by Liam Durcan
Poor Bolodis looked like he was going to crumple as the chief of intensive care showed them the CT scan done on arrival. On the monitor the brain was a washed-out monochrome grey, oxygen-starved from its deep-sea dive of a cardiac arrest, swollen and squeezing down on the vital structures of the brain stem. Measures have failed, they were told. The damage was irrevocable. Hernan wasn’t going to wake up.
“The resuscitation was tricky, technically, and not really a victory when you think about it,” the chief of intensive care said and closed the window of images with a keystroke. Hernan’s name disappeared from the top corner of the screen. After the perfunctory talk about possible outcomes for the patient, where the three of them stood around and traded dismal statistics and nodded, the chief of intensive care excused himself and left.
Patrick walked out of the ICU with Bolodis into a hallway filled with a fine mist of fluorescent light. They’d both been dismissed, that was clear enough, but he was uncertain about where he was supposed to go. Roberto would have brought his sisters to the hospital, Patrick thought, and he stopped at the ICU’s family room, wanting to find the Garcías and at the same time relieved to find the room empty. The polar cold light condensed on the walls that they walked past, no destination in mind until they reached a part of the hospital where two pavilions fused, a point marked by a cluster of elevators and a couple of vintage payphones. Bolodis pressed for an elevator.
Patrick stared at the elevator doors opening. He expected something ornate, or at least decorative, an art nouveau flourish or a simple repeating pattern instead of a painted metal door no different than in any hospital in Boston or Montreal. The inside was no less plain, a fact Patrick found irritating.
“He talked to you,” Patrick said, and Bolodis turned, preoccupied. Bolodis pressed the button for the lobby.
“Yes.”
“Tell me what he said.” Bolodis stared back at him, mute. “Tell me,” Patrick repeated.
“It’s not my business to tell you.”
Between the sixth and seventh floors of the Royal ‘s-Gravenhage Infirmary, the elevator skidded to an abrupt, mid-air stop; but this was the lesser event to Bolodis, who’d been pinned in a corner of the elevator, struggling to get Patrick Lazerenko’s forearm off his chest. Bolodis was the smaller man and had been caught off guard and off balance. Patrick leaned into Bolodis, his other hand jammed against the emergency stop button on the elevator panel. Bolodis struggled under the weight of an elbow now forced up against his collarbone. Patrick watched the jugular vein in the man’s neck distend with blood. And while the mechanics of assault were as foreign as a cartwheel, and in Patrick’s mind already made explicable by grief and disavowed and apologized for, he couldn’t help but feel an unmistakable, terrible thrill at the sight of Bolodis’s grimacing. This elation was fleeting, and then the act reverted to its embarassing and sinister origins. He was close enough to see the pores on Bolodis’s forehead, close enough to detect the smell of tobacco that lived on the back of the man’s tongue. “Tell me,” he said again and stopped leaning on the man, his own arm starting to tingle as it dropped. “Tell me what he said.”
Bolodis was bent over and breathing heavily. He craned his neck and stared at Patrick. The elevator kicked back into dumb descent. Bolodis wiped a drop of saliva that had formed on his lower lip and straightened up. “He talked about his family and the grocery store in Montreal. The rest of the time he told me about the years he spent in Detroit. That was it.”
The doors opened up to the empty main lobby of the hospital and it wouldn’t have surprised Patrick to see Bolodis bolt or take a swing at him but the man didn’t move. Bolodis was breathing more normally now, the only sign of a struggle the small cumulus cloud of reddened skin on his neck visible just under his Adam’s apple.
“Do you know if he saw me? Why he thought I was here?”
Bolodis shrugged, then smiled. “I am afraid I cannot help you with that.”
He wanted to hit Bolodis again, an urge he realized was based in futility.
“You were trying to protect him,” Patrick said instead.
“I didn’t agree with him. Understand that. He did things that are inexcusable. And he lied to me, don’t forget that. But I wanted to protect him, yes. He was my patient.”
“You knew about his heart,” Patrick said.
“I thought he had angina, I thought he needed his medication,” Bolodis said.
“You allowed him a professional courtesy, you allowed him to cause himself harm.”
Bolodis looked thoughtfully at Patrick. “I had no intention of that. Nor did you.”
A woman in her fifties entered the elevator and reached between them to select her floor. Bolodis used the opportunity to step outside the door and Patrick followed him to the threshold, where he blocked the elevator door as it started to close. He watched Bolodis walk away, disappearing through the doors of the hospital’s main entrance. Patrick stepped back into the elevator, letting the doors finally close and ignoring the glare of a Dutch woman whose journey to comfort the sick had been unnecessarily delayed.
The intensive care family room at the Royal ‘s-Gravenhage Infirmary was painted a most unusual shade of lavender, a decision no doubt based on one of those psychological studies of grief that demonstrated the superior calming effects of certain colours. But it was ineffective anaesthesia, discounting pain into a more vague discomfort, unnameable and therefore with less promise of relief. It would be difficult to tell if it worked with anyone who truly needed its help; by the time family members made it to a room like this, most were past tears and instead seemed to express their anguish through the more mundane movements like coughing or changing position as they sat and waited. The García sisters were angry; no one had yet explained their father’s condition, and it was clear as Patrick listened to them that they blamed Bolodis and the tribunal for neglect in the care of their father. Roberto saw this and came to Patrick, asking him to speak to Celia and Nina. In the lavender room Patrick sat down and tried to explain Hernan’s actions to his children, but instead of telling them plainly, he stumbled through a description of the illness and told them their father would have known which medications were dangerous. They understood. The talking stopped. Celia was calm, able to accommodate this discovery along with the events of the day, just as she had accommodated Den Haag and the realpolitik of Oliveira’s assistance and Patrick himself. Patrick was certain she’d deal with the impending impact of a planet-smashing asteroid in the same way, shifting her son from hip to hip as she figured out what needed to be done. Roberto and Nina were also silent, but unlike Celia, their silence was a bolted door, their grief complicated by anger as they came to understand how respite and severance had arrived at the same time.
Sometime later, the chief of intensive care reappeared, this time on his own. He repeated what Patrick had tried to explain to the Garcías, that recovery was not a possibility, that survival was an absurd term for someone who would never regain consciousness or breathe on his own. It was the hospital’s policy to discontinue life support twenty-four hours after the event, and everyone in the room, including the chief of intensive care, looked at their watches, as if they were synchronizing them in a caper movie. Eleven-fifteen tomorrow.
“There is the matter of the organs,” the doctor continued, apologizing for having to ask. Dutch law mandated that they have this conversation. “Do you know his wishes?” he asked, and then added, imagining perhaps that it showed a hint of discretion and not a fondness for irony, that they’d leave the heart alone.
TWENTY-TWO
The departure lounge was empty. He was early. He thought the train ride to Schiphol would have taken longer, he’d remembered it as quite a bit longer when he arrived, but he miscalculated and now he had an extra little brick of airport time to endure. After a couple of laps around the terminal’s commercial court, he decided to wait it out in the executive class lounge, with its big leather chairs and main room more sparsely populated t
han the western states.
Hernan was still alive when Patrick left the hospital late the night before. He had sat in the room alone with him for fifteen or twenty minutes trying to make sense of a life. Good intentions. The thought that benevolence could be so blindly applied and become so perversely transformed depressed Patrick. It suggested a world where any human impulse could be broken down and subverted to suit another end, that intent meant nothing. Maybe Hernan realized that, too; he must have realized it looking into José-Maria Fernandez’s eyes that day in 1983, how his intentions had led him to become part of a larger animal. He must have known it as he listened to the witnesses speak of him as a monster. And, to that end, Hernan lying before him made perfect sense. The ventilator shushed in the corner, as if to chastise him for thinking this way.
And then Patrick said goodbye, a goodbye that he told himself was meaningless, but damn the body if it didn’t misbehave, if the sight of the chest moving with each breath didn’t stir something inside. He would have stayed, he told himself that, he would have helped with the arrangements or just stood around. He asked Celia if she wanted him to stay. She said no in such a way that he felt neither compelled nor offended.
He wasn’t family. He wasn’t really a García and he’d never be one. Hernan was a man he’d spent time with for a few years almost twenty years before. He tried to tell himself that Hernan García was a construction, the product of a boy’s wishful needs, as much an act of creation as the “Angel” of Elyse’s book or the martyr’s tale now broadcast courtesy of the Democratic Voice. But he couldn’t convince himself. He knew this man, the terrible facts, the kindness, the irreconcilable truths.
He looked at his watch and thought the Garcías must now be gathered around Hernan’s bedside, watching, grieving, madly creating a story of their father for themselves that would endure beyond his acts that summer at Lepaterique, perhaps a story that would someday even accommodate those moments, along with his last days in Den Haag.
Until then, the story of Hernan’s life was most tangibly the property of Elyse Brenman, who watched the tumult in the courtroom and then spent the evening patrolling the hospital corridors a safe distance from where the Garcías waited, hoping for, or perhaps fearing, an ending to that last chapter. Oliveira staked his claim as well, showing up at the hospital enraged–as enraged as Oliveira could get, a minor-key homage to rage–threatening lawsuits and promising to arrange a press conference from the lobby of the hospital if he didn’t get some answers. His tone softened when he got those answers and, knowing martyrdom had come, fully, completely, he left the hospital without further incident. Somewhere in Den Haag, there were witnesses who had been waiting for years to tell their stories of Hernan García, awakening in their hotel rooms only to be told that something unforeseen had occurred and their testimony was now no longer necessary. Thank you. Be well. Goodbye.
After leaving the hospital, Patrick had returned to the Metropole, where he made travel arrangements and packed his bags for the next day’s flight. Despite sleeping with unusual soundness, he had still awoken an hour before dawn. At seven, there was a knock on the door and he opened it to find a young man asking his name and brandishing what turned out to be a tribunal subpoena, issued the morning before. He was accompanied by a solemn Edwin, now offering expanded concierge services. Patrick offered no explanation about what had happened to García, and so neither of the men at his door could have understood the obsolescence of the act or the reason for his indifference at receiving the summons. The young man didn’t seem to care but poor Edwin looked crestfallen at the lack of drama.
Patrick wasn’t due to leave for the train station for another hour, but after the morning visit he needed to get out of his room, and so he decided to walk over to the Garcías’ pension on Geestbrugweg with the intention of giving Marta’s book to Celia. He had been thinking about it since the night before; it seemed like the right thing to do in so many ways: a gift, a stab at that much-vaunted closure, a chance to see all the Garcías again, making sure they were all right after a night at the hospital. But on the way to the pension he reconsidered, worrying that Celia would eventually read the book and find her mother’s judgment in the margins, thinking he should instead just put the book on the shelves in the pension’s library and have it become lost forever. But as he turned and began walking back to the Metropole, he realized he was acting as much for himself, that the book in his hand was the only thing of the Garcías that he had left and it was something he couldn’t relinquish.
The lounge around him now was mahogany-panelled, dark and familiar, with an haute rec-room clubhouse feel that made him wonder where the ping-pong table was. After several tactical seat changes–drawing the attention and curious glances of the waitress–Patrick concluded that there was no place in the executive class lounge to hide from the many giant-screen televisions and so he passed the time trying to avert his eyes from the muted montage of the day’s events.
The hour passed slowly, more so because of his obsessive surveillance of the minute hand as it swept away the quarter hours. Patrick opened his computer, deciding that he needed focus, the industrious older cousin of diversion; yes, that’s what was missing. He reasoned that the news about the Globomart deal would have been sent by now, and once back in Boston, he’d be patting Sanjay on the back and they’d be well on their way to deprogramming everyone at Neuronaut from the cult of Lazerenko indispensability. The waitress came over, genuinely happy that this new seat was superior in some mysterious way to the other three he’d abandoned. Patrick chose something from the menu and sat in silent contemplation with other monks in the lounge, an order with faces pale before their laptop screens. He checked his messages for the first time that day and found a communiqué sent out late the previous night.
Neuronaut CEO Jeremy Bancroft takes great pleasure in announcing the signing of a new exclusivity contract with Globomart Inc., Medina, Minnesota, for “continued cognitive analysis of all Globomart marketing” for the next five years, including their soon-to-be-launched campaign–“Amer/I can.”
Neuronaut is also proud to announce the appointment of Sanjay Gopal, Ph.D., to the position of Chief Scientific Officer, effective immediately. Dr. Gopal has served in the research and development department of Neuronaut and was instrumental in developing analysis for Globomart’s “Amer/I can” campaign.
The next message was from Bancroft himself and had a heading succinct enough–re: personnel change/exit strategy–that he didn’t need to open it. The cult of Lazerenko had already ended. He closed his computer.
The waitress arrived with his meal. He thanked her and she left, smiling as she turned away. He wondered if she could tell how he felt. If it showed. Because it hurt, any sense of relief overwhelmed by the sting of dismissal like a punch remembered from a childhood playground. In the end, he hoped that, if asked, the waitress would say that she noticed nothing different about her customer when she came back with his beer, except that his computer was now closed and he looked a little less fidgety than before.
When the boarding call for his flight was finally announced, it surprised him, perhaps because now, he didn’t have any reason to go. He could take a flight tomorrow, or board the plane at the neighbouring gate for Barcelona or just wander through the terminal and any of it would make as much sense as going back to Boston. But Boston was as good a place as any and had the benefit of being the quickest way out of Den Haag, so when the second call came he shouldered his carry-on without hesitation and limped into that snaking line with the others, preparing his papers and wanting to see nothing more than the back of an airline seat. When he pulled out his boarding pass, the tribunal subpoena came along with it. Patrick folded the document quickly, and the gate attendant, focused on the boarding pass and matching his face with his passport’s photo, didn’t notice a thing.
“Ooh, that’s a shiner.”
“Yeah,” he replied, summoning a frat-boy grin that made him want to take a shower.
> At thirty thousand feet, the noise of an airplane was a beautiful thing. A seventy-decibel ode to constancy, an anthem to Bernoulli’s law, it thrummed its lullaby to him. Close your eyes. Don’t look at your watch. Don’t look at your watch. The plane tore its way back through time zones, strung on contrails, elongating the day of Hernan García’s death. But night would come. Somewhere over Britain the minute hand of his watch would cross the meridian of a particular quarter hour and it would happen, as it must, but Patrick had already climbed inside the noise of the engines, telling himself that it was already over, miles back and years ago.
He closed his eyes and remembered the evening before at the hospital, how they waited, staring at the lavender walls until, one by one, they began to excuse themselves to go on little hatchling expeditions to the washroom or the vending machines down the hallway. They ate in the hospital’s empty cafeteria, all of them sitting on the same side of a long table, as if to dissuade attempts at conversation. After dinner, he and Celia took Paul for a walk down the corridor that led away from the intensive care unit, and, finding a sign for the solarium on the twelfth floor, decided to go farther. The elevator doors opened onto a room with walls and a ceiling vaulted in glass. It was a dark and quiet place, the rarest of commodities in a hospital, as rare as a clear night in Den Haag. The sky full of stars spread out over them. Below, the more orderly constellation of Den Haag street lights was hemmed in by the sea. For the longest time they just sat and looked out.
They could have talked about her father; he could have told her that he thought Hernan had made a grave and terrible mistake, a mistake that exceeded any capacity to forgive but an act that they could perhaps one day understand. Yes. He’d try to understand. But at that moment, he hadn’t wanted to talk about Hernan. Hernan wasn’t really alive any more and Celia was not a person who needed her father defended or eulogized to her.
