Bringing Out the Dead Page 2

  “Squeeze,” I said. I wanted to give some lasting consolation. There was none. “Maybe you should take a break. Your brother could come in for a few minutes and then my partner will be back.” “No.” She shook her head. “He couldn’t handle it.” I felt bad for bringing her into this, but she was right: it was a job best done by the already fallen and, in my case, the still falling. I tried to imagine our sitting like that on the Great Lawn in Central Park, a picnic lunch between us on a bright blue and green spring afternoon. I opened the wine and she smiled and stretched her back on a cool breeze. Two young people.

  “Do you have any music?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Music. I think it helps if you play something he liked.” I was already using the past tense.

  “John,” she yelled, “put on the Sinatra.”

  John came in. He was crying.

  “Play the Sinatra,” she whispered.

  The opening strings of “September of My Years” drifted through the room. Not salsa, I thought, not a good rhythm for CPR, but what music to leave with. Unconsciously I picked up my pace and concentrated on my hands. There was a time when I believed music could make a dead heart beat again, and I once believed my hands were electric and bringing someone back to life was the greatest thing one could do.

  I have done CPR in grand ballrooms on Park Avenue and in third-floor dance halls uptown. On Park they stand tall black panels around you to shield the dancers from an unpleasant view, while the band keeps up their spirits with songs like “Put on a Happy Face.” Uptown the music never breaks and the dancers’ legs whirl around you like a carnival ride. I’ve worked on the floors of some of the finest East Side restaurants, serenaded by violins while the man at the table next to me cut into his prime rib, and I have worked under the gory fluorescence of basement diners where taxi drivers can order, eat, and be back on the road in ten minutes. I’ve watched Broadway shows from the front row, kung fu pornography from Times Square balconies. I once brought a bartender back to life on the top of his bar while Irish dance music played. The patrons moved over for us, but no one stopped drinking.

  One of my first cardiac arrests was in the Graceland Ballroom. I’d been there the Friday night before, to pick up a young man shot in the head, but this was Sunday afternoon, when families come from all over the city to talk and dance. A salsa band was playing, and the crowd of dancers made a path for us without losing a beat. The man lay dead in the middle of the floor, dead but not lifeless, because nothing could be lifeless in a room so full of laughter and dancing and music that sounded off your heart. We had a backup unit behind us and my partner and I moved perfectly—intubated with an epinephrine on board in twenty seconds. I took over CPR, my hands rising and falling into the rhythm of the music and the dancers’ feet stepping nimbly around us to the salsa beat, a pulse of life. On the monitor I watched my compressions become perfect beats, and when I took my hands away the beats continued. “He has a pulse,” I shouted, and stuck my thumb up in the air. The man started breathing on his own, and as we pulled the stretcher out the crowd cheered and slapped us on the back and the dancers filled in behind.

  Walking from that room I was blessed by life. I had purpose for the first time and it carried me through those early wild years. Only much later did that beat begin to fade, and only recently did it disappear, leaving a cold stone in its place.

  Larry had been on the phone ten minutes, and my knees felt as if I’d just spent an hour in a confessional. I had to admit that Burke looked better. The blue was gone from his cheeks, and the broken vessels in his nose had turned a familiar red. He wasn’t that old really, barely sixty. I noticed beats on the monitor, too wide to carry a pulse, but they were gathering speed. I pumped on and listened to Sinatra sing of the brown leaves falling down. When I looked up again the beats had tightened. I stopped and found a weak pulse in his neck, which soon became a strong pulse at the wrist. I sat on the bed. His brain was dead; I was pretty sure of that. I checked his pupils; they were fixed in place, but his heart was beating like a young man’s. Larry came in.

  “It’s okay, Frank. We can call it. Eighty-three.”

  “No we can’t,” I said. “He’s got a pulse.”

  “No shit.”

  The daughter looked up. “Is he going to be all right?”

  “His heart’s beating.” I didn’t say that he would never wake up and that his heart would beat on as long as machines pumped in food and oxygen—that I was just acting on orders.

  The news of Mr. Burke’s recovery spread quickly, and soon the living room was full of crying, smiling faces. The backup unit arrived with a longboard and the two EMTs helped us strap the old man in. Larry and I packed up the equipment.

  The stairway was tight and it took some time to get down; at each turn we had to tilt the board and pass it hand to hand over the railings, all the time fighting to keep the airway tube in place. The daughter led our procession, glaring at the faces that peered out from every door. When we reached the bottom she waved her arms at the people still sitting on the stoop—“Get out, get out”—pushing the ones on the top until the crowd moved and split, gathering on each side of the front gate to watch us bear Mr. Burke down the last six steps.

  At the back doors to the ambulance I felt the rain start. I looked up to where the clouds had moved under the moon, and in the fifth-floor window I saw Mr. Burke standing, watching the proceedings. The light seemed to go through him, his body too thin to stop it, but he felt more real to me than the man strapped to the board, the eyes unblinking in the rain. I held my breath and bent over, waiting for the feeling to pass. When I looked up again, Mrs. Burke had taken his place. She was holding a suit and a pair of shoes; she reached up her arm and the light went off. “Let’s go, Frank,” Larry said, and together we loaded Burke’s body into the back.

  There is an old woman named Doris who for years has been wandering the streets of Times Square. She carries all her belongings with her in two tattered canvas bags, and she sleeps in a box next to the playground in Clinton Park. She walks most of the day and night, her bags held just inches above the street, her head down, speaking to the passing ground in bitter tones. She seems to hate everything, but most of all she hates ambulances, for every ambulance she sees is the one that took her daughter away. If I park long enough in the area of Forty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue, inevitably I’ll hear a pounding on the back doors and Doris calling, “Marie, Marie, it’s Mama. I’m going to get you out.” Then she walks around to the front. “You’ve got my daughter; she’s in there,” she’ll say. “You give her back.” The first few times I saw her, I tried talking to her, but her hatred was uncompromising, exhaustive, a mother facing her child’s killers for the first time. “You give her back,” she yells, picking up her bags to follow as I drive away.

  2

  Larry climbed through the back doors and sat in the chair at the stretcher’s head. He reconnected the Ambu-bag to the tube in Burke’s lungs and squeezed. One of the EMTs sat at Burke’s side, searching the arm for a blood pressure. I hung the IV bags, hooked up the oxygen, and plugged in the EKG wires that had come off during the four-flight carry-down. The machine beeped out a record of the heart’s stubborn knocking, a perverse cable from the pale-blue face whose open eyes pointed blankly at the ceiling. Twice I tried to close them, but the lids rolled back.

  When the daughter stepped in I grabbed her arm and turned her to go, saying she could follow behind us with her mother, but she refused to leave. I’m always bad with the consoling part. I can start an IV in the back of an ambulance bouncing down Seventh at sixty, but my words of sympathy always sound so empty. I tend to look more stricken than the family. The best I can do is keep them from the dying, and Burke’s daughter had seen too much of that already. I pulled her out, and though she fought me, I held her arm and shut the door. “Help your family,” I said. “They need you more. Help yourself.” I left her there in the green halo of the streetlamps and the oily rain
sweeping in from Ninth Avenue.

  Into Forty-third, silent through the gray steam rising, no lights, no sirens, only the slow ticking of Burke’s EKG and the rhythmic slap of the broken wiper, a dirty mop on the front glass. I felt like I had been upstairs in Burke’s apartment for days, like the rest of the night would stretch out through every remaining year of my life.

  I made a right on Tenth. No rush, I thought, but when I saw the daughter drive up behind me in an old black Ford, I turned on the lights and sirens, pressed down on the gas. The emergency room couldn’t do much for Burke, but it was important for the family that it look emergent. I stared straight ahead, trying to think only of the road in front of me, the simple job of taking the patient to the hospital.

  I needed to concentrate because my mind tended to wander on these short trips. It was the neighborhood I grew up in and where I had worked most as a medic, and it held more ghosts per square foot than any other. If I wasn’t careful I could stop at a red light and forget where I was going, disappear into the past: a young boy climbing the elms in Clinton Park, a young man carrying a stabbed hooker out of the Smiling Eyes Pub. Lately I had been disappearing a lot, missing turns. I even took a couple of patients to the wrong hospital. Larry had sent Captain Barney three transfer requests in three weeks. He told him I was crazy, though that is a relative term and I considered Larry one of the strangest people I’d ever met. I just needed a few slow nights, a week without tragedy, followed by a couple of days off. I wanted to deliver Burke, give my condolences to the family, and never see them again. Get through the rest of this shift and forget it, see the new day in at the Blarney Moon bar.

  I was born in the same hospital I was taking Burke to die in, Our Lady of Mercy, Fifty-sixth Street between Ninth and Tenth, but those who worked there, or were unfortunate enough to be treated there, called it Our Lady of Misery, or simply Misery. My father, who was also born in Misery, never referred to the place as anything except the butcher shop, following an appendectomy in which the surgeon left a sponge under his colon. Three weeks after surgery, my father returned in agony and was immediately reopened. He spent the next two months in Misery’s critical care, a stay that was anything but miserable, for he had fallen helplessly in love with the night nurse, Mariah Horan.

  My mother often told me of the night they met. In details only a nurse could love, she described his thin feverish face and pale weakened frame, comatose from shock and so close to death, she claimed, the priest had been called. Neglecting her other patients, she stayed with him through the night, her hand rarely leaving his burning forehead, tracing with her fingers in his damp skin the sign of the cross. She came from a long line of Irish faith healers, peasant physicians who made house calls with Bibles and beads, and as she sat next to my father she spoke the prayers learned from her mother, a mix of Latin, Gaelic, and King James that sounded in my young ears like the kind words of a dinosaur queen. In the morning he opened his eyes and they were gray and without shine, but he was alive, and when he saw her he smiled and said, “Who’d ever thought they’d let me in heaven.”

  That was my favorite part, because my mother always laughed, something she rarely did. “And do you know what he called me?”

  Of course I knew. He called her the angel of his resurrection.

  She loved to tell that story while preparing my bed, mechanically pulling down the crisp creased sheets and softening the pillow with three quick punches. She was born a nurse, had as a young girl nursed every stray child or animal, left her job at Misery to nurse me and my father, and never quite stopped, and as she leaned over to feel my forehead and whisper good night, it was easy to see the angel he fell for that morning, her eyes glittering blue-white like Niagara, her cheeks flushed as if just christened, her hair bundled up over her head like a Greek madonna. “It was a long and difficult recovery,” she said, “but I never doubted. Every day I cared for him I loved him more.”

  Such was my mother’s power in those moments I would not have been surprised if the room had filled with the fluttering of doves, the songs of a hundred harps, and every night in that music she wrapped the earth in my blanket and secured it under my chin. In the grace of a child warm under the world, I slept easily, through the blaring of the night streets outside my window, the screams of my parents’ pitched battles outside my door.

  My parents fought often and ferociously, and it was not uncommon for my mother to leave my room after her sweet declarations and begin a blindsided verbal lashing of my father so intense you would think she had just found him dancing naked on the coffee table with the widow from next door, swigging whiskey out of the bottle and throwing up on the cat, instead of doing what he did every night: sit in the green recliner, sip gin from his ’64 World’s Fair glass, and watch television reruns: Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, I Love Lucy, and his favorite, The Honeymooners. During her attacks he never rose or yelled or took his eyes from the screen, but when she had worn herself to tears he would counter with a piercingly detailed summary of her faults—small-minded hysteria, religious fanaticism, poor dishwashing technique—his voice rising to describe mercilessly her stifling presence, right down to her hairy toes, climaxing with calls for divorce so grim they seemed irrevocable.

  I was proud of how well they fought. On our street it was defined as romance, more plausible than any candlelit dinner. All our neighbors fought, and my friends and I were skeptical of those who didn’t, like Dupa Dan’s folks, who were known Communists and antiwar agitators. Through the cramped rows of walk-ups, cries of anger and crashing glass were as common as sirens. Almost nightly the thin walls in our kitchen thudded with the smashing of our neighbors’ crockery. The Corcorans were smashers, my folks were screamers, and every day my friend Jimmy Corcoran and I tallied up their scores. It was all a game to us, a game because sooner or later they always made up, the storm passing sometimes as quickly as it had come, my mother still crying but smiling, my father holding her in his chair, stroking her hair: “I would die if I left you, angel. I could never do that.”

  Born to a poor family in the Bronx, my mother was raised on miracles. By the time she became a debt-ridden mother in Manhattan, she could find the marvels of God almost anywhere. She had shown me the Last Supper in a hardware store window, the Lord ascending into heaven in the spin cycle of a washing machine. She once found an entire Nativity scene in the bottom of a Slurpee, yet the great miracle she had waited and prayed for all her young life, the meeting and saving of my father, left a long and unremarkable wake. How could something so grandly brought end in the bent figure of my father—the same chair, the same television shows, the same dwindling gin? She had expected her faith to be tried, was ready for any infidelity, violence, or bankruptcy the Lord would choose to send—anything, that is, but the trial of dullness presented by my father.

  So she invented his betrayal, searched daily through his drawers and his wallet, sniffed his clothes for perfume, checked his neck for lipstick. She accused him of affairs with every woman in the building, the local hairdresser, a bus dispatcher, a crossing guard. She even for a time suspected him of secretly meeting Audrey Meadows, who played Alice on his favorite show.

  My father came home from work every night at five-thirty, and every night he would quickly change from his bus driver’s uniform into a pressed clean suit in which he would eat dinner and retire to his recliner, drinking until he passed out at midnight. His routine was evidence enough of his fidelity, but my father rarely denied my mother’s charges and often enjoyed encouraging them. At dinner he would casually refer to the height of his passengers’ skirts, and he could go on at length about the widow’s lingerie hung to dry outside our kitchen window.

  About once a week he would rise from the table and announce that he needed a walk. Preparations for these excursions could last over an hour as he showered, shaved, and changed into his best suit. He stood before the hall mirror and stared at the figure in the glass, a man of obvious wealth and industry, of power over man
y, a man who was perhaps on his way to the club for drinks and talk of the world and then to his table at the Plaza, a discreet supper with an actress friend.

  He was handsome, the handsomest man in the city, my mother used to say, but before his weekly walks she refused to be in the same room with him; acting as if it was their final parting, she banged the pots against the sink and cursed the cat. She told him never to return, to go to his women and let them endure his faithless love for more than one night. She said this though she had followed him enough times to know he never walked farther than the corner bar, to talk baseball with Pete the bartender.

  I lived for the few hours between dinner and the gin he disappeared in at eight. He might come home snarling, knock me around for a C in math, but there was always the chance he might step through the door laughing at some joke he had heard at work and couldn’t wait to tell. Some evenings he poured attention on us. He’d prop me on the thin edge of his knee and tell me stories of my grandfather, an Irish immigrant who made good, at one time owning three liquor stores, an entire building on Fifty-second Street, a house and horse in the Catskills, and who drank all his good luck away and gave what was left to his friends. He spoke of the years when there was nothing his father wouldn’t give him and years when there was nothing to give, and yet, rich or poor, he always spoke of the city as a child’s dream, a fenceless playground of construction sites and demolition zones. When my mother finished in the kitchen, he’d grab her and pull her into his arms, toppling us all to the floor. He’d smother her protests with kisses, and afterward, standing and laughing, he’d grab my wrists and swing me over her, around the room, my arms stretching out until I felt the wind of my feet pushing down the walls.