A Thousand Naked Strangers (27 page)

I'm lost in the self-doubt and crushing failures of my past right up until we reach the patient. When we do, I'm abruptly, irrevocably
here
. The world is gone, fallen off without warning, and we've dropped forty feet. There's nothing but massive oral trauma. No one else to turn to, no one to come and shepherd my patient into more capable hands. The call I feared all those years ago has come knocking, and there's nothing to do but run it.

I reach for the suction.

You wouldn't think a single mouth contains so many teeth until they're knocked loose and sent running for cover. The tongue—always in the way—once sliced in half, has an evil twin. There's more blood than you could possibly imagine. We strap him to a backboard and begin the steep climb back up the hill but stop every few feet to set him down and suction out the blood. There's just so much of it. And he's talking, I think, or not. Could be garbled Spanish, could be a gurgle. He's on the stretcher, in the ambulance, in motion.

Oxygen. Then more suctioning, more suctioning. I roll the entire backboard to the left because I can't keep up with the flow. Then he's not talking, not gurgling, nothing. I roll him back and he reanimates. The blood again. More suction. There are teeth on the floor of the ambulance. And then we're there. Through the doors and past triage, a nurse calling from behind us that he's headed to Trauma Two. Surgeons are waiting. They take one look and it's off. Off to another floor, to an OR suite,
to a place where they can sort out the pieces and begin the long job of reconstructing a deconstructed face.

By then I'm already gone. Talking to an ER tech named Errol about basketball, about Lebron, about everything but the call. It doesn't occur to me until later that I finally ran the one call I never wanted to run, that the panic I felt all those years ago was the panic of someone else and the person here now simply did his job. Things occasionally come full circle. Sometimes a question posed in the beginning gets answered in the end. And so there it is—a call, The Call, came in, and I showed up. No panic, no mistakes, no doubt. Just me in the ambulance with a horribly mangled face.

I'm tempted to call it perfect.

A
t only six weeks, my son gets sick. What started as a fever turns to pneumonia, to a stay in the ICU. He heals, because that's what kids do, but his lungs aren't the same. He's sick again in July, then in August, and after a few months of hope, he's knocked flat in the first few days of November. His pulmonologist suggests we pull him from daycare. I switch to part-time, and like that, I'm no longer a full-time paramedic. The decision is so easy, so obvious, so incidental, it's almost like it never happened. One day I wake up and I'm a stay-at-home dad who happens to ride an ambulance a few nights a week.

I pick up only night shifts, which means getting home at five
A.M.,
catching an hour of sleep, and then being up and on the move with a nine-month-old. Every week I work different days and slightly different hours, and the variation brings forgotten people back into my life. As I run into old partners and friends, I realize that the once new are now seasoned, and many of the once good are now burned out. For a while it's a return to the old days, when everything was new and fun and I couldn't wait to get in. But there's a difference between
being
new and
feeling
new. The excitement fades.

In December 2011 we find out Sabrina is pregnant, and by August there's
a second child in the house. Now I've got two kids at home on an hour's sleep. I cut my nights back from three a week to two. Occasionally, I work one.

Early on in EMT school, my instructor told us that nerves were to be expected—that when a bad call came in, we should expect some excitement and maybe a little dread, and that while we were on-scene and in the ambulance and afterward, when the patient was no longer in our care, we should expect the adrenaline, the fast heart rate, the hyper-focus. That feeling, he said, was what would keep us from making mistakes; it would keep us zeroed in. When it went, we should, too.

That feeling probably left me a while ago, but I don't realize it until I'm kneeling on a balcony outside a second-floor apartment. We're in a crappy part of town, a place I've visited a million times for a million different reasons, some valid. It's somewhere around midnight, perfectly clear, with the kind of gentle temperature that I've come to associate with crazy nights. It's the kind of night I used to love, the kind of call I used to love, but tonight something strange happens—I yawn. The patient is in her fifties, and she was caught in bed with the wrong man and beaten with a bat. The assailant was her daughter, the man was her son-in-law. There are cops everywhere, neighbors surge forward against the loosely strung police tape, and a helicopter churns the air as it sweeps a searchlight over the woods. Blood has been splattered on the walls and pools on the ground, people scream, and a single roll of cotton bandaging that fell from our bag has gotten snared on the handrail and flutters in the breeze. The bat is at my feet.

It's all chaos and madness and the threat of violence from a restless crowd. There are cops and news crews and a genuinely
critical patient. Yet I can scarcely muster the energy to care. There's no adrenaline, no hyper-focus. I'm merely an experienced tradesman doing his job. I run the call, finish the shift, clean my ambulance, and punch out.

Sabrina is in the kitchen when I wake up. I walk downstairs. She smiles and asks how my day was.

“I think it's time to quit.”

She nods like she's seen this coming all along.

•  •  •

It's impossible to have a serious discussion with kids in the house, so Sabrina and I load them in the car and drive around the city.

“I think this is the right call,” Sabrina says about my decision to quit.

I'm not sure what I expected—pushback, maybe, or some frustration—but I definitely didn't expect this. I thought she'd ask what I would do for a job, to make money and contribute. For years she's kept us going. Yes, she balances the checkbook and pays the bills; even all those overdraft fees I incur on my ATM card come down to her. But more than that, she actually
pays
the bills—our money but her salary. I do not live like a normal paramedic. My house, my vacations, my car, my love of lobster, nearly all have come from Sabrina. Half her coworkers think she's a sucker. The other half seem jealous—does
anyone
grow up wanting to work in an office? She has carried our weight for so long that I can't imagine her agreeing to my doing less.

But she sees it differently. All this time, she's been alone.

For years now, during my workweek, we've been ships passing in the night, our interactions reduced to handwritten notes—at once sarcastic and quotidian—scribbled on a pad and
left on the counter. Each one is equal parts to-do list, love letter, and death threat: a conjugal visit in imperfect cursive.

Please run the dishwasher if you're going to leave it full.

Would you like a fat lip with that mouth?

Feeling confident?

Maybe. I miss you.

I don't blame you, I'm a lot of fun.

Screw you.

Love you.

You, too.

Most times she doesn't know what I'm doing and is left to guess, drawing on a mental grab bag of all the calls I've run and found strange enough or scary enough to tell her about. Like the time a dispatcher came over the radio to say we'd passed the address and we responded by saying we knew but that they were still shooting, so if she could ask the caller to put down his gun, we'd be glad to go back. And then there are all the domestics we walk into and angry meth heads we fight. The bad neighborhoods, the abandoned buildings, the stray bullets and dirty needles, the perps lurking in the shadows, the horrendous things we see and laugh about but that must be leaving a mark somewhere.

Her phone rang one day: I was on the other line, telling her to turn on the TV. We were supposed to be leaving for Charleston in a few minutes, but there I was, or at least there was my presence, on television at the courthouse downtown. A judge was shot and so was a sheriff, maybe two. Someone was attacked in the parking deck and the shooter—still armed, still creating victims—was out there, too.

We might be a little late to the wedding, guys. Yup. Hazzy's job again.

Our friend Jim has been Sabrina's official stand-in for all dinners, movies, parties, and nights out that I miss. She'd be out having fun, having drinks, having a life, but never far from the understanding that I was out there somewhere—in the middle of a bad neighborhood, a bad call, a bad night. She spent every holiday with someone else. One New Year's Eve, after the toast but before Dick Clark signed off, I called to say I'd just run a bad call. A couple of bodies, one disemboweled, organs in the street. She could hear in my voice that it bothered me, but she was a million miles away, and there was nothing she could do. I told her to call me at midnight, and she said, “It's almost one.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, happy New Year.”

Driving down the street, with Atlanta slowly rolling past our windows, she says that recently, she's been alone in other ways.

Yes, she thought it was creepy that I cut obits out of the newspaper and keep them in a folder, but for a long time she thought I hadn't changed in any elemental fashion. I'd always considered myself invincible, she says, though not because I'm brave. In her view, I'm full of unearned confidence and possessed of a dreamer's inability to dwell on the past. Death and dead people, the ever-present threat of folding under pressure, she didn't think they affected me.

“You were having too much fun,” she says. “You were, I don't know, like an adolescent in search of adventure.”

This sounds like the truth.

She didn't expect me to take to the medicine the way I did, but what really surprised her was the way I took to the patients. “Remember Jane?”

I laugh. Jane was a homeless woman, a crack whore, and a regular. Sabrina and I bumped into her one day while we were
tailgating a Georgia Tech game and she was digging in the trash. Jane walked right up to me like we were old friends, even knew my wife's name.

“I could tell by the way she looked at you,” Sabrina says, “that you treated her with respect. You have a lot of good in you, and this job brought it out.”

We ride for a minute in silence, and she's polite enough not to mention Ponytail, Jane's boyfriend, who was also at the game. In what has become a legendary story among our friends, Ponytail nodded to Sabrina and said, “Holla at me, 'cause with an ass like that, I can make you some real money.”

After a minute, Sabrina says that something has changed. It's been a while since I've looked forward to work, but I no longer enjoy the patients. I'm gone nights and weekends and most holidays, and when I return, I refuse to talk about it. If I met Jane today, would I still be kind to her? There's no easy answer to that question, because what was once in me is gone. Not gone forever, probably, but gone until I break free. In the meantime, I'm somewhere else, and Sabrina is alone.

I've never thought of it like that before. I was simply a guy pursuing life's darker edges. It never occurred to me that I wasn't making the journey alone, that Sabrina was there the whole time and it was her fight, too. Our marriage has survived a career that breaks so many others because of a lack of secrets—mostly mine—but now Sabrina has laid hers bare.

It's been a long decade for both of us. It's time to come home.

“I think it's time to quit,” she says.

I nod like I've seen this coming all along.

•  •  •

By chance, after I turn in my notice, I've got six days off. That's a lot of time to think, to wonder about what I've done and whether, after everything, it's time to go. The decision feels all wrong until I show up the next week. The smell of the ambulance, the scratch of a freshly pressed uniform, the clunk of the boots, all tell me my time has come. Grady is in the midst of a major overhaul—staff, philosophy, everything. They've even changed the uniform. The light blue shirts of my day are gone, and in their place is a gray shirt with black pants. It doesn't look like a Grady uniform. All new employees have been issued the gray, and as existing employees have their annual review, they're given the new color. One by one the old blue disappears. I'm the last holdout. I want to ride out my final days in faded blue.

It isn't just the uniform that makes me stand out. Of Grady's two-hundred-plus employees, I'm one of the ten most senior medics on staff. That's hard to even say. When I started at Grady, I was probably the least experienced medic on the streets. Nearly all of the people I knew and worked with when I started are gone—to other services, to nursing, to med school, to other fields. None of my longtime partners are here. One got hurt, two have been fired, and one quit. The people I looked up to are also gone. A few are supervisors now, the rest scattered in the wind. In the early days of Grady, Atlanta was a city on fire, and it took a different breed to work EMS. When I arrived, most of that first generation was gone, but their acolytes remained, and they passed down their style and approach to the rest of us.

By contrast, those beginning their career now have it a little easier. They're serving a gentrified city and have never known the projects, all of which have been torn down. They don't know the old ambulances or a life before our location was tracked by GPS. They've
been hired by a hospital whose CEO refers to patients as
customers,
and they work out of a new building that doesn't oblige them to walk past Grady's lunatics on the way to a shift. By the time they arrived, we'd gotten our own fuel tanks, so they'll never know what it's like to drive an ambulance on stolen gas. I'm sure they're good, but they're brand-new, mostly, so they don't know—yet—when and how to bend the rules.