Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

He’d finally made a mistake and the disaster had set him free. He didn’t need to possess Jolene. He didn’t need to do anything. He just simply had to be himself.

The red line had been erased.

Allen ran home, showered, and then, standing with a towel wrapped around his waist, razor held aloft, his lathered face centered in the steamy bathroom mirror-he thought, No. Let’s let it grow and see how we look in a beard .

On the damp tile bathroom floor Allen took a few stylized steps and bent over an imaginary tango partner. He dressed, ate cereal in a warm blur, and drove to the hospital.

It was Friday, which was his favorite day because he spent all day in surgery. As he parked and entered the building he mentally put on his work cap to begin to focus on the day’s procedures.

But he was not so intense that he forgot to take the time to smile at the nurses, to say good morning to a janitor. And the staff locker room didn’t feel like a decompression chamber this morning. Just a changing room.

Capped, wearing blue booties over his shoes, with a mask loose around his neck, he sipped a cup of black coffee in the staff lounge. A small audience had gathered at a table around Lenny Merman.

“So what does it mean if you find a lawyer buried up to his neck in cement?” Merman asked

“Groan,” Allen said.

“Shortage of cement,” Merman said. More groans.

Merman was a burly ortho guy, so passionate about his work that colleagues joked he’d probably tear his way into a body with his bare hands if the surgical tech was late with his instruments.

“Okay, here’s another one. Why are lawyers buried at twenty-six feet instead of at six feet?” Merman would not be deterred.

“Boo, hiss,” Allen said.

“Way down deep they’re really good people,” Merman said.

Allen rubbed the stubble on his cheek and smiled when he caught his reflection in the mirror next to the bulletin board. They wouldn’t approve at the Mayo Clinic.

The charge nurse came in and posted the room schedule, and the blue pack of surgeons went off to the surgery suites. Allen walked down the corridor not even paying attention to the red line, went to a sink, and meticulously scrubbed his fingers, hands, and forearms with antibacterial soap.

Allen was a belly man. His domain was the region located between the crotch and the diaphragm, the area in which lay the liver, the spleen, the pancreas, the colon, the small intestines, and the reproductive plumbing. The internal structure, shape, and color of these organs were more clearly visualized in his mind than the faces of the people they belonged to.

He walked into the surgery and held out his hands like a matador to be draped and gloved by the circulating nurse. The team assembled. Allen greeted them-first his resident, Durga Prasad from Bombay, the surgical tech, a circulating nurse, and an anesthetist. Allen, Durga, and the tech worked in direct contact with the patient and observed the sterile barrier. So they were gloved and gowned. The anesthetist, the circulating nurse, and the anesthesiologist-if she wandered in-were not sterile.

The first patient shuffled in, a middle-aged man wearing a hospital gown. Allen matched the face to the procedure on the surgery schedule: bilateral inguinal hernia repair.

They eased the patient onto the operating table. He looked up a little wary at the huge circular AMSCO quantum surgical lights hovering over him on jointed arms, like the wings of a robotic angel. Next, the patient eyed the anesthesia machine which sprouted pumps, dials, tubes, and digital screens.

“You’re going to be just fine,” Allen said.

Then the anesthetist ran his IV and hooked up his monitor leads and injected Versed in the IV, which he followed with a shot of Sublimaze. The patient was masked, pre-oxygenated, and then was put under with Pentothal.

All smooth, amid casual banter about The Blair Witch Project, which Jeannie had just seen on video.

“Really, really overrated,” said Jeannie, the circulating nurse.

“Fakey, I thought, the wooden stuff hanging in the trees,” said Jerry, the anesthetist.

“Smart, though,” offered Allen. “Remember the way they hyped it on the web?”

After Pentothal, the muscle relaxant, succinylcholine, was administered. The patient shuddered. Behind his mask, Allen clicked his teeth. It was the same kind of muscular spasm that he had caused in Hank Sommer.

Allen took a deep breath and waited as the patient lost control of his muscles and went flaccid. Expertly, the anesthetist fitted a plastic shield over the patient’s teeth, then inserted an instrument like a stainless-steel, right-angled trowel-a laryngoscopic blade-into the sedated man’s throat. The patient’s head shifted as the blade was levered forward and upward to elevate the epiglottis and expose the glotal opening. Then the anesthetist inserted a plastic tracheal tube, hooked up the breathing circuit to the machine, and pumped nitrous oxide into the patient’s lungs.

Allen directed everything that occurred in the OR with verbal instructions. Nonverbal cues were conveyed through the eyes, the only feature that showed above the surgical masks. Surgical teams were close watchers, especially of their surgeon leader. Now all the eyes in the room keyed on him, to sense his mood, to see what kind of day he’d have.

He heard them whisper that he hadn’t shaved this morning and what did it mean?

The patient’s stomach was draped with sterile blue sheets. Another sterile blue sheet separated the patient’s head from the operating field. The human shape became abstract. Allen’s target was an anonymous shaved square of belly which had been designated with a rubber stamp: LEFT.

The tech unwrapped and positioned a sterile tray that contained the instruments for hernia repair, the square of exposed flesh was washed with orange Betadine disinfectant. One last point of etiquette remained: the choice of music on the CD player that sat on a table along one wall.

The eyes over the masks turned to Allen who always selected the music.

“Jeannie, pick us some sounds,” Allen said casually to the circulating nurse.

Allen could feel the slight lift in the room as Jeannie spun some Sheryl Crowe. Allen held up a gloved hand, the scrub tech firmly put a scalpel in it, and he made the first incision.

And so the day proceeded under the hot surgical lights. In between procedures, Allen moved between the pre op suites, where he interviewed his next patient, and the consult room, where he spoke briefly with the family of his last procedure.

A hemorrhoidectomy.

A left-breast biopsy.

Time out to consult on a patient in emergency, then back down to surgery to remove another suspect lump from an elderly woman’s breast and run it though Radiology.

Lunch was interrupted by a page to consult on a man admitted with a numb, discolored leg and a history of heart problems. Allen jogged up two flights of stairs, saw the patient, and agreed with the internist to give the man a clot-busting drug.

The hours floated by with soft intensity like a long, almost weightless parachute drop.

And soon it would end, after the last scheduled procedure, a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The lap choly was a routine gallbladder removal using a laparoscopic wand that contained a miniature video camera and lights.

After the patient was intubated and breathing on the machine, his abdominal cavity was inflated with carbon dioxide gas. A ten-millimeter sheath was poked inside through a port incision above the navel. Then the camera was inserted in the sleeve.

Two television monitors were positioned on either side of the operating table, so Allen and his resident could both easily view the liver and gallbladder.