The Art of Forgetting (32 page)

              The front door was locked. Lloyd needed to open it before the paramedics arrived.

              “Give me a sec, Kaz. I’ll be right back,” Lloyd said.

              “Don’t leave me, Lloyd.”

              “I’m not leaving you. I’m right here.”

              Lloyd rushed to the front door and opened it. The skinny guy was standing half-way up the stairs. He flinched and crouched a little at the sight of Lloyd.

              “Did you call an ambulance?” Lloyd asked.

              “What, are you serious, man?” the guy said.

              Lloyd tightened his jaw and reached in his pocket for his cell phone but it wasn’t there. He cursed and ran back in the living room knocking things off the coffee table in a frenzy. He needed to find Kaz’s car keys. He’d drive him to the ER himself. He turned to look at the wall by the door. There was no key hook. He ran to the kitchen and looked around. A small copper bowl filled with coins sat on the counter next to a pile of mail. Just behind it was a key ring.

              Lloyd grabbed the keys and ran back to the front door. The skinny guy was climbing back up the steps to his apartment.

              “Hey, you!” Lloyd said. “I need your help, now!” The guy looked at Lloyd with wild eyes. “Please,” Lloyd said. With that word, the skinny guy stopped, turned and started to descend the stairs.

              Lloyd ran back to Kaz’s side. His eyes were closed, his chest rising with deep sighing breaths.

              “Kaz, we’re going for a ride.”

              “I’m too tired. Let me sleep a little.”

              “You’ll sleep later,” Lloyd said. “We have to go now.”

              The skinny guy side-stepped into the bedroom, his hands clasped together and nodded the way some people do when they enter a church after a long absence. Lloyd nodded back at him.

              “Grab his feet. I got this end,” Lloyd said.

              There was a back door to the apartment that opened onto the actual basement. A clothes washer was shaking rhythmically on a brick base with a familiar tempo: one-sixty a minute. A concrete staircase led to a door that opened onto a gravel carport. With the help of the skinny guy, Lloyd hoisted Kaz up the stairs, sat him in the front passenger seat of the faded brown Toyota Corolla and strapped him in with the flimsy seatbelt. He reclined the chair just a bit and jogged around the car, jumped into the driver’s seat and pumped the gas pedal as he turned the key in the ignition. The engine whined and coughed and finally came to life.

              He ground the gears trying to shove the shifter in reverse and skidded out of the car port. The skinny guy stood there waving, holding his pants up with his free hand as Lloyd sped off down the back alley.

              Traffic was light but damn if there weren’t a shit load of traffic lights. Most of them red.

              “I let you down, I let you down, I let you down,” Kaz kept repeating as if he were uttering some sort of mantra.

              Lloyd reached over and squeezed Kaz’s shoulder.

              “Lloyd, I think I’m dying,” Kaz said.

              “No you’re not,” Lloyd said. “I’m a doctor. I know when people are dying, and you’re sure as hell not dying. Tell me about that girl. The one from Nicaragua.”

              “Guatemala. My sweet desert bloom.”

              “Did you ask her out?” Lloyd asked.

              “I did what you said. I asked her out for coffee.”

              “And what did she say?”

              “She said she doesn’t drink coffee,” Kaz said.

              “Damn. I’m sorry.”

              “She drinks herbal tea,” Kaz said. “We went out for tea.” With his eyes still closed, Kaz exposed his teeth in a broad grin. His gums were red and swollen.

              Lloyd accelerated to beat a stale yellow light.

              “That’s great Kaz.”

              “She’s lovely, Lloyd. Too bad you didn’t meet her.”

              “I will,” Lloyd said. “You’ll introduce me, right?”

              “I’m dying Lloyd. I’m so sorry I let you down.”

              Lloyd switched lanes and pushed on the gas pedal, released it, pumped the brake pedal twice and cut back into a space in the right lane.

              “Let me hear Chopin,” Kaz said.

              Lloyd spotted a CD case in the plastic console. He dumped it on his lap as he kept driving. Keeping an eye on the road ahead of him, he popped the case open, grabbed the CD and slid it into the slot on the car stereo. A moment later, the nocturne in E flat major started playing from the tinny speakers.

              The traffic light ahead was yellow. Still yellow. Lloyd downshifted and pressed the gas pedal to the floor. The light turned red as the nose of the car entered the intersection. But he was clear across. Right on cue, a police cruiser pulled out of an alley, its emergency lights flashing. Lloyd didn’t stop. The siren came alive.

              “What’s that?” Kaz asked.

              Lloyd turned up the volume of the car stereo. This would help, Lloyd thought. A police escort. No need to stop at traffic lights anymore. At the next intersection he slowed a little but kept rolling through the red light honking the horn. As cars pulled over to the side of the street, a clear path opened in the left lane. Lloyd accelerated. A second cruiser joined the chase. The more the merrier.

              Lloyd slowed to take the right turn onto Third Avenue. The medical center was just a few blocks away, now. He could already make out the white tower of the main hospital standing out like a fat obelisk against the hazy blue sky.

              The police sirens seemed to wail with growing urgency but Lloyd knew it could only be his imagination playing tricks on him. Perception is just as fucked up as memory is. Finally, he steered sharply into the driveway to the Emergency room, the thin tires of the Corolla squealing. He pulled the car to a stop in the ambulance bay, right in front of the automatic sliding doors.

              Lloyd stepped out of the car. A loud voice said, “Stop right there and put your hands on the car!”

              Lloyd turned. A barrel chested cop with a ruddy complexion held a pistol pointed at him.

              “I’m a doctor. There’s a sick man in the car.”

              “Put your hands on the roof of the car!”

              Another cop stepped out of the second cruiser.

              “Down on the ground! Now!”

              They really need to get their act together, Lloyd thought, coordinate their orders.

              “There’s a dying man in the car,” he said. “You gonna shoot me? Go ahead. I don’t give a damn anymore.”

              Lloyd went around the front of the car and opened the passenger door. He heard one of the cops cursing with the hollow tone of defeat.

              Kaz’s lips were blue. He wasn’t breathing. Lloyd unlatched the seat belt and gave him two mouth-to-mouth rescue breaths. He placed a hand on his neck and palpated the carotid. There was a thread of a pulse. The barrel chested cop stood by the car staring at Kaz, his firearm at his side pointing to the floor.

              “Help me out, will ya?” Lloyd said.

              The cop slipped the pistol in its holster and reached for Kaz’s legs. They carried him through the automatic doors. There was a gurney just inside the ER entrance. They heaved Kaz onto the gurney. By now Kaz’s entire face was blue. Lloyd gave him two more rescue breaths. He felt for a pulse. There was none.

              Lloyd yelled, “Code Blue!” He pulled out a plastic backboard from under the gurney, slid it under Kaz’s trunk and started doing chest compressions. A Filipino nurse in loose scrubs came running, holding onto her eyeglasses. Her stethoscope flopped off her neck and crashed to the floor. As she crouched to pick it up, a tall unshaven ER attending strode past her.

              He nodded at Lloyd in recognition and asked, “What’s the story?”

              Lloyd said, “Full arrest. Mercury poisoning.”

              The ER doc rolled his head back. “Holy Shit!” He glanced at his wristwatch and called out, “Thirteen twenty-two!” He yanked a clear plastic bag from a hook on the wall, tore it open and extracted a self-inflating bag and mask. He tossed it at the Filipino nurse who was now at the head of the bed and said, “Start bagging!” Then he put two fingers on Kaz’s neck and said, “Good compressions. We’re moving to Bay three. Let’s pump and roll!”

              Lloyd stepped onto the metal undercarriage of the gurney and kept pumping the chest as the gurney rolled to the open ER bay. The barrel chested cop was providing most of the push with the ER doc steering. A voice on the PA system announced, “Code Blue, Emergency room!” with a cool detachment. How many times had Lloyd heard that call without batting an eyelash?

              When they reached the medical bay, residents, nurses and therapists materialized in quick succession like clowns falling out of a car. One nurse applied monitor leads to Kaz’s chest while a resident wrapped a tourniquet around his arm and plunged an eighteen gauge Angiocath without bothering to wipe down the antecubital fossa with alcohol. A respiratory therapist prepared intubation equipment while a nurse broke the plastic seals on the medication drawers of a crash cart.

              Some people claim they see beauty in the coordinated fluidity of a full code, sometimes comparing it to a sort of ballet. Lloyd didn’t. He always viewed it as a form of savagery. And as he pushed down on Kaz’s chest, he felt like a savage, ravaging the limp body of his lifeless friend.

              A kid in a short white coat walked up to the ER doc and said, “Dr. Birch, can I intubate?”

              “Not this time,” the attending said. “Get ready to relieve Dr. Copeland on the chest compressions. He’s getting tired.”

              “I’m not tired,” Lloyd said.

              “I’m running this code Dr. Copeland. Get ready to stand back at the end of this cycle. Martha,” he said, facing a somber resident with short cropped hair, “get ready to intubate.”

              A few moments later, Lloyd stopped the chest compressions. He stepped away and the medical student sprang in his place. Gradually, Lloyd was pushed to the back of the room as a current of nurses and more doctors jostled its way to the gurney. Kaz was intubated, the chest compressions resumed, meds were flushed into the IV port while another IV was inserted. Even a clinical pharmacologist appeared and a discussion of mercury toxicity began in the peanut gallery.

              “We gotta get him alive first before we can even talk about chelation,” the pharmacologist told a chubby man in a long white coat.

              More rounds of meds and minutes later, still more. By now Lloyd knew that the code was continuing only because the ER doctor wanted to show that everything had been done – that no one had given up. But sooner or later all brutality must come to an end. Long past the adrenaline rush of the rescuers had been spent, the ER doc said, “Stop CPR.”

              He checked for a pulse. Readjusted his fingers and checked again. Then glanced at his watch, shook his head and whispered the time to a nurse holding a clipboard.

              Chapter 34

             
L
loyd was ushered to the ER family waiting room. “The hurt locker”, the residents had named it, because of its long, narrow layout and because it was where family members were led to when it was time to hit them with gut-wrenching news. He sat alone, resting his elbows on the round wooden table, cradling his head in his hands. The whole affair seemed surreal. He had never imagined that he might be putting anyone’s life at risk by continuing his research. And now Kaz was dead.

              The door opened. Lloyd expected to see the ER attending, perhaps the clinical pharmacologist. It was Erin. She shut the door and stood there oddly still, her lips pinched. She approached the table slowly and sat next to Lloyd.

              “Lloyd, I have to tell you something.”

              “Jesus, Erin. This isn’t the time,” Lloyd said.

              “You weren’t answering your phone.”

              “I was a little tied up, don’t you think?”

              “Lloyd, listen… it’s your mother.”

              Lloyd’s shoulders stiffened.

              “What about my mother?”

              “I don’t know. They started paging you overhead, over and over. Finally, I called the operator. It was your uncle. He was trying to get ahold of you but you weren’t picking up the phone. Something happened to your mom.”

              Lloyd patted down his pockets, not remembering that he had left his phone in the lab.

              “You can use my phone,” Erin said.

              Uncle Roy didn’t answer. Lloyd tried calling again with no reply. Then Erin’s phone rang. Lloyd picked it up.