Icarus. (12 page)

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.

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.

For she had returned after that first visit. Many times. Both in Virginia and in New York, after he was able to be transferred. And every time he felt her near him, he became stronger, more determined to fight whatever it was that was pinning him down and trying to smother him. When she was by his side she would hold his hand and touch his cheek, whisper to him, will him on and beg him to endure the agony because there was still so much pleasure ahead of them. To coax him into the future, she would talk about the past, about the time they'd spent together, and, although he still couldn't see her, he knew by her words that she was smiling and that she looked as beautiful as she could look, which was quite beautiful indeed.

"Do you remember the first time we made love?" she asked. And, yes, he most definitely remembered, every little detail. It was not possible to forget something so sublime, but he enjoyed listening to her tell it; the remembering made him happy, as if they were able to make love once again, after all these years, for the very first time. "I was so nervous," she went on. "But a different kind of nervous. Not a virginal nervousness, God knows, that was hardly the case, but I'd never made love with anyone when I knew it was so important. It wasn't just a date and we weren't just having sex, we were testing out the viability of our permanence. It doesn't sound very romantic, I know, but that's really what I thought, even then. And it was romantic, because somehow I knew that you were thinking the same thing. And if I didn't please you or somehow you were disappointed, well… I didn't think I'd be able to bear it. The idea that you wouldn't please me was inconceivable. I was so mad for you. Could you tell? No, probably not. Or maybe just a little. I didn't let on, at least not too much. I was afraid. Although I couldn't even tell you what I was afraid of. Maybe I was already afraid of how much I was in love with you.

"Do you remember? We went back to your dorm room. And you'd put candles all around. You'd bought a good bottle of wine. French, very ritzy. Put on Joni Mitchell. You didn't even like her, but you knew I did. And do you remember how we talked? How we knew we were there to make love? It was definitely going to happen, so there was no rush, and we just talked and talked for hours and hours. Lying on your bed, sometimes touching, sometimes not. And then there I was, lying up against you, in your arms, and we were still just talking until I kissed you. I couldn't stand it anymore; I just had to do it. Then I put your hand on my breast, I remember that. And then your hands were everywhere. So gentle. So sexy. We kissed and touched and made love and listened to Joni Mitchell and we didn't stop until sometime the next morning. I can still remember everything. Not just remember but feel. Every touch. Every kiss. It was fun, wasn't it, being young…"

Another time she came and sat and stroked him and talked about the first time she was pregnant.

"I hardly gained any weight and I know that deep down you didn't think there was really a child in there. But there was, and when I told you I thought it was time, when I was in such pain, remember how terrified you were? You kept making jokes and acting so blasй but I knew you were afraid for me, afraid it would hurt, afraid something would happen. I thought you knew right from the beginning that it had all gone wrong. And I remember you said you wished you could go through it instead because you knew I was so scared of the pain. I thought that was the sweetest thing I'd ever heard, you wanting to take my pain. And in a way you did because in the room, I can still see you, you were in such agony watching me. Here I was, trying to have this baby, and I just kept saying to you, 'It's okay, I'm fine, it's not so bad,' trying to comfort you. I can still remember your face when… when we knew. The doctor told you, spoke directly to you, and I knew it was devastating but you were staring down at me, making sure I was all right. I'd never had anyone look at me that way. I remember when I was a freshman, before I knew you, I broke my arm. Riding in Central Park. I needed an operation, had to have pins put in, kind of a big deal. And I called Mother and Daddy to tell them. I thought at least one of them would fly up to New York to, you know, take care of me. I remember, when it was time to get off the phone – by then I knew they weren't even thinking of coming up – Daddy said, 'Call us after the operation and let us know how you feel.' I didn't say anything, but I wanted to say, 'No! You call me!' But they didn't. I never had anyone who thought to call me until I met you. Only you wouldn't just call, you'd be there. And if you could, you'd even hurt for me." She was quiet for a little bit. Jack could hear her breathing. He couldn't tell if this memory had made her sad or happy or both. When she spoke again, it was with a new tenderness, but also with a quiet sense of regret. "I used to think that maybe it was right that we never had children, Jack. We were so much in love with each other, maybe we wouldn't have had enough left over for anyone else. I used to think that we had a finite amount of love in us – not just us, people, I mean. All of us. That we could use it up and when it was gone we wouldn't have enough for anything else, anyone new. When you can talk, Jack, I want you to tell me if that's true. If we're all in danger of running out of love…"