Orbit 5 - [Anthology] Read online

  Everybody else around here from old Loomis on up knew what was going on. Sturbridge ground his teeth so hard he bit his tongue. What a jerk he appeared! Kidding himself it counted to let the family see Walter Sturbridge on the job, while all the time these country cousins were getting ready to give Tanker the lead in a damn big show to which Sturbridge didn’t even have a ticket.

  He had found a corner in the Visitors’ Room and taken off his coat, loosened his shoes and tie, stretched out in a chair and lit a cigarette when Hartman came hopping over. Lawrence Jennings followed, puffing his usual cigar. He was Sturbridge’s boss on the Tankerville Herald. The son of Tanker’s dead sister, he was ten years older than Tanker but was his nephew. He would be worth millions, Sturbridge thought, struggling to see Jennings from this fresh viewpoint.

  “It’s this way,” Hartman said. “They hold out no hope for John. He may die any time. They want to use his heart and maybe other things for transplants. You get around. What do you think?”

  Praise God, Sturbridge thought, Loomis had already told him. He didn’t have to sit there with his mouth open, like some country bumpkin being taken in by a shell game. “They can’t change their minds afterwards,” he said.

  “I’m surprised at you, Walter,” said Jennings. “I thought you were more modern. This second-thought business cuts both ways. If we don’t say yes now, we can’t say it later. We think John would want us to say yes.”

  Jennings chewed fiercely on his cigar and looked around the room. Sturbridge’s eyes followed, taking in the clusters of family. Ordinary people, he thought. They hadn’t expected to get anything except Christmas dinner out of John Phillpott Tanker until it was far too late to do them any good. He figured the hospital would have a downhill fight convincing this collection of heirs that they would be talked about as progressive citizens, freed of ancient superstitions, if they signed away all of Tanker that anyone seemed to want.

  “Write something on this transplant business if you can, Walter,” Jennings said. “Everyone will be curious, and the family would like to see the right story in our own paper.”

  Sturbridge nodded. “Anybody know Rowalski?”

  Jennings did not reply. Hartman, whose eyes were shifting about the room, following his partners as they distributed releases for the heirs to sign, finally said, “Rowalski is about John’s age. His father was an engineer, worked for Crewes and Lloyd—you’ll remember them, down at the end of Water Street. The father died quite young. Accident, if I remember right. Anyhow, he left his wife with four small children and not much else. This one, Sidney his name is, has been sickly since high school.”

  “Let’s hope this will be a break for him,” Jennings said as he moved away. “Call me tonight if anything bothers either of you.”

  When the lawyers left, Sturbridge glanced at his watch —quarter of eleven—he had been in the hospital an hour and a half. Dimly he recalled there were two real good movies on the late shows. By twos and threes, the heirs slipped away. Soon Sturbridge was alone in the Visitors’ Room. They would write themselves a little note to remember the funeral and flowers, he thought, and so much for John Phillpott Tanker.

  He stubbed out his cigarette, tied his shoelaces, and went to the men’s room to wash his face. Glasses off, he stared at himself in the mirror, cheered because he was still very much among the living. He tried to remember whether he had left a razor in his car.

  He got into Tanker’s room by following two aides wheeling a big machine. Concealed by a swarm of doctors who were tapping needles, muttering at the blinking lights, and peering into the green faces of cathode-ray tubes, the man on the bed had become plain Tanker. Though barely alive, he was a patient, and a rich one. The blood would continue to drip, the needles to flicker, and the oxygen to hiss through the hoses until the very end. There would be no fooling about that. Sturbridge saw a nurse staring at him and left.

  To kill time, he went down to the bottom floor and bought a sandwich at a vending machine. It was cool down there; he slipped off his coat and tie and walked around to the small waiting room by the emergency office. Old Loomis was inside, eating sandwiches, with a young fellow wearing a white uniform. Loomis called out, “Come over with us, Mr. Sturbridge. Want you to meet Danny Gruber, he’s one of our technicians’ up on seven. Told him about you. Can I get you some coffee?” The old man scuttled away.

  “Pretty busy up there, ain’t you?” Sturbridge asked.

  “We’re about ready now. We’ll really clean house tonight, if they don’t fool around too long in Recovery.”

  “You just have to wait until he dies, don’t you?”

  “Until he’s pronounced dead. Can’t say just when the end is.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, when is a man dead—when he stops breathing, or his heart stops beating, or when there’s irreversible brain damage, or what? In the old days, no problem. You could just let the body lie around until the neighbors came in with the police. That was when you could let a person get really dead dead, Mr. Sturbridge. But the liver, kidneys, heart, and all that don’t wait around. They get dead dead pretty fast, too. You’ve got to be pretty spry. Not so spry there’s any loose talk about murder or manslaughter, but still spry enough so that you have some chance your transplant might take. They have a committee,” Gruber added.

  Great suffering God, Sturbridge thought, another committee. A committee to decide if you were dead. Not dead dead. Just dead enough.

  Loomis came in with coffee. He poised there for a moment like a startled old seagull. “Gotta get back,” he said.

  “Can you take a minute,” Sturbridge asked, “and tell me about Rowalski?”

  “Gruber here knows him better. I just see him in the elevator, but Gruber here, his wife and Rowalski’s wife, both nurses here one time. About four years ago when he had the valve job done, looked like he was going to be fine, and he and this nurse fall for each other. Nice girl, she was. Got two kids, ain’t they?” He looked at Gruber, who nodded. “Sure hope he does well tonight.” He tottered off toward his elevator.

  Sturbridge lit another cigarette. Gruber didn’t smoke. “When does the committee get in on a business like this?”

  “Been in close to an hour,” Gruber said. “Five of them. They cover everything. All kinds of electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms, and down on the second floor there’s a special little lab for tests.”

  Sturbridge looked at his feet. That was how it was done, he thought. Sitting in the middle of all this data, they were pretty certain just how alive a fellow like Tanker was. The tough part was to decide how little alive Tanker needed to be in order to be dead enough to be legal. Committee members allied with the surgical transplant teams, with millions of dollars in malpractice insurance standing between them and any finger-pointers, might see death come earlier than others.

  He looked at Gruber. “You wait until they make up their minds?”

  “For the final green light,” Gruber said, “but our spies tell us when it’s getting close.”

  “So it’s not close now?”

  “No. If it was, that little light would be blinking sevens instead of fours. If it started on seven I’d be out of here like a bullet. I’m going back up anyhow, Mr. Sturbridge. Would you like to come up and see a little bit of what getting ready is like?”

  Leaving the service elevator, they stepped over a recent litter of empty cartons and bottles. Gruber opened a small door and eased Sturbridge in. The place was like a gigantic airplane cockpit with the odor of intricately processed wire and metal, smelling like nothing else whatever, and he breathed this in like fresh air on a mountain-top. His gaze swept across the precise confusion of this array of dials, lights, meters and gauges, blended into that incredible symmetry possessed only by things that somehow worked. Gruber moved along the panel with a technician’s certainty. He pushed a button. “Is everything all right. Miss Lord?” he said.

  “Fine, Mr. Gruber, but Dr. Lutz wants the temperature
of the liver tank raised one degree.”

  “O.K., Miss Lord, I’ll take care of it.”

  He was busy for a minute adjusting dials. Then he beckoned. Standing beside him, looking through the plate-glass viewing port, Sturbridge could see the entire operating room. Doctors and nurses, masked, gowned and gloved, stood ready.

  The waiting men and women reminded Sturbridge of a painting of communicants at some ancient rite. Here they stood, patiently, many barely out of childhood, with years spent in training, eager to wield the instruments and say the words which are the incantations of their modern magic. Their faith had saved and would save again. In his mind Sturbridge saw other men and women gathered in remote rooms the world over, communing with those powers whose force they respected, waiting, waiting for someone like Tanker. The idea was so overwhelming that his mouth would only say something silly. “What if someone has to take a leak?”

  “No problem. Someone is always scrubbing. They go to the john, drink coffee, yak a little, the young ones may get in a little necking, and then they scrub and gown up again. It may go on for hours.” He smiled. “You know, my wife was a nurse here, and my brother is one of the doctors out there somewheres. I get it from all sides.”

  Christ, Sturbridge thought, this transplantation business was how Gruber made a living. He liked it. I bet the first thing he’ll tell his wife will be how he raised the temperature one degree on the liver tank.

  A door slammed on the other side of the partition behind them. “What do you mean visible, you goddamned fool?” a gruff voice said. “That polymyograph they hooked onto him is so damned sensitive, it would give a higher reading hooked onto an old horse turd than it’s giving hooked onto Tanker. You scientific hotshots give me a pain in the ass.”

  There was a pause before a softer, smoother voice replied, “If that boss of yours wasn’t so damned anxious to get a new kidney into that worthless son of old man Krillus so he can nick him about twenty thousand, you wouldn’t be breathing down all our necks to pronounce this poor devil dead.”

  “You miserable hypocrite. Would you play God and pass judgment on Krillus’ boy just because he had a little tough luck, and deny him a chance to live? We’ve had both his kidneys out for a week now.”

  “I’m not hypocrite enough to say this man’s dead when a student nurse can look at the dials and see he’s alive.”

  “Dials, my butt. Pull that damn plug out of the wall, and that whole show will stop in two seconds. We’ve got seven operating rooms ready to go up here, with nurses and doctors killing time playing with each other until you make up your feeble mind this man is dead.”

  Gruber smiled. He walked along checking the panel, humming happily. “Things always get a little tight in the committee at the end,” he said.

  Committees were committees, Sturbridge thought. When the high priests of Egypt got together in a back room of the temple, they probably had things to say to each other. He said, “Tell me about Rowalski.”

  “Good man, always trying. We both studied electronics, and took some courses together. He’s a solid technician. After he had the valve job and got married, things looked good for a while and he thought some of getting a job with us here.”

  “So what does he do?”

  “He has a little radio and TV repair shop at home. Picks up a few dollars but not a living. The agencies help him out.”

  “Not much of a life,” Sturbridge said.

  “He lost his gumption after the valve job went bad, and hasn’t been the same Rowalski. His wife has the jitters and takes four kind of tranquilizers and smokes three packs of cigarettes a day. She can’t sleep, so things have been going to hell. There’s a lot of us wishing him luck tonight.”

  Sturbridge nodded. “I never thought of it from Rowalski’s point of view. Just Tanker’s.” He rose. “You’ve been kind,” he said, shaking hands, “and thanks, but I better get out of your way now.”

  Back on Recovery, Sturbridge tried to mix in and get inside Tanker’s room for a quick look, but a nurse spotted him and shooed him away. He sat in a phone booth trying to reach his paper and heard outside, “John, for Christ’s sake, old man, we’ve been set up there for over three hours. Good God Almighty, how long is it going to take you to convince these stupid bastards—” The doctors moved away.

  They were working men with a job to do, Sturbridge thought. They knew Tanker’s goose was cooked. They had all these cases in here needing transplants, and ever since Tanker was tagged It, they’d been going. Taking blood out of Tanker for matching as fast as they ran it in. How did they know they were matching against Tanker and not some skid-row bum who had swapped his blood for a few dollars? Probably did the best they could. In ancient days they robbed graves so they could study bodies. Now, upstairs, they waited, poised like a suspended shot on television, aiming to cheat death when they started. He was an alien standing there: still he could sense the pressure as it seeped down the stairways and down the elevator shafts and flowed into Recovery.

  He yawned. Despite the air conditioning, his clothes were sticky. He needed a shave. Most of all he was tired, tired really of being an onlooker, sneaking peeks through keyholes and unshaded windows.

  Perhaps he could see Rowalski, he thought. He dialed the hospital. The central desk said no. Maybe he’d gone up.

  Back in the Visitors’ Room, he found the little light but now it was flashing three. They weren’t on top yet, he thought. He went through his coat, tie, shoes and cigarette routine like an enfeebled actor, condemned forever to rehearse an unsatisfactory and misunderstood role. He pulled out a notebook and did the one thing he knew how to do.

  He took off his glasses to rub his eyes, lit a fresh cigarette, and felt sorry for himself. The little light was flashing sevens. So now it was close. Upstairs the last cups of coffee were being drunk, last visits to the john were being made, sleepers were being awakened. Around the high sinks it was scrub, scrub, scrub, as each crew’s reinforcements moved up, kidding and joking to ease the tension of the hours ahead, like troops, in the last hour before dawn, moving up to the line of battle.

  He didn’t try to get close to Recovery. Outside Tanker’s room three doctors stood in a small, tired, and solemn cluster. Soon there was a fourth. It was 4:15. Sturbridge wondered if all the patients waiting for Tanker were already on seven, or if they were now saying goodbye to their tearful families. Near him an elevator came up and was locked with open door. Aides appeared with long low carts and reels of electric cable.

  Then Sturbridge felt a surge of pity and understanding for the fifth man on that committee, who now must be excruciatingly aware that his own squeamishness, conscience, or sense of fitness had condemned him to be the one who finally said Tanker was dead enough. Sturbridge could picture him dragging himself from one dial to another, staring at one group of flashing lights and then another, hoping to find there some mechanistic magic that would relieve him of his burden. For he must know full well that by now University Hospital waited on him.

  Sturbridge saw him come out. Hours earlier, he must have been called from a dinner party. Now in his disheveled suit he resembled a sad and bedraggled penguin. He stepped toward the other four and with an oddly appealing gesture threw up his hands.

  The long low carts, the reels of cable, more doctors, more nurses, moved into Tanker’s room and soon, as if moved by a will of his own, Tanker’s bed appeared, still covered and surrounded by tubes and needles, tanks and flashing lights. It moved, in what seemed to Sturbridge a poignantly solemn procession, past the tormented five and into the waiting elevator. The door closed.

  Sturbridge heard the nurse. “Desk,” she said, “this is Recovery. Patient John Phillpott Tanker expired four thirty-seven a.m.”

  * * * *

  Sturbridge called his paper and gave them the time of death. Driving through the early dawn, he thought it would be nice to get home where he could take off his clothes and be comfortable.

  When he had typed about half a page,
the smell of frying bacon overwhelmed him. God, he hadn’t realized he was that hungry. As he ate, he told Maisie all about it. Then he fell asleep over the typewriter. Maisie let him doze a little while, then woke him and he finished the piece. He called it “The Night John Phillpott Tanker Died,” and Maisie took it down to the paper while he went to bed.

  Even Lawrence Jennings went out of his way to flatter him. “They keep telephoning, Walter. They like it. We need some more. Can you keep them coming?”

  Gruber’s brother, other doctors, and a lawyer friend coached him. He explained the problems so the ordinary man could see them. He called his second article “Legal Death.” Letters poured in screaming, “A man is dead when he’s dead and any fool knows that.” Others showed more understanding.

  He visited families made wretched by their burdens: invalids who neither died nor recovered nor adjusted. Instead they lived with the hopes and monstrous despairs of the near-dead, bound to life by an umbilical cord woven by modern science. He knew these families well. He wrote and wrote, and called it “The Hopeful Supplicants.”