In Case of Emergency (3 page)

“Do you have any questions?” Ruth asks.

What causes jaundice? How do you tell anxiety from a cardiac problem? How had Ruth known the man’s entire medical history just from his lung sounds? How good will I have to be before people stop looking at me like I’m an idiot?

Somewhere in my shift was also a car accident: a two-vehicle incident on the busy nearby freeway. While we were on our way with lights and sirens, wearing helmets and reflective brush jackets, I was especially jittery. I pictured carnage and broken glass, a car fire and the Jaws of Life. But the vehicles had minor damage, the people seemed virtually unharmed, and the trickiest part of handling the call wasn’t the medical assessment, or the spinal precaution gear, or the transportation of the two patients to the hospital—it was pulling the victims apart. They’d been screaming and clawing at each other in the middle of the freeway.

“How can I do better?” I say finally.

“Mapping,” she says. “Do the mapping homework I gave you. Try to multitask on scene. Be able to distinguish critical patients from stable ones; that will come with time. And paperwork, paperwork,
paperwork
. If you don’t fill out the forms right, it’s as if the events never happened. Don’t forget, there are legal consequences for the decisions you make.”

Ruth oozes calm capability, but earlier I saw signs of frustration. She would try to let me make mistakes, but due to the extent of my ineptitude, she kept taking things out of my hands in order to do them correctly and in half the time. And then there’s the fact that while Ruth isn’t compassionate toward her patients, there is something generous about her efficiency. All day I watched people respond to the knowledge that they were being taken care of. Now, aching and exhausted, I wonder if it’s too late to go back to working as an extra or something equally useless. There’s nothing so painful as desire: wanting something only reminds you of your shortcomings.

As I gather my stuff, Carl makes it clear he will be making fun of me the moment I leave. He has already started to imitate my high-pitched stress-voice, and halfway through the shift he started referring to me as “Ricky Rescue,” making even the stoic Ruth snort. Before I pull the door shut behind me, Carl calls out, “Just remember, not everyone gets the color red.”

* * *

When I was sixteen years old, I witnessed a hit-and-run. Car versus pedestrian. Today I heard an EMT joke about that type of call: the car usually wins. I still remember exactly how everything looked—downtown Los Angeles, the skyscrapers leaning in on me with their boxy silhouettes, mirrored contours directing the setting sun’s light in a hundred directions at once. I’d been on my way to a bus stop. When I heard the sound of impact I turned around in time to see a body flying through the air.

The event was so out of sync with my daily life I almost laughed. For just a second, I was sure it was some kind of joke. The airborne object looked so lightweight, its flight so effortless, that it seemed to be an inflatable doll, not a human being. A black jeep tore out of the intersection and whizzed past me. I heard a small group of people crowded around the object, calling for help. “Does anyone know CPR?” someone yelled.

I did. High school lifeguarding had taught me that. I walked over in a daze and observed a woman in her early thirties; it looked like the car had hit her squarely in the chest. Her eyes were open and unseeing and she was covered in blood. Someone was already trying to breathe for her, so I did compressions, badly. As soon as I placed my linked hands over her sternum I forgot everything: the appropriate rate, the ratio of breaths to compressions, the depth I was supposed to be pushing. I don’t know if it mattered. We never could get her chest to inflate; probably the impact had popped her lungs. Certainly she had broken ribs. Giving compressions felt like snapping toothpicks suspended in Jell-O.

The fire and police departments appeared within minutes and took over. Only then did I notice the force of her trajectory had knocked the woman out of both of her shoes and one of her socks. I saw her stupefied husband, eyes also unseeing but very much alive and uninjured, being helped into the passenger seat of the ambulance. Later, on the news,
I learned she was a mom of two kids, visiting LA from South Dakota. They said she died in the hospital due to sustained injuries. I knew she died on the corner of 5
^th
Street and Figueroa.

As I drive home, I lose my adrenaline rush. Traffic isn’t bad, but everything moves like it’s sedated, even the cars. I circle Echo Park Lake, watching the ducks through the window. The dirt-filled pickup truck behind me honks. I notice I’m gripping the steering wheel, and loosen my fingers. How strange that I went through four weeks of EMT training, talking about trauma, blood, injury, and death, and didn’t think of that woman once. But then again, that class was all about how to help people, and I didn’t do anything except be witness to her last few moments.

What I remember most clearly was how after the ambulance took the woman away, I kept trying to find a bathroom. I wanted to wash my blood-encrusted hands. I tried gas stations, restaurants, and cafés but everything was out of order or off-limits. Finally I boarded a bus, fumbled with the money I handed the bus driver, and expected him to notice. But he didn’t. Her blood was all over me—my hands were the most obvious—but he didn’t notice a thing and no one on the bus did either.

My little Corolla seems to park itself. Retrieving my phone from the glove compartment, I see that NutraSweet called twice, leaving messages both times, and sent me a handful of texts throughout the day.

I remember how soft his lips are, how guileless his smile.

When he answers the phone, I don’t tell him about my day or ask how he is. I tell him I don’t want to see him anymore. No, I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel. Yes, I should’ve told you in person and not over the phone. No, I’m not dating anyone else. The truth is, I’m just not interested. Then I hang up and go inside, suddenly starving.

On my first day of the four-week EMT program, we were given a diagram that was meant to encompass everything we would learn throughout the course. It showed an ever-branching algorithm: the top
pinnacle started with the scene of a call; the middle, a patient-assessment flow chart, branched out like a Choose Your Own Adventure book; and at the bottom, every arrow pointed to the box that said your patient arrives safely at the hospital. My whole life had been spent waiting for such an algorithm.

4

Your eyes absorb light in cone-shaped fields of vision, the center point sharpest, the concentric edges increasingly indistinct, like a photograph in which a single seagull is perfectly captured and the rest of the flock blurs into the sky.

Vision is one of those rare senses that, while involuntary, you have some control over. As soon as you open your eyes, you take in light. You take in light and therefore shapes, movement, trajectories, the passing of time. Your eyes constantly move about, sampling your surroundings, your fields of vision roving like the rings of a target. You don’t take in dimension so much as fluctuation. Proportions are implied. After all, everything would look two-dimensional if nothing moved.

Six oculomotor muscles attach to each of your eyeballs and rotate your sight up, down, side to side, and diagonally. These muscles also act as anchors, keeping your eyes from bouncing around in their sockets while your body hurtles through space.

When you’re given a specific task, the difference between amateur and expert is obvious even in how you direct your gaze. Sight can distract and overwhelm. Driving around a curve in a narrow road, an amateur constantly judges the distance to parked cars, whereas an expert keeps the gaze fixed ahead, scanning for oncoming traffic. The eyes of an expert athlete don’t follow the ball but instead anticipate its movement.

Light enters by way of the pupil and gets cast, upside down, upon the retina, which translates the image into signals your brain can understand. No photoreceptor cells fill the space on the retina where the optic nerve attaches, so there’s a blind spot. Your codependent eyes fill in each other’s holes, cover for the other’s mistake. This snag in your vision always occurs in your periphery: the blurred object in the corner of your eye, the one you’re not looking at, is the object that disappears.

Except you don’t see out of the corners of your eyes. There are no corners. Your eyes are globes, sitting in orbitals, and sight occurs in circles, concentric cones of vision, and even the crystalline lens, just under the round hole of your pupil, is dimple-shaped as it refracts and projects light onto the rounded wall of your retina. There are no corners, and yet every form of visual representation—from photographs to paintings to movies to magazines—is constrained to squares and rectangles, as if to better imitate the action of your eyelids closing. As if to suggest that the narrowing of sight is more important than the act of seeing.

5

“We’re going to be late,” Ryan says.

“I just need a few snacks. I forgot to eat dinner.”

My brother gives me a suspicious look. He peers down each aisle, carrying an empty basket, and I trail after him, scanning the store and trying not to be obvious about it.

“Fine, but then we won’t have time to get a drink.”

“We have to get a drink.”

“Is Tin Lizzie even open on Sundays?”

“Of course it’s open, it’s a bar.”

“But it’s Orange County.”

“
And
it’s tradition.”

“Some tradition. Dad will have alcohol.”

“I need alcohol before Dad.”

“It will take too long.”

“It’s hump day, Ryan. Live a little.”

“It’s
Sun
day, you asshole. I work at 6 a.m. tomorrow.” He picks up a package of roasted almonds with sea salt. “What do you want, anyway?” He puts the almonds in the basket without waiting for an answer. “I have to get up early, Pipes.” When I still don’t respond, he says, “Fine. But if Tin Lizzie’s is closed, we’re going straight to Dad’s.”

“Fine.”

We’re at Sustainable Living, the organic food market on Sunset Boulevard. The food is delicious but the checkers are snobs. The produce is always perfectly ripe and colorful—not that I come here for the produce.

Ryan starts drifting down Aisle 7. Despite his supposed hurry to drive down to Dad’s place in Costa Mesa tonight, the only time Ryan ever moves quickly is when he’s working. The rest of the time he’s got one speed, and it’s a kind of dreamy, slow meandering.

He stops in front of the baking supplies. “I swear, this time if you don’t ask her out, I will.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Ryan picks up carob powder, then some kind of cake-making kit that comes with icing bags and little jars of color. “It’s a shame she’s the reason you come here. There’s beautiful food in this store.”

“Keep your voice down.” I poke my head out of the aisle, looking around the store one more time. Since there’s no sign of her I finally give Ryan my full attention, which means telling him about my new job. I decide to leave out how incompetent I was and instead stick to describing basic operations.

When we get to the produce section he can’t hide his excitement, so I wait by the scale while he carefully selects peaches, kiwis, a bag of cherries.

You would never know Ryan’s gay. He came out when he was twenty-four years old, and no one had any idea. I was in my first same-sex relationship when I was only seventeen, but Ryan says it’s a shame I lost my curiosity at the halfway point. We like to joke that Ryan went fully atheist while I took the more benign, agnostic route, by keeping my options open and insisting there was no need to make up my mind.

Before Ryan came out, he had a bird obsession. All through college and after, he dated a lot—girls were always chasing him—but all he ever wanted to talk about were the canaries and macaw he owned, dirty animals who never stayed in their cages and left bird shit all over his apartment. You’d go over there to find his blinds closed, streaks of white on the stove and banister and refrigerator, feathers and crumbs of their food pellets in the bathroom sink and crushed into the carpet. The macaw was loud and aggressive; the canaries never went to sleep when they were supposed to; the neighbors started to complain. Ryan always talked about them like they were friends, and then one day he donated them to a pet store and announced he liked men.

He comes up to me looking blissful, the basket nearly full. Then he gets serious. “Hey, remember, next month would have been Mom and Dad’s thirtieth anniversary, so he might be in a bit of a mood. Maybe you could go easy on him if he starts—” He stops when he recognizes the disinterested expression on my face. “You’re so good at that.”

“What?”

“Not talking about things you don’t want to talk about.” He places his hand flat on the metal pan of the scale and pushes down until he gets the red needle to read one pound exactly. “Malcolm wants me to go to couples therapy.”

I’m indignant on his behalf, but he shrugs and asks how things have been going with Nathan. Instead of answering I pluck a kiwi from the basket and wave it around. “Is it true you can eat the skin? Hair and all?”

He throws his head back and laughs. I love when he does that; the sound is full and good-natured and seems to percolate up from his navel. “Marla’s going to kill you.”

“She’s distracted,” I huff. “She’s got a date with some guy from work tonight.”