Hero Fed Weds in ICU

HERO FED WEDS IN ICU

by

LESLIE CORTEZ

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 Leslie Cortez

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. None of the characters is real (with one fairly obvious exception). Most of the factual assertions are true, but some merely satisfy the author’s need not to do research.

Table of Contents

Part One

O’Day age 53

O’Day age 49

O’Day age 47

O’Day age 47 (cont’d)

O’Day age 47 (conclusion)

Part Two

O’Day age 49 (cont’d)

O’Day age 53 (the next-to-last day)

footnotes

PART ONE

53:

By the time the average man is 53, his heart has pumped 90 million gallons of blood more than 2.5 million miles. His testicles have produced 8 trillion sperm, and his brain has lost 8% of its weight at age 20. He can expect to live another 25 years, but he may well be disappointed. The popular term for this stage of life is middle age, yet less than .01 percent of the U.S. population lives to be 106.

They went for the paddles — though everyone present understood, save the newly dead patient, they wouldn’t save the newly dead patient. Automated external defibrillators (AEDs) — like drunken sex, murder-for-hire and representative government — work much better in the movies than in real life. A well placed jolt can stabilize a quivering atrium without much trouble, but a panicky zap to a lifeless heart in an airport concourse or church vestibule (or, in this case, a federal courtroom) almost always is a complete waste of energy.

The odor of smoldering plastic from the dead man’s wristwatch, along with the blackened display, suggested that whatever resuscitation might potentially have occurred at the hands of a veteran bailiff and a chiropractor-slash-alternate juror would have by now, or forever not. The dead man’s eyes were locked in a wistful regard of his tangle of eyebrows and diminishing ash-colored hair; a corner of his rubbery mouth was hiked up, in an inexplicable smirk or as-yet-undetected stroke. The county M.E. would determine which, assuming Cook County — or maybe Beijing? — would pop for an autopsy on a 53-year-old Assistant C.D.S. Attorney who’d died of apparently natural causes 16 words into his opening statement. (Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you remember nothing else about this case, remember this:)

Assistant C.D.S. Attorneying is a young person’s game. And not just for the hours, which are brutal; among the late Sherman O’Day's next-to-last words was a private lament to a newspaper pal of the injustice (LOL) of appearing in court less than six hours after leaving the office the night before. There also were epochal changes in the job itself. Just when he’d gotten the hang of cyber crime — and making the most of the statutorily fuzzy buzzword terror — the red states seceded and O’Day found himself enforcing the laws of the Democratic States of America, soon to become the Chinese Democratic States of America. Lifelong Learning is a wonderful thing, but what’s the good of experience, of seniority, if one can’t, at a certain point, coast?

O’Day’s crime was his competence. Decades after his contemporaries had risen into management or shunted into academia or elbowed themselves onto partnership tracks in high-dollar law firms, he was putting away drug smugglers and identity thieves because he was good at it. The strategy, the showmanship, even the shitwork required in moving a case from search warrant to sentencing -- O’Day had had a talent for it, was recognized for it, and that became why he’d stayed with it. That, and a sense of accomplishing something, more on his worst day than could an Assistant General Counsel in charge of subpoena-compliance at a pharmaceutical company, which was a real job one of his former colleagues had jumped at for 300K a year.

To be sure, defying The Peter Principle had its price. Being at least 10 years older than the next-most-senior ACDSA meant that O’Day had had to prove himself, more than anyone else, to each new U.S. Attorney (or D.S. Attorney, or C.D.S. Attorney) who cycled through. Longevity was equated with mediocrity, a lack of ambition or both. O’Day’s father had spent 43 years on the line at a G.M. plant in Ohio, and no one ever accused him of mediocrity or lack of ambition. Not to his face, certainly. Perhaps he’d passed onto his only child a healthy regard for stability, an aversion to undue risk. For that he should apologize?

Lucky for Sherman, longevity, stability and undue-risk-aversion had endeared him to his bosses in Beijing.

The ultimate defendant of his mostly rewarding, modestly rewarded career was Elmore Giles, founder and chief executive of the cable propaganda network that had rendered the formerly united states ungovernable. That was not why Giles was on trial in the CDSA, however; he’d been indicted on two billion counts of criminal libel (one, give or take, for each of the citizens of mainland China and what now was informally known as Blue China), plus a single count of sedition. As Secretary of News and Information in Walmart’s Real America™, he was immune from prosecution and could not be compelled to appear -- but appear he most enthusiastically did. Three-hundred sixty pounds of salt-cured pork, in a $3,000 Armani suit. O’Day and his team had been struck not by the self-righteous gall of the man himself, which was legend, but that of each and every member of his legal team, right down to receptionist and courier. Long before the Democratic States started handing up indictments for lying about universal health care, these people clearly had considered the other America their enemy.

In view of the growing maelstrom in the 10th-floor courtroom of Judge Letitia Metzler, Giles was more sure than ever that God was on his side. Judge Metzler herself -- a compact and youthful former lifeguard and camp counselor -- was performing CPR until she was stopped by the sickening crack of Sherman O’Day’s ribcage. (That can be fixed! the chiropractor yelled.) Eduardo Gonzales knew a family practitioner and two OB-GYNs were on trial for Medicare fraud down the hall, so when he realized his old friend had not simply fainted, that’s where he ran. What little Ed knew of CPR he’d picked up from too many crime scenes, too many car crashes, train crashes, plane crashes -- even, once, a hot-air balloon crash. Gonzales also, of course, took the opportunity to text the City Desk of his dying newspaper while the AP guy was making his morning stop at the clerk’s office and before the TV people got word at the County courthouse a few blocks away. O'Day would have insisted. But the Medicare trial was in recess, the defendants nowhere in sight, and when Gonzales returned to Room 1023, most of the women, including the judge and a few other colleagues and acquaintances from this court and others, were in tears. Paramedics pushed past him but quickly ascertained what was what and stood down. One of them said to Judge Metzler, still out of breath from her efforts, sweat stains desecrating her crisply starched navy blue robes: He’s gone.

49:

A typical 49-year-old man has earned 68% of the money he ever will earn, and slept with 90% of the sexual partners he ever will have. He is nine years older than the oldest winner of the Cy Young Award, but half a century younger than the oldest chess grandmaster, Andor Lilienthal. He has voted in three presidential elections.

What’s happened to me?

Except through a wired-shut jaw and a haze of anesthesia, it came out, WdsHPmmtme?!

A wake-up call?!

(Wkubcul?)

Most definitely, a wake-up call, repeated the earnest and much-too-close Dr. Mahavir Singh. O’Day was aware of stiff plastic tubes in his nose and titanic nausea; awareness of the many impediments to actually heaving his guts out eluded him. He shifted inside a meringue of cold sheets in a cold and blurry room.

I’ll talk to you more after you’ve woken up and gotten a little life back in you. But you’re a lucky S.O.B., my friend. For now we’ll leave it at that. A lucky S.O.B.

Only at the second S.O.B. did Singh smile, and it lasted no longer than a beep on O’Day’s heart machine. Singh scrutinized the luminous peaks and plateaus as he straightened to leave, the uniform nature of which, one could argue, attested to one’s surgeon’s abilities. O’Day would not argue that. His body felt broken, virtually shattered, and reconstructed as if by Cub Scouts who’d only skimmed the instructions. He would be withholding judgment on Dr. Mahavir Singh for at least the duration of his stay in Intensive Care.

Beep… beep… beep…

Drip drip drip drip drip drip drip…

IV bags were sending God-knows-what into helpless veins -- technically in silence, but, once noticed, IVs are impossible to disregard. Not that O’Day could see straight; Dr. Singh had appeared as a glittering golden mosaic, and still nothing in O’Day’s surroundings had come into focus. Were his eyes now ruined too? Lifelong 20-20 vision had been his only physical attribute worth bragging about. Now white-coated doppelgangers drifted about an antiseptic miasma, knowing O’Day couldn’t tell animal from vegetable or mineral and equally oblivious of him. For this he felt resentful, bereft — and relieved. The sooner the specters disappeared entirely, the better.

He closed his eyes and opened them again in a completely different room, on a completely different day.

Yet still he felt much like death.

And still his wife, Alexis, had not been to see him.

This he surmised by the absence of anything remotely personal in his new surroundings. If Alexis had popped down to the cafeteria, having slept in that awkward-looking chair (which looked capable of folding out to an awkward bed), there would be evidence. A book. Bottled water. Clothes folded tightly in a corner. Instead there was only a bouquet of government-issue red and white carnations, doubtless from O’Day’s colleagues down at the federal building. They were lovely -- enhanced but also diminished by mid-April sunshine that poured through a generous window.

Like death, spring comes for all, whether we’re ready for it or not.

Well, good afternoon, Mister O’Day! It’s good to see you finally awake. A plump and exhausted-looking nurse came into his room unannounced and stood over Sherman with her hands on her hips. This nurse was pretty in the face, as O’Day’s mother would have said, but her job was aging her fast.

I gotta tell you, I was tired of looking at your chart to see what color your eyes were!

O’Day tried to smile with a fractured jaw — and instantly reconsidered. He whimpered like a puppy.

My name’s Dolly, the nurse said, pressing a button on a panel above O’Day’s head, indifferently draping a football-sized breast on either side of his nose. You’ll have to put up with me from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. But not for much longer!

Away went the breasts — and the beeping that had followed O’Day to his private room. Dolly moved to an IV stand in the shadows; O’Day would have continued watching but for the pain of raising and craning his head.

Doctor Singh says you’re doing great. You’ll be outta here by the weekend.

Whhddistnnhhw?

What day is it now? Dolly stepped back into the sunlight. With the window to her back she formed a zaftig silhouette. Tuesday.

She checked her watch. "About 20 after 1. You’ve been here since Sunday