A Thousand Naked Strangers (23 page)

The crowd surges forward. More people are coming, they're screaming, yelling, pushing against the ambulance, against the
stretcher. Marty calls for help over the radio, but whether the dispatcher can hear him over this noise, we don't know. The mob is too loud—yelling for us to go faster, to do something, to tell them something. They are distraught and violent, and we're being overrun.

And then, from nowhere, salvation. Three Fulton County marshals—who were serving a warrant in the area and heard our distress call—come speeding over the grass in their cruisers. They're all flashing lights and sirens. They jump out, nightsticks drawn, guns drawn. They're yelling for the crowd to get back and let us through. The crowd goes silent, then parts. We load our patient and back out. We're safe, not because we're good but because we were saved. Because someone else came along and pulled us out of a situation we cavalierly got ourselves into.

That's what breaks the spell. Our arrogance and contempt, our hubris, got us into trouble. Someone else came along and saved us. This is our scariest day on an ambulance, and it ends our brief stint as para-gods. We're brought back to earth, to the real world of two simple medics serving as a single link in the patient-care chain. Unfortunately, our awakening hasn't happened quite quickly enough.

The fire chief—the one we ignored and disrespected and pissed off—has called our supervisors and raised hell. He says we were insubordinate and negligent. He wants something done. The negligence claim soon gets tossed out. It's clear to anyone with any sense that we made the right call. Still, a fire chief is a powerful person. His bruised ego must be dealt with.

So we're told to apologize. Since Marty is the one who spoke to the chief, he's specifically listed in the complaint. The job of apologizing falls on his shoulders alone. He doesn't want to do
it. He gets angry and raises his voice as he pleads our case, yelling mostly about the kid by the pool whom we were left to deal with, but about everything else, too. Nobody's listening. Eventually, he composes a handwritten apology and drives to Atlanta Fire headquarters to deliver it in person. He stands alone on the carpet and tells a fire chief that he's sorry. Sorry for disagreeing. Forget that we were right, that the chief's own firefighters dropped the ball and were mishandling a patient. Forget that we came along and saved the day. We stood our ground, and for that we were wrong.

Sorry.

M
arty is leaving. He says it's partly because of the thing with the fire chief, the betrayal he feels, but also it's the job in general. He says EMS isn't for him and it's time to go.

It's early in the shift, just after sunset. We're in Southeast Atlanta, a few miles from Turner Field, where a few months ago we watched the Braves win the division only to flame out once again in September. We're headed to an abandoned school. There's a cop down here who thinks he's found something but can't be sure—sometimes the eyes play tricks. Right now, though, I'm not terribly interested in this person who's (possibly) dead in an abandoned school. All I can think is that my best friend—the guy I've run calls with and sweated and bled and gotten drunk with—is leaving. Once again I'm going to be alone.

I ask Marty if he's sure. “Because once you leave, that's it,” I tell him. “It's over.”

“I know.”

A fat cop lumbers over, and Marty unrolls his window. The cop tells us he was driving by when a junkie flagged him down and said there was someone inside.

“A body?”

The cop shrugs. His car is parked on the curb, and it's not a
regular cruiser but a traffic-enforcement car. “I hand out tickets,” he says. “I don't find bodies.”

“Where is it?”

The cop hooks a thumb over his shoulder. “In the school, I guess. I'll follow you.”

People always talk about how they want to die and at what age, but almost no one considers where. When I die, I'd like it to be peaceful and painless. I'd like it to be quick. But just as much, I'd like it to happen anywhere other than an abandoned building in Southeast Atlanta. A death here isn't merely undignified. It's forgotten. We're crunching through the dead grass, through the weeds and litter, when I ask Marty what he's going to do. “When you leave, I mean.”

He shrugs. “Don't know. This job's gotta qualify me for something, right?”

But what? This is what we do, what we've done so many times. Get called out to someone who's not recently dead but truly dead. Dead-and-gone dead. Dead-dead. We've developed a routine for these calls, a system. One of us approaches the family, hands folded, and says, “I'm sorry, but he's dead. Is there someone we can call?” We take turns with the family, but we're both on body detail. We scour the room for answers; we dig through pockets looking for ID, for meds, for clues to what might've happened. We speculate on how long he's been here and why.

One way or another, we'll all be present for this conversation someday.

It's been years since the school was full of children. Though the power has been cut and the windows are boarded up, the chain-link fence has been chewed through and pushed open by junkies and lunatics and bored teenagers. Maybe the odd prostitute. “Well,
this should suck,” Marty says as we slip through a hole in the chain-link fence and cross the schoolyard on a well-worn path through the weeds. Then: “Scratch that. I changed my mind.” I'm expecting him to say he's not leaving, that this strange life is too good to walk away from. Instead he says, “At least he'll be alone. And that's a plus.”

Usually, we find them in houses. Most times we find bodies—stiff and swollen—pinned between the toilet and the tub. Even when they're in the bedroom or the kitchen, the bathroom light is on, the medicine cabinet open and rifled through. The dying tend to know something is wrong, and if they can, they make their way to the bathroom. When they never come out, someone knocks and knocks until alarm becomes suspicion becomes anguish becomes a 911 call.

As soon as we enter the school, we're swallowed by darkness. I click on my flashlight and am amazed by its uselessness. This beam of light is our lifeline, what we'll use to get to the body and what we'll use to get out again. Somewhere in the darkness, something moves and I swing my light. We hope it's only a rat, but we're not in here alone.

We shuffle through the auditorium, stepping over fallen pieces of ceiling and piles of turd that dot the floor like a dysenteric minefield. As we go deeper, things get worse. We're in a hallway now, dark as night and shockingly narrow. The plaster ceiling sags and buckles with water damage, long strips hanging down like flypaper. The walls, also plaster, heave forward, lumpy shapeless arms reaching out to grab us as we stumble forward, tripping over debris.

All the while, we can't see. All in a place alive with groans and creaks, the distant moaning of God knows what.

“School, maybe,” Marty says.

I stop to shine my light on him. “School?”

“Yeah. Maybe I'll go back to school.” The traffic-enforcement officer shuffles his feet at the edge of our small circle of dim yellow light. Marty shrugs. “But maybe not.”

We round another corner, and for the first time we catch a whiff of what lies ahead. Decomposition is a terrible, sickly sweet smell, but at least today it tells us we're on the right path. Our trail will end down the next hall. When we turn the corner, we're blinded by a flash of light and immediately stop. We're disoriented from stumbling through the darkness, so it takes a minute to realize what we're looking at—the door at the end of the hall is half glass. My light is bouncing off and shining back in our eyes.

We continue on, the smell more intense with each step, and the traffic cop beside us begins to mumble. Five feet from the door, he says he's never seen a dead body. When we reach the door, the smell is overpowering. Flies as thick as grapes bounce off the glass. It's been over a week, possibly two. It's pure Hollywood—a man in the fetal position, his skin nothing but a roiling bag of maggots. Large sections that should be there simply aren't. When a body is left to nature, words we don't normally associate with humans begin to apply: bloating, rotting, liquefying, bursting. These have all happened. It's the ultimate lesson in humility. We're nothing but meat, and if circumstances allow, we'll end up no different than a possum lying by the roadside.

“I'm just over it,” Marty says. “The whole thing.” He peeks in the window. “Aren't you?”

The cop groans. He, too, wants out—at least out of this building—but he wandered in without a flashlight, and now he's stuck.

I don't
know what else I'd do, and I tell Marty that. “Have you really thought your way through this?”

Marty looks down at his feet but doesn't say anything. He stares at the floor, forehead crinkled like he's deep in thought, but nothing comes. He keeps looking down at the floor, and as his mouth slowly flops open, I realize he's not thinking at all. I shine my light on the ground and there, at our feet, are drag marks. It takes a second to process this information, what the drag marks mean. Then, slowly, I trace them down the hall, back the way we've come. Our patient didn't slink back here to die in peace. He was dragged, perhaps kicking and screaming, to this dark corner of a long-abandoned building and killed. The cop sees what we see. He fidgets with his keys. We've trampled yet another crime scene.

Outside, it's bright. We hop in the truck to write up our short report but have to unroll the windows. There are a lot of things that stay with you when you find the dead. Glasses, canes, clothes, money. A watch that keeps ticking. Today it's the smell. It's sunk into our clothes, our nostrils. It's inescapable.

“So that's it? You've made up your mind?”

Marty nods and that's it. We've come all this way and gone through so much together, from useless and scared to battle-tested, lesson-learned, competent but humble crew. We're exactly where we hoped to be when we set out. How bittersweet it is to have found what we've been looking for, only for it to be dead on arrival.

•  •  •

Two months later, Marty's gone.

Poof.

I'm
left to wonder why I'm still here. Did I choose to stay, or was I left behind? Maybe I like it here, have decided this is where I belong, that nothing else could ever compare to rushing through the streets to perform, to witness, and occasionally, to save. But maybe not. Maybe I have nowhere else to go and I was, in fact, left behind. Sitting in the back of the ambulance, staring at a succession of patients—always the same complaint, always the same place—I start to get angry. I start to get bitter. I really begin to hate this job. I've been warned it could happen someday, and now someday is here.

All I can do is hold on tight, because the burnout's coming, and it's a long drop to the bottom.

E
arly on a Sunday morning, I go looking for a priest. It's late November, cold and raining. As soon as I went in-service, dispatch sent me to a Spanish-speaking trailer park in Southeast Atlanta. I'm here now, looking for the priest because he speaks English, but he's too busy to talk. I can see him, way up ahead of me, but I can't go after him; anyway, he's surrounded by an enormous crowd. It's a parade, really, and he's leading it. Somewhere in the middle is a grandmother, yelling to no one, carried along by the slow procession of mourners weaving its way through the trailer park to the shuffle of weary feet.

So we wait and sit quietly over a child covered ominously by a sheet. We're waiting for the inevitable screech of tires, for the wail of a mother who isn't sure but suspects the worst. A mother who doesn't speak English and whom we can't let in the ambulance, not without warning her. Suddenly, a commotion. Without being told, we know she's here, and right then I hope someone tells her quickly—she deserves that, at least. But the priest is still up there, still surrounded, the parade still marching on toward nothing. Telling her falls to me.

I jump out of the ambulance and try to calm her, slow her down, explain that there was nothing we could do, nothing
anyone could do. But she's beyond all that, and my words of condolence are delivered in a language she doesn't speak. I look around frantically for help, and there sits a nine-year-old. She's waiting for the bus, Hello Kitty backpack slung over her shoulder, juice box and Pop-Tart in her lap. I ask if she knows this woman, if she's the mother. The girl nods. I do the only thing I can. I tell the girl to say what I say, to be gentle but direct, to use my exact words. “Say the baby has died. Don't say
gone
or
passed
or
no longer with us
.” These words are confusing and, to the hopeful mind of a mother, cruelly misleading, as if her child isn't dead but somewhere else. The girl turns to the mother and, in a voice both clear and steady, delivers the news.

The sky comes crashing down.

•  •  •

It's been a bad year.

After Marty left, I slipped into a funk. I don't want to be here, and worse, I don't want to be with the person seated next to me.
Whoever
it is. Marty's slot has been left open, so I no longer have a regular partner but a succession of part-timers and misfits. Of the people who regularly rotate through my truck, I get along with one, and he, naturally, is here the least. Usually, it's one of the others, none of whom is any good. For a while I tried to get along, and when that failed, I started to argue. Then I stopped caring. Now I'm riding out the year in silence.

Oddly, the crash of my professional world coincides with the crash of the economy. It takes a while for the havoc loosed on the rest of the country to reach Atlanta, but when it does in 2008, it comes as a shock to a city that has been in the midst of
a historic decades-long expansion. Back in the early eighties, Atlanta went from tiny Southern town to international city almost without warning. The city sprang up from itself in all directions, sprawling across an enormous swath of North Georgia. At one point Atlanta was growing at a faster rate than any city ever had.