Robert Liparulo - The 13 th tribe

… so very slow. I’m exhausted, trying to get to him, but I’m not getting any closer.” She sniffed and smiled weakly at Jagger, as if to say, Isn’t it crazy? “And all around him are these sharks, and I know they’re going to attack him any second.” The tears came again, and she shifted to hug Jagger’s arm.

He felt the same-at least the sense of it, until she put it into words, and then he was down there too, deep in the ocean. But in his tortured imagination, the sharks had already attacked. All Jagger could do was scream, a bubbling explosion of muffled anguish.

He tried to comfort Beth, all the while buffeted by an internal storm of anger, frustration, and worry. His thoughts flipped from images of Tyler in happier times-jumping into his arms, falling asleep on his lap-to should-have-been fantasies of sweeping the boy out of harm’s way and somehow getting the upper hand on the woman: hopping up, dodging her bullets, making her eat the gun. He continually checked with the nurses and learned more than he wanted about bullet probes and forceps, resorbable microsurgical nerve and blood vessel sutures, and how infections have caused more deaths than blood loss in gunshot victims.

The physicians’ frequent calls for blood-it sounded like “Adem! ” in Arabic-were like fresh jabs at his heart with an ice pick. A nurse rushed out of the OR, her green smock bloody, her surgical mask spattered.

A thought pierced Jagger’s brain: That’s my son on her, my son!

She rambled in Arabic to the nurse at the station, rushed back to the OR door, and turned again. She waved her hand in a spinning circle and yelled an Arabic word Jagger understood: “Haza! Haza! ” Now! Now!

The station nurse picked up a phone, replaced it, consulted a computer screen, picked the phone up again, and started dialing.

Jagger learned over the counter. “What is it? What’s happening?”

The nurse ignored him, pushed the disconnect button, released it, dialed.

Jagger reached out and grabbed her arm. “What!”

“The pediatric surgeon hasn’t shown up yet,” she said in nearly perfect English. “I paged him twenty minutes ago. Please!”

He released her, and she continued dialing. She spoke into the phone, urgency imbuing every foreign syllable. When she hung up, Jagger said, “Where is he? Is he coming?”

She nodded. “Yes, yes. The ER surgeons are doing everything, but he too will be here soon. Don’t worry, please.”

Don’t worry. Don’t worry! If ever anything was easier said than done…

He sat on the edge of a chair and stared at the blue cotton slippers a nurse had asked him to put on over his bare feet. He thought about his boots on the steps near the burning bush, next to Tyler’s sneakers. His boy had wanted to remove his shoes to approach the bush. What kind of kid thinks like that? What kind of god strikes him down?

Eventually a man came down the hallway, fast-walking with nurses scurrying around him, slipping off his watch and pushing scrubs over his arms and chest. He rushed into Tyler’s OR. Jagger tried to follow, but two hefty orderlies stopped him.

Some time later-twenty minutes, an hour, a day; Jagger had lost all sense of time-sharp calls emitted from the room, followed by the unmistakable THUMP! of a defibrillator. Both Jagger and Beth pushed through the OR door before the orderlies could stop them. Tyler’s little body lay on the operating table, his skin too white under the blinding brightness of a Cycloptic lamp, blood everywhere, an army of doctors and nurses standing around, one holding defib paddles over Tyler’s chest, then pressing them down and Tyler convulsing, all eyes on the EKG, blipping irregularly.

“No! Tyler! Tyler!” Beth yelled.

Someone barked out words, and the orderlies intensified their efforts to pull them away. Jagger knew that, unlike movie depictions, deliberators didn’t restart flat-lined hearts. Mostly, they corrected ventricular tachycardia, which was the heart’s equivalent of a last cry for help, telling anyone listening, “I’m going… I’m going.. ” which it often did within seconds-unless shocked back into a normal rhythm.

Behind Jagger someone said, “ Talitha Koum.”

Thump!

The bouncing green line on Tyler’s EKG spiked, plummeted, began making a mountain range on the screen. The physician holding the paddles nodded and handed them to a nurse. Jagger let himself be pulled away.

He twisted out of the bouncer’s arms and wrapped his arm around Beth to guide her. They nearly walked into Owen, who moved to Beth’s other side and gripped her arm. Jagger realized it was he who had said those words, Talitha Koum. The man had disappeared sometime during the chaos of Tyler’s arrival. Jagger was glad to see him; it felt like having someone else on their team, a friend. He didn’t want to think of where they’d be, what would have become of Tyler, had Owen not been there.

Shuffling back to the chairs, Jagger could feel Beth shaking as violently as she would have standing naked on the Arctic tundra. He and Owen lowered her into a chair, and Jagger sat beside her. Owen crossed the room and sat on the floor, his back against the wall.

“What?” Beth said. “What was that?”

“I’ve heard that happens all the time during surgery.” He hadn’t. “The heart’s response to low blood pressure, trauma.”

“His heart… oh, Jagger…” She pushed into him harder and wept into his shirt.

Could anything be more emotionally wrenching or physically draining as watching your child fight for his life? All the love and protectiveness that fills every cell of your body like a third strand of DNA from the moment you learn of his existence, feelings that can’t possibly grow stronger, but do with each of his smiles and tears and sounds and thoughts-that irresistible force that nurtures, guides, teaches, and tells dangers real and perceived, Don’t even think of coming near my kid… All of it crashing head-on into an immoveable object made of helplessness and the fact that the human body is fragile in a world of hard, sharp things moving too fast, of diseases, stupidity, and malice. That point of impact, where neither side gives or flexes or compromises, creates an energy that can tear you apart.

Jagger felt that tension pulling at his sanity, and he held on to his wife as he would a tree in a hurricane. Like a tree, she was rooted in soil that was more solid than the tilled-up dirt of his life. Maybe that was cheating, depending on her strength, which flowed from a source he had blocked off and rejected; but she was his wife, and it was on her he trusted to help him survive this storm. In turn, he hoped to be someone she could hold on to. But he wondered how much help he could be when all he wanted to do was rage… at God, at the world, at the people who did this to his son.

He sat beside Beth, comforting her as best he could, then got up and walked to where Owen sat. The man’s head was lowered, his hands clenched together in his lap.

“ Talitha Koum? ” Jagger said, crouching in front of him.

Owen raised his head and smiled. “Jesus said it when he raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead. It means, ‘Little girl, I say to you, get up!’ It applies to little boys as well.”

“A prayer?”

“A plea.”

“You took off,” Jagger said.

“There’s a chapel on the third floor.” He pushed himself up. “I hear it calling to me now. Do you hear it?”

Jagger rose, shook his head.

Owen gripped his arm. “Of course. You do your work here. I’ll do mine there.”

Jagger watched him disappear down a hall, then he started pacing. He thought about calling someone, even got the mobile phone out of Beth’s bag. He stared at it, noticing for the first time in months the bars that indicated service. He opened the directory and found the number for Beth’s parents, a little picture of them smashing their faces together to fit in the frame, laughing about it. But why put them through the agony of uncertainty? There would be time to call when they knew more. He dropped it back into the purse.