The Far Arena

by Richard Ben Sapir

  The nurse didn't speak English well. She was not Petrovitch's nurse. Lew tried to brush the water down off the outside of his pants. It didn't help. It was inside. The body rested on the bottom of the dark, wet truck. Now the driver wanted to go. He had to get back to the airport. He had been hired when Lew had landed from the air base. He was an Oslo driver. He had agreed because the American had said it was rush. Well, where was the rush ?

  Orderlies came out wheeling a raised chrome platform about waist high. They slid a thin piece of white plastic underneath the block of ice, between it and the truck. Someone ordered the driver not to rock the truck. The driver said he had been rocking the truck since the airport and no one minded then. The nurse told him to stop rocking the truck. She had forms for McCardle to sign.

  McCardle wasn't signing any forms. He told that to the nurse. She said someone had to sign forms. One didn't go delivering cadavers hither and yon, with no one caring. This was not Brooklyn, America, and gangster people, said the nurse.

  McCardle told the nurse it wasn't his body. It was Dr Petrovitch's now.

  Dr Petrovitch had his own problems, the nurse said. She wanted McCardle inside the office immediately to fill out forms. She said she wanted no part of madness.

  The block of ice, suck and smooth now, glistening as the driveway lights from the emergency room hit it, came out of the back of the truck on the plastic sheet, ever so evenly, ever so carefully, on to the chrome table.

  The orderlies pulled up the sides of the white plastic sheet, and McCardle noticed the plastic was opaque. It covered the ice mound with the body in it. Orderlies folded it closed, but it dripped, water flowing down the chromium legs of the wheeled table. The orderlies quite smoothly and steadily pushed the mound up the small gradual incline that had received so many wheeled stretchers and guided the high table, each keeping a hand on the plastic-covered mound, through the doors and into the hospital.

  On the black driveway the water drippings had become hard. It was ice again.

  McCardle was left with the truckdriver, whom he paid, and the nurse with the sweater, whom he followed, and the question why was it important if he had trouble with his sinuses.

  'Because you can't go into a hyperbaric chamber if you suffer sinus trouble.'"

  There were no further explanations. He would first protect the piece of paper authorizing his departure from the drilling site. Second, get in touch with Houghton Oil Corporation representatives here to make sure he was doing the right thing. Third, he would cautiously answer any questions they might have. Geologists at exploratory sites were not supposed to discuss their work.

  McCardle decided to say nothing until he had authorization from his company. Another nurse, with an operating mask and green cap and a green gown, intercepted McCardle.

  'You're the American,'she said.

  'Yes.'

  'Come with me. Get undressed. Come. Come.'

  McCardle followed her to a small well-lit room with three chairs on narrow white metal legs. The seats appeared to screw on. Her hands pulled at his jacket. It was a reach for her.

  McCardle pulled away.

  'What's happening?'

  'Dr Petrovitch wants you to be a part of this. He is grateful for the specimen. Come. You've got to get scrubbed.' 'How am I going to infect a cadaver ?'

  'We're saying it's not. That's how Dr Petrovitch can claim the hyperbaric chamber immediately.'

  'It's not going to get more alive by going in now,' said McCardle.

  'Doctor, you don't know its temperature exactly. We don't know exactly its interior temperatures. The exterior was obviously melting. So why not now?'

  'Because it's dead. I know it's dead. I found it dead.'

  'Of course it's dead. We know that,' said the nurse. 'Get undressed and scrubbed. I'll explain.'

  The explanation was shocking to Lew McCardle, partly because he had not been aware of the extent of advances in low-temperature medicine. He had attended that lecture run by Dr Petrovitch in Sweden the year before, but he was not aware so many plans had become actuality.

  'If we treat the patient as a totally rehabilitable patient, we find we are always more successful. We assume all the functions of the body can be induced to proper functioning. We make the body prove to us we are helpless. We don't know what will respond to treatment, especially with a total case such as you have brought in.

  'But if we make the assumption we will try to save everything, just as we would try to save all the functions of a frostbitten arm, then who knows? Perhaps a kidney will survive. We are sure we are capable of reviving skin tissue. It was a perfect specimen from appearances, Dr Petrovitch was saying.'

  T don't know,' said Lew McCardle. His jacket was off, his pants were off, and he was stepping out of his arctic boots. He needed a shave, and, from the wincing eyes over the nurse's mask, he realized he was ripe.

  'The wet's from the ice,' he said about his dark, wet long Johns. He felt very tired and old, and in need of washing and rest. He tried to sit, but the nurse wouldn't let him rest.

  'Our technique is like that with any part of the body suffering frostbite. It is alive until it proves it does not respond to everything we can give it. Dr Petrovitch heads a small staff, without lavish funding or quarters, but we are all proud of him and what we can do. We are proud of the limbs that work today because we did not accept their loss when others did.'

  'Nurse, that body is dead.'

  'In ten, twenty, thirty minutes we will accept it. But not now. And why not ? Why not see what we can save, yes ?'

  Lew McCardle pushed his document through the sleeve of a fresh green operating gown. He didn't have time to transfer it to the other hand that was getting into a sleeve also.

  'I guess,' said Lew.

  His hands were scrubbed at a sink in a room down the hall while he held the document in his mouth. The nurse gave him a plastic bag for it when he said he was taking it with him. They covered his face with a mask, his head with a hat, and the nurse, with great discipline, washed his feet and pulled on fresh new socks.

  'I'm not too clear,' said Lew. 'Do you do research or treat people ? Usually they're separate, aren't they ?'

  'We do what we can do. Dr Petrovitch is a great man. Most other men with his achievements would have been popularly famous. Popularly.'

  'Let me make one phone call first. I think I had better reach one of our offices,' said Lew.

  'Too late,' said the nurse. 'You're in the entry lock.'

  'But this is a storage room,' said Lew, pointing to the stacked cartons against a light green wall and three chest-high machines with burnished steel exteriors, waiting, their plugs pinioned to their sides by plastic clasps.

  'Yes. Once we begin, we have to have everything here we might need. We can't open the doors to bring in extra machinery until it's all over. It's all here.'

  'And when you declare it dead, do you open the doors and let everyone out?'

  'No. Then you go into a decompression chamber. This is why we asked you about the sinuses. We're all going under compression.'

  'I just delivered the body. I didn't sire it,' said Lew.

  The-door to the chamber was open slightly, and a rubber-gloved hand signalled for them to enter quickly.

  'If the patient is declared dead, then you may go immediately to decompression. We have a phone link from there. You can call your office.'

  'I've heard of Catholic saints being made saints vox populi, never people dying that way.'

  ' Vox populi?’ said the nurse.

  'Voice of the people,' said McCardle. 'It's Latin. When the Catholic Church makes a saint, or declares one, sometimes it is the people themselves who demand that a person—'

  'Please, please, doctor... we're in a hurry,' said the nurse, and Lew bent down to enter through the lock and to wait until he was told everyone had now agreed what he had found was dead.

  Dr Petrovitch, in operating gown and hat, nodded as Lew entered.

  'Thank you,' h
e said to Lew, whose head had to be kept bent as he manoeuvred for a place to stand. The nurse guided him.

  'I will explain everything. Don't speak to Dr Petrovitch, speak to me,' whispered the nurse. The chamber was a giant tube. Twelve feet wide and about twenty feet long, Lew estimated. There were five women and two men. One woman - a nurse -standing by a dark hole in the far side of the chamber, received instruments through the hole and was stacking them.

  'I thought nothing entered,' said Lew to his nurse.

  'Nothing big. We can get small instruments, but large amounts of plasma and machinery have to come in from the entry lock.'

  'And we leave that way ?'

  'No. Through the rear lock,' said the nurse.

  Lew felt a heaviness about his head. Oxygen, the nurse told him, was now being pressurized into his system and into the systems of everyone else in the chamber, not of course for their benefit but for the patient's. The problem with frostbite, just as with gangrene, was that the blood no longer carried sufficient oxygen to the tissues.

  The chamber pressurizing oxygen into the patient made up for the failure of the body. And there was no way to do it without treating the doctors as well as the patient.

  Lew bent over sideways to hear her. He felt perspiration collect in his rubber gloves and remembered his nails had not been clipped. He felt them squishing at the tip of his gloves. He had a sudden strange desire to clip his nails.

  He felt a push at his head, guiding his sight toward the back of a green apron.

  The specimen was on its back in the shiny, drippy block. Someone had chiselled out a section to the groin. A tubular metal drill pointed just beneath the scrotum. It whirred, spitting back pieces of ice that clung on gowns and then quickly became water spots. Other drills were working. At the head, one technician was drilling holes into the open mouth, another was making two passages to the cranium.

  Lew tried to follow the explanations. The foil tabs were for any possible brain waves to be elicited. They were going to pump out all of its blood and replace it, since immediate tests had shown that the red cells were all but driven out completely from the blood, and that the normal enzymes and salts in the protoplasm of cells was so concentrated now because of the low temperatures that its own blood would kill it at normal body temperatures.

  The blood itself cannot possibly carry oxygen in its current form,' she whispered. 'Its three-dimensional molecular structure has been broken down. It can't carry oxygen without it.'

  'Could you simplify ?' said Lew.

  'We're going first to elevate the temperature rapidly by pumping warm water into its digestive tract, while we simultaneously exert oxygenated heat on its external surfaces. That's the most crucial time, those first moments of normal temperature. At those first moments we pump out its old blood and put in new. We establish a cardiopulmonary bypass and provide renal dialysis. It gets an artificial bloodstream, heart system, and kidney system. All of this has to be done within one minute when it hits the critical normal temperatures.'

  The little figure was still running in its glistening cell of ice, but this time towards the ceiling. One leg was forward, the other back, one hand reached to the ceiling, and the open mouth now had a big plastic tube in it. Wires and tubes stretched down to the chest and head. Tubes burrowed their way in through the remnant of covering glacial ice to each limb. It was as though every advance of modern technology was now by wire and tube hooked into that stopped body hauled up from the crust at the top of the world.

  A nurse read things from a list on a clipboard to Dr Petrovitch. He nodded and grunted at each sentence. Once he shook his head. A nurse checked the chest cavity. It looked like a convention of wires leading towards a terminal in the ice. The terminal was the chest.

  The nurse put the board down in front of her stomach. She looked to Dr Petrovitch. Petrovitch inhaled. He looked into the eyes of everyone in the room.

  Lew felt embarrassed by the intensity of those black eyes, as deep as the holes of space, Lew thought. Breathing should have been easier. The air was almost doing it for him. Lew felt his own heart beat, heavy and solid. There was quiet in the chamber. No one moved. It was as though they all stood at the opening of something so subtle and so deep it went on forever.

  Then it all happened quickly. Petrovitch nodded and machines were operating. Heavy, glistening shiny yellow pads went over the top of the mound. A nurse called out seconds.

  Lew saw a clear bag of clear liquid go down a few centimetres in a sudden drop. The top of the yellow pads lowered in a simultaneous jerk.

  Dr Petrovitch put his hand on top and pressed steadily down. That was where the leading foot had been. Foul, putrid water gushed out of the end of the table into white plastic buckets on the floor. They had no handles and Lew saw the water getting darker.

  The front foot was down, and the whole mass of ice was down, as though the yellow pads had exhaled bulk. The ice had given up something and was now water in sealed plastic buckets set against the far wall, away from the body it had held.

  Hands removed the shiny yellow pads. One of the pads hit Lew's socked foot. It was hot.

  The head was free of ice, Lew saw, the hair suck and wet like a just-born infant. The pale, smelly blood collected through tubes in plastic bags. The new, dark red blood coursed into the body. Lew suddenly realized there were no bottles in the chamber, only bags.

  He asked why, and the nurse, so engrossed, did not answer him. He reasoned it out for himself. In oxygen under pressure, dangerous gases could be created by air pockets in bottles.

  A nurse removed the yellow pad at his foot and stored it too.

  It was a muscular little body with a burn scar at its side and a white healed wound on its left shoulder and several on its right forearm. The right thigh pumped blood. What was once a smooth core hole was now an ugly, bloody wound.

  The mouth closed on a large tube. Suddenly, the body jerked as though its stomach was being sucked out. It jerked again, then tremors shot through its shiny fingertips. Forty-two seconds were called out, and Dr Petrovitch roughly pushed away scalpels paused at the chest cavity. The chest moved. It expanded up, contracted down. Expanded up. Contracted down.

  'Is it breathing ?' Lew asked.

  'No,' said the nurse. 'Machines. It's at normal temperature.'

  'What's he doing now ?'

  'He's seeing what's working. He's going to shock the heart now.' 'How do you know ?' 'Look.' 'What?' 'There.'

  Lew saw only another machine. A nurse turned a dial, then turned it back. She was blocked by another doctor moving around Petrovitch.

  The body jerked again, and a foul putrescence, dark and bitter, vomited out of the sides of the mouth. White pads wiped it away until Petrovitch said something sharply. Big red welts on the cheeks showed where the pads had wiped. They had also taken away an outer layer of skin.

  The pads were stored with whitish smears set grey against their pure white gauze.

  The nurse no longer counted seconds.

  'The heart is working.'

  'My God. By itself?' asked Lew.

  'No. No. In consonance with the machine. It's the machine's energy. But the muscles appear to be responding.' 'What does that mean ?'

  'It means that a muscle with machine help is functioning.’ "That's amazing. Is this the first time?'

  ‘No. It's been done with the pancreas and other organs. And the pancreas has functioned alone without machine stimulus.' 'So what's happening ?'

  'It's not dead yet,' said the nurse.

  'Shhh,' said Dr Petrovitch. The nurse had talked too loud.

  If it wasn't the hyberbaric chamber pressiirizing oxygen into all of them, it had to be the tension. Eyes watered and did not blink. Sentences were cut short. Instruments came and went on the slightest nod or sound. People hung on expectant orders.

  'What ?' whispered Lew.

  'Shhh,' said the nurse assigned to explain things to him. She poked him sharply. She wanted him to get out of the way. L
ew moved to his right, two steps. His neck hurt from bending over. He found himself holding his breath. He had been standing in front of some form of oscilloscope. It had a round face with a white grid and a smooth-flowing green sine curve, keeping its pace with time like restful moving green hills.

  Lines taped to the floor ran to the edge of the table, to the head. Lew felt dizzy. His own breathing was heavy. Even with that body now being electronically goaded to function in one organ or the other, to see it work like the living drained Lew, taking away feelings of stability. He felt alarmed. Ironically his old football injury caused him no pain whatsoever. He glanced at the oscilloscope connected to the body's brain.

  A sharp spear of a line interrupted the smooth hill flow of the sine curve, and then there was smoothness again. Lew noticed electrodes on the chest wall of the body. Petrovitch looked back over his shoulder. He motioned Lew to move. The finger contracted . Lew stepped farther to the side.

  Petrovitch said something hoarsely in Norwegian. Lew made out 'much work, challenge, extremely dangerous now'.

  There was a hush.

  A nurse called out the number of minutes in Norwegian. 'Time since normal temperature,' said Lew's nurse. 'I heard.'

  Suddenly, the nurse dropped her head in her hands and began sobbing. She no longer talked in English and Lew couldn't get an answer.

  Dr Semyon Petrovitch himself had to explain. He pointed to the oscilloscope Lew stood near. The lines were jagged and harsh, like jarring interruptions of a honking horn during a peaceful symphony.