In Case of Emergency (19 page)

Later she would wake up in Germany and then at Walter Reed; she would meet the new version of herself over and over again: the shuffling steps, the coaxing memory games, the lessons on how to multitask, how to follow a conversation even when music was playing. She would meet her anger over and over again, too. She would endure the torment of watching people recognize her as someone other than who she had been.

In the actual moment of the explosion, Ayla shut her eyes tight. She heard the sand raining against metal, the piercing cries layered over the echo of the blast; she pictured a woman floating. A woman with a sad, fierce face, her long dress and hair whipping in the wind. Somewhere between losing gravity and slamming against foreign earth, Ayla was back home in Wisconsin, being tucked into her childhood bed, listening to her mother tell their favorite ghost story.

24

All the cells in your body replace themselves many times over the course of your lifetime, with the exception of neurons. What sprung to life remains until death: neurons of varying size, width, length, and complexity, neurons
shaped like shooting stars, like trees, like insects—as familiar in appearance as they are startling and indescribable—with names like “spiny stellate” and “star pyramidal.” This alien machinery is part of you, as biological as your bones and eyes and teeth.

When you think about neurons, you think about your brain, about spidery cell bodies stretching out in all directions within the confines of your supercomputer’s gelatinous folds. But what about sensory neurons, the layers and layers of them, living just under the surface of your skin? If you want to talk about emotions, if you want to talk about what’s visceral, you start here.

Every memory ever formed starts with sensory input. All experience begins with the subtlest of subconscious observations: the location of your hands in space, the textures of all the surfaces intersecting with your body, the weight of your clothing, the temperature of the air. Your experiences start with your posture, how relaxed or tense your shoulders are, if you’re hungry, if you need to pee.

Picture your skin, the body’s largest organ, stain-resistant and waterproof. Picture the peripheral nervous system like the tentacles of a jellyfish, nerves shooting out from the cracks of your spine, white-hot and responsive, winding around bones, snaking across neck and clavicle, twisting through the muscles of hands and feet. These nerves culminate in neurons, embedded in your skin, raw ends clawing for the surface, as if trying to break the seal where water meets sky.

Some sensory neurons specialize in pressure changes, others in temperature, and still others in the spatial arrangement of your limbs. They work together to create a composite picture. Your emotions aren’t based on singular input—after all, when your face grows hot, that flash of crimson could be a sign of shame, or of blushing happiness, or of visible fury. What distinguishes your emotions is how all the various feedback integrates. Say your sensory neurons collect the following observations: your clothes feel tight, your seat uncomfortable, your voice too loud. As you sit,
fidgeting—eyes retreating into their sockets, the skin of your forehead constricting, your jaw clamped tight—your amygdala stiches together these incoming sensations and singularly labels them
anger
.

Expansive breathing + bursting sensation =
joy
.

Rising pulse + trembling hands =
fear
.

Keep in mind, what science has yet to quantify or comprehend is the mechanism by which your past gets triggered. Old emotions spike abruptly, with piercing, visceral conviction. You smell the stink of the long brown cigarettes your grandmother used to smoke, and you can see and sense and hear her, the way her hip bones jutted out from flower-patterned dresses, the yellowed fingernails gripping your shoulder, the dry-as-a-leaf laugh. All this visceral sensitivity, stored in your antennae-studded nervous system; your skin all that separates you from constant daily stimuli. And you, a living conduit.

25

During our last night in Monterey, Ayla’s body startles mine awake, her muscles twitching in her sleep, and at first I’m in a panic, tumbling toward reality from a dream, my hair plastered to my neck with sweat. I listen hard and hear nothing. My eyes adjust in the darkness; I realize it is actually very early morning, that today is Sunday, our last day here. Her muscles twitch again, a small spasm in her lower back that travels to the hand curled underneath my shoulders. Impulses course through reflexive limbs; I think of sparks of electricity like frenzied fireflies—glowing, darting, bursting, extinguishing—all without ever having had a particular destination. Just before falling back asleep I am seized with the conviction that I must remember this, tomorrow, when I am on an ambulance, but what exactly I must remember is not clear.

26

I arrive at Station 710 before 7 a.m. and finish a full rig checkout and restock. I’m grateful to be back after my time at headquarters; it’s easy enough to settle into my old routine from training. At 0659 my new partner arrives and dives for the phone, calling Dispatch to clock in before he’ll be considered late. After he hangs up, he comes out to the lot and lights a cigarette. He takes note of the finished checkout form, balanced on the bumper, while I squat by the large tires, checking their tread and air pressure.

“You don’t have to do that,” he says. “I looked at them just last week.”

I don’t believe him but don’t say that. Our introduction is clumsy—we don’t shake hands—and I’m distracted by the way the sour suck of his cigarette creates two freckle-covered ravines between his cheekbones and jawline.

William Leone is about twenty-five years old, very tall and pale, with thin auburn hair that sticks straight up. Wide brown freckles cover his entire face, so much that it’s hard to see what his features look like underneath. With the narrow-framed look of someone who should be lean, whose body should create the shape of a long thin reed, he isn’t and it doesn’t. A bit of a paunch fills out his uniform, just above where the belt cinches up his pants, and his arms look soft and unused.

“They always stick me with new hires,” William says. “I bet you’re pretty green.”

Proceeding to lecture me in what is meant to be a voice of exhaustion, he insists on being the driver rather than the attendant, emphasizing that he doesn’t like being in the back with patients. He doesn’t like talking to them, assessing them, or doing paperwork on them, and—because I’m new—I should pay my dues, in blood, vomit, and paperwork. I look behind him at the parked Silverado truck, plastered with fire department stickers.
I note the LAFD undershirt and belt buckle. It’s so obvious he wants to be FD someday, so I remind him that the majority of fire department calls are medical runs.

“Or did you not want to be a firefighter?”

He doesn’t like this, either.

Our first call comes in at 0948 for a difficulty breather, and William warns against acting as navigator. “Do
not
try to map me!” he yells over the sirens.

“All right, it’s just how I was trained.”

“I know some tricks and shortcuts it’s gonna take you years to figure out. Put your goddamn Thomas Guide away.”

William likes to tell me what I do wrong. The way I fill out a rig checkout form is too detailed (don’t bother to put the mileage), and I use incorrect radio speech (say “en route,” not “in route,” and say “copy,” not “copy that”). His refusal to let me drive the ambulance makes me feel like a little kid denied rides at Disneyland.

We park in front of a peach-colored residence, drag the gurney up the driveway and down the little walkway that leads to the back house. Near the open screen door of what looks like a shack, a circle of firefighters and police officers stand, looking down. Our patient lies facedown on the cement, his arms bent awkwardly underneath him, his slightly bloody face covered with ants.

I don’t want William to know this is my first dead body. I listen as one of the firefighters confirms absent lung sounds, absent pulse, fixed and dilated pupils. I observe rigor mortis and dependent lividity for the first time, having learned in EMT school that these are “definitive signs of death,” along with putrefaction and decapitation. Ruth used to warn me that calls come in incorrectly sometimes, and I find myself wondering about the caller, how close that person got before deciding to disappear.

“Is that blood?” A cop points to a small red blotch underneath the man’s right knee.

I squat down along with one of the firefighters. We grab the man’s shoulder and waist—his skin is so cold even through my gloves, probably from lying on concrete overnight—and dislodge him. When we roll him onto his side, his arms come with him. I watch my hands to make sure the ants don’t transition from crawling on his face to crawling on me.

“A body you can turn by the ankles,” the firefighter jokes. We all look to where his right knee had been.

It’s a push pop. The man has been lying on top of an unfinished push pop, one of those frozen sherbet treats with cartoons on the side. After noting this, and that there are no signs of trauma, we roll him back to where we found him, which doesn’t feel like the right thing to do, but no one wants to look at his face.

William gets permission from Dispatch to post at Vermont and Vernon.

“Why?” I ask him.

“I need a couple things,” he says.

He parks at a 99-cent store, and as resentful as I am that he didn’t ask for my permission, I go in.

The store’s aisles are stacked with gaudy trinkets. There’s one just like it in Hollywood where I used to live; when I was practicing to be a bartender, I would throw parties and go to the 99-cent store for supplies, neon tiki shot glasses and tiny foldout paper umbrellas, cheap limes and generic mixers. I’m trying to remember the names of all the stupid drinks some of the customers at Mad Dog Bar & Grill liked to order, names like Naked Girl Scout and Red Death and Painkiller, when I almost collide with Jared. He’s coming around the corner of the hardware aisle, holding a tube of toothpaste.

“Piper?”

“Jared.”

His hair is cut too short, exposing pronged and angry-looking temples. He’s lost weight but he was always a little skinny. It’s Aim toothpaste he’s holding, a brand I’ve never heard of; he’s chosen the kind made especially for sensitive teeth.

I’m surprised by his beaming smile; he looks like he wants to hug me. After a small lean forward, his arms lifting, reconsidering, Jared settles back onto his heels. “You look—it’s great to see you.” He takes in the uniform, the badge, even looks at the boots and nods, as if he can see the steel plates hidden underneath the skin.

“Firefighter?”

“EMT.”

He looks appropriately impressed. “That’s so great.”

He tells me he’s teaching at Hydrian Art Center, over by USC.

“Still living at—”

“Yup, you wouldn’t recognize it anymore. Just redecorated, made a new lamp for the living room, turned out pretty good.”

We talk about our old neighborhood. My favorite hole-in-the-wall noodle restaurant has closed; he reminds me how the place inspired me to put
togarashi
chili powder on absolutely everything for a little while. His technique classes are always filling up; he’s trying to sell a collection of hand-blown plates at some fancy boutique. I still love him; I still hate him; this stuff never goes away. He tries so hard to appear effortless; there’s always something awkward about him, a little off, which is maybe why I labeled him as some kind of kindred spirit in the first place.

“Is the EMT thing full-time or you still doing gigs as an extra?”

“Hell no. The same week I turned in my last round of dues, that assistant director was such a prick I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“He was a piece of work.”

“A strange one. Definitely.”

“He had a thing for you.”

“What? No. He was into blond wannabe starlets and his poor wife had—”

“Blond starlets and you. He wanted to give you that speaking role in—what was that movie?”

“No, the first AD thought I should get that line. I’m telling you, Ben despised me.”

“Same difference. He wanted to rip your clothes off.”

It’s still there, some kernel of attraction, a nudge at my center, the distant memory of how good the sex was, all mixed up with the feeling of having been duped, of wishing for triumph in a stupid situation when there’s none to be had. As if he can sense a weakness in me, Jared leans forward and says, “I’ve missed you, you know? It’s really good to see you.”

He used to leave small sculptures around the apartment for me, bits of tangled glass with specks of opaque green and curving turquoise, and other creations, too, like the time he welded two five-by-seven steel plates to a hinge to make a kind of book, small and heavy in your lap, and even though the pages inside were empty, waiting to be written on, you could close the book and secure it with a giant padlock as if it held secrets. Somewhere in my unpacked box of belongings is that book, the key to the padlock taped to buffed steel, the pages inside still blank.

“Jared,” I tell him, “I don’t ever want to be friends with you.”

“I know,” he says.

We smile at each other then, even break into laughter. As we walk out to the parking lot I mention Ayla, and, for the first time since she and I started dating, I settle into the news. I am not hung up on him anymore. I finally crawled out from hiding, and, anyway, look at him. Jared tells me he is dating someone named Christy, who he talks about in an offhand way, like it’s new still, like he hasn’t made up his mind how he feels about her, but then he mentions they’ve been together for over a year.