Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life Read online

  Without waiting for the caddy to acknowledge, Richard rolled his father over on his back. It was the first time he had physically touched the Old Man, other than a handshake, in more than twenty years. Richard had taken the company’s mandatory training in office safety and high-rise disaster preparedness, which included basic first aid and cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. He couldn’t remember the rhythm—was it twenty or thirty chest compressions? two or five breath-of-life ventilations?—but he suddenly realized the exact number didn’t matter. He just had to do it.

  He crossed his palms over his father’s breastbone and started pumping. He dimly recalled the fire department instructor describing the beat of that old Bee Gee’s song “Stayin’ Alive” as the perfect pace. Push, push, push, push, staying alive! Push, push, push …

  After what he guessed were twenty or so compressions, he pulled opened his father’s jaw, used his index finger to probe the airway and depress the tongue—which was rough and dry as sandpaper—took a deep breath, and bent to close his lips around his father’s mouth. He blew as hard as he could, forcing air into his father’s lungs, and out of the corner of his eye saw the chest rise an inch or so. He took another breath and blew. Then he went back to pumping along with the Bee Gees.

  As Richard worked, the two Chinese government officials knelt quietly on the grass beside him. When he could spare them a glance, he saw their faces held reverence, even awe. He remembered that Chinese culture valued respect for one’s parents and elders. That was what they were feeling now. Then he put that thought out of his mind and kept on pumping.

  A long time later—push, push, push, push, breathe—he could hear the familiar thwock-thwock-thwock-thwock and the jingling mechanical whine of a helicopter descending. It took effort not to change his rhythm to match the beat of those blades. A frenzied downwind battered his hair and shirt collar. He glanced over to see skids dig into the perfectly manicured green. After a minute, a pair of hands in purple nitrile gloves at the end of dark-blue uniform sleeves gripped Richard’s arms to stop him and then take over the compressions.

  He sat back on his heels. The med tech moved into position above his father while others brought a stretcher from the helicopter.

  As they loaded John Praxis through the fuselage doors, Richard confirmed the hospital where he would be taken. He retrieved his cell phone from the caddy and called his office, told his administrative assistant to find his brother Leonard and sister Callie, tell them what had happened, and get them over to the UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay. Richard himself was allowed to ride in with his father.

  Two hours later, with John Praxis still in surgery, the three children sat on the cold, slate-blue vinyl furniture of the waiting area. Callie was next to Richard and held his hand. After he had described giving the Old Man mouth-to-mouth and CPR, she had smiled and murmured, “You saved his life.”

  Leonard, on the other hand, was unusually quiet. As the time dragged on and still no word came from the doctors, he became restless, crossing and uncrossing his legs, then tapping his fingers. Finally, he signaled to Richard with a toss of his head. He got up, went a short way down a connecting corridor, and paused to let Richard catch up.

  “What were you thinking of?” Leonard asked in a fierce whisper.

  “What do you mean?” Richard asked, surprised.

  “Giving him CPR like that.”

  “Dad was dying.”

  “So?”

  Richard shook his head, not understanding. What was he supposed to do? They gave everyone the training so that, when the time came, they could all save lives. It was what they expected of you. “I still don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “People die. It’s natural. It was his time.”

  “You wanted him to die?” Richard asked.

  “No … no, of course not. But, after all, he’s not that young. How much longer could he expect to live? And it was the perfect opportunity for him—doing something he loved, on a beautiful spring day, no pain, no lingering. He probably didn’t even know what hit him.”

  “But I could save him. The doctors can—”

  “Come on! You heard what they said. Massive heart attack. Irreversible tissue damage. Possible brain damage. Yes, he could live, but what kind of life? He’ll be an invalid, maybe a vegetable, still dying, just more slowly.”

  “But these days, with transplants—”

  “Get real, will you? There are waiting lists, criteria, priorities. Who would assign a fresh, young heart to a man his age?”

  “I guess I didn’t think about that,” Richard said.

  “I know, and it’s just too bad you didn’t.”

  “Well, would you have let him die?”

  Leonard’s eyes went opaque.

  “In hindsight … yes.”

  * * *

  Whirrr-Click! … Whirrr-Click! … Whirr-Click! …

  John Praxis came awake slowly to the sound. With each whirr, he felt growing pressure in his chest. With each click, a little thud and release of the pressure. Over and over again. He still felt pain in there, but it was an ache, a throbbing, like the remembered pain after the dentist had drilled a tooth. Not the deep, cutting pain that went along with the Thunderbolt. This was pain he could handle.

  He opened his eyes to the muted wash of fluorescents shielded inside tiny egg crates against blue-white ceiling tiles. He breathed in through his nose and caught the scents of a hospital—fresh vinyl rubbed down with mouthwash. So this wasn’t the morgue. So he was awake and not dreaming. Or not mostly dreaming.

  “How are we doing?” asked a female voice from somewhere above his head.

  Praxis thought about this for a long time. “Not dead yet, I gather.”

  “That’s the spirit! But you should go back to sleep now.”

  “What happened to me? Why do I feel this—?”

  “Sleep now. You’ll get answers later.”

  The next time he awoke, the ceiling was different and someone had raised the head of his bed slightly, so he could also see a fair amount of the opposite wall, with a television set mounted high in the corner—its screen dark now. The whirr and click were still taking place inside his chest. He moved his head to one side and saw a familiar face.

  “Hello, Dad.” Callista Praxis, who was sitting close to the edge of his bed, put down her magazine and reached for his hand.

  He tried to reach for hers and felt a restraining cuff. “What the—?”

  “It’s to keep you from moving around. Please don’t struggle.”

  “What happened …?”

  “You had a heart attack.”

  “How …?” Wait, he already knew the answer to that one—walking uphill on the damned golf course. He changed direction to ask, “How bad?”

  “Pretty massive.” Callie never could tell a lie. “But they say you’ll be all right.”

  “Adele …?” He turned his head to look around.

  “Mom sat here for twenty-three hours straight. She’s gone home to rest.”

  “Tell her …” He struggled with the thought. What could he say? I’m sorry? I love you? I didn’t mean to almost die on you?

  “You can tell her yourself in a little bit. Why don’t you go back to sleep now?”

  He decided to go back to sleep. The whirr and click were becoming just a white noise that no longer meant anything. The pressure buildup and release inside his chest were like the impacts of his feet on a carpeted floor. No longer the focus of his awareness. There wasn’t even any pain.

  The third time he awoke, it was to a bright light shining into his right eyeball. Flicking to one side. Flicking back. A large pink thumb was holding his eyelid open.

  “Don’t do that,” he muttered. He tried to push the nuisance away but his hands were still cuffed to the bed.

  “Pupil response is good,” said a voice.

  “Are you a doctor?” Praxis asked.

  “I’m Doctor Jamison, from your OR team. I’m just checking vital signs.”
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  “That means I’m still alive, does it?”

  “Yes, very much so,” the man said.

  Praxis looked around. The head of the bed was even higher now. On one side was a window, drapes drawn, dark outside. On the other side a wall with a credenza-thing and a couple of straight-back chairs, now empty. No sign of an enclosing curtain, so he was in a private room, not recovery, not intensive care. That would be good news, wouldn’t it? No sign of Callie or the boys, either, so there was no death watch—another good sign?

  He looked down at his chest to see what all the whirring and clicking were about—and saw that the thin front of his hospital gown, lower down below his stomach, was pushed out by strange shapes that pulsed in time with the muted sounds and distant thuds. It took him a minute to interpret those shapes as loops of hose that came up over the edge of the bed, went under his gown, and stopped somewhere … inside his chest.

  “What is that?” he asked, nodding at the hoses.

  “Ah … we need to explain that,” Jamison said.

  “So explain,” Praxis said, using his CEO voice.

  “You suffered a major infarction with irreversible end-stage biventricular failure.”

  “In English, that’s a heart attack,” Praxis said.

  “No, in English, your heart had already died.”

  So that was to be his epitaph: Your heart had already died. Well, truth to tell, John Praxis had secretly been expecting it for a long time. Ever since a bout of rheumatic fever as a child, the doctors had been urging him at the annual checkups to take care of his heart. Then he had experienced a couple of “episodes,” ten and eight years ago, that seemed to be the consequence of all that concern. But those events had been nothing like the Thunderbolt. He’d felt tired, weak, short of breath—and had some discomfort in his chest, like heartburn or a spell of indigestion. The doctors had called them “silent” heart attacks and said they were a warning. So he quit smoking entirely, cut way back on his drinking, and started taking exercise—ironically, most of it on the golf course. The doctors had prescribed nitroglycerin pills for him, but when Praxis started feeling so much better, he stopped carrying them. Instead, he paced himself, and whenever he felt weak or tired, he just sat down. The “heart condition” just hadn’t been that big a deal. It wasn’t as if he was going to die.

  “That explains my falling over at the Olympic Club,” Praxis said. “It doesn’t explain those tubes and the whirligig going on inside me.”

  “When we couldn’t get your heart back to a stable rhythm through either stimulation or percutaneous intervention,” Jamison said, “we had to open your chest. We found multiple and extensive blockages and areas of previous necrosis. In laymen’s terms, your heart was beating on will power alone. We had no alternative but to remove most of the ventricular muscle tissue.”

  Praxis tried to relate what the doctor was saying to what he felt inside his chest now. “Yet I’m still alive. How so?”

  “We replaced your heart with a mechanical device. It’s air driven and simulates natural systole and diastole. The hoses you can see are powering it. They’re linked to a pump under the bed, which is regulated by an automated blood pressure cuff on your left arm and a fingertip oxygen monitor on your left hand.”

  Praxis digested all of that. He hadn’t even noticed the subtle, alternating pressures on his upper arm as the cuff inflated, took its readings, and then deflated. “How long do I have to wear all this?”

  “Until we can find you a replacement heart. We’ve already entered you on the UNOS waiting list.”

  “Eunos? Who are they?”

  “United Network for Organ Sharing.”

  “A waiting list. There’s a wait. … How long?”

  “Well, you understand it’s all speculative at this point.”

  “How long?” Praxis insisted, using his command voice again.

  “Seventy to ninety days. But, given your age group, that’s really—”

  “You’re kidding me. I’m tied to this contraption for three months?”

  “At least you’re alive. And really, your prognosis is excellent—”

  “Yah, but only if I don’t go crazy and try to kill myself first.”

  “We’ll make you as comfortable as humanly possible.”

  “You can start by getting me a glass of scotch.”

  Dr. Jamison hesitated. “Was that a joke?”

  “Just wait until I ask for a cigar.”

  3. The Brain Explodes …

  It was a day for celebration. After six months of discovery, deposition, and dealing, six days of actual trial, and less than six hours of jury deliberation, the St. Brigid’s case was finally over and won. Antigone Wells had brought everyone—the hospital foundation’s entire Board of Directors, their chief witness Townsend and his field analysts, and her legal team of Carolyn and Sully—back to the Bryant Bridger & Wells offices on Trinity Place for champagne and canapés. Inside of ten minutes, of course, the whole firm was crowding into the conference room to share the joy.

  With an award of construction costs plus actual damages plus punitive damages to the tune of two hundred and fifty million, the firm could afford to pour Veuve Clicquot brut like seltzer water and offer whole trays of Chef Bonnaire’s special Dungeness crab puffs and those little calamari dumplings. Hell, with the firm taking a third of that award in fees, they could afford to pay their rent plus utilities for the next hundred years.

  It was a shame, of course, about John Praxis and his much publicized heart attack. Wells didn’t want to kick a man when he was down. But all of that had no bearing on the case. The judge had instructed counsel that the elder Praxis’s medical condition could not be mentioned in front of the jurors. The suit was against the company, not the executives or the Praxis family itself.

  Now Ted Bridger, the old man of the BB&W law firm—who, come to think of it, was the same age as the elder Praxis and also served in semi-retirement, while Sullivan Bryant, the most senior partner, had passed away a year ago—was proposing the afternoon’s toasts. First to the AISA people, “for their hard work and diligence, which effectively made the case for us.”

  And a voice from the back: “And for which they will be adequately rewarded.” Which brought a polite chuckle.

  Then to the St. Brigid’s board, “for all the good work they do in the community, and for selecting BB&W to represent them.”

  That voice again: “And to their newer, bigger, and better hospital.”

  Finally, to Antigone Wells and her team, “who played their big fish with great skill in the time-honored fashion and successfully landed him.”

  To which many voices responded: “Hear, hear! … Antigone! … Auntie! … Speech! Speech!”

  Wells put down her glass, folded her hands in front of her stomach, and raised her chin to respond. “This has certainly been a great day,” she began. “Thank you for your kind words, Ted. And I want to say thank you, as well, to my own team, who-oo-ooo—”

  —and she fell right into the ceiling.

  The world turned upside down. No, literally, the floor became the ceiling, and the ceiling became the floor, and she was falling up toward the ceiling. Whatever she was saying to these bright, smiling faces flew right out of her head. Her own voice became a buzzing in her ears and faded away. Her stomach turned sour and flopped over, and she was sure she was going to vomit right there in front of everyone. But before her head could hit the ceiling it filled with an amazing white light. And the world was buried in deep, soft snow.

  * * *

  After a long time and from a great distance she was suddenly confronted by a boy and a girl with identical short haircuts. They were not people she had seen before, none of the firm’s associate attorneys or administrative assistants, no one from building security—which she could figure out because, in addition to their dark-blue uniforms, they were also wearing bright-green plastic gloves. She tried to think of the boy’s and girl’s names and realized she could not think at al
l.

  They were staring intently, directly into her face—which was a rude way to treat one of the firm’s partners. Then she realized she was sitting on a padded bed or stretcher inside a tiny metal room that lurched from side to side while angels wailed and hooted above her head. She felt a chill dampness around her loins, soaking her underwear, pantyhose, and skirt, and knew with sudden horror that she had peed herself. And all the time she was trying to deal with this, these uniformed people were asking her the most absurd questions.

  “Can you smile for us, Miz Wells?”

  “I can but I don’t feel like it,” she mumbled.

  “What was that?” asked Boy Uniform.

  “Couldn’t make it out,” said Girl Uniform.

  “Can you raise your arms above your head?”

  That was the boy again.

  “Ungh … no … I can’t.”

  “All right. Don’t let it bother you.”

  That was the girl this time.

  “Can you tell me the date?”

  “May something … thirty …”

  “Good, good. And the year?”

  “Year of … the elephant …?”

  Why were they asking her about elephants?

  “Phone Admitting, we’re going straight to Neurology.”

  * * *

  Flick-blaze! Flick-blaze! Antigone Wells woke up with a bright light shining intermittently into her left eyeball. Each time the light blazed, its whiteness, brilliance, and clarity startled her. And then the world would go briefly dark as the light flicked away to the side. After a few more flashes, the annoyance itself went away.

  But soon it started up again in her right eyeball. This time the effect was just the opposite, like watching a lighthouse try to send its beam out through a dense fog. Glimmer-gone! Glimmer-gone! This light was much more soothing. But all this nonsense with the lights really had to stop.

  “Would you please stop doing that?” she asked as politely as possible.

  “Excuse me, Miss Wells,” said a male voice. “What were you saying?”

  She tried again, enunciating each word clearly and slowly.