"Kathe Koja - Queen of angels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Koja Kathe)

Deborah shrugged again, “Come on, Deb, You know that.”
“I don’t know anything.”
Her back locked again in half a motion dry pestle grind. The aide put out his
cigarette. “Hey Deb,” the other nurse said. She had a jaundiced bruise shaped heavy
as a thumbprint above her left eyebrow. “You really believe that? That they can hear
us, they know what’s going on?”
No. I don’t know, “I don’t know what I believe.”
“If it ever happens to me,” quick paper squeeze between strong fingers,
tossing her empty cup in the trash, “I know what I want and fuck my family. No
code, no way.”
“Get a MedAlert bracelet,” Deborah said. “|Slow Code.’”
Full code meant resuscitate; no code meant what it said. All the patients
wanted was a way out, but sometimes the families were obdurate: do everything
possible, they said. Guilt and rage and terror, as if keeping them alive meant anything
anymore; rag talismans, strapped and bleeding and feeding from tubes, tubes for
food and tubes for shit and someone’s daughter, someone’s niece, someones
grandson shaking their heads: Bring her back, they said. If anything happens, bring
him back. Slow code was the compromise, the last mercy unspoken: Stop for a
drink of water; stop to check your watch. Inside the room the decision is in
progress, relentless as the process of birth. We did everything we could, and it is a
fact, like oxygen; it is simply the truth.
Elliot was a no-code.
Nothing was too likely to happen to Elliot, though; except for an essentially
empty head he was in pretty good shape. Waxy as a still Pieta Christ, long muscles
in the cheap cleanser-blue pajamas and less trouble than a potted plant; the smell
from his body was warm, the way a baby is warm, damp smooth skin against a
sheltering cheek. Deborah’s notes on his chart were routine. She never wrote down
the way he smelled, the peculiar oval shape of his lips as if steeped in a pleasing
dream. He never screamed, cried, cried out. No one ever came to see him.
Which in its way was good. Immersed in permanent solitude, he missed no
one; unlike some of the others, the daily pitiful litany: Where is my husband? Where
is June, my daughter June? Is Michael here? A very few of them had families who
came every day, to nurse their own, each deadening chore made sacred by abundant
martyring love. To feed, coax with homemade delicacies mouths too slack to chew;
to wash them, to change their laundry, soft pastel percale, bright flowers. To read to
them, to talk. It was sadder that way, hideous the families’ suffering, but it made
Deborah feel obscurely better. The ones she hated to see were the ones who came
once a year, hectic with their own agenda, guilt and loathing vivid as a blood trail and
full of complaints and rages for the staff: Perhaps the patient has not had her diaper
changed this hour; perhaps the patient’s hair has not yet been washed. They explode
as if finding vivisection in process, curse and call names. Last month a man poked
Deborah in the name badge, stiff finger so hard the thin plastic edge eased like a
needle through her uniform and into her skin.
“I don’t,” poking, “want to see my mother like this. Ever. Do you understand
me?”
Go fuck yourself. “What’s the matter?” leaning a little away from him, his
pointing finger, his bitter cigarette breath. His mother was Mrs. White, Susanna:
another CVA, victim of a carotid artery angioplasty that loosed a clot unseen like
death itself come claiming through her veins. Quad and trach and tube-feed and
oxygen, that was Susanna. She had two daughters living three thousand miles away,