An hour later Joe walked into room 419 in the recovery wing.
“Ted, hi. How are you feeling?”
“Ha. Like my rib cage was wrenched open and my sternum was cracked. Oh, yeah, and my arteries were rearranged, but I’m still breathing. Watch your cholesterol is my advice to you. Please have a seat, Joe.”
Joe said, “I have a little gift for you. I think it’s going to have to wait until they let you out of here.”
“Hey,” said Scislowski, examining the bottle. “Channing Winery Private Reserve Cab. I’m going to save that for a special occasion. Like the first night I’m home. My wife and I are going to drink to poor Ray.”
Joe pulled up the offered seat and told Scislowski that he felt terrible that Ray had died, that Ray’s son was inconsolable.
He said, “Dr. Daniel Perkins was your surgeon?”
“Sure. One of a couple or so in the operating room. You know, what I wanted to tell you is that I had an out-of-body experience.”
Joe said, “Really. I want to hear all about it.”
“Okay, because it was amazing. I’m in the operating room, I guess unconscious. And then I was up above the operating table, my back to the ceiling, and I was watching the operation. You’ve heard these stories before, haven’t you? Patient dies and he hears what the people in the operating room are saying?”
Joe leaned in, said, “Ted, you’re saying you died?”
“I’m not just saying it. Dr. Perkins told me. My heart stopped. I was officially dead. Yeah, believe it. I watched the heart-lung bypass machine squeeze my heart. They were listening to classical music, talking over the violins.
“I was in a state of…I don’t know what else to call it but wonder. Or grace. I could see and hear everything, including the flat line on the monitor. Then here they come, regular beeps. My heart beating in my chest. A nurse says, ‘He’s back.’ I wake up in the recovery room. What do you think of that?”
“Damned good story, Ted.”
“And all true.” Scislowski laughed.
Joe laughed with him. It felt great to be in the presence of a man so happy to be alive. He said, “So, Ted, Dr. Perkins brought you back to life?”
“God, I love that man. I’m only sixty-three. I have a lot to live for.”
“Ted, Ray was a good friend when I was in school with Dave, and I feel awful that he died. Were you with him when he passed away?”
“I’m sure I was,” said Scislowski, “but I was knocked out, so I’d get sleep before my operation. I very dimly remember a nurse calling, ‘Mr. Channing. Mr. Channing.’ I opened my eyes and called out to Ray, but she had closed the curtain. There was some fussing going on, as if she wasn’t supposed to be there, and then the nurse and an orderly, I think, wheeled him out. I said, ‘So long, Ray.’”
Joe wanted to ask who else was in the operating room when Ted Scislowski came back to life, and what nurse and what orderly had wheeled Ray Channing’s body out of the room, but it felt wrong to do that. As if he were questioning Scislowski’s memory.
And then he did it anyway.
Scislowski said, “I heard voices but didn’t see any faces when they rolled Ray’s gurney out of the room. I do remember the sheet over his face. Now, when I was in the OR, I was just watching Dr. Perkins. Everyone was wearing gowns and masks, but I know Daniel. He’s been my doctor for ten years. Joe, why do you ask?”
“Favor to Dave. He’s grief stricken.”
The two men talked for another few minutes about Ted’s upcoming stay at rehab and how long Joe would remain in Napa. They were making small talk about their families when a nurse came into the room with Ted’s medication.
Joe made a mental note of the nurse’s name, and after she left, Joe put his card on Ted’s nightstand and shook his hand good-bye.
He got into the elevator thinking of Scislowski saying, “God, I love that man,” and continued thinking about Ted Scislowski’s story about his life-and-death-and-life operation.
Dr. Perkins, the nice white-haired doctor with the metal-framed glasses and bright-red tie, had opened Ted Scislowski’s chest, cut away the arteries that had led to his heart attack, and effectively, scientifically killed his patient. After that, he’d reconnected the arteries in a medically precise procedure and, using a heart-lung bypass machine in an almighty-God kind of way, palpated his patient’s heart and brought him back to life.
Joe had a new thought about Perkins. If he was a killer, he was a very, very smart one.