Holding Still for as Long as Possible (18 page)

I pressed “save draft” and decided to wait until later to respond in an honest way. I could feel Desperation's presence in the room, hanging around me like a stifling, wet wool sweater. I was not going to let that bitch get the better of me.

[ 16 ]

Josh

It's always the quietest people who are experiencing the real emergency. For example, the woman I drove to the hospital who didn't even know she had sliced her arm off until I was relaying her condition to the trauma team at Sunnybrook. She talked quietly about her dog the whole time, about whether or not she'd get home in time to walk him.

The people who are about to die often walk themselves to the hospital, or don't call 911 because they don't want to seem like they are over-reacting. There's a look in the eyes. They usually say something vaguely psychic, such as
I feel as though I'm about to die.
Heart-attack patients usually know. They tell you. If they don't tell you, you can usually see it.

I can't remember the last time I was seriously thrown by a call. Most days, it's tedium express. Our first call today was a woman with a headache. Seriously.
Marty
,
she kept whining.
Someone call my husband. I'm dying!
Marty wasn't picking up his phone. Gee, I wonder why.

The headache woman occupied our stretcher for four straight hours in the waiting room at Toronto Western. I hadn't wanted time to think because I knew all I'd do was obsess about Amy, the breakup, and what it meant. I wanted car accidents and overtime calls and constant epi shots. Instead I got the glare of the twenty-four-hour newsreel in the waiting room, and taking turns with Dave, my partner for the day, napping in the ambulance. I smoked way too much, and my voice got hoarse.

In the middle of a conversation about some ridiculous reality show, all the male medics rubbernecked towards triage: a blonde ponytail, a new medic. “What is she? Like, fourteen?” Mike laughed, but didn't stop looking. Diane rolled her eyes.

The new medic pushed her patient into the offload delay room beside the vending machine while her partner talked to the triage nurse. It took me a second, but I recognized her from her snorting laugh — it was Jenny, the student medic-actor from
COHERT
. “Hey — Josh!” she said, nodding at me. I felt the other guys immediately begin to like me better. I gave the introductions.

Just as I was finishing, my phone beeped.
Thinking bout going 2 NYC 2 c Jason, my X? Let me know if u'r not okay w this, or need 2 talk.

I concentrated on my hands, trying to relax through the surge of anger and jealousy rising up my throat. I suggested to Jenny we go get coffees for everyone. Offload delay meant there were about ten of us sitting around and this gave us something to do, right? Right.

By the time Jenny and I hit Bathurst Street, I'd learned a little more about her. Recently broken up with a guy from back home. Moved from Sault Ste. Marie to go to Humber College two years back. I suddenly remembered she was new in Toronto, and felt bad I hadn't called her. In the couple of months since we'd last seen each other, she'd moved out of Etobicoke into a bachelor apartment on St. Clair. Hadn't made a lot of friends at school because she'd been studying too hard and living in Etobicoke. Jenny was the only medic from her class hired on in Toronto.

She had to stop at the Scotiabank
ATM
machine to get some cash. It was only when the
ATM
spit out her card and began to beep that she pulled her tongue out of my mouth. “I want to take you home,” she said. I was seriously drawing a blank about how to form a sentence, let alone tell her that I was not some ordinary straight guy, not in the least. This might turn out to be my first attempt at
that
conversation and I was not looking forward to it. Another consequence of leaving the comfort of Amy.

Luckily my pager went off right at that moment. My patient had been off-loaded and there was a Delta down the street for a kid seizing. I had to forget coffee runs and cute forward girls and get going.

As soon as I left Jenny, the burning, angry, fist-through-a-wall feeling in my stomach returned. I pictured Amy with her idyllic academic boy, walking through New York City over the Christmas holidays while I stayed here with the depression calls and overdoses. Instantly I saw their baby, their dog, their brownstone in Brooklyn and fancy cottage upstate. I had imagined it all as soon as Amy told me he'd been back in touch, that she was thinking of connecting with him. She had said it with such fake lack of concern, I knew it had to be a big deal for her.

When a day starts going to shit, it just keeps going that way. Dave and I got a call involving a twenty-four-year-old woman, short of breath, feeling anxious. Shortness of breath automatically means a Delta.

The only calls that annoy me more than panic attacks are the ones that people make because they assume they'll be seen quicker if they arrive in an ambulance. Or Dial-a-Nurse tells them to call. Dial-a-Nurse always suggests calling 911 so as to cover their asses legally even though the caller is clearly suffering from the flu. Unless you're ninety-two, the flu isn't an emergency. Go to bed. Call your doctor.

I'd been awake for two days straight. Amy wouldn't let me sleep for more than three hours without waking me to process the end of our relationship. She'd been reading books about grief. She was underlining passages. As a result, I was not entirely pleasant to be around. My circadian rhythms were all fucked up from working too many nights in a row, and I felt crazed. And now I had to deal with her new boyfriend, or her old boyfriend, or whatever.

I felt lucky that I'd been teamed up with Dave. He was one of the younger guys — a slow mover, a wisecracker, no bullshit. I didn't have to make small talk or listen to him bitch about something stupid. “Some chick freaking out again,” Dave mumbled, looking at his pager and taking the driver's seat. Most of the time I alternated half the shift driving, half in the passenger seat. Not with Dave. When we were together, Dave drove. I didn't mind, really. I was tired. It seemed as if I always got panic-attack calls when I was on the fourth night shift in a cycle and feeling as if I wanted to punch people when they breathed too loud.

People always think they're having a heart attack, not a panic attack, but heart attacks are easy to spot. You don't have the energy to hyperventilate when you're having a heart attack. If I had to go to one more panic-attack or backache call, I was going to blow my head off. In school they made it seem as if every call was a real emergency, that you were helping people and saving lives. Truth is, most calls were bullshit. When I told this to Billy she said, “Isn't that a good thing? Do you want more people to be dying all the time? Besides, even if they're not dying, you're still helping someone.” I hadn't thought of it that way. I just didn't feel as if I was making a difference any more.

The girl with the panic attack was living in a dorm at the University of Toronto. We went through all the questions:
Why are we here today? When did your symptoms start? What were you doing when they started? Any pain, how much pain, for how long?
She was stressing out, hyperventilating, but ultimately did not want us there. Her roommate had called:
I thought she was dying
.

We took the girl's vitals, assured her they were all within normal parameters, and she started to look fine. I wanted to feel compassion, but I couldn't muster it. I was hungry, tired, and I couldn't help thinking we were taking up so much time here, and there must be a real emergency somewhere else. I ranted inside my head while talking to the girl in a calm voice, listening, asking the right questions. She smiled at me, though her face was puffed up red and her pupils were darting. “Thanks,” she said. “It's ridiculous, I know, but it feels so real. Like a truck is coming at me all the time and I can't stop it. I really thought I was dying. God, I feel so ridiculous now.”

Just for a moment, I felt good about being there.

Dave and I got back in the truck and I began to think a miracle might occur: we might get a lunch break before eleven hours had gone by. I had never needed a half-hour more than I did in that moment. And that's when we got another call.

“Josh, buddy,” said Dave gently, taking the last bite of a 7-Eleven taquito before scrunching up the wrapper, “there's another person dying to meet us.” I slammed my fists on the dash as he started up the lights. “You gotta relax, Josh. What's with you today?”

“Nothing. Just girlfriend trouble.”

“Ah, that's why I do not date girls.”

I looked at him more closely. “You're gay?”

“Yeah.”

He looked at me, just as close, and all of a sudden I saw that he knew about me. “My family has the queer gene, I guess. My sister is, at the moment, turning into my brother.”

I nodded at him, wishing the subject away.

“I don't know, man. I think that's pretty fucking cool, you know. She's always wanted it. I mean
he.
I'm always fucking that up:
he's
always wanted to be a guy. If there's anything this job has taught me, it's that life is too short to live a lie, right?”

“Amen,” I answered, lighting a smoke.

“I mean, I don't talk about it at work 'cause, like, all these assholes and stuff.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“But you only get one life to be happy, and you may as well fucking be happy!”

“I hear that.”

After work I went to Roxy's house to drink beer instead of going home. We sat at her computer and finished all our Christmas shopping, then played video games. I couldn't bring myself to think about Amy. I didn't tell Roxy about Jenny and the bank machine.

“Where's Billy?” I asked.

“She's in her room.”

“She's been in her room this whole time? Even though she knew I was here?”

Roxy laughed. “Imagine, you're not the centre of her universe . . .”

My surprise about Billy not paying attention to me had nothing to do with arrogance. Rather, I felt an exaggerated sense of rejection before anything had even happened between us. I suppose this was part of Billy's allure, the fact that she seemed into me one moment, but dismissive the next.

In the kitchen I took another beer out of the fridge. Looking out through the glass patio door onto the back deck, I made out the moon and some stars. When I looked more closely I saw Billy curled up in her parka on a lawn chair, cigarette dangling from one shaking hand, rocking back and forth. She looked manic, head tucked into her shoulder, cradling a cell phone.

“What's wrong with Billy?” I asked Roxy. “Did she get some bad news or something?”

Roxy, immersed in the video game, took a few moments to answer. “I dunno, nothing. Same old.”

“Same old what?”

“I dunno. She gets panic attacks and stuff. Really bad. She doesn't talk about it with me but a lot of times Maria comes over and I can hear them talking about it. Or sometimes, she'll ask me strange questions over and over again about things.”

“What kind of things?”

“I don't know. I probably shouldn't be telling you this. It would embarrass her.”

Billy stuck her head into the living room. “Hey. Going to bed. See you later.”

She didn't seem to register that I was there.
Her face was red and blotchy, and she was clutching a pillow in her arms. She was gorgeous when she was dishevelled.

Earlier today I had decided to finally ask her on a date, as an emphatic movement away from Amy. Now, something about the way she was walking made me refrain. Maybe it's not the right time to start something new, I thought. What do I even have to offer? I can bandage you up, but who knows what else I can do for a girl. If Amy and I couldn't make it, maybe I was meant to be single. I would sleep with random people — Jenny; the nurse from St. Joe's. Single guy. Uh-huh.

But I had no idea how to be that person. I was
such
a marrying type. Maybe there was some sort of book on how to not be a lap-dog, I thought. Maybe Amy was already highlighting sections of it to leave on the table when I got home.

I knocked on Billy's door anyway. She was wearing a bra and panties but standing as if she were fully clothed. I tried to look at her face. It was really difficult.

“You want to go for drinks next week, or maybe the weekend after New Year's?”

“Sure, yeah.” She shrugged, pulling at a string of her hair and twirling it. She looked at me as if to say,
Is that it?
All over her bedroom floor were art supplies, spilled glitter, cardboard, and drying holiday cards.

“I mean, like, a date. Do you want to go on a date?”

Billy raised her eyebrows, and I thought:
For the first time in my life, I'm going to get shot down.

I have never been so relieved to see Billy's trademark smirk emerge. She reached up and put her hand on my face, rubbing the stubble on my cheek. “I'm gonna have to get used to stubble, I suppose.” With that she kissed me softly, biting my lower lip and then pulling her hand away to slap me gently. “Sure, baby. I'll go out with you.”