused—one for busy professionals and another for the patients to play bumper cars.

Hank Sommer’s house sat back from the road on a bluff over the St. Croix River behind a screen of two-hundred-year-old white pines. From the road it looked like a small lake cabin, but as Allen wound down the serpentine driveway between the thick tree trunks the house revealed itself stage by stage in levels that cascaded down the bluff.

Hidden, subtle; quirks that Hank appreciated and Allen did not.

The weather-streaked cedar-plank walls and the rough shake roof were silver-dark, as were the thickets of frost-tortured ferns and hosta that clogged the walks of liver-colored cobbles. Canadian hemlock and Japanese yew grew in the shade like prickly green shadows. That was Hank for you, drawn to shadow as the better part of light.

Allen would cut it all down. Let in some light. Put in a tennis court.

Earl Garf’s boxy green Chevy van sat like a guard dog in the turnaround in front of the garage. Allen parked behind the van, got out, and noted a bubbling of rust along the driver’s side of the van’s rocker panels. He was expected, so Earl would stay in the basement, out of sight until summoned to drive Jolene into town. But he’d make enough noise to intrude, to let Allen know he wasn’t far away. That had been the daily drill every time he’d checked in on Hank since they’d foolishly brought him home.

Allen mounted the simple brick porch and pressed the bell.

Jolene opened the door and Allen sniffed. The secondhand smoke of Hank’s Camel straights still lingered inside the house.

Seeing her, he wanted to take her all at once, like medicine. Like tonic. But he controlled himself and disguised his disappointment at the way she had renounced makeup and shorn her long hair. He was used to the suffering look that bleached the faces of families of terminal patients. But he didn’t like seeing it on her.

This morning, fresh from the shower, she wore gray sweatpants and a blue, armless T-shirt. It was very warm in the house so she was barefooted.

“Hello, Allen,” she said, very friendly.

“How’re you doing, Jo.” His eyes flew to the firm white magnets of her bare upper arms. Veered away.

She merely nodded, letting the weary smile play across her lips as she took his coat. He kicked off his shoes as she hung his coat in the hall closet, and as she turned back to him he was minutely aware of the entire volume of her body, the air it displaced and the smooth way it moved. She was all surface, image.

It occurred to him that he could only visualize the interior of anesthetized draped bodies on an operating table. He could not see past the surface of moving bodies. This insight bothered him slightly.

“I really appreciate this,” she said.

“No trouble at all,” Allen said.

As usual there was no mention of Earl down in the basement.

She led him through the living room. He approved of the way the house was a little cleaner every time he visited. More of Hank’s clutter had been pruned and removed to the basement and the garage.

Seeing the light filter into the house through the slats of heavy wooden Venetian blinds, and the black Bakelite plastic rotary phone on the living room desk, Allen understood that Sommer had been born twenty years too late. On more than one occasion, he had heard Hank quip that he would have liked to jump into Normandy with the Airborne and kill Germans, but he was only two years old at the time. Spiritually, Hank belonged in the tar pits with the generation of blue-collar smokers who’d fought in World War II.

They went through the kitchen and down the circular stairway. “The canoe guide called,” Jolene said. “He’s bringing down Hank’s truck this afternoon.”

“Broker,” Allen nodded. “He’s a good guy. Doesn’t say much.”

“I’d completely forgotten about leaving it up there.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not, it’s a detail. Details are important.”

“Yes, they are. For want of a nail,” Allen recited.

She stopped and cocked her head. Allen explained, loving the bare slate of her face, “It’s an old saying, from a poem. ‘For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of the battle the kingdom was lost.’ ”

She nodded, filed it away, and they resumed moving through the master bedroom, past the open door of the bathroom where the mirror was still beaded with the moisture of her shower. The king-size sleigh bed looked like it hadn’t been slept in for a week.

Then they turned into the spacious studio where Hank Sommer’s loose body was arranged on a cranked-up hospital bed. Allen startled at a flurry of gray movement on Hank’s lap.

“Just the cat. She likes to curl on his stomach,” Jolene said.

Allen watched the gray, short-haired animal dart from the room. He disliked cats and he hated surprises, so he especially hated this cat’s name: Ambush.

Hank wore a baggy blue shift and as they entered the room his eyes lurched back and forth. His hands clenched up, strangled invisible tormentors, and fell down.

Allen smiled tightly at the narrow single bed at the foot of the hospital bed where Jolene kept vigil. She had never been this devoted to Hank when he was whole. Now she kept to the care schedule like a martyr, and he had a real worry she’d hurt her back, moving him through the turning and ROM exercises.

It was more denial. Like the radio and TV and the vase of fresh flowers that sat next to the bed and that she changed every other day. Some days she tuned the boom box to his favorite oldies station. On other days it was C-SPAN or the History Channel.

It annoyed Allen the way she clung to hope.

A diagram of instructions for turning and feeding was taped to the wall. She’d set up a regular baby-changing station on a cart next to the bed. Diapers, baby wipes, oil, talc, Desitin for rash. The most ironic of her makeshift innovations was the baby monitor with speakers positioned throughout the house.

Her hand drifted up and touched his forearm, and Allen felt a jolt of excitement. It curdled to pique when she said, “He always does that when I come in, like he’s looking at me.”

“Random eye movement; he blinks, he drools, he grunts. It doesn’t mean anything,” Allen said stiffly.

“Well,” Jolene said, “sometimes I come into the room and his eyes pick me up.” She approached Hank’s bed, stopped at a distance of one foot, and stared into him like he was a department store window.

Allen’s face flushed slightly. He folded his arms tightly across his chest and kept his voice low and under taut control. He gave it to her straight and clinical, and then some.

“We had the best man from HCMC neurology evaluate him. He found ‘no visual pursuit.’ That means his eyes cannot fix and follow an object. Diagnosis: persistent vegetative state. We can run CAT scans, MRI’s, EEG’s; they will probably show brain shrinkage.”

Jolene pointed. “Look, he did it again.”

Allen went on, a little heated. “The eye movement is a primitive auditory response, just electricity firing down in his brain stem. It’s not human, it’s reptile. Remember what the neurologist told you—the diving-seal syndrome.” Allen paused, visualizing the image of Hank plunging into blacker and blacker arctic depths. “The deeper the seal goes, the more nonessential physical systems it shuts down.”

Jolene wrinkled her nose.

“Look, I, ah . . .” Allen stammered. Immediately he recovered, overcompensating with a technical barrage: “When Hank’s body reached a crisis it had to choose between supplying oxygen to his brain or to his core organs—the heart and lungs. Peripheral functions lose to core functions. Unfortunately, in that scenario, the cerebral cortex is a peripheral function. And brain cells die within four to six minutes without oxygen. So along with consciousness, the voluntary motor fibers that control the face, the arms, and legs were wiped out. The involuntary muscles continue to function, intercostal muscles and the diaphragm survive to support the lungs which powers the heart.”

“All I know is that he looks at me,” she said as she went to the bed and fluffed the pillow behind Hank’s head. As she stepped back she fingered his thick hair. “Okay. I fed him and changed him. He doesn’t need turning for two hours.”

“I’ll be just fine,” Allen said.

“Well, I have to get dressed.”

Out of habit, Allen threw back Hank’s gown and checked the incision. There was no sign of infection, it was healing normally. As was the feeding-tube insertion. Then he opened his bag, removed a blood-pressure cuff and a stethoscope, took Hank’s blood pressure, and listened to his lungs. The vital signs were regular. One hell of a resilient lizard fought for life within Hank’s human husk.

Then he took a pencil light from his shirt pocket and moved it back and forth in front of Hank’s eyes, which blinked rapidly as the pupils tightened normally to the light. Allen dismissed this lizard reaction, more attuned to the rustle of material on skin and the lily scent of body lotion coming through the open doorway to the bedroom that adjoined the studio.

Hank’s blue flotsam eyes sloshed from one side of his head to the other. His hands spasmed, clenched, and dropped. Just the lizard again, some nerve pathway twitching.

Allen heard heels strike hardwood. She stood in the doorway wearing a simple gray dress, panty hose, and half-inch heels. The white-faced widow.

“I’m not sure exactly when I’ll be back. Milt mentioned having lunch after we meet.”

“Go,” Allen said. “You need to get out of the house.”

She turned and disappeared and Allen overheard some muted conversation as Earl ascended, troll-like, from the basement. The door closed and Earl’s van started, and a moment later Allen heard the tires spit gravel against the tree trunks as he swerved down the long, twisting driveway.

In the more immediate vicinity he focused on the music playing in the background: Bob Dylan singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Allen walked to the radio and punched the off button.

They were alone.

Not they. It was a curious gray area. The definitions were inexact. Hank was more an
it
. Legally,
he
was dead. Clinically,
it
was alive.

He walked up to the bed and—Jesus—a needle of pain pierced his right ankle and snagged in his sock. Allen lurched back and kicked at the husky gray fur ball. The goddamn cat had snuck back in the room and had been hiding under the bed and had lashed out a paw.

The cat evaded the kick, which infuriated Allen who aimed another powerful kick. Missed. The animal skittered in a scramble of claws on the polished oak flooring and disappeared into the hall.