Free Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) by Samuel Shem Page A

firm date,” he shouted.
    She said something he couldn’t hear.
    â€œWhat? I can’t hear you.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œKeep shouting!” he yelled over the dying man’s screams. “You’ve got to shout!”
    â€œ
Ottobre
30,” she shouted. Just two more weeks.”
    â€œOkay. October 30.”
    â€œOctober 30,
sì, sì.
I love you!”
    â€œI love you, too!” he shouted back, but suddenly was embarrassed because everything had gone silent. The garbageman had died.
    â€œAnd have you seen your mother flying around?” she screamed.
    Orville spoke normally. “You don’t have to shout anymore.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œNo, I haven’t.”
    â€œAnd no buildings are talking to you?”
    â€œThe hotel never actually
talked
to me. It was just a—I don’t know, but nothing since, no.”
    â€œThis is the bad sign,” she said, sounding worried. “Something’s fishy.”
    â€œAfter my mother’s third letter the other day, if I never hear from her again it’ll be too soon. I still don’t know who’s mailing her letters.”
    â€œPoor Orvio,” she said, “to have to deal with these
pazzi
Columbians.”
    They said how much they missed each other and how they longed for the feel of their toes intertwined. With shared avowals of their love and the sheer impossibility of waiting two more weeks with such yearning, they hung up.
    Orville pronounced the garbageman dead and changed out of his green surgical scrubs. He was hustling out the door to get down to the office and Bill when an ambulance rushed up screaming, and out of the back came a small body with tubes going in and blood coming out.
    â€œEleven-year-old girl,” said the emergency tech. “Shot by a nine-year-old boy.”
    Orville turned around and followed the stretcher in. A little older than Amy. A sweet girl, shot in the chest, looking like she was about to die. Her color was turning from healthy pink to cyanotic blue—soon it would be deathly white. Everything in Orville clicked in to save her. He did the usual things, but nothing was working. It was puzzling. Her heart didn’t seem to have been hit by the bullet, nor had the aorta or vena cava, but her heart was straining, as if drowning, beating but not pumping out much blood. The girl was going under.
    Her parents were there on the other side of the curtain, waiting.
    What the hell’s going on? He felt a flicker of panic—of missing something that might save her, of failing. The nurses went silent, avoiding his eyes, waiting for him to come up with something else to try. One nurse, a friend of the parents, was sitting with them. The mother prayed. The father paced. Orville realized that the thread of the whole thing—the girl, the parents, the nurses—was unraveling fast.
    He stood over the little girl, watching and waiting. He’d been in situations like this often before, in various hellholes all over the world, with someone who was dying, often from a bullet. If he were lucky, now, something else might happen.
    Time slowed.
    And then, as if a hand were on his shoulder, Orville felt himself pulled back—it was, he realized, a kind of Celestina moment—pulled back in order to truly
see,
seeing the girl, seeing the chest, seeing the heart, seeing—yes!
Not
the heart. The sac
around
the heart. The bullet must have nicked the pericardium. Blood was leaking into the pericardial sac and, trapped there between the heart and the sac, was compressing the heart—like a swimmer held under. Cardiac tamponade.
    Quickly he jerry-rigged a large-bore needle to a lead of the EKG machine and pushed it between the ribs gently until the current of the heart showed him to be in contact with the pericardium, and then he popped it through the sac and with a whoosh, like the rush of air out of the mozzarella Pappa’s windpipe, bright red blood