Mr. Wentworth gave no answer.
Chapter Forty-One
The strawberry-haired woman consulted the steel box once more. Numbers flashed across its frame, changing constantly, each figure moving up and down in a rapid blink.
Two more people entered the room. They all looked at the box. A line ran across the box’s frame, patterned like the stitches on a blanket. The woman pressed a red circle on the wall. An alarm sounded in the room and rang out in the hall. Not an echo, but the same alarm repeated, from another source.
The line that was a procession of blanket stitches now shaped into a chaos of troughs and peaks, moving across the frame at random heights and spaces. “Ventricular fibrillation,” the strawberry-haired woman called out, using pieces of Latin that Jane understood but rearranging them into words she had never heard. “Lower the bed,” she commanded. One of the other people turned a crank on the bed. Fred, who had been sitting upright, now lay flat. A man gently moved Jane and Sofia to the edge of the room. “Please wait outside,” he said to them. They moved outside the room but lingered and watched from the doorway.
The strawberry-haired woman jumped on top of Fred, as one jumped on a horse. Small and round and at least in her sixth decade, she leapt onto the bed with the grace of a gazelle and thumped his chest with her fist. Again, she checked the steel box. Of all the boxes Jane had seen, this one reigned supreme. All in the room obeyed its commands; it told them to smile or frown. The woman frowned. She placed her hands, one on top of the other, over the middle of Fred’s breastbone and pushed down and released. She repeated the motion in a rhythm. After several cycles, another person tapped her shoulder and indicated that he could take over. He stood beside the bed in readiness to do so. Jane watched the strawberry-haired woman, tiring but determined, and saw that this required intense work, to move a person’s chest up and down for them.
Words were passed between the hospital staff in whispered calm. Jane understood little of it. She watched Sofia to gauge what was occurring. Sofia’s face seemed to change from pink to gray.
Everyone looked at Fred, then at the box.
“What takes place, Sofia?” Jane asked her.
“Oh,” Sofia replied, and said nothing more.
Footsteps thundered down the hall and a man pushed a chest of steel drawers on wheels into the room, which rattled as it entered. More steel boxes painted white and blue sat atop the chest. The cart pusher handed out items to the group. The group sprang into action. One person placed a clear mask over Fred’s mouth and pumped a balloon into his throat. Another removed Fred’s gown.
Next, a man with gray hair entered. He wore a suit. More people entered after him. Each new person seemed older than the last. In less than thirty seconds, a dozen people had entered the room.
Dr. Marks entered last. The cart man handed him two black paddles, shaped like irons. The boxes buzzed and beeped. “Charging to two hundred,” the cart man announced. “Clear.”
Dr. Marks placed the irons on Fred’s chest. They buzzed. The sound sickened with its volume and flatness. Fred’s body lifted half an inch from the bed, then flopped back onto it like a rag doll dropped by a child.
The group all looked to the box. It must not have given them the answer they wanted, for they chatted and muttered again. Dr. Marks shook his head. He looked at the irons as if to check that they worked.
“What has happened, Sofia?” Jane asked.
“His heart has stopped,” she replied. Jane nodded. She knew little, but she knew a heart was made for beating. Sofia seemed to have ceased blinking and breathing.
Jane clutched the chair beside her, then cursed herself for the display. This person was but a friend. She had known him less than two weeks. It was silly to get swept up in the affairs of persons she hardly knew, but she hoped he survived, for Sofia’s sake.
Sofia took Jane’s hand. Jane held it, if only to bring Sofia comfort. She did not need comforting herself.
“Charging two hundred,” the cart man announced. “Clear.”
Dr. Marks placed the irons on Fred again. They buzzed, and he rose from the bed once more, then flopped.
They all watched the box. “Damn,” said Dr. Marks.
After Sofia had banned Jane from observing the advancements of the twenty-first century, Jane made her peace with shutting her mind to the wonders of the new world. Now, as words rushed past her ears like cardiac arrest and ten thousand volts, she yearned to have disobeyed Sofia and learned every detail of the medical endeavors of the past two hundred years.
The strawberry-haired matron bowed her head. The cart man exhaled.
Jane sensed the group begin to tire. Not in their physical action, which remained crisp and practiced, but in their mood. The strawberry-haired woman’s voice grew less sure. Dr. Marks’s commands were less vital. A vapor seemed to descend upon the room, some sort of malaise, or wobble of faith. She saw that the longer this process went on, the less likely it stood to succeed. These doctors and nurses completed not the steps of some infallible sequence, which, when followed correctly, would lead to their patient’s recuperation. Instead they made a series of attempts, with each subsequent shot wilder than the last. The more boxes and tubes and people added to the gamble, the more diminished the chance of return.
Earlier, when she was presented with the option of leaving him on her own terms, Jane had resigned herself to the notion with sadness but determination. Now the choice was taken from her—Fred threatened to depart from her life with the audacity to not even check with her first. She found
