protection. On the painful trip over the Atlantic she had pictured how Adam would build a fire in the fireplace, sit on the sofa with her in his arms and soothingly stroke her back. And everything would heal. But it hadn’t turned out that way at all. The coffee table caught her attention and something inside her protested violently: I don’t like surprises any more than you do! And once again it was as if she were lying defenseless and the only thing between her and the guerrilla was the darkness and a little downy grass.
She knew that a bus would be arriving at the stop across the street in about three minutes. If she could just keep out of sight so that he didn’t see her… She grabbed her backpack and left.
Cissi kept her promise. Vera accompanied her back to her office after her lectures, and Cissi explained what Future Wealth and Welfare involved. Vera was given tomes and compendiums to read through, and then Friday came, the day she was to be interviewed by the department’s executive board. The board members would decide if she was a suitable representative of ‘the common people’, yet also capable of saying something of interest about future welfare.
On the way down the hall, Vera whispered, ‘What do you think they’re sitting there hoping for?’
Cissi grinned crookedly. ‘They probably want a car mechanic with a burning interest in financial derivatives. Unfortunately, I don’t know any, and I think it would be hard to find one given the time constraints we’ve been working under…’
It wasn’t an answer to lessen Vera’s nerves.
Aware of the seriousness of the situation, Vera was pale-faced as she entered the seminar room. Its walls were decorated with portraits of straight-backed men, each one bearing a plaque engraved with the date of their promotion to professor. The executive board members, all of whom were over 50, sat with their backs to the sun: tall Professor Överlind, with bushy, greying hair; department head Marianne Lange, a small, tough lady; Professor Sparre, with his dark, sharp eyes; and, of course, the day’s main protagonist, Professor Åke Sturesson. Secretary Lilian Blom sat a bit off to the side in a flawlessly ironed white blouse, ready to take notes. A blazer was completely appropriate for the situation, Vera noted with relief, stroking her arms lightly.
After a few polite introductory comments, including an invitation to Cissi to join them, they began to question Vera about her background. Vera felt like she was at a job interview. They seemed particularly interested in her years as a thoracic anesthesiology nurse, when Adam had been training to become a surgeon.
‘So then, opened chest cavities are bread and butter to you?’ Överlind touched his breastbone.
‘Well, I don’t know if I would say that,’ Vera answered, smiling tentatively towards their silhouettes in the backlight, ‘but, yes, I have participated in a number of heart and lung operations.’
‘Why don’t you still work there?’ Sparre sounded suspicious.
Why do you ask that? Vera wondered as she tried to answer. ‘I was waiting for… I was going to go with…’ She stopped and looked down at the table. ‘I had planned to work as a volunteer, so I went abroad last year, first to the Congo and then Colombia…’
‘And now you are back in town,’ Sparre persisted, ‘but not at the hospital?’
‘No, I have actually applied for a part-time position in anesthesiology, but…’ Vera wondered if she should mention all the complications with her knee and the discussions with the unemployment office about her degree of disability. She opted instead for the more impersonal reason why she was not, at the moment, doing the thing she was trained to do.
‘You know how the labor market is for college graduates in this town.’
They nodded; this was a well-known problem. The unemployment office in Umeå struggled with the country’s, if not the world’s, best-educated group of unemployed people. Who wanted to employ someone with a PhD in physics to work in a grocery store? He would probably be Einstein-eccentric and give customers the wrong change because he was busy daydreaming about formulas. Vera knew someone with a pure physics PhD who started playing online poker and now earned three times as much as he had earned as a graduate student, just by ‘reading the board’ – code for systematically winning money from people who couldn’t count the odds, but humbly folding when the opposition was superior.
‘You know about these things; is it true that you can perform a heart massage directly with your hands?’ asked Överlind, as he squeezed his left hand lightly in front of his chest.
‘Yes, it is. I’ve done it myself.’ From the corner of her eye, Vera saw Cissi looking at her in surprise.
‘In other words, you can hold a heart in your hands and get it to start pumping again?’
Överlind’s interest made Vera wonder if he felt himself in need of such help. ‘As the anesthesiology nurse, my clothes aren’t usually sterile. I stand behind a cloth sheet. It is my responsibility to make sure the patient is properly anesthetized, and only the surgeon touches the patient.’
‘But you said that you have held a living heart in your hands…’ said Sparre with a critical tone.
‘Yes. We had an emergency situation on the ward once – a patient who had been operated on to repair a coronary artery went into cardiac arrest. You are not supposed to compress the thoracic region of a person who has just been through an operation. In that case you open the sternum wire.’ Vera saw that nobody understood, so she explained: ‘That’s the steel wire that holds the chest cavity together after the operation.’
‘Why can’t you apply compression from the outside to get the heart started again?’ asked a pale but fascinated Överlind.
‘When you attach a new coronary artery to a heart, one possible reason for cardiac arrest is that a stitch is leaking. In that case, applying pressure will just make it worse.’
All eyes in the sunny room were on Vera. She didn’t understand. She had studied economics and read about welfare, and they were asking questions as if she were applying for a job with an air-ambulance team and they suspected her of pretending to be an anesthesiology nurse.
It was Lilian Blom who finally broke the silence. ‘Was it leaking?’
‘No. It was a ventricular fibrillation – the heart hops and shakes, but it doesn’t pump. I lifted the heart out of the pericardium and touched it really gently until they came with the… well, they’re like small metal spoons that are used to shock the heart and synchronize the electrical impulses.’
‘Did it work?’ asked Överlind.
‘Yes, he survived. In fact, it’s surprising how often things turn out well. Even if it was tense at the time.’
‘And now you are… one of our first-year students?’ Marianne Lange sounded surprised when she consulted her papers.
‘Yes.’
‘Why is that?’ Sturesson and the others looked searchingly at Vera.
She fell silent. I have been sent by what remains of the aboriginal people… because everything we have the power to take, is not actually ours for the taking. She looked at the group in front of her. No. She could not say ‘Koyaanisqatsi: little brothers and sisters,
