Absolute Zero (8 page)

Booop . . . Booop . . . Booop.

“Shit! Call a code. He’s arrested in here!” Amy yelled as she ran through the door into the recovery room. Broker was right behind her and he saw Sommer lying rigid with his eyes shut, his lips and cheeks turning the blue-gray color of the glacier water, and from then on it only got worse.

“Christ, he’s in V fib! What the fuck happened?” Allen rushed into the room and his dazed eyes swept the monitor and then fixed on Sommer’s face.

“I don’t know. He came out clean in the OR. He was fighting the tube. Vitals were fine, train of four. Now . . . he bradied on me,” Amy shouted back as she moved behind Sommer, clamped his face in both her hands.

“What the . . . ?” blurted Dr. Brecht, coming through the door.

“He’s in bradycardia. Bag him, start CPR,” Allen said, crossing his hands over Sommer’s sternum. Immediately Brecht reached for the defibrillator that sat on the cluttered crash cart.

With one eye on the monitor screen where a low, bumpy line traced the failing heartbeat, Amy thrust Sommer’s jaw up, opened his mouth, and swept a finger in his throat. He hadn’t swallowed his tongue. “ABC’s, ABC’s,” she chanted under her breath. “Oxygen.” She grabbed the oxygen mask as Brecht checked the defibrillator cords and unwound the paddles. Amy yanked the mask over Sommer’s face and pumped the balloon bellows.

Allen pistoned down in a CPR rhythm and burned a question at Amy. “How long?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” Amy said between clenched teeth.

“More than four minutes?”

“I don’t know, goddammit.”

Brecht lowered the paddles and went to the cardiac monitor. “Jesus,” he said.

“What?” Allen asked.

Brecht poked a button on the monitor. An alarm began to wail and the Ely doctor erupted.
“The fucking alarm was turned off!”

“No. That’s not true . . .” Nancy protested.

“Nancy, shut up,” Amy said. And Broker, standing back against the wall out of the way, winced at the reflex of damage-control in her voice.

“Christ, Amy,” Nancy stammered, “I just went out to help with the accident case, I looked in before I went outside,” she protested. “His vitals were normal, he was talking. The monitor was set and he was fine.”

“Well, he’s not fine,” Allen muttered as he pumped down. “He’s in arrest. I want to see your charting. I want to know how much sedation he had on board.”

“I brought him out clean,” Amy declared, the gray of her eyes tightening, going steely.

“What the hell?” Mike, the administrator, lurched in the doorway.

“Get him out of here,” Brecht shouted. Shari, the paramedic, stepped in and gently but firmly crowded the horrified administrator back into the corridor. Allen and Amy stared at each other, their faces inches apart as they worked. Brecht returned to the defibrillator and held a paddle electrode in each hand.

Amy shook her head. “He’s coming back.”

But the line on the monitor was still going a bumpy boop de boop and Brecht hovered, holding the paddles like cymbals. Allen kept up the compressions.

Boop beep boop beep beep beep . . .

“Keep ventilating, he’s coming around,” Amy said as the white clay of Sommer’s chest moved. “I’m telling you, he’s breathing,” Amy insisted.

“She’s right,” Allen raised a hand in the first calm gesture since the incident started. “He’s back.”

Broker caught peeks of Sommer in the blue-clad scurry and could see the faint pink filter into his cheeks, his throat, and into his motionless, thickly muscled forearms.

Allen popped back one of Sommer’s eyelids and Nancy handed him a slim penlight. “Mid position, reactive to light. C’mon Hank, wake up, man,” Allen whispered.

Sommer lay like a grotesque doll with his smock pulled to the side and his swollen belly bulging in the harsh light. A long splash of Betadine bathed the incision and bled thick orange streaks down his hip and groin. The incision itself looked like a line of flies melted into his skin and, below the cut, his genitals were a heap of spoiled white fruit. Gently, Allen tidied the smock as the steady beep-beep-beep marked time in the silent room.

Allen swayed, regained his balance, and shot a withering stare at Amy. “I want to know all the meds he’s had in the last thirty minutes.”

“I did everything right.” Amy’s posture was firm, but her cocky, confident demeanor had deserted her, and her words came out with a dry rasp that grated into irritation. “Doctor, sit down, you’re asleep on your feet.”

“Answer the question. Any signs of recurarization?” Allen persisted.

“No, dammit,” Amy said.

Allen steadied, took a breath, exhaled, spoke in a more normal tone. “I’m sorry, he’s a friend of mine . . .” He looked at Sommer, the monitor. He rocked again. Caught himself.

Amy shook her head, disbelieving. The small room was full of sympathy but she found herself at bay, and when she spoke she was speaking to herself, not replying to Allen. “Could he have aspirated when we went after the new patient?” She shook her head, bit her lip. Thinking out loud, she muttered, “God, did I take the airway out too soon?”

Beep-beep-beep.

The doctors and nurses stood in a circle over Sommer as the room took on the acoustics of a brightly lit morgue. When Brecht broke the silence and told Nancy to wheel the snowmobile accident to X-ray, she moved like she was walking underwater. Iker appeared in front of Broker and raised his hands, questioning. Broker shook his head, exhausted. He pushed past Iker and continued down the hall away from the institutional tile, the stainless steel fixtures, the barren whiteness of it.

He shoved through the emergency room door, and paused in the garage to pull on his parka and light a cigar. Then he stepped out into the stinging snow. It was more hospitable than where he’d been.

A moment later Shari joined him. Cupping her hands expertly against the wind, she lit a filtered cigarette with a Zippo. They stood for several minutes, smoking.

“Friend of yours?” Shari asked.

“I just met him three days ago,” Broker said. “I don’t get it.” He couldn’t make it fit coming after the storm, the long paddle, the plane ride, the blizzard, the successful operation.

Shari was direct. “The nurse-anesthetist fucked up. Which is a hard call because Amy is really good.”

“How? Without the big words.”

“Who knows. The guy’s got that short, muscular neck, a receding chin, and the buckteeth. He’s an anesthetist’s nightmare. After surgery, when they take him off the gas, they remove the breathing tube and the carbon dioxide builds up in his bloodstream. That gets him breathing again. What they’re saying is his airway collapsed in the recovery room. So maybe he was breathing but still had enough residual sedation in him to come back on him and he went hypoxic.”

“Allen said . . . curare something?” Broker asked.

“Recurarization,” Shari said, nodding. “It means like reparalysis. If Amy miscalculated the amount of sedation he had on board it could have taken effect again, and he takes a spill off the steep slope of the oxygen-hemoglobin-dissociation curve. That’d do it.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. And nobody was there. He couldn’t get air. He started sliding into arrest and no one caught it. Somebody—probably Nancy, who’s working a second shift and is covering three jobs today—neglected to calibrate the monitor alarm.” She shrugged. “Cut the O’s to the brain for four minutes and the guy’s a carrot. It happens.”

Broker turned away and wandered back into the hospital where people continued to teeter on stilts of shock. Amy stood vigil in the recovery room at the head of Sommer’s bed. Brecht, Judy, and Nancy huddled a polite distance from her. It was like a wake in there, so Broker went back in the hall and saw Allen pacing, bent forward, as if he were walking uphill. Allen blinked, focused, and recognized Broker, then walked over and patted him on the shoulder. The fatigue he’d kept at bay to perform the operation now poisoned his face into a haggard nicotine-yellow, and Broker read it all in the surgeon’s hollow stare. Save the guy and then . . .

Allen attempted to smile. “I have to tell Milt. You know, he’s been asleep through all this.”

“What happens now?” Broker asked.

Allen slowly shook his head. “It depends on how long he didn’t get oxygen. He’s comatose. He could wake up in a few hours or in a few days, or it could be weeks. Or . . .” Allen pursed his lips. “Once he opens his eyes he can be evaluated by a neurologist. Until then, we’re only speculating but . . .” Allen faltered, his voice caught. “Jesus, look at him. He’s suffered some damage.”

“Some damage?” Broker repeated.

“Brain damage.”

“You mean?”

“I mean, she shouldn’t have pulled that tube so soon in the OR.”

“He was talking. They were talking. They were teasing back and forth,” protested Broker.

Allen made a weak, erasing gesture with his right hand. “I don’t know. It’s like . . .” he swatted the air, “. . . stop signs. Nobody obeys them anymore, they can’t be bothered to take the time.” A sound between a cough and a laugh rattled in his throat. “She was in a hurry, I guess.”

Then Allen continued down the hall to the nurses’ station and Broker watched him pick up the phone slowly as if the receiver were an anvil. Slowly, Allen pressed in the numbers and waited and then, as he began to talk, his facial expression collapsed inward like a piece of crumpled paper.

Standing ten feet away Broker could hear the stunned, vaguely familiar female voice protest over the phone, “No, what a minute, how could that happen? He was in the hospital, goddammit.”

It was still snowing.
But softer now, almost out of respect.

“Stop signs, huh,” mulled Dave Iker. “He’s got a point. World War Three will probably start some hot afternoon down in Minneapolis at a four-way stop.”

They were both pretty beat up.

Iker’s service belt reeked of wet leather, piled on his desk in the sheriff’s office in the Ely courthouse. They were still wearing the mismatched sweat suits from the hospital, and Iker’s purple and red sweatshirt bore the crude drawing of a bearded man holding a big grasshopper. The type underneath spelled:

ST. ERHO FESTIVAL, MENAHAGA, MINNESOTA

St. Erho was the patron saint who rid Finland of grasshoppers. Uncle Billie maintained that St. Erho’s Day, like St. Patrick’s Day, was an excuse to get drunk, because there never were grasshoppers in Finland.

Broker stared out the window at the moderating storm and it all went into a distracted glide, and he mused how lots of Finns had settled around Ely. Maybe because the lakes and forest and six months of winter reminded them of home. Or maybe their national ethic of fatalism attracted them to farm fields full of granite rocks.

Broker caught himself drifting, shook his head, and asked, “That nurse-anesthetist, Amy, she local?”

Iker nodded. “Ummm. Amy Skoda is one of the few who figured how to come back and earn a living.” He slowly raised his eyebrows. “She was asking about you, before it all went bad.”

“Skoda? She a Finlander?” Broker asked.

“Half Finnish, half Slovene; the cream of the local gene pool.” He threw an arm toward the wall where a procession of retired peace officers stared down from framed portraits. “Second picture up there. Stan Skoda’s kid.” Skoda filled the picture frame like an amiable fireplug and Broker vaguely remembered the man from hunting parties when Broker was in high school.

“Take a hike. I gotta make a call,” Iker said. The format glowing on his computer screen gave his face a lime tint as he hunched back to his chair and stared at the number jotted in his spiral notebook.

Broker nodded, got up, and went looking for the gents, as Iker reached for the phone. He had to make the duty call to Hank Sommer’s wife and explain the circumstances of the tragedy.

When Broker returned, Iker was predictably more gloomy.

“How’d it go?” Broker asked.

“She said ‘—but he was in the hospital’ three times.” Iker shook his head. “Could have been worse. That doctor, Falken, had already called and prepared her. She’s got this nice voice,” Iker said. “You know, like way down at the bottom of an air conditioner.”

Broker nodded. He knew how it worked; the phone rings and a strange cop from faraway invites a wife to take a sudden plunge to where she keeps her personal ideas about mortality.

Iker, who lived thirty miles of impassable highway to the west in Tower, then called his wife, made sure that she and the kids were all right, and explained the day’s events and how he was stranded with Phil Broker.

“So now you and your ex-copper buddy have two choices, huh?” another wife’s voice rattled in the telephone.

“Yeah, I guess.” Iker winced and held up the receiver at arm’s length. Broker heard the wife say: “You can shovel snow or get drunk.”

Iker hung up, shrugged. “What are you going to do?”

“Get a room at the Holiday Inn.”

“I got to finish filing this report. Maybe I’ll see you at The Saloon later.” Iker tossed Broker his truck keys.

Broker left the courthouse, climbed in Iker’s truck, and drove toward the Holiday Inn that overlooked Lake Shagawa at the edge of town. No way he was going to try the unplowed road to Uncle Billie’s Lodge in these conditions. Iker’s Ford Ranger barely grabbed traction in Ely.

Moving at a crawl in four-wheel low, he went over some of the medical terminology he’d heard thrown around this afternoon: Sommer had suffered a significant “anoxic insult” and was currently comatose—in a coma due to oxygen starvation to his brain precipitated by respiratory complications following surgery. The informal opinion at Miner Hospital was that Amy Skoda had underestimated the amount of sedation in his system and took him off anesthesia too early in the operating room. Perhaps, someone speculated, she’d anticipated that the surgery would take longer, not allowing for Allen’s speed and skill. Sommer’s being hypothermic may have been a factor. Whatever the precipitating events, he developed trouble breathing in the recovery room.

Nobody was there when he crashed, and the alarm on the monitor had not been set.

As he left, Broker overheard someone console Amy.
It could happen to anyone
. But it didn’t happen to anyone. It happened to Hank Sommer, the guy Broker had promised to get out of the woods. The guy he helped deliver to a warm, safe hospital where they preserved his heart and lungs and lost his brain.

Wham.

Broker hooked a frustrated fist at the steering wheel in a tantrum of flash anger, swerved, and almost lost control of the truck. Reflexively, he steered into the skid and came out of the spin.
Take deep breaths through your nose. Check yourself
.

Usually he had a much longer fuse.

The Holiday Inn was a deserted post-and-beam jungle gym with a cathedral ceiling and a bored, snow-hypnotized receptionist who smiled discreetly at Broker’s attire. He carried in the duffel he’d retrieved from the dispatch desk, took a room, and went down a stairwell, opened a door, and stepped into a limbo of clean walls, curtains, and hotel furniture that could be anywhere-USA.

And he just wanted to disappear.

But he stripped down out of habit, went to the shower, and applied soap, shampoo, shaving lather, and a razor to peel off the cold outer layer of the last twenty-four hours. He rubbed a porthole in the steamed bathroom mirror and gauged his fatigue by the redness of his eyes. He took out dry jeans, a fleece pullover, and his spare boots.

After he’d dressed, his hand moved toward the phone, thinking to call the hospital and check with Allen, who’d stayed behind to watch over Sommer and Milt. He withdrew his hand.

You don’t really know Hank Sommer
.

And it was like—all his life he’d worked the sharp end and he’d always been annoyed at the compulsion of people who couldn’t resist adding their personal embroidery to the messy edge of tragedy. Now he discovered he was not immune to this character defect.

He was dwelling on it.
If you hadn’t hassled Sommer so much during the storm he might not have pushed so hard, might not have ruptured himself.

Try again, Broker.

You
fell apart out there and an injured man had to take up the slack.

Either way, if Sommer hadn’t paddled to the max they would have dumped in the middle of the lake, not ten yards from the point. Their bodies would be stiff white logs rolling among the rocks on the leeward shore of Fraser Lake. He’d gone on a canoe trip in only fair physical condition and his strength had faltered when the chips were down.

These were ponderous thoughts to keep afloat in an ocean of fatigue, especially after the narcotic hot shower, and the bed beckoned, but so did the image of Sommer lying less than a mile away with his eyes closed, his heart beating, and his lungs sucking oxygen.

And his head full of static.

Broker lurched to his feet and grabbed his parka. Iker’s wife was right. He needed a drink.

The snow had grayed
the early afternoon enough to switch on the streetlights and it was a bad day for a drive, but Broker took one, anyway. He pushed the Ranger through the small business district and followed the flashing blue light of a county snowplow out Sheridan Street to the outskirts of town, where the plow stopped, defeated by drifts on Highway 169. Broker turned around in front of the International Wolf Center and retraced his route.

Ely was end of the road, a departure point for tourists paddling into the wilds. Things were different when Broker was a kid and spent part of his summers here. Then, the iron ore they dug up from the veins that literally ran under the town was so pure it could be welded directly on to steel.

The iron fields were so potent they interfered with radio signals, and the rattle of boxcars full of ore had competed with the buzz of seaplanes flying fishermen into the paradise of northern lakes.

The mines came to grief on the global marketplace. Miners who had landed on Iwo and Saipan were thrown out of work when the steel could be shipped in cheaper from Japan. In the late ’70’s the government annexed the lake country along the Canadian border as a wilderness preserve and banished the gasoline motor to keep the woods and water pristine. The bitter land-use controversy still flared.

Broker switched on the radio, scanned the dial until he hit WELY. “Sally, your brother wants you to stay put. He’s safe, he’s made it to town and won’t get back until this blow is over.”

WELY was one of two American radio stations licensed to transmit personal messages. The other was in the Alaskan bush. He turned off the radio and stared into the storm.

Now the school district was shrinking. Income from vacationers didn’t translate into the kind of jobs that supported families. Like his home ground on the Superior shore, another piece of his geography was being changed by ’90’s Über wealth.

Take it in stride, he told himself, keep moving, don’t look back.

Mike and Irene Broker had raised their boy to be a stoic. They had been inoculated against sentimentality by bumping up hard against the Depression and Hitler, and they’d passed the antibodies to their son. Broker understood the cultural message of his time. He’d been raised to fight Communists, and he had. He’d come home from his war refitted with a forty-gallon adrenaline tank.

So he’d joked that he’d worn a badge to feed his action jones. But the fact was, if somebody had to remain vigilant in the night so others could sleep in peaceful beds, it probably should be somebody like him.

A shape jerked at the corner of his eye and he almost wrenched the wheel—
seeing things
—an artifact of shock and fatigue, and he was back to taking deep breaths through his nose to steady down his jumpy thoughts. And he almost had to laugh—Christ, he’d come up here to get away and . . .

He just had to maintain control and forward motion and balance. He used to be good at keeping things separate and filed into their own compartments. But it wasn’t that easy to take this one in stride. He’d sprung a leak. Stuff was getting in. Stuff was getting out.

His mom—well, Mom had always worried that he had too much imagination for police work. Peel back the bark, she’d said, and he was layered and impressionable.
Like a ball of wax
, Sommer said,
things stick
.

And the things that stuck were memories from more than twenty years of cleaning up after human beings at their worst. And suddenly he swerved again, but this time it was in his head, and he was back in the middle of the argument with his wife.

And she’d said,
Oh, I see, so it’s all right for you to do it but not for me, is that it?

The memory invoked all the hoarded resentments; she still thought she was indestructible at thirty-three. She took too many chances out there and left him home to rehearse attending her funeral with their daughter Kit . . .

Right now Kit’s absence ached in his arms and he could smell her milky sweet-sour breath and her copper curls and see her chubby face that was part Rubens and part Winston Churchill, and he could hear her pure laugh that was so uncomplicated by fear. He experienced a piercing memory of her a month ago as she struggled with the physical limitations of her limited grasp and discovered that she couldn’t carry all her stuffed animals at once.

She was going on three and by the time she was four she’d experience the death of something—a cat or a dog or a hamster. She’d find and poke her first roadkill. Fearless, like her mother, she’d probably lift the maggots on a stick.

She was almost ready for
The Lion King
, which he’d screened. She’d see Mufasa trampled to death by stampeding wildebeests and watch little Simba vainly attempt to rouse his father from a permanent sleep.

Eventually, she would pose the question:
Daddy, will you die? Will Mommy die?

Will I die?

Broker parked Iker’s truck in a snowdrift in front of The Saloon on a desolate street in Ely and was in a fine mood when he pushed his way through the door, stamped off snow, and took over a table in the corner. The place was dim as a cave and sparsely populated by a few hardy snowmobilers and a storm-weary bartender and waitress.

Broker was no drinker. For a thirst-quencher he preferred lemonade on a hot day, and his only use for bar culture had been as a fertile recruiting ground for bottom-feeding snitches. He always made a point to leave drinking scenes before the lip sync went haywire and people’s expressions became dissociated from their words.

Uncharacteristically, he ordered a double Jack Daniel’s and drank half of it. He gagged, flushed with sweat, and drank the rest, then sat back and waited for the numbness.

He kept getting stuck on the inverted sequence of Sommer’s mind being suffocated inside his living body, and the image obligated him to reflect on his own fast parade of sudden death.

“Traffic,” Broker mumbled to his whiskey glass.

August. Last year, on a sticky, humming, deep-green afternoon he and his father were out for a walk by the state capitol in St. Paul. They’d paused on a freeway overpass with the domes of the capitol and the St. Paul Cathedral bracketing them north and south, and rush hour on Interstate 94 clamoring below their feet. Mike Broker at seventy-nine took long mental vacations and tripped down rabbit holes of nostalgia because in the rabbit holes he was young and doing things that mattered. That hot August afternoon, Dad had looked down at the racing cars and said, “This is what it sounds like when a lot of young people die fast and unhappy in a tight spot. Hundreds of lives go screaming by each minute.”

Dad was talking about the first hour on Omaha Beach.