In Case of Emergency (28 page)

“Everyone okay?”

Yes. Everyone knows to get out of the way of projectile vomit.

We walk into the ER with our patient very much alive, sitting crazy-eyed on the gurney, a bright green rubber airway assist still dangling out of his nose. The awaiting full arrest team looks bewildered.

“Is this him?”

“Yeah, it’s him. He came back.”

We move like a confused school of fish to get him into a room, unload him onto a bed, disentangle wires, hang up the IV bag, hook him up to the hospital’s pulse ox, and so on. The lead medic’s voice calls out over the scuffle of activity. He’s looking at his run sheet for reference: “Good evening, everybody, we have a twenty-eight-year-old male overdose found pulseless, v tach with agonal breathing. Epinephrine was administered at…”

He continues. The last I see of our patient as the swarm closes in are the big man’s terrified eyes. He looks no closer to understanding what has happened to him tonight.

William joins me in the parking lot and helps with the cleanup, which is unlike him, but he’s in a good mood now that we had a good call. We go through a whole roll of paper towels on the walls and floor and ceiling, then use disinfectant spray and a few clean rags, and then move on to round three—a combination of germicide wipes after letting the disinfectant spray soak for three minutes.

I hear shouts from one end of the Crossroads parking lot and turn to look. There’s an EMT named Peter Mohan who used to be a gymnast; he’s doing his back tucks again. The nurses who smoke always goad him, and Mohan always says the same thing—“I am not a windup monkey”—and then he does a back tuck anyway.

“Where to after this?” William asks.

“I’m sick of everywhere.”

He looks at his watch. “One more minute.”

We are boycotting Station 710. We hate the new two-car crew. Phil and Steve are gone—Steve Chang is an ER tech at St. Mary’s now, Phil Hall is living at home in Connecticut, waiting to hear back from medical schools—and they have been replaced by Andrew Yurt and Danielle Martin. Andrew is obviously in love with his partner, and the giggling way she takes advantage of this, to get out of any work or cleaning or having to lift her patients, is sickening. I tried to convince Pep and J-Rock to switch to our shift, but besides the fact that they are creatures of habit, both of them bellowed about William being a racist, and I couldn’t really argue. Carl is no hope either. He and his new partner, an ex-MMA fighter, have been comfortably seated on their shift ever since Ruth got picked up by the Long Beach Fire Department. Apparently, when she finished the academy, half of her fellow graduates couldn’t stand her, and the other half couldn’t wait for her to become chief.

“I vote for the Manchester strip,” he says. “I want to get a nap in.”

“Done,” I say. “I really don’t care.”

We clean the inside of the rig again, calling out to each other what needs to be restocked, and then drive to Station 710 to grab supplies. We don’t talk about the call, but we don’t ever talk about the call. We’re not friends, but we do respect each other. If nothing else, when there is work to be done, we do it and save our squabbling for later.

Lately William has seemed burned out. Not just cocky, not just his know-it-all self, but crispy around the edges. I think he thought he’d get hired by a department by now, or maybe it was the call we had about two months back, the old lady with dementia who kept shrieking at her husband and left deep scratch marks along both of his arms. If I remember right, William’s grandfather has dementia, too.

He started drawing comics a few weeks ago, dark, twisted comics that
make you laugh even as you feel a little uncomfortable. I’ve been working with him for almost half a year now and never knew he could draw. One shows a withered old woman in a liquor store with skin like an elephant’s; she’s wearing nasal cannula attached to a personal tank of oxygen and she’s purchasing a carton of cigarettes. He captured the fuck-you expression on her face perfectly.

You hear stories in the field about burnout. The consensus is that everyone goes through it at least once, and it lasts a month or so, if not longer. It can be cyclical or it can be career-ending. Some people are easy to spot, like Frankie Fisher from Station 630, whose hands shake slightly but only when he’s not running calls. The first time I met him, he was sitting on the aluminum bumper of his rig, taking his own blood pressure, a habit he became so famous for someone managed to get a hold of some Atenolol and slip it into his duffel bag as a joke. Or Bob Pasteur, who tried to resuscitate a kid who got hit and then dragged by a drunk driver’s SUV. To hear people tell it, the boy was so covered in abrasions it looked like his skin was gone, and his ear was found several blocks away with an earbud still in it. Bobby turned in his uniform a couple months later.

With William it’s different. He’s always been surly and a loudmouth. Burnout on him looks more like apathy. It’s been difficult to goad him into an argument, and when he does get mad, it’s something. I saw him get into it with a nurse because he didn’t want to have to take a transfer patient all the way to Burbank. In the middle of his shouting he turned so red you couldn’t see his freckles anymore, and the nurse, an athletic Australian man who towered over William by at least six inches, looked so alarmed I can’t believe he didn’t report it.

We park at the strip mall on Manchester Avenue and William steps out to smoke. I lean the seat back, turn the radio volume down, and place the walkie-talkie on my stomach so it will wake me when Dispatch calls our rig number.

I’ve had some bad calls. A while back we arrived at a residence to find a man sobbing into a couch and his dry-eyed wife holding a Mason jar, the lid sealed tight, a tiny human fetus curled at the bottom. And there was the woman whose boyfriend threw her out of his car on the freeway. She’d been all dolled up in a new dress, had gotten her nails and hair and makeup done, and that was the worst part, somehow, the shredded and bloody manicure.

I know burnout will come for me someday but I like to think it won’t. As far as I can tell, no one escapes it, not even the lifers who have no intention of ever doing anything else. And as much as I keep telling Ayla how much I love my job, keep regaling her with stories, the triumphant and the horrific, I also keep stalling on decisions about whether to be a nurse or a firefighter or something else entirely. Some nagging part of me thinks maybe after burning out I’ll know what to do.

41

She grinds her teeth but she denies it. She swears I snore but I deny it.

During the day, she doesn’t twitch. But she does bite her nails.

Sometimes when her anxiety kicks in she gets distant and cold. I ask her what’s wrong and she gets defensive. So I slip into being wary and introverted, reading a book while she cleans surfaces already wiped down, while she scrubs at bathroom mildew like it’s personal. After busying herself for a while, she’ll relax enough to allow herself to be soothed, to be seen, to be touched; she’ll welcome me back into the room with joking fondness, like I’m a guest who has just arrived. I can see her constant effort to balance herself. How to live in the world, and how to live with me in it.

When we stay at my apartment, I cook for us; mostly we stay at her studio, where she makes scrambled eggs and country potatoes, tuna
casserole, vegetable barley soup. We don’t try to cook together. For her it is a reminder of a lesson learned anew since her injury, a not-quite-seamless reintegration into normal living. To keep it from being a struggle, she uses recipes that outline every last detail, with handwritten notes from over the years: what pot or pan or knife works best, exactly what setting to put the stove burner on. A list taped to the microwave explains what materials are acceptable to put inside, and a reminder taped eye-level on the freezer door urges her to check expiration dates before eating anything.

Although she stores her leftovers in a complicated Tupperware system she refuses to teach me, she has no objection to my doing the dishes. By this time, she’s relaxed. The cooking is over, the meal eaten. We’ll put music on and sing together, my hands covered in suds, her husky voice a surprising low soprano, while she waits to dry each item and put it where it belongs.

Ayla hangs out with a cluster of butch women, lesbians who seem to have read the how-to-be-a-lesbian manual, because they drive trucks and wear baseball hats, watch sports and build things, and seem to have been born into long-term monogamous relationships. More often than not, Ayla spends her time with just one of them, Annie, an ex–army sergeant who is now a security guard in Santa Clarita. Annie and Ayla don’t talk much when they’re together, but seem to exist on the same subdued but attentive energy, a shared vigilance for all that happens around them. At some point I realized Annie was the friend Ayla told me about, the one who almost killed her rapist in the mess hall. There’s something in Annie’s eyes that tells me she wouldn’t still be here if it weren’t for Ayla.

I went with them to the gym in downtown Los Angeles once, and watched as they worked out together, spotting each other on weights, stretching stiffly and half-heartedly, the way bodybuilders do, between reps. The men at the gym treated the two women the same as any other guy in the place: many pairs of eyes stared fixedly in the mirror, flicking from their own straining muscles to those of the women working out beside
them, back and forth and back again, before seeming more or less satisfied.

Ayla’s new job is dog-walking, and her reputation has spread quickly. Her charge now covers a wide spread of breeds, from a Great Dane to a malamute to a Catalan sheepdog, not to mention your basic terriers and Labradors. There’s a mixed beagle/German shepherd named Rocky, an Australian cattle dog named Prawn. While the other dogs run for the ball and chase their own tails, Prawn stays by your side.

On my days off, if we stay in, I quiz her on material for the online biology class she’s taking, the warm-up course before fall’s fully loaded semester. If we go out, we wander through Silver Lake, passing cafés and bars and boutiques, admiring the murals. We’ll go to the parks where she takes her canine clients or we’ll walk around the reservoir if the pathway isn’t too crowded with strollers and joggers. She’ll show me a new residence spotted on one of her walks—perhaps a house shaped like an igloo, but with a porch, or a gated, pallid monstrosity surrounded by palm trees.

On nights when she gets the fierce headaches, I’ll wake up, too, thinking for a moment that I heard the phone ring at Station 710, thinking I have to put my boots on and respond to a call. When I remember where I am, I throw an arm around her warm, naked waist and drop back to sleep.

Her body’s burdens make her shape and density more certain. I know where her center is. I know where her edges are. I feel cocooned in her arms every night we spend together, I know exactly what I’m holding on to, and it has gotten hard to fall asleep without her weight around me.

And she has yet to strangle me in her sleep.

42

People say there are no seasons in LA, but tell that to the torrential rain. I’m sitting on the couch at Ryan’s place, listening to him and Malcolm
fight. Malcolm thinks Ryan hides his emotions; Ryan doesn’t know why everything has to be such a big deal. Malcolm doesn’t feel like his needs are getting met; Ryan rolls his eyes when he hears phrases like “I feel like my needs aren’t getting met.” When Ryan came out he thought he’d never have to have conversations like this one.

They seem to have forgotten I’m here. I listen to the rain crash against their little house, the rat-a-tat on the roof and the splattering on the windows. Their backyard is taking a pounding. I watch the rivulets on the glass of the back door and think about how Marla and Tom will move in together next month and I wonder what they will fight about. Marla never told Tom about sleeping with Alexander; she swears it was a one-time thing, she doesn’t even talk to him anymore, but I don’t trust her to tell me the truth about him. She thinks I’m “oversensitive” about the subject. In any case, I need to find a new roommate. Ayla and I don’t bother discussing the possibility of moving in together; we know it’s too soon. While I’m no slob, she’s so eagle-eyed in her cleaning habits I would drive her ballistic. And even though I have trouble admitting it, sometimes when she gets distant I take it personally. I get needy and wounded. Sometimes I’m like a little kid who needs attention. It’s worse when I’m sleep deprived, when I ran too many calls the night before.

There are other things, too, like three months ago when she wished me a happy birthday two days before my actual birthday, or how I get snarly when I see other women checking her out, which usually just makes her laugh. “I’m not going anywhere,” she always says, and I pretend I don’t know what she’s talking about.

Now Malcolm is complaining about their sex life, which apparently has been waning for the last few months. Ryan says, “You do know Piper’s my sister, right?” I’ve never seen him so exasperated. I take that as my cue to leave.

It’s late—“oh-dark-thirty in the morning,” as Carl would say—and my little car struggles to warm up as I turn the screeching windshield wipers
to full blast. My car’s headlights barely illuminate three feet in front of me, so when the last northbound curve of the 10 east appears unexpectedly, I almost fishtail my car. Swearing under my breath, I check my speed, realizing I missed my exit. Somewhere along this rainy late night drive I started thinking about how Ayla told me that she never masturbated as much as when she was in Iraq, how it was something about the heat, the sand, the homesick yearnings, the restless energy, the hurry-up-and-wait, the frustration that followed her losing sight of any real purpose in being there. She found stolen moments in which to touch herself, lose herself. In her almost two years of active duty, the act of self-service kept her sane.