Garcia's Heart (44 page)

Bolodis stopped at the desk, catching the attention of a nurse, who then turned to the big board behind her where the patients' names were listed. She pointed to another corner of the unit and the room that awaited there. The last corner, they'd run out of corners, and here, as if needing witnesses to the spectacle of being confronted by reality, he found a nurse and a respiratory technologist talking to each other, sharing a joke perhaps, both stopping when he and Bolodis entered, all of them standing over an immobile Hernan García.

The chief of intensive care came into the room a short time later with his white-coated entourage. When Bolodis introduced Patrick as a doctor and a friend of the family, the chief gave a nod of collegial recognition–a complex gesture in itself, an alloy of relief and wariness–and went on to explain that it was most likely an arrhythmic event, the heart tripping into an ineffectual pattern of pumping causing a prolonged period of circulatory compromise. Hernan was intubated,
ventilated, canulated, and paced, said the doctor, pleased at his accomplishments, like a man rounding third after hitting an
ICU
home run. Of course, Hernan was comatose. No, no, coma was too broad a term, too generous; the chief of intensive care looked at his residents and asked, “Does he have brain stem reflexes?” and one of the residents shook her head. No.

Hernan García was dead, after all. Patrick saw Hernan's chest rising and falling with machine regularity. He touched Hernan's arm, fingering the scar that ran down his forearm, looking like an ill-tailored seam. The chief of intensive care, thinking these two doctors in front of him would find a solace in the facts that they could not find in the body, called them out of the room to look at scans of Hernan's injured brain.

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 than 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.