Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

Allen carefully sat the coffee down on the small nurses’ table, wrapped both arms across his chest, clasped his shoulders, and hugged himself. The notion of him operating to save Hank’s life brought a slight tremor of irony-he recalled Hank’s tough-guy pontificating yesterday morning. Well, Hank, it looks like the situation is now slightly reversed.

His eyes fixed on the telephone sitting on the desk, next to the blood pressure monitor and the coffee cup. He took a moment to clearly remember a time when he was totally satisfied with himself. .

He remembered Jolene Sommer at that party a year ago at Milt’s river place. She had playfully mussed his hair and had told him it was too perfect.

Allen, you’ve got to learn to unwind a little.

Her touch had left him permanently tousled. Like a warm breeze it had carried hints of foreign vacations and easy laughter. After meeting her he’d returned home to his life and discovered it was a colorless shell furnished with brand-name cliches.

There is more , she’d seemed to intimate.

There is me.

But she hadn’t said anything remotely like that. It was a wish on his part. It wasn’t that he thought Jolene could change. He thought he could change and she might be a catalyst.

Change into someone less wooden, more with it. .

He rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling and reminded himself: You’re too disciplined, too trained, too tidy a man to contemplate such messy human knots .

As always, there was refuge in his work. So he sat down at the small desk and sipped the strong, familiar, bad hospital coffee from the familiar generic Styrofoam cup. The room’s furnishings were also familiar-the whites, grays, and tans of the examining table and the cabinets, the strident biohazard logo on the Sharpes disposal box.

Allen took a deep breath to steady down. He used diaphragmatic breathing as part of his pre-op checklist to enhance visualization. But this deep breath was to prepare him for the phone call to Jolene.

As he exhaled, he visualized the sprawling house tucked on the shadowy pine bluff overlooking the St. Croix River, south of the Hudson Bridge. His watch said 9:18 A.M. He had an idea of how she spent her days. He did not think of her at night when she was with Hank. The idea of her touching his gnarled old body that smelled of cigarettes. .

At 9:18, depending on the weather, she’d be settling into the Mission oak rocker in the sunny corner of the kitchen with a cup of coffee. She’d be listening to the morning show on public radio. She followed the current events program every day to build her vocabulary and deepen her range of subjects. She’d have a pen and a notebook in her lap. She’d be taking notes.

Hank was proud of the fact that Jolene had never graduated from high school.

She’d be wearing the white chenille robe that complemented her green eyes and brought out the ruby highlights in her dark hair. Her smooth skin had an olive cast and she joked that she’d deliberately ordered it a size too small, like a pair of jeans, so that it would fit snug. That damn gray cat he despised would be curled on her lap.

When Allen shut his eyes he was startled by the abyss of fatigue that met him in the dark behind his eyelids. The sound of the window shuddering in the wind brought him up sharply on task and he oriented himself on the serious fact that five lives were suspended inside a tiny airplane somewhere in that sky. All to bring Hank Sommer back here.

What if the plane crashed? Suddenly he saw himself comforting Jolene, winning her over. He’d take her to Florence.

Allen killed the fantasy with a stab of concentration. He was gifted with the highest utilitarian virtues; he was meticulous, he was thorough, he’d memorized a Latinized medical library with almost total recall. His steady hands were capable of tying almost invisible knots in synthetic, absorbable Vicryl sutures.

He could not afford an overactive imagination.

So it bothered him when he couldn’t control the adolescent excitement that speeded up his heart as he dialed the area code and the number and counted one ring, two, three. .

“Hello,” the voice came on smooth and tight and to the point.

“Jo?”

“Allen, well, that was quick; who got the big Bambi?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the kitchen looking at the Weather Channel, you guys must be really catching it.”

“I want you to sit down and listen carefully; something happened.” He spoke in the available, but guarded, professional tone he used with the families of critical patients. He was not a hand-holder but he didn’t stand in doorways with his own hands in his pockets, either.

“Oh Christ, Hank didn’t fall off the wagon, did he? The way he was yelling on the phone. .” She paused. When she resumed talking, first fear stiffened her voice. “Allen? Is everything all right?”

“Jo, it’s Hank. He ruptured himself. Bad.”

“Oh, Christ. I told him to have that taken care of.”

It sounded like she did sit down from the rush of concern in her voice. Succinctly, he explained the storm, the rupture, leaving Milt and Hank in the winter camp, the paddle out, how the guide and the cops were going back with a floatplane, and how he was now stranded in this one-horse hospital with a skeleton staff in a blizzard, anticipating operating under less than ideal conditions.

“Just be prepared,” he told her in his best level tone.

The velvet wore thin in her voice as she showed some bare knuckle. “Just what’s that supposed to mean? I’m not some fucking Boy Scout-you’d better give me more than that. You’d better tell me he’s going to be all right.”

“I’m just saying it’s bad up here, there’s a blizzard. Christ, he’s in this little airplane with some cowboy pilot.”

“Promise me, Allen. You’ve got to pull him through.”

“Don’t worry, Jo.” He pressed the cool plastic of the receiver against his forehead and blamed the fatigue, because he found himself looking at all the possible outcomes on this bad morning, and in one of them the plane simply disappeared into the storm and was never seen again. An Act of God.

She broke his glide. “Give me the phone number for the hospital, there must be an airstrip up there. I’ll watch the weather. I’ll get Earl to find a quick charter. .”

“I don’t think Earl is a good idea under the circumstances,” Allen said tightly.

“He’s handy, he knows how to get things done. Like hire a plane on a short notice. I’m just being practical.”

“Hank hates him,” Allen said.

“Let me worry about that. You tuck your head into your surgeon’s cap and take care of business. I’m counting on you.”

“Yes,” Allen said simply, suddenly helpless before the inadequacy of language; so he gave her the hospital phone number, hung up the phone, and tried to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the sweat on his palms. Enough of this bullshit. It was time to get serious.

And finally the traction of his willpower engaged and he jettisoned the distractions-his personal life, the exhausting canoe trip out of the park, even Jolene. They became irrelevant as he narrowed in focus until his triangular face seemed to winnow to a point.

Then he raised his raw, blistered hands and inspected them. As always, he felt contempt for people who never touched anything except keyboards and telephones and money, who talked their way through life.

He took pride in making his living with his hands. During his surgical residency at the Mayo Clinic he had worn a red-and-white- striped regimental tie under his staff coat. The pattern and the colors invoked the bloody bandages of the barber pole that had served as the original shingle surgeons hung out to advertise their profession. The surgeons had followed European armies out of the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the modern era. They’d cut hair and they’d amputated arms and legs.