A Thousand Naked Strangers (20 page)

We run these calls until one
A.M.
and then, in the unlikeliest of places, catch a break. Posted down in the Pittsburgh neighborhood where everyone carries a knife and we run more stabbings than shootings, we gratefully find ourselves not busy. We get out, lean on the hood of the ambulance, and talk. Hookers wander by. A few stop and talk, some out of boredom, but some ask for sheets or sterile water. Extra gloves. God only knows what they do with the gloves.

Homeless guys wander by, but it's too late to beg, too late for anything but drugs, and we don't have drugs. Packs of girls walk by, loud and laughing, slapping at their weaves because weaves itch, and there's no way to scratch, so they just slap. Once in a while a couple of guys in their twenties—known as Young Boys to everyone who lives here—walk by, and if they're trying to look tough, they'll scowl, but if they're for real, they'll just nod and keep walking. We've spent enough time in shark-infested waters to instinctively distinguish between a predator and his prey. A guy who's for real is slow-moving and self-assured, possessed of an almost casual disregard for everyone. Nothing left to prove, he simply is. People who live here see it, too, and they go silent as he walks by. Even birds stop chirping when the lion stirs.

Then, in the darkness, our number is called. The dispatcher's voice is rushed, and we know right away that our long dry spell of running nothing but nothing has come to an end. Something bad is headed our way.

•  •  •

Really, she's been there all along. Her entire life has been leading to this moment; hers is a very secular kind of predestination. Tonight she's finally stepped off the curb and into a dark street,
or popped that ballooning aneurism, or sat across from her husband as he cleaned his gun and wondered—while she peeked down the long steel barrel—if he remembered to unload it.
Bang,
and her moment has arrived.

Tonight it comes as a surprise for her but not for us. We knew she was out there somewhere, and while we handed out spare gloves to hookers, her countdown reached zero. Tick-tock-tick. That bad call, the one we knew was out there, is no longer merely waiting but coming for us, a bull let loose and charging, the heavy pounding of hooves. Nothing but horns and muscle and fury.

We're dispatched out to a wreck. A Caprice Classic that was T-boned by an Escalade. The Caprice got hit so hard and skidded so far that two of the wheels were shorn off at the axle. Both cars were full of people, and when we arrive, they're all out, walking and confused, crying, yelling, bleeding. Some are hurt and a few aren't. We pick our way through the crowd as more ambulances show up. A fire engine blasts the night apart with its horns. The front-seat passenger took the brunt of the hit, and she's pinned beneath the caved-in door of the Caprice. Her pelvis is broken; the femur is a memory. Her right lung has been punctured, and all hell is breaking loose inside her skull. She has seizure after seizure after seizure as the fire department tries to cut her out.

None of the firemen is a medic, so one throws a coat over my shoulders and lets me into the car—the hot zone is what they call it—where I start an IV and pump her with round after round of seizure-stopping benzodiazepines, which tonight don't help. All this is taking forever, and the hospital has already called back to see where the hell we are.

“Yeah, Doc, I know we've been here a while, but she's stuck.”

“What do you mean,
stuck
?”

So we wait. The fire department cuts. The patient seizes. The Golden Hour—the sixty minutes between insult and surgery that we give a critical patient before her chances of survival drop—tick-tick-ticks away. I'm really sweating, brushing up against all this broken and slowly-being-cut-into metal. Marty stands on the fringe as his phone blows up. That nurse from earlier will . . . not . . . quit. “I know you're working tonight, but call me as soon as you're off. I'm drunk. And I have no idea where I left my underwear.”

Finally, the saws break through and she's free.

As we're leaving, a cop asks me for a prognosis, but he already knows what I'm going to say; he's got a can of spray paint in his hand and he's shaking it, cap off, as he's asking the question. Before I've said, “Not good,” he's turning and drawing white paint lines around everything in the road: tires and debris, shoes, purses, ejected car seats, and when they're in the road, ejected people. If she dies tonight, that cop will come back with an investigative team. They'll close off the road. They'll study the paint lines, re-create the scene. They'll determine fault.

Then we transport. The back of the ambulance is nothing but blood and glass, cut-off clothes, and a used ventilation bag. The suction tubing is full of blood, though almost none of it has made it down into the canister. At Grady, the doctor listens to my report as he checks the patient's abdomen for internal bleeding. I tell him about the cars, what kind they were, how they looked, how the other passengers looked. Where she was seated and whether she was entrapped. I tell him she never stopped seizing. She's rolled off the backboard, and someone lubes a
gloved finger and slips it up her ass to check for rectal tone. The glove snaps as it's stripped off and the voice yells that the rectal tone is good, which negates a spinal injury, and that's better than nothing. Then she's wheeled off to surgery, and while she's still alive, whether or not she'll live is hard to say. Sometimes it's worse than it looks.

•  •  •

It's almost three. The hours between two and four go one of two ways: Either the city releases us from its grip and we scurry to a corner for fitful rest; or it doesn't. And this time of night, when it doesn't let us go, what it gives us is something strange.

I usually forget everything I do after three
A.M.
Amnesia brought on by exhaustion, by the impenetrable darkness of a road with no streetlights. There are entire calls, start to finish, that will never leave me. My three
A.M.
calls won't be among them. Recently, someone asked if I remembered running a white guy in an all-black neighborhood. “You remember,” the guy said, “he was dead for so long, he was stuck to the carpet. Remember that?” I didn't remember. Not that he was stuck to the carpet, or that when the cops showed up, everybody in the house claimed not to know who this white stranger was or how long he'd been dead on the floor. I'd forgotten it all.

This morning we catch a call for a woman with back pain. We drive over, get out, and knock on the door. She yells for us to come in. We walk to the bedroom and find her lying naked in bed. She's got the sheets thrown back, goose bumps run over her arms, her bare legs, and across her stomach. Marty is shocked, scandalized, and embarrassed. He looks away, face red.“Uh . . . ”

I'm behind him, holding our bag. I gently ease around him.
Smile. In my experience, the more you try to pretend you aren't staring, the more it looks like you're staring. We are, after all, professionals. Besides, if she's not embarrassed, why should I be? I'm not naked.

“What's going on?” I ask, casual, like this is any other call.

“I threw my back out masturbating,” she says. “That's my dildo.” She points to the nightstand. We look, and sure enough, her giant rubbery dildo winks at us from its perch. For a moment the only sound is the soft rumble of its vibration. It's three-thirty in the morning.

Now I'm embarrassed.

“Um . . .”

She smiles. “Is this common?”

“I don't think so,” I say. “Then again, I don't use one. But I've never seen this, if that's what you mean.” I clear my throat. “Would you like me to cover you up?”

“Why? Would it help? Ya know, the heat?”

“No.”

“Then I'm fine.” She curls her toes, and I stare at her feet, trying to ignore her breasts, trying to pretend I haven't noticed it's time for another Brazilian. “If I start nipping out, you'll know I'm cold.”

I've seen hundreds of people too sick to care that they're naked. This woman is one of only two who has seemed to enjoy it.

“So we need to get you onto our stretcher. Can you slide over, or do we need to pick you up?”

She shakes her head. “I can't sit up at all. Whole back's locked up.”

We crawl over to get her, and now it's the three of us in bed together—her naked, us in our purple rubber gloves. The
mattress is soft and worn out, so it's almost a waterbed, and our weight creates a big cozy depression. We sink in. We slide down and there's no stopping it. It's like wrestling in outer space—we're slow and awkward and unable to stop ourselves from falling on the bed, on her, on each other. I'd laugh if this weren't so awkward, so outrageously inappropriate.

Finally, she's out of bed and onto our stretcher. She's covered with a sheet and buckled in. Marty grabs her robe, drops it on her lap. We turn off the lights but leave the vibrator on. It rumbles away as we walk out the door.
Mmmmmmmmm
 . . .

•  •  •

Around four
A.M.
is when people wake up dead. A woman rolls over and notices her husband is cold and stiff, too silent to be anything but gone. Maybe Aunt Gladys got up in the middle of the night, and it's not until four-thirty that someone hears her gurgling in the bathroom. It's hard to run a call like that at this hour because we're exhausted, and the last thing we want is to slip-slide through two-hour-old urine to drag Aunt Gladys out of the bathroom in her wet robe while she strokes out.

Every blip of the radio makes my heart pound with fear.
Please, God, do not let us catch a bad call right now. It's almost time to go.

Time unwinds slowly, as if the clock is not merely an object but a cruel and calculated tormentor—the indifferent hour hand, the sadistic minute hand . . . it's torture. The final forty minutes of the shift are waterboarding in fluid Swiss motion. We stare out the window. The sun's not up, but it's close—the hint of light is there, levity after a long black night. And then mercy. A dispatcher comes over the radio and sets us free.

We throw it in gear and race through the streets. We're tired and we're beaten, but we're going home.

By the time we hit the gas station, the sky is no longer black but gray, a thin line of silt blue visible in the east. With the windows cranked down and fresh air streaming in, the city isn't so mean. Back at Grady, we restock the equipment, wipe down the ambulance, and turn in our keys. We talk to the day crews and tell them what we did, how they
never
could have done it—not like us, no way in hell—until it's time for them to clock in and take over. They're day-shifters, so they're weak, they're backups—except they're family, too.
Be safe, guys. Be safe.

Minutes later, I walk past the hospital, sneaking around the homeless guys waking up. Then I'm in my car and out on the streets and at last I can say the words:
It's quiet
. Back at home, I strip down and shower. Sabrina isn't awake, not yet. I slip between the sheets and know there's nothing to do but sleep. Real, genuine sleep. No ambulance, no radio, no one waiting to die.

I'm unconscious before the bed knows I'm here.

T
he clerk is horrified. I'm standing before him in a bloodstained shirt, my eyes red from not sleeping. The blood is Gumby's, and it's smeared across my stomach as if somebody sponged it on. Marty and I ran a call this morning, tiny little Toyota versus dump truck that went exactly the way it should have. The Toyota was broadsided, and the driver's door was punched in thirty-six inches. The impact was so intense, the gas cap popped off. That cap—black molded plastic worn brittle by spilled gas—was the first thing I saw when we got on-scene. The next was Gumby. He was slouched over the console, a broken and pulpy mess, his body contorted into something less than human but, remarkably, alive. His face was purple and swollen. How old he was, I couldn't say. But he had a flattop shaved at a slant that looked like Gumby's head. So we called him Gumby.

Extrication took forever. Minutes, hours, days, I don't really remember. Almost without our noticing, he was cut free and in the back of our ambulance. We worked him all the way to the hospital—suction and oxygen and a pair of huge IVs—and I wasn't careful enough to make sure that big floppy hair didn't touch me. I didn't notice the blood on my shirt in the ambulance or at the hospital or even as I clocked out. Who looks at
his own stomach? But now I'm here in the hardware store, trying to buy a new plunger, and the clerk has brought it to my attention. “I hope that's not real,” he groans, pointing to my stomach.

“As long as it's not mine” is all I say in reply. I hold out my credit card, but he isn't ready to move on, is either unwilling or unable to complete our transaction.

The interrogation continues. “Did he live?”

“Last I knew.”

“What happened?” Before I can answer: “I bet you see some horrible things.”

“I guess you do, too. I mean, you've seen me.”

But he's in no mood for jokes. “What's the worst thing you've ever seen?”

Again with this fucking question.

There's a line behind me, people who no doubt normally resent any delay not of their own making, though they, too, have forgotten their purchases and are leaning in to hear what I have to say. The patch on my shoulder says Grady, and the bloodstain on my shirt says,
Yes. The rumors you've heard, they're all true.
Except they're not. Grady's an incredible place, but it's just that—a place—and being a medic is a job, something I do to make money. Money I use to buy things. Like plungers. Except when I can't. Like right now.