Coma

12

Monday, February 23, 2:45 P.M.

Bellows impatiently tapped the top of the extension telephone No. 482, expecting it to ring any second. He was going to answer it before the first ring was completed. In the background the droning voice of the aging professor emeritus, Dr. Allen Druery, could be heard, extolling the virtues of Halstead. The four students appeared lost within the emptiness of the surgical conference room. Bellows had originally thought that the atmosphere of the conference room would add a positive note to the lectures he had planned for the students. But now he wasn’t so sure. The room was too big, too cold for four students, and the lecturer looked a bit ludicrous standing at the podium and facing tier after tier of empty seats.

From where Bellows was sitting, he could see only the backs of the four students. Goldberg was busy taking notes in a furious fashion, getting every word. Dr. Druery’s lecture was mildly interesting but certainly not worth notetaking. Bellows knew the syndrome, though. He’d seen it in action a thousand times and even suffered from it to an extent himself. As soon as the lights would dim, and someone would start speaking, many medical students would respond in a Pavlovian fashion by taking notes, madly trying to get every word down onto paper without any thought as to the content. The medical student responded in this utterly unintellectual way because, more often than not, he was asked to regurgitate whatever trivia he had been fed.

Bellows was sorry he had not told Susan that he indeed would be hurt if she missed the lecture. In such a small group, her absence was painfully apparent above and beyond the fact that she was so visually distinctive. Bellows was nervous that Stark would decide to pop in and welcome the group. Of course he’d wonder where the fifth student was, and what could Bellows say? He thought about saying that she was scrubbing on a case. But so early in the game, that was unlikely.

The worry about Stark had finally caused Bellows to page Susan so that he could retract his previous silent acquiescence to her cutting the lecture. It was a bad precedent to establish. So he thought he would just inform her that she was sincerely missed and should get herself up to the tenth-floor conference room on the double. Bellows specifically decided to use the word sincerely because in the context it was used, it had several implications.

Bellows had made up his mind to ask Susan out on a date. There were several unanswerable questions and aspects involved in such a move, yet the payoff was worth the risk. Susan was bright and spirited, and Bellows was almost positive she had a dynamite figure. Whether she could be feminine and warm according to Bellows’s interpretations of those qualities remained to be seen. The trouble was that Bellows had some pretty outdated notions about femininity. For him surgery and his schedule came first; thus an important aspect of Bellows’s definition of femininity concerned availability. He expected his female friends to respect his schedule as much as he did and to rearrange their schedules to accord with it. An interesting aspect of Susan’s situation, it occurred to Bellows, was that for the next month or so, they would have similar schedules. That was encouraging. And if all else failed, Bellows reasoned that at least Susan would be a damn interesting screw.

But the phone remained silent under Bellows’s expectant hand. Impatiently he redialed the page operator and told her to repeat the page for Dr. Susan Wheeler for 482. Replacing the receiver, he again waited for the ring as the minutes slid by. Bellows began to think that maybe things would not go so smoothly with Susan. Perhaps she wouldn’t even go out with him. She could already be tight with someone else. Under his breath he cursed females in general, and he told himself that he should be sensible and leave well enough alone. At the same time he knew that Susan was triggering off his keen sense of competition. He also visualized that curve of Susan’s low back as it spread out over her ass. He decided to page once more.

Gerald Kelley was as Irish as one could be and still live in Boston and not Dublin. His hair was reddish blond and thick and curly despite the fact that he was fifty-four years old. His face had a ruddy hue, almost as if he wore theatrical makeup, especially over the crests of his cheekbones.

Kelley’s most notable feature and by far the dominant aspect of his profile was his enormous paunch. Every night three bottles of stout contributed to its awe-inspiring dimensions. For the last few years it had been pointed out that when Kelley was vertical, his belt buckle was horizontal.

Gerald Kelley had worked for the Memorial since he was fifteen years old. He had started out in the maintenance department, the boiler room to be exact, and now he was in charge. From his long experience and mechanical aptitude he knew the power plant of the hospital inside and out. In fact, he knew almost all the mechanical aspects of the building by heart. It was for this reason that he was in charge and also why he was paid $13,700 a year. The hospital administration knew he was indispensable, and they would have paid more if Gerald Kelley had made an issue of it. The fact was, each party was satisfied.

Gerald Kelley sat at his desk in the machinery spaces of the basement, thumbing through work orders. He had a day crew of eight men, and he tried to distribute the work according to need and capability. Any work on the power plant itself, though, Kelley did himself. The work orders in front of him were all routine, including the drain in the nurses’ station on the fourteenth floor. That plugged up on schedule, once per week. Placing the work orders in the sequence he felt they should be done, Kelley began to match them up with his crew.

Although the general din in the machinery spaces was at a relatively high level, especially for people unaccustomed to the area, Kelley’s ears were sensitive to the character of the mixed sounds. Thus when the clank of metal on metal reached his ears from the direction of the main electrical panel, he turned his head. Most people would not have heard the sound amid all the other mechanical noises. However, it did not repeat itself and Kelley returned to his administrative job at hand. He did not like the paperwork attached to his position; he would have preferred to fix the sink on the fourteenth floor himself. Yet he also understood that organization was a necessity if he were to keep things running. There was no way he could attend to every repair himself.

The clank recurred, louder than before. Kelley turned again and surveyed the area near the electrical panel, behind the main boilers. He returned to his papers but found himself staring ahead, trying to understand what could have caused the kind of sound he had heard. It had a sharp, brief metallic resonance foreign to the indigenous sounds of the area. Finally curiosity got the best of him and he wandered over to the main boiler. To get near to the electrical panel situated next to the main chase, which contained all the piping rising up in the building, he had to go around the boiler in either direction. He chose to go right, which gave him an opportunity to check the gauges on the boiler. This was an unnecessary maneuver because the system had been fully automated with backup safety devices and automatic cutoff switches. But it was an instinctive move for Kelley, having originated in the days when the boiler had to be watched minute by minute. So as he rounded the boiler his eyes were on the system, his mind appreciating its marvelous compactness compared to the system when he had started at the Memorial. When he looked ahead toward the electrical panel, he froze in his tracks, his right arm lifted involuntarily in self-defense.

“God, you scared the life out of me,” said Kelley, catching his breath and allowing his arm to come back to his side.

“I could say the same,” said a slim man dressed in a khaki uniform. The shirt was open at the neck, and the man wore a white crew neck t-shirt which reminded Kelley of navy chiefs during his wartime duty. The man’s left breast pocket bulged with pens, small screwdrivers, and a ruler. Above the pocket was embroidered “Liquid Oxygen, Inc.”

“I had no idea anyone else was in here,” said Kelley.

“Same with me,” said the man in khaki.

The two men looked at each other for a moment. The man in khaki was carrying a small green cylinder of compressed gas. A flow meter was attached to the cylinder head. “Oxygen” was stenciled plainly on the side.

“My name is Darell,” said the man in khaki. “John Darell. Sorry to have scared you. I’ve been checking the oxygen lines out to the central storage tank. Everything seems fine. In fact, I’m on my way out Could you tell me the shortest route?”

“Sure. Through those swinging doors, up the stairway to the main hall. Then you have a choice. Nashua Street is to the right, Causeway Street to the left.”

“Thanks a million,” said Darell, heading for the door.

Kelley watched him leave, and then looked around in disbelief. He couldn’t figure how Darell had managed to get where he had been without being noticed. Kelley had no idea he could get so absorbed in his Goddamn paperwork.

Kelley walked back to his desk and returned to work. After a few minutes he thought of something else that bothered him. There were no oxygen lines in the boiler room. Kelley made a mental note to ask Peter Barker; assistant administrator, about oxygen line checks. The trouble was that Kelley had a poor memory for everything except mechanical details.