The initial reaction of Corvallis was, some would say, curiously detached and unemotional. Evidently, someone in the back of this medical practice had been taken ill. Perhaps an elderly doctor had suffered a heart attack, or something. One would think that a medical practice, sited in a building full, from top to bottom, of medical offices, in a neighborhood entirely given over to the medical industry, would have some special procedure to follow in such a case. But, if Corvallis Kawasaki understood correctly what he was seeing, this was not the case. When there was a problem, the people here dialed 911, just like anyone else. The call was routed to the nearest fire station and the EMTs were dispatched. This was mildly surprising, but the technology executive in him found it actually to be quite reasonable and, in a way, comforting. The EMTs in the fire stations were the best at what they did, the quickest to respond. The system was working.

Now that his focus on the screen of his laptop had been broken, he sat up straight and began to take in further details. A woman in pink scrubs was standing where he could see her, hands clasped together in front of pursed lips, staring down a hallway. Her eyes began to glisten. The EMTs were firing off tight bursts of words. The receptionists had stopped doing their work entirely and were just sitting frozen at their workstations, gripping the edges of their desks, like officers on the bridge of a starship getting ready to be hit by photon torpedoes. The voices of the EMTs became louder and clearer. While continuing to do their work, they were, it seemed, wheeling the patient out of a room, down the hallway, toward the exit. The woman in pink scrubs sprang out of the way. One of the receptionists, who had a better angle than Corvallis, scrambled up, ran across the lobby to the door, and hauled it open.

The EMTs wheeled Richard Forthrast out on a gurney and maneuvered him at reckless speed out the door and in the direction of the elevator bank. He was only visible to Corvallis for one, perhaps two seconds, and so it took a little while for Corvallis to process what he had seen. Richard was shirtless, the open-back hospital gown stripped away from him, and electrodes had been stuck to his torso. A tube had been inserted between his teeth and, presumably, down into his windpipe. One of the EMTs was holding a sort of rubber bag, squeezing it in a slow steady rhythm to force air into Richard’s chest.

Corvallis Kawasaki’s first, absurd instinct was to pull his phone out of his pocket and dial Richard’s number. Because what was going on here was obviously weird, obviously a crisis. On both of these counts it was very much a Richard sort of problem. For much of his postcollege life, Corvallis had been in the comfortable habit of knowing that any such matter could automatically be handed off to Dodge, who would be not merely willing but eager to take it on. Why, Dodge would be offended if weird crises were not instantly dumped into his lap. This was now at odds with the intellectual awareness that Dodge was dying or dead.