into the wind-driven rain.
Lingering after Kari’s departure, Ken Nakamura said, “I hope you realize
she’s a perfect match for you.”
Through the rain-streaked glass door, Jonas watched the woman as she
hurried toward her car. He would have been lying if he had said that he
never looked at Kari as a woman. Though tall, rangy, and a formidable
presence, she was also feminine. Sometimes he marveled at the delicacy
of her wrists, at her swan-like neck that seemed too gracefully thin to
support her head. Intellectually and emotionally she was stronger than
she looked.
Otherwise she couldn’t have dealt with the obstacles and challenges that
surely had blocked her advance in the medical profession, which was
still dominated by men for whom-in some case shauvinism was less a
character trait than an article of faith.
Ken said, “All you’d have to do is ask her, Jonas.”
“I’m not free to do that,” Jonas said.
“You can’t mourn Marion forever.”
“It’s only been two years.”
“Yeah, but you have to step back into life sometime.”
“Not yet.”
“Ever?”
“I don’t know.”
Outside, halfway across the parking lot, Kari DoveIl had gotten into her
car.
“She won’t wait forever,” Ken said.
“Goodnight, Ken.”
“I can take a hint.”
“Good,” Jonas said.
Smiling ruefully, Ken pulled open the door, letting in a gust of wind
that spat jewel-clear drops of rain on the gray tile floor. He hurried
out into the night.
Jonas turned away from the door and followed a series of hallways to the
elevators. He went up to the fifth floor.
He hadn’t needed to tell Ken and Kari that he would spend the night in
the hospital. They knew he always stayed after an apparently successful
reanimation. To them, resuscitation medicine was a fascinating new
field, an interesting sideline to their primary work, a way to expand
their professional knowledge and keep their minds flexible; every
success was deeply satisfying, a reminder of why they had become
physicians in the first place-to heal. But it was more than that to
Jonas. Each reanimation was a battle won in an endless war with Death,
not just a healing act but an act of defiance, an angry fist raised in
the face of fate. Resuscitation medicine was his love, his passion, his
definition of himself, his only reason for arising in the morning and
getting on with life in a world that had otherwise become too color less
and purposeless to endure.
He had submitted applications and proposals to half a dozen
universities, seeking to teach in their medical schools in return for
the establishment of a resuscitation-medicine research facility under
his supervision, for which he felt able to raise a sizable part of the
financing. He was well-known and widely respected both as a
cardiovascular surgeon and a reanimation specialist, and he was
confident that he would soon obtain the position he wanted. But he was
impatient. He was no longer satisfied with supervising reanimations.
He wanted to study the effects of short-term death on human cells,
explore the mechanisms of free-radicals and free radical scavengers,
test his own theories, and find new ways to evict Death from those in
whom it had already taken up tenancy.
On the fifth floor, at the nurses’ station, he learned that Harrison had
been taken to 518. It was a semi-private room, but an abundance of
empty beds in the hospital insured that it would be effectively
maintained as a private unit as long as Harrison was likely to need it.
When Jonas entered 518, Helga and Gina were finishing with the patient,
who was in the bed farthest from the door and nearest the rain-spotted
window. They had gotten him into a hospital gown and hooked him to
another electrocardiograph with a telemetry function that would
reproduce his heart rhythms on a monitor at the nurses’ station. A
bottle of clear fluid hung from a rack beside the bed, feeding an IV
line into the patient’s left arm, which was already beginning to bruise
from other intravenous injections administered by the paramedics earlier
in the evening; the clear fluid was glucose enriched with an antibiotic
to prevent dehydration and to guard against one of the many infections