"Paul Park - Tachycardia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

PAUL PARK

TACHYCARDIA

I RETIRED FROM THE CORPS of Engineers when I was sixty-five. During the afternoons I'd
play golf at Colonial City Park. I'd have lunch with friends, dinner and a couple of drinks.
Then I'd go home to my house on General Pershing Street and turn on the lights. I kept that
place as clean as a hotel After Mary Elizabeth passed away, I took down most of the
photographs, cleaned out most of the things.

It says in the Bible that death can come at any time, so you might as well not fret about it. I
was on the seventeenth tee at City Park. I sat down on the grass, because I was dizzy and
my pulse went to 250. That day I was paired with Bobby Squires, who's a doctor I've known
for years. He drove me downtown to his office at University Hospital -- the old Hotel Dieu on
Tulane Avenue. I hadn't been there since Geoffrey was born. In half an hour I was on a table
in the emergency room, and the technician was putting in a drip.

Bobby explained the whole thing as I lay there with a needle in my arm. There is an amino
acid called Adenosin that stops the heart. After eight seconds they switch to saline and start
it up again. Usually that takes care of the problem, which is called tachycardia. But my heart
was still roaring even after the procedure, so they decided to try it a second time. I couldn't
breathe because of the pressure in my chest, and I passed out.

How can I describe what I was feeling? Your heart stops, and everything is still.

My wife once read a book that says you hang suspended in the air above your body. I
thought that was ridiculous, even at the time. I was sitting in the dirt, rubbing my knees and
the backs of my hands, and then my chest and thighs.

It can be painful to grow old by yourself. If you outlive the members of your own family, you've
lived too long. Now my heart was quiet, and I didn't breathe. I sat until my eyes were
accustomed to the darkness. Smells came to me -- mold, concrete, a trace of urine. The dirt
under my hands was clotted with spider web, and it seemed to me that I could hear the
whining of a mosquito.
Now I could see the limits of that place, a concrete box about ten feet square. The ceiling
was low, and I didn't want to stand. Instead I crawled forward on my hands and knees. There
was a gray light that got stronger as I crawled toward it, though it remained indistinct and
didn't throw off any kind of shadow. It wasn't until I reached the opening that I understood
why. The concrete passage to the outside air was narrow, and it turned back on itself in two
ninety-degree angles. Squatting on my haunches, looking back toward where I had been
sitting, I saw deep, horizontal slits in the wall above my head, blocked, I imagined, with
vegetation or debris. I could see now where I was, a concrete pillbox or bunker, with walls
many feet thick. And though I understood the principle of the entrance, I was not prepared,
as I turned the corners, for the brightness of the outside air. As I crawled out into the open,
the brightness was like a punch in the nose, and my eyes were watering.
As I had had to get used to the darkness, now I got used to the light, which took a longer
time. I collapsed onto my knees and forearms and put my head down. I could see that I was
wearing my golfing clothes, and my hat was on my head. My shorts and polo shirt had
seemed appropriate to a fall day in New Orleans. Abruptly, now, I felt like a fool.
There were huge, shaggy trees all around me, with roots like the fins of a rocket. There