they were ready.
The cool air couldn’t reach his head because of his surgical cap, but
the sweat on his scalp felt icy. Shivers cascaded through him.
Blood, heated to one hundred degrees, began to move through the clear
plastic IV line and into the body through a thigh vein, surging
rhythmically to the artificial pulse of the bypass machine.
Jonas depressed the plungers halfway on each of the three syringes,
introducing heavy doses of the free-radical scavengers into the first
blood passing through the line. He waited less than a minute, then
swiftly depressed the plungers all the way.
Helga had already prepared three more syringes according to his
instructions. He removed the depleted ones from the IV ports and
introduced the full syringes without injecting any of their contents.
Ken had moved the portable defibrillation machine next to the patient.
Subsequent to reanimation, if Harrison’s heart began to beat erratically
or chaotically fibrillation it might be coerced into a normal rhythm by
the application of an electric shock. That was a last-hope strategy,
however, for violent defibrillation could also have a serious adverse
effect on a patient who, having been recently brought back from the
dead, was in an exceptionally fragile state.
Consulting the digital thermometer, Kari said, “His body temperature’s
up to only fifty-six degrees.”
“Sixty-seven minutes,” Gina said.
“Too slow,” Jonas said.
“External heat?”
Jonas hesitated.
“Let’s go for it,” Ken advised.
“Fifty-seven degrees,” Kari said.
“At this rate,” Helga said worriedly, “we’re going to be past eighty
minutes before he’s anywhere near warm enough for the heart to kick in.”
Heating pads had been placed under the operating-table sheet before the
patient had been brought into the room. They extended the length of his
spine.
“Okay,” Jonas said.
Kari clicked the switch on the heating pads.
“But easy,” Jonas adv1.
Kari adjusted the temperature controls.
They had to warm the body, but potential problems could arise from a
too-rapid reheating. Every resuscitation was a tightrope walk.
Large doses of vitamins E and C, tirilazad mesylate, and phenyl tertiary
butyl nitrone.
The patient was motionless, pale. He reminded Jonas of a figure in a
life-size tableau in some old cathedral: the supine body of Christ
sculpted from white marble, rendered by the artist in the position of
entombment as He would have rested just prior to the most successful
resurrection of all time.
Because Kari Dovell had peeled back Harrison’s eyelids for the
ophthalmoscopic examination, his eyes were open, staring sightlessly at
the ceiling, and Gina was putting artificial tears in them with a
dropper to insure that the lenses did not dry out. She hummed “Little
Surfer Girl” as she worked. She was a Beach Boys fan.
No shock or fear was visible in the cadaver’s eyes, as one might have
expected. Instead, they held an expression that was almost peaceful,
almost touched by wonder. Harrison looked as if he had seen something,
in the moment of death, to lilt his heart.
Finishing with the eyedrops, Gina checked her watch. “Sixty-eight
minutes.”
Jonas had the crazy urge to tell her to shut up, as though time would
halt as long as she was not calling it out, minute by minute.
Blood pumped in and out of the bypass machine.
“Sixty-two degrees.” Helga spoke so sternly that she might have been
chastising the dead man for the laggardly pace of his reheating.
Flat lines on the EKG.
Flat lines on the EEG.
“Come on,” Jonas urged. “Come on, come on.”
4
He entered the museum of the dead not through one of its upper doors but
through the waterless lagoon. In that shallow depression, three
gondolas still lay on the cracked concrete. They were ten-passenger
models that had long ago been tipped off the heavy chain–drive track
along which they’d once carried their happy passengers. Even at night,
wearing sunglasses, he could see they did not have the swan-neck prows
of real gondolas in Venice, but sported leering gargoyles as
figureheads, hand-carved from wood, garishly painted, perhaps fearsome
at one time but now cracked, didn’t need them in that gloom.
Neither did he require a flashlight. Where an ordinary man would have
been blind, he could see.