Dead Certain

onto a gurney. I got out of the car and watched the rapid grace and military precision with which every person went about their job. The whole transition—from car to gurney to hospital-* happened so fast that it wasn’t until the automatic doors had closed behind them that I realized that it was my roommate, Claudia, who was on the other end of the stethoscope pressed against Bill Delius’s chest.
     
    On the street, Prescott Memorial Hospital is called the Knife and Gun Club—something I hadn’t known until Claudia told me. It wasn’t the kind of thing they put in the glossy brochures they send out when they’re looking for donations. It’s also a piece of information that I’ve never felt the need to pass along to my mother. Her vision of Prescott Memorial was of a sunlit clinic where crippled children learned to walk again. While I understood that it was in no one’s best interest to disillusion her, passing through the double doors to the emergency room I found myself wondering how she’d managed to believe the fiction all these years.
    Tonight the waiting room was filled with the usual bad-news ER crowd. Babies cried, drunks complained, and the air was filled with clashing odors characteristic to all hospitals: the salt smell of blood and the acid stench of vomit mingled with cleaning solution and the unmistakable scent of fear. A young woman in black fishnet stockings and a miniskirt so short it seemed to come up to her throat leaned against the wall holding a clump of bloody gauze to a laceration on her head. In an adjacent hallway a couple of drunks were sleeping it off on gurneys. I looked around to get my bearings and realized that compared to my office at Callahan Ross, my roommate went off to work every day into the Black Hole of Calcutta.
    I felt at loose ends and wasn’t quite sure what to do. I knew that I should probably try to call the Icon suite at the Four Seasons, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was still trying to convince myself to pick up the phone when the mechanical doors to the business end of the ER whooshed open and a young man in the short white coat of an intern hurried over to me. He looked barely old enough to shave.
    “Were you the one who brought in the coronary arrest?” he demanded without preamble.
    “Mr. Delius? Yes. I brought him in,” I stammered, alarmed by the raw urgency in his manner.
    “Then you’d better come with me,” he instructed. “The doctor has some questions.”
    I opened my mouth to say that I hoped that I would be able to answer them, but by the time my mouth began to form the words I was already looking at his back, retreating through the doors that separated the waiting area from the treatment rooms. I hurried up and followed him into the first room—trauma one—a bad sign. This was Claudia’s kingdom, the room they held open for the most serious injuries, the place where they kept all the heavy-duty equipment pumped and primed and ready to go.
    Nothing had prepared me for the tumult—the bleeps of monitors, the scrape of gurney wheels, and the shouts of the medical personnel that formed an indecipherable cacophony. Through the open doorway I could see that the small room was jammed with people, all focused with a terrifying sense of urgency on the inert form of Bill Delius.
    “Does he have a history of heart disease?” demanded the intern who’d come to fetch me.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Diabetes?”
    “I don’t know, I don’t think so,” I stammered.
    “What medications is he currently taking?”
    From over his shoulder I could hear Claudia asking for the defibrillator paddles as matter-of-factly as if she were asking a dinner companion to pass the salt. Even though we’ve all seen it reenacted so many times on television, that it’s practically become a cliché, there’s nothing hackneyed about the actual drama of watching somebody try to jump-start the human heart. Even the intern paused in his questions at the sound of my roommate’s voice, suddenly commanding and adrenalized, warning everyone to clear.
    Bill Delius went asystole after the second attempt. His heart no longer had enough electrical life in it to even squiggle uselessly. The face that stared up at the ceilings was that of a dead man. Claudia straightened up and took a step back from the gurney, her eye catching mine for the first time.
    “A friend?” she demanded.
    “A client,” I answered, feeling ridiculous.
    Claudia blinked and then