I listened to her pulse and heard the unnerving sounds of a desperately irregular heartbeat. Soft, erratic thuds, like fists punching pillows. It was 2 in the morning on my birthday. The siren screaming over my head sounded like a New Years Eve party favor. Our festive whirling lights made dark storefronts momentarily look as lively as dance floors. Everything in the early morning streets seemed stunned by the exuberance of the ambulance's passage. We could have been a carnival with a human tragedy hiding in the midst of it.

The paramedic asked me to listen to her lung sounds. I placed the stethoscope on her chest and closed my eyes. Her breath produced a rush of static, a furtive broadcast from the underground radio station deep within her tissues. I tuned her in. Long hisses of feedback with voices hidden underneath, the conversations of single cells idly discussing the current lowered blood oxygen levels. A commercial for helpful bacteria which offer up to 40% more efficient digestion than the leading intestinal flora. The creaking Synovial music conducted on the pipe organs of the long bones.

Unable to make sense of her transmissions, I pulled the blood pressure cuff from the shelf beside me and wrapped it around her upper arm. The velcro sealed and I inflated the sleeve, placing the stethoscope against the artery. I I pumped it to around 180, then opened the valve and watched the dial slowly descend, trying to pick up more pirate broadcasts from the physiological substrata. Her heart entered the range in which I was eavesdropping, flooding the frequency with its irregular explosions. Although I had already heard the heartbeat, the sound was terrifying, burst of genetic anxiety that resonated momentarily with my own cells. Something hardwired within me knows that this message is one of war, a transmission from the front lines of a desperate struggle.

Now the dial falls into the lower frequencies, beneath the relentless trumpeting of the besieged heart. I hear the hiss of capillaries feeding the bluing tissues. I jump at a burst of conversation intercepted along a major nerve axis, then the grinding pumps of neurotransmitter reuptake obscure the words. The blood pressure dial reaches zero -- I have scanned the full range. Nowhere in her physiological transmissions did I hear the birthday song.

As I was about to pull the stethoscope from my ears, I detected a single remaining tone, wavering and stuttering in the dead airspace. There was another message, an impossible one, broadcasting on the zero frequency. Pirating death's proprietary channel. I strained to hear it, seeing as I did so the lights of the hospital flash by the side windows. We were nearly there. The paramedic told me to switch the patient over to the portable oxygen. I complied, removing the stethoscope earpieces as I did so. The message being mysteriously sent out on the zero scale vanished.