Code White

by Scott Britz-Cunningham

  She opened her mouth to go on, then skipped back like a record player needle jumping its groove. “Uh, CHARM stands for Current-Sensitive Heuristic Axon-Redirecting Matrix. It’s the gel that we apply to the outer surface of SIPNI.” She silently castigated herself, not only for the skip, but for using the lifeless word “surface” instead of the joyful word “shell.”

  The red light of the camera held its unblinking stare. “The gel lets SIPNI grow its own connections. When first applied, the gel is only a slight conductor of electricity. But it has a very special property such that, each time a tiny spark of current passes through it—wherever SIPNI finds an axon, or the axon talks back—that part of the gel undergoes a chemical reaction that makes it a much better conductor. The next time, the connection gets faster and stronger, until a minute pathway is formed, less than a hundredth of the diameter of a human hair. SIPNI keeps sweeping the area with electrical pulses, searching for all the axons within reach. As pathways are formed, the chemical reaction releases a neural growth factor impregnated into the gel, which causes the axons to grow into the gel. Eventually, the gel solidifies, forming a sieve of high-conducting nanotubes, which are filled by axon terminals, like cables inserted into the holes of an old telephone switchboard. After that, the connections are permanent.”

  Oh, what a mess she was making of this! Neural growth factors, nanotubes, axon terminals … She had rushed through them all, impetuously, as one runs toward the light at the end of a dark tunnel. Had she lost her viewers completely? Deergha shvaasam. Deergha shvaasam. Whether she had done well or ill, this was live television. There was no going back.

  * * *

  Harry Lewton, the newly hired chief security officer, watched the struggles of Ali O’Day on the middle screen of a long row of TV monitors in his office. In his right hand he held a mug of coffee still too hot to drink, while in his left he held a phone receiver to his ear, propping his elbow on a pile of security status reports from the night before. His inlaid tan caiman-skin boots were balanced on a plastic wastebasket, rocking it precariously on one edge.

  He was speaking to a nurse on the general medical ward on the eighteenth floor of Tower C.

  “That’s Viola Lewton, spelled V-I-O-L-A,” he said. “I brought her in yesterday. Aspiration pneumonia is what they said it was.”

  “Your mother? Yes, I know her. She had a pretty rough night of it, but she’s finally sleeping now. It’d be a shame to disturb her. I can have her call you when she wakes up.”

  “Fine. Will you personally see to it that she gets her Parkinson’s medicine? She needs to take it three times a day. Without it, she has trouble speaking or eating.”

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Lewton. It’s right here in her chart. Someone underlined it and wrote exclamation marks.”

  “That was me.”

  Harry’s mother was only fifty-eight, but she had had Parkinson’s disease for the past six years and it had made her as decrepit as an eighty-five-year-old. It wasn’t just the tremors, which were one of the easiest things to control with medication, but she lived in a slow-motion world, her every movement requiring painful deliberation. Her body was becoming a prison. She had had to give up her career driving a school bus, and now she had gone so far downhill that she could hardly feed herself, much less cook or bathe or button a blouse.

  She had never known anything but Texas and Louisiana until three weeks ago, when Harry had pulled her out of a nursing home and brought her to live with him in his apartment in Chicago. That was like firing on Fort Sumter as far as Harry’s family was concerned. His sister, Luanne, had put her in the home, and she insisted that it was the only safe place for her to be. But for Harry, turning his mother over to the care of strangers was desertion. So he had flown down to Houston, brandished his power of attorney, and taken her himself.

  Now he had nothing but guilt to show for it. Even though he had arranged for daytime home care, he had underestimated how difficult it would be for his mother to feed herself or even to drink. Several days ago, she had had a bad choking episode that led to pneumonia. Would that have happened in the nursing home? Harry felt responsible. Sure, he pulled strings to make sure she got a private room and the best doctors in the city, but that didn’t erase the fact that for the sake of pride and honor he had played roulette with his mother’s life.

  “Can you hold for a minute, Mr. Lewton? I think I see Dr. Weiss coming down the hall.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  Harry glanced at the TV. Christ, look at those peepers! The shy, sphinxlike woman on the monitor kept looking off into space as she spoke. But now and then, quite abruptly, she would turn and stare straight into the camera, opening her green eyes wide under the canopy of her dark, gull-wing eyebrows. When she did that, she seemed to reach out from the TV screen and look directly at Harry himself.

  Harry was intrigued by her, by her bashfulness, which struck him as a paradox that needed explanation. She paws the ground like a scared kitten. But she’s a panther, no kitten. If she wanted to, she could eat you for breakfast. You or any man. Just look at those eyes.

  From time to time, Harry glanced at the other monitors—closed surveillance circuits that gave him a godlike view of what was going on anywhere in the hospital. The pièce de résistance was a sixty-inch LCD screen on the wall to his left, which displayed a schematic of glowing lights showing the status of every door, elevator, and fire alarm within the 1.2 million square feet of the medical center. The lights were all green now, not a yellow or red among them. The medical center was functioning as it ought to, like a healthy, vigorous body.

  The only irritant to the healthy body was on the plaza outside the main entrance. The cameras showed a couple dozen protesters circling there, as they chanted and waved signs, all neatly printed in the same blue paint: STOP DR. FRANKENSTEIN;, NO AMALGAMATION OF MAN AND MACHINE; HONOR THE HUMAN SOUL; WHERE WILL IT END?; FLETCHER MEMORIAL PLAYS GOD.

  TV cameras always brought out groups like this. But this bunch wasn’t doing any harm. They were staying out of the flowerbeds and they weren’t blocking the traffic circle. Not like those Green fanatics who tried to shut down the oil terminals back when he was an assistant security director in Texas City. That had been his first job after leaving police work, and he had handled it well. He had gone strictly by the book, which was easy enough when you’ve just finished your MBA in security management. No one got hurt, nothing got blown up, and—bottom line—the tankers came in on time. If only everything else in his life had turned out as smoothly as that. It almost made up for that fiasco at Nacogdoches.

  Back on the center screen, Dr. Ali O’Day was trying to explain what a neural net was, and, judging by the puzzled look on Kathleen Brown’s face, it was an uphill climb. Ali looked different than she had the few times Harry had seen her in person, in the hallways or in the staff dining room. It’s that surgical cap she’s wearing, he decided. It swept her wavy, shoulder-length sable hair out of sight, and starkly accentuated the forehead and cheekbones of her shield-shaped face. Yes, that’s it. And now he noticed something he hadn’t seen before—a little bitty hump to the ridge of her nose. Not an Irish nose, he told himself. Not the nose of an O’Day. Her mouth, too, had something exotic about it—a little wide for her jawline, with lips spread apart, as if frozen in the beginning of a smile.

  What was that about her husband? Harry had never noticed a ring on Ali’s finger, and in the three months he had been at Fletcher Memorial, he had never seen this man with her. Kevin, that’s what his name was. Even now, she never glanced at Kevin in that fleeting, automatic way that husbands and wives did when they needed to get a fix on something familiar or bolster themselves with a shot of approval. He was a lucky bastard if a husband is what he really was. But something was missing. Definitely something was missing.

  Harry heard a rattle at the other end of the phone line.

  “Dr. Weiss here,” said an impatient voice.

  “Doctor, this is Harry Lewton. My mother—”r />
  “She’s not doing as well as we’d like. She’s still running a temperature, and the portable X-ray we took during the night shows a worsening of her pneumonia. I’m going to add imipenem, an IV antibiotic. That should give us better coverage for anaerobic bacteria.”

  “How serious is this?”

  “Aspiration pneumonia is a leading cause of death in patients with Parkinson’s disease.”

  What an impersonal prick, thought Harry. “If there’s some kind of test or treatment she needs, make sure you do it,” he said. “I’ll pay whatever insurance doesn’t cover.”

  Dr. Weiss ignored Harry’s offer. “We have her on ten liters of oxygen right now. We’re watching closely for any signs of respiratory fatigue.”

  The internist’s voice was suddenly drowned out by the opening banjo lick of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” Harry’s cell phone’s ringtone. In one movement, Harry snatched the phone from his belt and shook it open. There was an incoming text page. Harry had been expecting a message from the VP for finance, but this was something very different. When he held the screen up to the light, he saw, in plain block letters:

  FMMC CRITICAL STATUS. VERIFY THREAT PARCEL ENDO LOBBY. AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS 0830. MAINTAIN STRICT SILENCE. DO NOT EVACUATE. ALL OPERATIONS MUST REMAIN NORMAL. PENALTY FOR DISREGARD CATASTROPHIC. GOD IS GREAT.

  “Aw, Christ!” he muttered. “You gotta be shittin’ me!”

  “Excuse me?” said Dr. Weiss.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean you. It’s a … it’s a text page. Look, I’ve got something I have to deal with right now. Can we talk later, after I’ve had a chance to see my mother for myself?”

  “Yes. Let’s do that.”

  “Bye, then.”

  Harry read over the message several times, making sure that he hadn’t gotten it wrong. Was it a joke? A bona fide threat? The hospital got prank calls all the time, but he had yet to get one on his personal pager. He scrolled up and down, but there was no callback number. By reflex, he turned to his computer and accessed Logline, the com tracker that could be used to trace calls going to any phone or pager within the hospital. The page had come from within the hospital.

  Briskly punching the number, he heard one ring and then the sound of a woman’s voice. “Neurosurgery.”

  “This is Harry Lewton, in security. Did you just text-page me?”

  “No, Mr. Lewton.”

  “Whose line is this?”

  “This is the office of Dr. Richard Helvelius.”

  “Well, somebody just paged me from this telephone.”

  “I didn’t page you.”

  The snippiness in her voice irked him. “And you are?”

  “Aileen. Aileen Zimmerman, Dr. Helvelius’s administrative assistant.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “No one. Not at 7:30 A.M. I’m just opening up the office. Dr. Helvelius is in surgery.”

  “I know that, goddamn it. The whole country knows it. It’s a national event.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. At last the woman’s voice came through, tautly. “How can I help you, Mr. Lewton?”

  “Could anyone else have been using this phone within the last five minutes?”

  “No. As I said—”

  “Well, if you think of someone who may have, call me back.”

  Harry slammed down the phone. Jesus! It would be a hell of a trick for Dr. Helvelius to page him while prepping for surgery on live TV. Logline must have gotten the number wrong. Make a note of that for the system support people. A fourteen-million-dollar upgrade, and still more bugs than a bayou in July.

  Endo Lobby. That could be either the Endocrinology Clinic or the Endoscopy Clinic. If the call had really come from someone in the hospital, you’d think they would have known that and been more specific. So it could still be an outsider, a hoax. Maybe one of these protesters. A disgruntled patient. A kid with nothing but time on his hands. God! Why not a little respect for people who have to work for a living?

  Still, there was something about the message that made him uneasy. Something a little too businesslike for your typical wiseass kid. Harry took a swig of his coffee and got up from his desk. Hurrying toward the door, he threw on a blue blazer that hid the slim 9mm Beretta holstered under his armpit. Endocrinology was closest, just down the Pike. Start there.

  7:45 A.M.

  Ali O’Day backed through the swinging door of Operating Room Three, her freshly rescrubbed hands held aloft, her face covered with a blue paper surgical mask. The OR was almost back to normal. Golden-haired Kathleen Brown and her television crew had withdrawn to the family lounge, leaving a sole cameraman to shoot the video of the actual operation—footage that would be edited into a segment for that evening’s special edition of Lifeline.

  In her mind, Ali was still facing Kathleen Brown and the pitiless blinking red eye of America Today—endlessly replaying that string of flubs, which was all she could recall of her performance. Why did the right thing to say always occur to her just when it was too late to say it? The experience had left her so flustered that she could hardly think about the operation, and that upset her more than anything. I’ve got to shake this. I can’t afford to lose control, she thought as she snapped a pair of chocolate-colored surgical gloves onto her hands. I musn’t let Jamie down. She looked across the room, toward the still form of Jamie Winslow, barely visible through the drapes and trays. Stay calm, she told herself. Remember that Jamie is what this day is about.

  * * *

  Ali had met Jamie a few months before, when his legal guardian, Mrs. Gore, brought him to the Department of Neurosurgery. Five other neurosurgeons had written him off as hopeless, and with good reason. The tumor inside his head was a Grade V on the Spetzler-Martin scale. It was huge, it was deeply entangled with the brain’s vital blood supply, and it nestled directly against what the neurologists referred to as “eloquent cortex”—indispensable parts of the working brain. If it were taken out too abruptly, the gush of new blood into old deserts could have burst the arteries, leaving Jamie paralyzed, speechless, or even locked into an irreversible coma state. There was no question of restoring his eyesight: both sides of his visual center had long since been destroyed by the AVM.

  Every surgeon who had looked at Jamie had concluded the same thing. There was nothing to justify the awful risks of surgery. Yes, there was a big chance that the AVM could kill him some day: it might break open and bleed without warning, or it might simply keep on growing until it had crushed the life-sustaining centers in the brainstem. But that would be in the course of nature. No surgeon wanted this young boy’s death on his own hands. The Hippocratic Oath said it succinctly: “First do no harm.”

  But Jamie Winslow did not have the look of the hopeless. It was hard to give up on him. When Ali first walked into the examining room to meet him, he cocked his head, gave her a big, toothy smile, and asked her whether she had had a good time in California.

  “Yes, I just flew back from San Diego, from the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. It’s like a weeklong school for doctors. How did you know that?”

  “You sound really sleepy. People’s voices go down at the end when they’ve been up all night flying on airplanes.”

  “Yes, I took a red-eye flight. But California?”

  “I can smell the smoke in your hair.”

  “Smoke? What do you mean?”

  “There’s some really big fires burning in Southern California right now. I’ve been hearing about it on TV, ’cause a lot of firemen from here in Chicago have gone over there to help out. That kind of smoke has a special smell. It’s not like cigarettes or anything. I smelled it a couple of years ago when we went to Chain O’Lakes Park and they had a prairie fire.”

  “That’s amazing. Yes, there was a haze everywhere. You could smell the smoke from the mountains. But I had no idea that I had carried it back with me.”

  “Sure, I can smell it.” Jamie cocked his head and lowered
his voice, like a conspirator. “So did you play hooky from that doctor meeting you went to?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jamie grinned, his gums showing in the place of a missing upper tooth. “Your suntan lotion. I can smell that, too.”

  His smile was like a sun that never dimmed, despite a pall of illness, loss, and abandonment that would have dimmed the spirit of many who had traveled further in life. After his father was killed in Afghanistan, his mother was unable to care for him and turned him over to the custody of the courts. For two years, he had lived at the Grossman School for the Blind in Wheaton, where Mrs. Gore, a dormitory matron, acted as his legal guardian. He was bright and friendly and did well in school, learning to read in Braille and getting high marks in arithmetic. But an impish insistence on doing things his way had earned him more than a few detentions. Had he not been shielded from harsher discipline by Mrs. Gore, his natural-born independence might have progressed to outright rebellion.

  At the Grossman School, he was learning swimming and goalball. But baseball was what he really cared about. All through the spring and summer, he followed the Cubs and the White Sox on the radio, his spirits rising and falling with every crack of the bat. He liked the simplicity of the game. Football and basketball were too complicated to follow without the aid of sight. But in baseball, he could reconstruct everything that happened from what the radio announcers said. There was a moral simplicity to it, too, so plain that even a seven-year-old could understand it. Every man stood alone at the plate, his fate tied to his unique strengths and weaknesses, like a Greek hero. Jamie could identify with that. It was a mirror of what he saw life to be.

  When Dr. Helvelius once asked him what he would do if he got his sight back, his answer was immediate. “Baseball. I’m gonna be a major league baseball player. One day, I’ll lead the Cubs to the World Series. You’ll see I will!”