Girls Fall Down Read Online Free Page B

of the morning shift change, his footsteps audible in the lobby, and went up to his office, unlocking the door and booting up the computer. When he checked his voice mail, he found a message already waiting for him – an unexpected work call from the cardiac OR , scheduled to start within an hour. He downloaded his mail, looked it over quickly, then collected his equipment and took the elevator up to the surgical floor.
    In the prep room, he reached into the rack for a green gown, tied on a mask and slid disposable gloves over his hands. Despite the gear, he would not be sterile, not fully scrubbed in; that was the normal procedure, the photographer only ambiguously part of the team, outside the sterile field. Thus the first and most unbreakable rule, that he and his camera must under no circumstances touch anyone or anything.
    He could hear the music through the door, so he knew that Walter Yee was doing the surgery today; Walter, usually over the objections of the team, played REM relentlessly, and insisted on singing along with his favourites. He did not sing well. They were in the early stages of the operation when Alex arrived, the chest already opened. Walter was humming ‘Losing My Religion,’ his gloved hands moving delicately among the veins and arteries.
    â€˜Hi. I’m Alex Deveney, I’m the photographer,’ he said for the benefit of anyone there he didn’t know, and moved towards the table. Walter gestured with his head to indicate where he wanted Alex to stand.
    â€˜Can we get a picture of this before I start working?’
    Alex nodded, framed a shot of the chest cavity, the heart’s red throbbing muscle and glistening fat, then kept shooting as Walter placed a clamp on the largest artery and gestured for the infused medication that would paralyze the tissue.
    â€˜So who got caught in the traffic jam last night?’ asked the anaesthetist.
    â€˜That was the subway thing, wasn’t it?’ said one of the nurses. ‘I saw something about it in the paper this morning. Somebody smelled a funny smell or something, and the security guys went crazy.’
    â€˜Girls fainting, I heard,’ said a resident.
    â€˜Oh yeah, I was there,’ said Alex. ‘It was very strange, private-school girls just crashing.’
    â€˜Probably dieting themselves to death, poor kids.’
    â€˜No, they were having rashes and stuff. Thought they’d been poisoned. It looked like some kind of hysterical thing.’
    â€˜I’ve never liked the word hysteria,’ said Walter thoughtfully, as he cut into the heart and began to open it, exposing the cavities. ‘I don’t find it helpful. And it has a bit of a gender bias, don’t you think?’
    â€˜Yeah, the wandering uterus.’
    â€˜Oh my God, my uterus has escaped!’
    â€˜It’s taken off down Yonge Street!’
    â€˜Can I move over there, Walter?’ asked Alex. ‘I’d like to get some shots from the other side.’
    â€˜Hang on a second … yeah, okay. Linda, squeeze over for Alex there? Thanks.’
    â€˜Anyway,’ said Alex, ‘you can call it somatization if you want. I spent half an hour convincing myself I didn’t have a rash. Like instant cutaneous anthrax or something.’
    â€˜And we’re letting you into the OR ? Standards are really slipping.’
    â€˜But if we don’t, the terrorists have already won, right?’
    Walter was singing again as he probed the mitral valve, professing along with Michael Stipe that he was Superman and that he knew what was happening. Alex took some longer shots of the gowned figures clustered around the table, then moved in closer and focused on the thick meat of the heart.
    â€˜Tell you what I saw on the subway this morning,’ said the resident. ‘I saw the kid who owns evil.’
    â€˜Oh yeah?’
    â€˜Really. I got on and there was this kid, this teenage boy, holding this big old box,