THE NEXT DAY I ARRIVED at Janush’s office for orientation, walking down the hall in the direction of the crease in my pants, which today was straight ahead. Janush wasn’t in, but Yvonne, the secretary, was.
“Hi!” I said.
“Carumph,” she replied, pointing to her mouth. I saw she had half a piece of chocolate in the other hand, hidden behind the desk.
“Candy,” she finally managed. “You want some?”
“No, thanks,” I said, “they make me break out.”
“How about some Sanka? I got Sanka.”
“No, really. I’m fine.”
“Gary will be here in a minute. You just have a seat.”
I sat in a chair near Janush’s desk, and in sauntered a guy wearing a gold sport coat, black pants, black shirt, black tie, and black shoes. He had bright red hair combed straight forward, but the front was butch-waxed up to a point, like a gangster Woody Woodpecker. He had a pencil-thin red moustache in the middle of a pale white face. Even though he was about my age, he seemed of an earlier generation;
“Hey, how’re you doing?” he said, as if we were old acquaintances.
“Fine.”
“Ee-glosh,” said Yvonne.
“Name’s Ed Grabowski,” he said, extending his hand.
“Jim Holder.” His hand was surprisingly warm. He took the seat next to me.
“This is orientation, right?”
I told him it was. Yvonne nodded yeah.
“I look forward to this here,” he said. “This management thing is just my line of work.”
I said that was good.
“Fits right in with my plans, being around the bodies and all.”
Bodies?
“Yeah, Nancy’s old man owns Princetti’s, the funeral parlor on Cicero and a hundred and fifth. You know the place?”
I didn’t, but Yvonne was listening with interest.
“Got a hell of a good business. Three, maybe four funerals a week. It’s not bad money, you know.” He unbuttoned his coat, thrust his arms through his sleeves, and leaned back in his chair. “The old man lets me do some embalming when they get busy. I get a hundred bucks for the drain and flush,” he said with pride.
Yvonne looked down with disgust at her half-eaten chocolate.
“The old man’s gonna set me up in my own-business someday. This here’s kind of a sideline while I study undertaking. You know Merrymount Academy on Western and Ninety-seventh?”
Yvonne said she did. That was her neighborhood.
“Well, that’s the one,” he said.
We were quiet for a moment, then he leaned close and whispered, “Tell you what, though….”
Yes?
“You can make some good contacts here with the doctors. Who do you think tells them where to find a funeral director?”
“The doctor?”
“Damn right,” he said.
Janush, dressed in a blue suit, entered with a tall black-haired woman in her late twenties, whom he introduced as Barbara Stevens. He put his hand around her waist. She gave him an irritated glance, but he didn’t notice.
We followed Janush down the hall to a conference room filled with men and women, in roughly even numbers, wearing tan lab coats and plastic name tags. Most of them were fairly young. Everyone sat on folding chairs.
“First,” he said, “let’s welcome three new members to the service team. They are—stand up, Ed, attaboy—Ed Grabowski, who comes to us from Merrymount Academy, where he’s studying hospital management; Barbara Stevens, recently of City Hospital, where she worked as an assistant in Medical Records; and Jim Holder, who recently graduated from Rhineland College in Indiana. He’s young, boys and girls, but he’s willing. Now, let’s get down to business. It’s been reported that people aren’t handling the syringe disposals right. There have been two major stickings resulting in gamma globulin shots this week. Remember, please, to ask the nurses to twist off the needles with the pliers provided and dump both syringe and needle into the box. They’re putting in the needles attached, and the damned things are punching back out through the cardboard. Ellie McCarthy, the nurse on Fifteen North, got a used needle right through the palm of her hand.
“Second, make sure you get these carts out of the hall. They’re piling up by the elevators, and there’s no room to move. Arrange them up and down the hall where there’s room, and no hoarding carts and wheelchairs! You people on the surgical floors have got to stop your raiding of the medical units.”
A few of the older hands were giving each other the eye. You could tell who the hoarders were, just by their smart-assed looks.
“And you people on the evening shift,” continued Janush, “Bobby Leonardi tells me there’s been some going home early. No hitting the elevators until the stroke of midnight. Romona will speak to the issue.”
From a corner of the room came a short fat woman with gray hair pulled so tightly, it must have given her a headache. Her red lipstick aggressively overran her lips, perhaps to make them look fuller; but the effect was somewhat grotesque, as if there were blood on her mouth. She held a clipboard in one hand and a skinny cigarette in the other. This was Romona Fisk, our supervisor on the evening shift. She was never without the cigarette or clipboard, even when dancing. Standing next to Janush, she took a drag and started to talk, but it didn’t amount to much. You could tell she thought the meeting was a bore, and on the evening shift she’d run things her way.
Janush and she mumbled on for a while, and Grabowski reached over Barbara to hand me something. It was a photo of his wife, standing on the bedroom stairs in a blue negligee. The picture was pretty murky, but it looked like she had nothing on underneath. You could see the shadows of nipples under the frothy nightgown, which was the “shorty” style popular at the time. She’d recently had her hair done, and her teeth were extra-shiny because of the photographic flash; but it was an honest smile.
“Nancy,” he said with pride.
Barbara leaned over to look.
“Very nice,” I said for his sake, and for hers I added, “His wife, the former Nancy Princetti.”
“No!” she said with evident sarcasm. “Not one of the Princettis. Really?”
“That’s right. The ones and onlys.”
“Let me see that.” She took it out of my hand and held it up to the light. Romona was droning on about Food Service.
“Well,” said Ed, “what do you think?”
“She’s very pretty, Ed,” I whispered. But I was thinking, Who shows his wife in a nightgown to people he just met?
“She’s lovely,” said Barbara, “but she looks like a five-dollar whore. Next time you take a photo, why don’t you have her put some clothes on?” She said it in the sweetest, most disarming way, almost as if she were flirting.
Ed did a double take. This lady next to him seemed pretty nice, but she didn’t act like the girls back home. Maybe she was kidding him, that’s what it was. She was a kidder.
“And another thing, Ed,” she continued, “blue is not the color, simply not the color. You tell Nancy to get something else.” She patted the back of his hand and stuck her chin toward the lecture. Her authority was such, Ed felt instructed rather than insulted. He would probably go home that night with a pink nightgown for Nancy. They’d make love, and he’d pose her on the stairs for a new photograph. Barbara had changed Ed’s life for the next three weeks or so.
But she wasn’t so happy herself. She’d never had the children she wanted, and then her husband left. He fell in love with a woman named Sylvia, who happened to be their milkman. According to Barbara, Sylvia was ugly to the bone, but he fell in love with the uniform. They ran away to Albuquerque and lived in a trailer home, and nothing ever happened to them. That’s why Jack liked Sylvia so much. She made nothing happen, and you can depend on that. Barbara, on the other hand, made everything happen, especially to herself. She said she got a “jackalope” postcard from them now and then, showing a cowboy riding an animal that was half jackrabbit and half antelope; but there was no news to speak of. Once Jack pasted a picture of his face over the cowboy’s face and drew a speech balloon near the mouth that said, “Ha, ha!,” to show how much fun he was having. He’d been a lawyer in Chicago, but all he did in Albuquerque was sit around the trailer home and cook up his special chili.
“Oh, poo,” she said, “this is boring.” And so it was. Janush was back on the floor, talking about a form the clerks should use for visual acuity tests. I looked around the room: people were half asleep. But I wasn’t. I was having the time of my life.
The next evening I reported for work. The hours were four until midnight, and when I pulled up near the hospital, parking spaces were easy to get. Everyone else in the world was headed in the other direction, looking tense and driving crazy. They flowed north on Lake Shore Drive, thick as mud, while only a handful of cars headed south toward the Loop. It was like free-falling. The sensation was giddy and happy, but there was also the feeling of everything blowing past your ears at high speed.
Romona Fisk held forth from an office near the sixth-floor elevator. To my surprise, it had no windows, and the room was intensely hot. A small squat fan sat in the corner making white noise, a dull drone that went on like a headache. She had her elbows on the desk, a cigarette held in both clasped hands. The others in the room were Ed and Barbara. It was Romona’s job to break us in.
“Hey!” said Ed, giving me the “bang, you’re dead” sign with his thumb and index finger. Barbara said hello with her dimples. Romona opened the palm of one hand by way of greeting. Otherwise, she didn’t move, since her main principle was the conservation of force. After all, this was the evening shift, and things went slower. Let the rest of the world bang into each other. It was those on the evening shift who sanely held it all together.
Her first task was to check in the clerks, but she did it without moving. They came by the office. If somebody was missing, she’d have the clerk on one unit cover the other one, too. They rightfully hated this practice, and sometimes we would take up the slack ourselves. There was a clerk missing on one of my stations, Six South, but the clerk on Six North said she would handle it, to my great relief.
Romona took us on the two-dollar tour of the hospital, pointing at things of interest with her lit cigarette. We went past Housekeeping, Maintenance, Transportation, Medical Records, Admitting, and even X-Ray. We saw huge stainless-steel pots of mashed potatoes being churned in Food Service, and got special permission to visit the second floor, where Surgery was located. In a cold blue-tiled hallway, we stood peering through a window at a brain surgery in progress, in spite of the late hour. It was surprisingly informal. The surgeon seemed to be telling jokes, because he waved his instruments around a lot, and the nurses were laughing. At one point, he jumped down from his stool and did a little dance in the middle of the floor. Our view of the brain was obstructed. Ed was disappointed.
When the tour was over, Romona dropped us each off at our stations and introduced us to some of the staff. Then she went to her office, saying she’d see us in the cafeteria around six P.M.
My stations were all those on the fifth, sixth, and seventh floors, including Intensive Care, Pediatrics, Orthopedics, and two large general medical and surgical units, one of which was “Social Service.” This meant the people on the unit were all poor, and the state or nobody at all was paying the bill. All the equipment on Social Service, or Six South, was cheap, borrowed, or old. The beds were old wooden ones from the 1930s, with stiff hand cranks. The other units had new electric beds that did everything but the breakfast dishes, but the rooms on Social Service looked like mill-town tenements. They were also very full, six beds to a standard room. Since the sixth floor was also the lowest floor with regular patients, there was some symbolism to where the poorer patients were placed. Wealthy patients were usually given rooms on the top floor of Metropolitan or on the executive diagnostic unit, Fifteen South, where people from the big corporations went for three days of testing each year, mainly for ulcers and heart disease. These rooms were all private and had elegant furnishings. The hallways were kept in semi-darkness after dinner, and the nurses seemed to walk on cushions, noiselessly. But on Six South, there were no easy graces. All was public and loud, with clattering carts, screaming nurses, and nursing aides who could rip off your jaw just for the recreation.
I walked from one unit to another, trying to look as though I had some role. Finally I headed back to my office, which was smaller than Romona’s and even less well situated. Actually, it was a former storage room, about six by eight, with ceramic tile walls and no windows. I tapped my fingers on top of the desk for a while, looked through the drawers, which were mostly empty, and went back into the hall.
There stood Robert Sage. He looked like Frankenstein’s monster after three years on a diet. Two purple scars, with marks where stitches had been, ran the length of his scalp, and the hair had not grown in. His color was yellow, and his eyes were dead, but he smoked a cigarette and strolled around in an old woollen robe. As he passed by like a creature from Night of the Living Dead, I saw a note on his back: “My name is Robert Sage. Please return me to Six South”
“Lobotomy,” said Betty Marder, one of the nurses.
“They still do them?” I asked.
“No law against it. In fact,” she said, “the state of Illinois ordered this one. He couldn’t stop beating his wife, he set fire to the house, and the kids are wards of the state. You should see the chart. It’s amazing.”
She pointed to a rack of metal charts. The patient’s name was taped to the front of each chart, and they were arranged by room number. The station clerk, whose name was Ruth, had a bunch of them piled in front of her, transcribing doctor’s orders. The doctors indicated when this was needed by slipping a pink piece of cardboard into the chart.
“What’s more,” said the nurse, “they gave his wife one, too. She’s up on Eight South, in about the same condition.”
“Why up there? Why not give them a double room?”
“Insurance, what else? You just take a look at the chart,” she said and walked briskly down the hall, an enema bag held high in her hand.
For the first time, I entered the nursing station, and Ruth, the black station clerk, gave me an evil look.
“Whatchu doing in here?” she said.
“I need the chart of Robert Sage,” I replied. “Do you have it?”
“You’re not gone be looking in these charts,” she said, giving what I hoped was her sternest look.
“Oh, yes, I am,” I said, picking up the nearest one. Thank God, at least it was the right one.
“Romona’s gonna hear ʼbout this,” she said, wagging a finger.
“Yes,” I said, “but you work for me, and Betty said I could look at the chart.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” she said. “If Betty says so, you can do it. Just make sure you put it back where you got it.”
The new management program, which hired mostly college kids and other misfits, didn’t sit well with the nurses, especially the supervisors, who saw their own roles threatened. Nurses ran hospitals, by God, nurses and doctors. Ruth thought that way, too: besides, she had been passed over for promotion when they started the program.
I took the chart to the back of the station and sat on a chair. The history and progress notes, on lined paper, told the story. After several years of odd behavior, including tattooing his penis with the picture of a whale and setting fire to the neighborhood cats, Sage had brought on the slow wrath of the state, which made the lobotomy decision. Drugs and shock treatments hadn’t worked, and he had a green card, so the state would cover his expenses. Since his wife was also crazy (made crazy, perhaps, by him), they’d ordered one for her, too. But her financial situation was different. Through her father, Ellen Sage had insurance, which meant she could stay on the neurological unit. After the Sages recovered, the social worker planned to have them live together again, like Adam and Eve in the garden. The main problem was who would do the cooking.
“This is a hoot,” I said.
“Mind your own business,” said Ruth.
Betty Marder came by and shrugged.
“I thought lobotomies went out with dungeons,” I told her.
“Believe me,” she said, “he’s happier now. Just look at the guy.”
There he was again, leaning on his elbows at the tall nursing station desk.
“Cigarette,” he said, pointing at his mouth.
“Not now,” said Betty in a slightly loud voice, as if he couldn’t hear. “You have cigarette later, before you go to bed.”
“Heap big cigarette, ugh!” said Ruth, which got her a punch in the shoulder from Betty.
“I keep all his cigarettes here,” she said, taking a set of keys from her pocket and opening a drawer at the back of the station. There were two or three boxes of very small vials, each with a different color-coding, and a pack of Pall Malls.
“Narcotics. This one here is morphine,” she said, holding up one of the vials and flicking it with her finger. “It’ll cure whatever ails you.”
“And then some,” said Ruth, as if she knew.
“Narcotics,” repeated Robert Sage, pronouncing the word perfectly.
The nurse put the vial on the desk and locked the drawer again. Then she reached onto a shelf and pulled down a disposable syringe and needle, each in its own paper wrapping. After assembling the two, she snapped off the head of the vial, removed the plastic shield from the needle, and sucked the watery liquid into the syringe. All of us watched with fascination.
“Me,” said the patient from 601, pointing.
“No, not me,” said Betty, sticking out her chin. “You have a cigarette later.”
“Later,” he said.
“You give me now,” said Ruth, holding out her arm and spanking the vein. “Make Ruth feel good.”
“This is for Mr. Johnson, fool,” said Betty. “Cancer give much pain.”
There was a light on down the hall where somebody needed help, and the room number on the chart indicated it was William Johnson’s. The Kardex, which listed each patient’s drug and treatment regimen, said he could have morphine every four hours. More often might kill him, and only the disease itself was allowed to do that. A woman stood outside Mr. Johnson’s room, looking down the hall at us. Her arms were folded, and she looked impatient.
“Pain,” said Robert Sage, pointing at his head.
“No pain,” said Betty Marder, already halfway down the hall, holding the syringe.
A failure of technology can result in acts of kindness. Years ago, the hospital had installed an intercom system so the nurses could talk to the patients directly and not have to walk to the room. Being the first of its kind, it didn’t work well, so the nurses forgot about it. A long panel of lights and switches that looked pretty antique rested at the front of the station, between two sections of charts. Everyone ignored them, watching instead for lights above the doors of the rooms. This was nicer for the patient, since it meant more contact with the staff, but it also meant more steps for the nurses and aides. They had to walk to the room, find out what the patient wanted, return to the station to get it, and then go back to the room. On a given evening, a nurse would walk about twenty-five miles. But the sheer exertion of answering all the lights sometimes had the opposite effect: in the absence of the nurse, aides would sit at the station talking while the halls were lit up like Christmas trees. While Betty was taking care of Mr. Johnson, three lights were shining on the other corridor.
Robert Sage still stood congenially at the desk, a Mona Lisa smile on his face. He reached over, picked up a chart, and opened it, as if to read.
“Hey,” I said, “you can’t read that.”
“He shore can’t,” said Ruth, “that’s why we let him do it,” and then, under her breath, she said, “Stupid honky.”
“Honky!” Robert Sage said brightly.
“You damn, right!” said Ruth, giving a square-toothed smile.
Ed and Barbara walked around the corner.
“How’s it going, my man?” said Ed. “You ready to eat?”
“I hear the meat loaf is simply divine,” said Barbara.
“Yum,” I said and joined them.
We left Robert Sage to his own devices, flipping through the medical chart with the appearance of understanding.
“Who was that?” asked Barbara.
“Dr. Robert Sage,” I said, “who sees through stone.”
“Huh?” said Ed, hitting the down elevator.
“The wisest of the wise,” I said, “and the happiest man in the world.”
“Except for you, Ed,” said Barbara, giving him a punch on the shoulder. He blushed, because he didn’t know what else to do.
Romona joined us in the cafeteria. She was halfway through a story about her son, the real-estate failure, when the gravel voice of a woman came over the loudspeaker system: “Dr. Blue! Room 621, Six South. Dr. Blue, Room 621, Six South.” It was repeated several times, but by the second, half of the medical staff in the cafeteria had jumped to their feet and were running from the room.
Romona was flushed and excited. “Come on!” she said. “This ought to be good. It’s your unit, Jim.”
We headed after the fleeing doctors and nurses. Some of them were standing by the second-floor elevator, impatiently staring up at the light; others were clambering up the stair-case. Romona decided on the elevator but pointed toward the stairs for the rest of us. “Not for me,” she said, pointing to her heart. “But the rest of you go that way.”
“What’s the deal?” said Ed, shrugging his shoulders.
“Somebody’s having a heart attack,” said Romona. “Hurry up, for Christ’s sake! They might need supplies.”
Ed and I headed up the stairs as fast as we could go, but Barbara was just behind us. The stairwell was filled with breathing and clatter, and we burst through the sixth-floor door dizzy with the exertion. People were streaming down the hall in white coats, interns with their pockets full of notes, residents in longer white coats, stethoscopes bouncing around their necks. We followed timidly, trying to act like we knew what we were doing. Romona wasn’t there yet, so we stood around on the other side of the hall, trying to catch a peek of the action.
It had to be Mr. Johnson. His wife was standing alone at the deep end of the hall, holding her head with both hands. Barbara walked down to her, and, after a few words, they sat down like they’d known each other for years.
Romona came lumbering up, swinging her clipboard and half out of breath, even though she’d taken the elevator. “You’re gonna love this,” she said. “Come on.” She led us into the room, where we could see what was going on. The medical personnel had filtered down to about five people called the “arrest team.” Every evening one was assembled: the medical resident on call, in this case a Dr. Rickles; the intern assigned to that unit; the anesthesiologist on duty, a Dr. Ramanujan; an EKG technician; and an inhalation therapist, who hadn’t shown up yet.
The resident stood at the head of the bed, shouting orders. Beside him, sticking a tube down Mr. Johnson’s throat, was Dr. Ramanujan, but it wasn’t going too well. She maneuvered and pushed, but the tube wouldn’t cooperate. In frustration, she threw it to the floor and reached into the drawer of a large red portable unit, called the crash cart. Every floor was supposed to have one. It was my job, in fact, to stock the thing. On it was everything needed for an emergency like this: saline solutions, various drugs for the heart, IV tubing, a portable EKG machine for monitoring the heart, and a lethal-looking device with two round metal “paddles” called the defibrillator. This was used in case the heart stopped altogether; you placed these paddles on the chest and shot electricity through the body, to shock the heart into action.
The anesthesiologist had trouble finding a tube the right size. The new one didn’t seem to work either; when she removed it from his mouth there was blood on it. If she kept this up much longer, she was going to dig the guy a new throat. The resident looked pissed.
“Give me that, God damn it,” he said, and grabbed the tube out of her hand. “I’m going down through the nose.” Tossing the old one aside, he took a thinner tube of red rubber, greased it with a packet of KY jelly, and pushed it down Mr. Johnson’s nose with slow, twisting motions. Dr. Ramanujan stood against the wall, her arms folded calmly over her chest; you could tell she was humiliated. The resident had seriously broken protocol, and there would be confrontations later. Meanwhile, Mr. Johnson, his chin thrust toward the ceiling, eyes closed, turned bluer and bluer. That’s why they called Dr. Blue over the loudspeaker—the patient turns blue, or cyanotic.
Dr. Rickles taped the tube to Mr. Johnson’s face. Then he attached a large rubber bulb, the Ambu bag, to the end of the tube and started squeezing with both hands. The bulb gave off an ugly wheezing sound, like water going down a bathtub.
“Hey, you!” said Dr. Rickles, looking at me.
“Me?” I said, pointing at my chest.
“Commere and squeeze this thing,” he commanded.
“Go!” said Romona, giving me a shove.
I tripped over some wiring and stumbled across the room, but soon I was squeezing the Ambu bag on the count of twelve per minute, as Rickles had instructed. The room was a blur of action. All the while, the intern, a sleepy-looking guy not much older than me, had been pushing with the heels of both hands, his arms stiff, his full weight thrown, on Mr. Johnson’s breastbone. You could see the chest sink under his pressure. This was keeping the heart going, while I was doing Mr. Johnson’s breathing. Betty Marder was busy setting up an IV. At the same time, the EKG technician strapped electrodes to the arms and legs and placed a brass cup on Mr. Johnson’s chest by means of a suction device. All these were attached to wires that ran into the crash cart. By now the whole area was littered with wiring, like the engine of a car. Rickles gave his attention to the EKG machine perched on top of the cart. Out of it ran a thin gray strip of paper with mountainous black marks that indicated the rhythm of the heart. It slid through his hands—where he read it like a stock report—and dangled to the floor, adding to the other debris of death. Rickles ordered drugs as the paper demanded. These were injected by the nurse right into the IV tubing, through a little rubber membrane.
The intern looked winded. By now he had both knees on the bed and was sweating over his task. “Need…some…help…here,” he panted.
“Let’s get the board in place,” said Rickles, pulling two pieces of equipment from the back of the cart. They looked like Rube Goldberg had made them. One was a highly polished piece of wood, about three feet long and two feet wide, with holes and metal collars on both ends. The other was a piece of stainless steel bent into an elongated U to which a plunger, made of red plastic the size of a fist, was attached. At the count of three everyone, including Ramanujan, lifted Mr. Johnson by the shoulders while Rickles slipped the board beneath him, level with his chest. Then we let him fall back, and I resumed his breathing. Rickles and the intern, working on each side, snapped the metal piece into the board’s metal collars. The “fist” was now located a few inches over Mr. Johnson’s breastbone. After a few adjustments, like lowering a piano stool, Rickles had it set right, and the intern, with far less effort, started pumping on the handle. The red fist pressed into his chest with powerful ease, then sprang up again.
The patient was apparently stabilizing; Rickles looked calmer. My hands began to ache, so I skipped a beat now and then to let the strength come back to them. Romona and Ed still watched intently, the best spectators a heart attack ever had.
A heavyset inhalation therapist burst through the doorway, mumbling apologies. He started in my direction, as if to take over.
Rickles was beside himself. “Get out of here, jerk,” he roared, sticking his index finger under the poor guy’s nose. “Get fucking out of here!” He pointed to the door like the evil baritone in an opera. As the therapist fled, humiliated, Romona gave him a withering look of disdain.
“Asshole!” hissed Rickles, as an afterthought. Then, after a pause, he said, “Shit!” I saw what he was referring to: the EKG was going crazy. The thin black stylus flew back and forth wildly, making marks on the paper like an angry two-year-old. You could hear the machine clicking desperately.
“Tachycardia,” said Rickles. “Everybody step back.”
When he twisted a dial on the defibrillator, a red light came on. Then he picked up the paddles; the intern, without being asked, squirted a white fluid on them that looked like runny toothpaste. This was to help conduct electricity. He placed the paddles on Mr. Johnson’s chest, each side of the heart, at a distance from each other, and looked around the bed. “Back!” he screamed at me. “Nobody touch the bed.” I backed away as far as I could, and he pushed two red buttons attached to the paddle handles. A needle on the machine swung all the way right, and Mr. Johnson’s body seemed to leap a foot off the bed, first the head and then the feet, in a kind of ripple effect. Immediately, everyone took up his old position, as if nothing had happened.
Rickles looked at the EKG again, but nothing had changed. Tachycardia, I later learned, meant the heart was totally out of control, literally collapsing upon itself. When the heart was normal, its contractions created a “sinus rhythm” on the EKG characterized by a sharp “spike” or V followed by a slurred lower-case r. These would parade confidently when everything was going right, accompanied by a small beeping sound.
“Again,” said Rickles, poised with the paddles. Everyone stepped back, and Mr. Johnson again took to the air by force of his own muscular contraction. Nothing had changed on the EKG. While we mechanically moved the blood and breath, the heart itself was giving up. Every tactic the doctor tried only created a new dilemma. Finally, the EKG stylus fluttered and stalled, and a straight black line appeared on the paper, the straightest line you’ll ever see. The moment of death spilled out of the machine and piled up on the floor. The machine hummed with eerie satisfaction in the otherwise quiet room.