Mouth to nose. Mouth to mouth.

Others tried to introduce mouth-to-mouth into the medical mainstream, but it was repeatedly ignored. Too sexual. Too disgusting. Who would want to put his lips around the mouth of another who is so close to death?

Bear, the authors of this letter that I carried in my breast pocket, Miller and Wolf, the anaesthetists in Baltimore, explained that they had experimented on live patients, administering mouth-to-mouth and measuring the gases in their blood. Their data proved that expelled air from a rescuer, delivered straight into the lungs of the victim via the mouth, resulted in significantly higher levels of blood oxygenation than that produced by the push–pull method, the Nielsen method.

Because this is everything. This is what it’s about, Bear. Oxygen. Water flooded your respiratory system. You asphyxiated. Which meant there was a lack of oxygen in your blood. Which stopped the beating of your beautiful, beautiful heart.

By the time they contacted me, Miller and Wolf’s recommendations for formalizing mouth-to-mouth as the official method of resuscitation had already been accepted by the American Medical Association. It had yet to be accepted by any international medical governing bodies, and they knew that for this to happen, they would have to demonstrate that the method was simple and that it could be performed by anyone, even women and children. Practising on live victims on a larger scale wasn’t feasible, and they wanted to design a training manikin. A doll that looked unconscious but not morbid. Made out of a material that could be manipulated, that would resist but also yield a little to touch. The impression of life. This is why they wrote to me, Bear. Because of what I could do with soft plastics. Because of the Anne doll. They hadn’t even known about what happened to you.

38

L’Inconnue

Paris, 1899

I was still alive when I was pulled from the black water. The batelier who hauled me out slapped my face once or twice and, when he got no response, assumed I was dead. I seemed dead, and anyway moments later, I was. Besides, he wouldn’t have been able to resuscitate me had he known there was still a beat to my heart – he wouldn’t have known that was possible.

The chances of his having come upon me in the moment that he did – in the seconds I stopped struggling but before I would have sunk – were minuscule. But this was the way it happened. He became aware of me in that navy light because of one flap of my arm. He thought he’d come upon an enormous bass, and was fixing to drop a line when he saw the moon-pale flesh of my hands, my arms suspended in the yoke of the dead man’s hang. The deep was claiming me fast, and it was only because he had the bargepole in his hand that he was able to catch me. After hooking me at my collar, he hoisted me up by the waistband of my skirt. Bemoaning the loss of a good fish supper, he dragged my sopping bulk over the side of the boat and covered me with an oil-stained, sooty blanket. He tucked me between two barrels and carried on with the morning deliveries that stood between us and the morgue. And I. Lay there, dead. A frothy mixture of air, water, blood and mucus issued from my mouth and nose, and water dribbled thinly from my ears. One unseeing eye casually open like a door somebody forgot to close.