Axiom Ch. 06

At 3:30 in the morning of May 5th, the world would remember it as the time and day fourteen senior employees of Ceres Laboratories were arrested on charges of homicide and fraud. Some of them were caught unawares, having been too confident that their little plan had worked out. The other few had to be chased down and arrested at airports, mere minutes away from boarding private planes to escape the country. News of the scandal broke out quickly, spreading across the internet like wildfire. Little did they know that this was only the beginning.

However, Aidan would remember the time and date for a completely different reason. Because at 3:30 a.m, May 5, Gwyneth Miriam Kenner, aged 28, went into cardiac arrest precipitated by massive hemorrhagic shock. The blood loss from her wounds had exerted considerable stress on her cardiovascular system, and despite the slow infusion of blood meant to replenish volume loss, her heart just suddenly stopped beating. Aidan had been sitting in a chair, reading through an e-mail update when he heard the alarm go off at the nurses' station. In a flash, a team of doctors came running, spilling into the room and moving about in a perfectly choreographed dance.

Stunned, Aidan slowly got to his feet and moved closer to the glass room, at a complete loss for what to do. All he could do was stare in silence, crushed and utterly devastated by the sight in front of him. One doctor had his arms locked in a straight line over Gwyneth's chest, compressing her sternum in a steady rhythm while another one took off her oxygen mask and replaced it with one he was holding, manually pumping air from a blue balloon. A third doctor fished out a pre-filled syringe and fed it into her arm as the fourth stood nearby, watching the ECG screen intently while holding a pair of defibrillator paddles at ready.

Remember all those scenes you've seen on TV where a patient flatlines and they just zap him back to life? That's all bull. That's Hollywood medicine for you. Because the truth is when a heart stops beating, the predicament cannot get any more bleak. The only thing that doctors can do is push some heart-stimulating drugs, perform CPR and pray for a heartbeat. Any heartbeat, even the most irregular of beats, would have been a glimmer of hope. That's how humbling it is - you just sit there and pray that the heart starts pumping again.

Aidan's world went silent. The only sound he could hear was a deep bass beat in his ears, a familiar tempo that he had first heard using a stethoscope at an art gallery in Brooklyn. Two sounds. One lower, one higher. Thumping in a steady, insistent beat, delicious and sentient. Pulse. That's when he'd first known, that's when she'd first whispered the truth to him without even realizing it. All the secrets of the world, locked away in the sound of her heartbeat. There was nothing more he craved to listen to at that very moment. Lub - dub. He would've given anything, anything at all to listen to that melody again.

The only movement in the room came from the doctor performing the cardiac massage on Gwyneth. Everyone else froze in position like a members of a race-car pit crew, poised to spring into action. All these people, just waiting for one heart to start beating again. Everything inside him had shattered into a million tiny pieces, then reassembled, only to splinter again.

He wanted to beg, wanted to plead. This couldn't be it. How could this happen? They hadn't even started, and now he was already looking at the end. Only then, he realized that he'd never actually told her, outright, that he loved her - and fresh anguish drenched him to the core, delivering a final, crippling blow. Those three unsaid words. Would he ever be able to say it to her?

And so a man stood there, watching the events unfold in a glass chamber in front of him, locked away like an alternative universe. And in that moment, everything was decided for him. Every question he'd ever had in his entire life, every doubt, every fiber of his being found its answer. It was as if his whole world had exploded and imploded simultaneously, the entire microcosm of his mind swallowed up in a giant black hole and then igniting with a furious brilliance that was destroying and blinding. He could only look at the frail, skinny figure on the bed, her tiny frame almost engulfed by all the equipment around her and that was it. That was all that existed. Nothing else did anymore.

It couldn't be.

It couldn't be.

The woman he loved was going to die.