The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [102]
It all takes a long time.
AND STILL HE ISN’T ALIVE when they arrive at the hospital, and nothing that is done to him there can bring him back. He has had (we learn these helpful terms later) hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the medical slang for which is “hocum.” Goddamn these doctors anyway, with their jargon, their jauntiness, damn them all except for Margaret, who is my beloved exception. Ventricular fibrillation dropped him down. Eventually he was declared dead, Oscar was. An autopsy showed an abnormally enlarged murmured heart, from the track and the basketball and the genetic code, though I refuse to give up the metaphor and think it enlarged itself from his love of Chloé. Margaret explained all this to me in her calm, horizon-greeting African Zen style, using terms like commotio cordis. Against the terrors and sorrows of death, only the multisyllabic Latinate adjectives and nouns for protection, the know-how, and then the prayers, for those who have them.
TWENTY-FOUR
THERE I WAS, CAGED. I sat in the front seat next to David, with Chloé bending over Oscar in the back, trying to breathe her life into him. All around us people, these fans, these monkeys, hollered. They whooped. They celebrated. On their faces were all the manifestations of glee. Being of a difficult and combative nature, I wanted to kill them early in their lives.
I sat in the car, containing myself but wild with sanctioned fury, and then I thought of whom I would sue.
Oscar and Chloé, these two kids, who had served me coffee day after day out at the mall — I had taken a liking to them. I enjoyed the spectacle of how they felt about each other. I thought it was rather inspiring, actually, those two orphans, with nothing, really, to their names. They weren’t middle class in any of the tiresome customary ways, and they didn’t have two nickels to rub together. You could tell from the fatigue lines under their eyes that they’d been around a few blocks. Sometimes, seeing them working together at Jitters, I thought: David should marry me. We could have that. Except, possessing money, we would have it easier, we would do it with a little more style and a little less emotion.
And now, in the backseat, Oscar looked, to all appearances, no longer living, no longer even dying. His dying had been successfully accomplished. Watching Chloé trying to keep him alive, putting her lips to his, I started to cry. I never do that.
I’m a lawyer. I reached for the car phone. I called the emergency number. I explained the situation. The dispatcher told me that no ambulance would be able to move faster in this traffic than we were able to do. No helicopter would be able to land where we were located, the congestion being what it was. Such a maneuver, I was informed, would be unsafe. It would be faster if we just continued to drive.
So we stayed in the car.
I’m a lawyer. I think about responsibility. And in my ire, I thought: I’ll sue the university, for staging the game; I’ll sue the city of Ann Arbor, for having clearly inadequate plans for controlling and siphoning off the traffic. Within Ann Arbor, I’ll sue the police department and individuals within that department, standing at intersections and misdirecting the cars, buses, trucks, and vans; and then I will organize a suit against the city manager, for permitting the congested and overfilled parking lots to block proper egress from the city; and the zoning board, for the proximity of the buildings. I’ll sue the architects, for the design of those buildings. I