Believing Cedric (38 page)

“Okay. Continue compressions please. Janette, let's get an
IV
in heach arm.” Hanif sidled around to one of the arms and Janet handed him a needle for insertion. “Thank you.” He bent low, his face close to Cedric's skin, fingers massaging into the flesh, looking for a vein. He found it, pierced the epidermis, taped.

The doctor liked what he was seeing with Hanif. In William's book, it was the little things that counted, the cordial transitions, the methodical, though still human, interactions that had to take place quickly and efficiently. He hadn't gotten to know the resident on any kind of personal level, hadn't invited him for a drink or quick lunch, Hanif having only been there since the beginning of the month.

He'd apparently chosen to do a four-week elective in Ontario for a few reasons: specializing in family medicine, he'd been looking for a place where the problems he would have to deal with were sure to run the gamut, but he also wanted to be around, and interact in, colloquial English, a combination that was hard to come by in his native province of Quebec. Ontario, of course, dove at the chance to help him out. Quebecers, thought William, they've always gotten the red-carpet treatment. Then, checking himself, he wondered if that was really the case or just the way we liked to conjure it.

At least Quebec is where William
assumed
Hanif's roots were, even if, judging from his looks and name, along with the throaty pronunciation he'd given to an Arabic word that came up in conversation the week before, he might have been from North Africa or the Middle East. William supposed he was Muslim, though couldn't really say why. It probably had to do with how thoroughly polite he was, as if he were trying to take up as little social space as possible, knowing how cramped the scaremongering world felt with even the presence of his religion.

Hanif took a vial of epinephrine from the crash cart and drew a little more than a milligram into a syringe, hastily injecting it into one of the
IV
s.

William switched with the paramedic who was giving the compressions, as he was heaving audibly from the exercise, getting tired. “Thanks,” the man said breathlessly.

Both the doctor and the intern stopped at the end of the cycle, pausing to glare up at the monitor, hoping the drug would have an effect. But there was nothing.

Hanif, jumping the gun on the three-minute mark before he could inject more medication, followed the epinephrine up with forty units of vasopressin, into the other arm. Another cycle. Another pause, all eyes on the monitor. Waiting for a sound, a beep, a leaping spike. No activity.

Hanif cleared his throat. He took his stethoscope from his neck and listened on the side of Cedric's chest. “Okay. We avv bilateral breath sound with the bagging.” He lifted one of Cedric's eyelids to check for pupil constriction with a penlight, ran his cold finger along the bottom of Cedric's eye. There was no reaction to either. “Okay.”

At the two-minute-and-fifty-second mark, he injected one milligram of atropine and drew blood to be sent to the lab, William's whispering the only sound in the room: “three-and-four-and-five-and-six-and-seven-and-eight-and-nine-and-
twenty
-and-one-and-two-and . . .”

Seven cycles of
CPR
. The quiet was becoming an uncomfortable one. Both the paramedics, with little to do, stood, shifted, watched, wordless.

Janet picked up the chart to write out the steps that they'd taken so far, the type and quantity of what they'd administered, eyeing the blank monitor every few minutes. She wasn't noting the information hurriedly.

Hanif injected more epinephrine, more atropine. Janet noted it down. She stopped looking at the screen.

William began to exchange glances with Hanif more frequently, until he eventually broke the silence, huffing, tired, “And what's our time?”

Hanif checked his watch, knowing that they had far exceeded the fifteen minutes that, even if they had been chasing a vague rhythm, and had done everything perfectly, would be enough to cause brain death. “Let's just do two more cycles. Then we'll . . . then we'll see.” He injected the last milligram of atropine, having reached the maximum dosage, and stepped away from Cedric, toward the monitor, reading through the empty digits, watching the bottom of the graphs, his eyes busy, the screen calm.

In the room, on the bases of the instruments and bed, the wheels teetered stationary, idle. The clinical apparatuses shed indistinct shadows onto the mottled flooring. Empty hooks on the
IV
stands curled, their ellipses glimmering, rigid. On the soap dispenser above the sink, a lobe of foam sagged from its tip, gradually clotting in the dry air. The cloth of the bed gripped tightly on to its folds and wrinkles.

When the two cycles of
CPR
were finished, Hanif put his hands in his pockets, looked at the toes of his shoes.

William, having stopped, took a step away from the bed. “So,” he said, waiting long enough for his own breathing to return to normal before speaking, “I guess we should call it.”

“Right,” Hanif agreed, then leaned over Cedric to do one last test for pupil restriction. Without seeing an inkling of a reaction, he straightened up, comparing his watch with the clock on the wall. Janet, pen poised above the corresponding box on the chart, scribbled the numbers down as he said them. “4:43
PM
.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

A crackle on the radio from the ambulance just outside sent one of the paramedics to check on it, the other paramedic trailing awkwardly behind him. “We should probably be getting back. So . . .”

William waved. “Go ahead. Thanks again, John.”

Janet was turning Cedric's driver's licence over in her hand, writing things down. “I'll uh . . . I'll call his information into the station so they can notify the family.”

“Thanks, Janette,” Hanif mumbled after her.

The two men, alone in the room, stood around the body for a moment or two, William making his way to the monitor and turning it off. He found himself watching Hanif as he did so, considering the possibility that this might be the very first death Hanif had ever witnessed, the first body (besides the inert cadavers that he'd had to dissect in his gross anatomy labs) that he'd ever seen. And there was something about the way he was looking at the man's face, as if studying it—looking over the soft dents of Cedric's temples, the slackened muscles of his brow and cheeks—which made William aware that, for some unseen reason, this was more than just a poignant experience for the resident.

William offered what he could. “As I'm sure you know, sometimes, with massive heart attacks, there's really nothing medical science can do. We did our best.”

“I know, yes. But still, it gets you . . .” Hanif broke off with a heavy sigh. “I mean, I'm wondering . . . right now . . . Do you . . . ? What do you think happens when our body dies?”

William stiffened, became noticeably nervous, worried that the conversation was about to spiral in the direction of fluffy clouds and paradise, of Allah and seventy virgins; or was it seventy-two? William wasn't sure. He felt suddenly ignorant, realizing that his knowledge of Islam didn't go far beyond the discriminatory media and its regurgitated stereotypes. If he was about to have a sensitive religious dialogue, he was entirely unarmed for it. He half-cringed to clarify, “You don't . . . mean, as in: Is there a heaven, do you?”

Hanif flashed him a dreary glance. “No. Of course not.”

They both snickered, releasing some of the tension.

“What I meant was,” Hanif continued, “medically,
scientifically
, what do you think happens inside the cerebral cortex, to consciousness, while the brain is in the hact of shutting down? What do you make of these things like tunnels of light and your life blinking before your eyes?”

William was focusing on the part of Hanif's tone that almost sounded hopeful, as if it were important that this peaceable summation occurred. He also realized that this wasn't a question he'd given a great deal of thought to. Though he did know that when you witnessed someone die, or even saw a body just after it had passed, there was a definite finality in their posture and presence, something that was unquestionable, complete. It was as if, in their deepest physiology, they had flicked a switch, an unequivocal, polarized switch. And William doubted very much that there was any kind of lingering between the
On
and
Off
position of that switch.

But he also felt, and perhaps more importantly, that Hanif's question, with its strange pang of hope mixed into it, was a dangerous one, one that fell on the other side of that line that William liked to draw, between hard science and everything else.

“So you're asking what I think happens to consciousness . . . as the brain shuts down?” William repeated, plainly stalling.

“Yes. That is what I'm asking. What do you think?”

Finally, reluctantly, William squared his shoulders to Hanif and answered him in a calm, deadpan voice, “Nothing.” He honestly hoped he wasn't offending the man. That was just the way it was. He was sure of it. “Nothing happens.”

A pause. “Right,” said Hanif, turning to look at Cedric again, though in a way that insinuated how, while that was close, it was somehow not quite—not exactly—what he, himself, believed.

The autumn that Cedric passed away brought with it unexpected gifts. One of them was the funeral itself. Melissa had sat in her appointed seat, among the featured mourners, looking calmly at the rouged and powdered face of her late father, his hands folded in a serene way that, Melissa considered, was quite unlike him. She teared, consoling her mother beside her, and wasn't at all prepared for what she saw when she turned around at the end of the service and looked through the faces of the other people in attendance. It struck her that she knew almost none of them. Ex-business partners, ex-lovers, ex-friends. It was disconcerting to think how some of them might know her father's story much better than she did. It was disconcerting that she had never thought of her father's life as a story.

Then came the day that Julie handed her a brown envelope. Julie had been asked to go through his personal effects, and had found it, in the top drawer of his desk. It was a series of poems that Melissa had written and stapled together when she was younger, about the life of Primo Levi, the paper now supple and yellowed.

“Wait . . . He stole this from me.”

“Yes.” Julie grinned. “I think he did.”

This time around, Melissa didn't destroy the poems. She kept them in the same envelope, and left them sitting on her own desk, where they lay perfectly still.

That winter Eamon also passed away. It happened abruptly, and due to complications after he'd caught pneumonia. Melissa was the only one at his burial. She had written him a warm elegy, one that she had imagined herself reading during the service but couldn't quite bring herself to do it. Instead, she folded the paper into a tight rectangle and dropped it into the winter ground to be buried along with him. She lay fresh flowers at his grave. They froze.

At her home, cuticles of snow grew along the windows. The winter air was seldom windy, and mostly grey. Nights were long, the harbour of her bed inviting. She took a bit of time off work, spent much of it in silence, the refrigerator humming to itself in the kitchen nearby.

The envelope of poems that Cedric had stolen from her still lay on her desk. Sometimes she caught herself watching its brown lines and divots.

Until, one afternoon, she took out a spiral notebook, sat down, and set out to write an elegy for him, Cedric. Her father.

 

( i )

Reaching up to the frosted copper handle

and opening the door to air

so warm it stings the cheeks

Supper steaming at the window

with the sweet breath of fried onions

Mittens drying on the furnace duct

beside a lunchbox lined with breadcrumbs . . . 

This book, like every book ever written, is fictional. That said, everything in it is either based on real people, real stories, or real history. If there are any discrepancies of facts within (or my interpretation of them), the blame lies entirely with me, the teller of these stories, and not with the people who inspired, lived, or shared them.

In the chronological order of the chapters, I'd like to recognize and express my gratitude to the following people:

For the school-teacher chapter: Greg Ellis and the Galt Museum Archives in Lethbridge, the librarians at the Lethbridge Public Library; Angie Warkup; and Linda Nugent, who gave critical feedback and invaluable anecdotes for the proceeding four chapters as well.

For the Ukrainian chapter: Father Mark Bayrock, Jack Peak, Joe Lavorato, and Tekla Berkedale.

For the First Nations chapter: William Singer III for his patient storytelling, Kelly Tail Feathers for his studious fact-checking, Robbie Plaited-hair, Jeff Doherty, and inspiration from the brilliant writer that is Sherman Alexie.

For the hippie chapter: Lucy Carlson, and the library staff at Lethbridge College.

For the Greece and textile-mill chapter: an anonymous (and shockingly corrupt) landlady of my past, Stefan Fournier, Kenn Hale for useful legal information, and George Arnokouros for language and cultural accuracies.

For the inner-city youth chapter: immeasurable thanks to Deb Mallet for her life story, and to Anthony Suppa and Larisa Williams.

For the South African chapter: Michael Mercier for his legal advice, Rick Holden, Gail Leuzinger, Irving Hexham, Lee White, Brianna Sharpe, and an enormous thanks to Nicki Mosley.

For the Ottawa youth chapter: Jeff Lindberg, Brian Silcoff at the Ottawa Archives, Glenn Garwood, Ralph Getson with his inexhaustible Maritime fishing information, and the Archives of the Canadian War Museum.