“Is a Mac 5 big enough for a twenty-five-year-old?” he asked of the air.
“She’s twenty-four,” Jemma said weakly.
“It’s fine,” said Dr. Chandra. “You better do it. Look at how blue she’s getting. Is the oxygen on?”
“It’s on,” said Dr. Sasscock. “You’re bagging like a fucking retard. Get her chin.”
“What chin?” asked Dr. Tiller. “Do we have a line yet?”
“No,” said Emma. “I know I’m in but there’s no flash. Let’s give the ativan IM.”
“Okay,” said Dr. Sasscock. “Let’s go.” Dr. Chandra gave a few more rapid breaths and then took the bag away with an unintentional flourish. Dr. Sasscock swooped in, thrusting the laryngoscope blade between Maggie’s teeth and hauling up on it with his whole arm. Jemma could see the tip bulging in the soft tissue of her neck. “I see it,” he said.
“She’s getting rather gray,” said Dr. Tiller.
“Just hand me the tube before I lose it,” he said. He took the tube from Dr. Chandra and poked it into her mouth, poking and poking with it, trying to get past some obstruction. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I see the cords but it’s not going in.”
“Holy shit,” said Janie. “Look at her!” Maggie got at once more gray and more blue, went briefly into v-fib and then went asystolic.
“What are you doing?” asked Emma, because the skin at Maggie’s neck suddenly burst apart in a spray of black dust, and the silver tip of the laryngoscope poked through.
“I almost have it,” Dr. Sasscock said, but then the pressure of his arm lifted the scope up free through her neck and above it, so her face and neck split like an opening door, releasing a head-sized cloud of dust that expanded to hover over her whole body. Dr. Sasscock was left looking down at his tube. He stepped away, and said something that Jemma, too distracted by the death, didn’t hear.
Strange, Jemma thought, that someone with so much death in her life should never have seen one before. As a student she had always avoided them, managing by virtue of luck and foresight never to be present when the old train wrecks on her medicine clerkship kicked the bucket, or slipping quietly into a side room in the ER to fumble at suturing when a hopeless trauma came in. It was a shock to her new senses, to be aware of Maggie’s feeble soul struggling to raise itself above her ashen body, like it was trying to get a better view of the death, and suddenly be swept away, as if a giant hand had passed through the room to gather it up or knock it away. It was a violent transition; just watching made Jemma feel like she’d been knocked in the head with a cinderblock. She passed out — it seemed like just the thing to do — but not before becoming aware of the vomiting and lamenting and face-pulling of the PICU team, and last of all she saw Jordan Sasscock, holding the dusty, bloody tube before his face, looking at it reproachfully, like it had betrayed him.
61
Hilary charges it upon the heretics as a great crime, that their misconduct had rendered it necessary to subject to the peril of human utterance, things which ought to have been reverently confined within the mind, not disguising his opinion that those who do so, do what is unlawful, speak what is ineffable, and pry into what is forbidden. Shortly after, he apologizes at great length for presuming to introduce new terms. For, after putting down the natural names of the Father, Son, and Spirit, he adds, that all further inquiry transcends the significancy of words, the discernment of sense, and the apprehension of intellect. And in another place, he congratulates the Bishops of France in not having framed any other confession, but received, without alteration, the ancient and most simple confession received by all Churches from the days of the Apostles. Not unlike this is the apology of Augustine, that the term had been wrung from him by necessity, from the poverty of human language in so high a matter: not that the reality could be thereby expressed, but that he might not pass on in silence without attempting to show how the Father, Son, and Spirit are three. How many hours and days did I waste before I realized that what was really wrong was the same way, enshrined inexpressible by the poverty of my language — unholy instead of holy, created by us instead of Him, rendered ineffable because it is absolutely ubiquitous and absolutely corrupt — and that I could be excused for raging against lies I could not articulate? I am oppressed by a mystery and must overcome it with mysterious tools.
62
Dr. Chandra shuffled down the ramp, looking at his shoes. They were better shoes than he’d ever had in his life. Previously, before the end of the world, he could never get ones that fit him because his left foot was a size nine-and-a-half and his right foot was a size ten-and-a-half, and though he usually tried to buy for the bigger foot, he was a sucker for a cheap shoe, and gravitated to stores where two-hundred-dollar shoes were on sale for fifty dollars. They were outliers and misfits in the most exact sense of that word, the shoes that migrated to the huge, sad emporiums where he shopped — little tennies hardly big enough for a kewpie doll lay next to huge Frankenstein boots. He always bought the big shoes, because they were cheap and because it made him feel special, if fake, knowing that people perceived him as having big feet, and some reasonably handsome man or woman might look at him as he clomped down the street in his size thirteens and wonder, was it true what they say about men with big feet?
They were hard to run in, but he almost never had any occasion to run in the old world, someone having said falsely of him that they had never seen him ever run even to a code, that he had only done that thing like when you are trying to be polite to the driver who is allowing you to cross in front of their car at an intersection, where you give the appearance of running though you are still moving at the velocity of a walk. And the laces would never stay tied, perhaps because the constant sliding motion of his foot within the shoe slowly worked them loose as he walked. He was always having to stop and balance on one foot to tie them, a struggle if he had a package or had been drinking, and he had a horror of touching the ground, which made it complicated to touch the laces that had been flipping and flopping against the filthy sidewalk, sometimes trailing in a smear of poop or a glistening comma of spittle. A normal person would have just bought shoes that fit, but when he looked down he got a rare good feeling, watching his big feet fly over the earth and never saw when he passed his striding reflection in a shop window, what everyone else did, a schlumfy goofball in clown shoes.
But finally he had shoes that fit him. The angel made them special, sized exactly to each foot but shaped so that one did not appear larger than the other, and both appeared larger than they actually were. The laces were coated with a very selective adhesive resin that stuck only to itself, not to the shoes, not his fingers, and not to the filthy ground, and now every day he tied his shoes exactly once. He had the aspect of somebody who was staring depressively at his shoes, but really he was admiring them — they were only three days old and the best thing to happen to him this week.
He looked up, finally, narrowly missing a collision with a child — it was Jeri Vega, one of the old liver kids. Months after her recovery, he was still shocked by how well she looked, and hardly recognized her out of her gaunt, yellow hairiness. She looked up into his face as she twirled around him, gazing seriously into his eyes and giving him a sharp Shirley Temple salute. They had all had that look about them, before, not in their eyes but something around the eyes that proclaimed their chronic illness. It was the closest thing to clinical acumen he had developed in his short medical career, being able to recognize it, even in the fetal surgery and bone-marrow transplant poster-children who had lived cutely on billboards and bus-sides all over the city, part of a public relations campaign launched by the hospital shortly before the flood, meant to educate the public about the extremely wonderful things happening in their midst. Now that look was gone from all the children, but some of the adults were already starting to get it.