Portland
I recognized the house even though I’d never seen it before, recognized it even if the two police cars hadn’t been there, they were all the same these days (the places we went): the bedsheeted windows, the trash-choked clapboard siding, the greasy scatter of engine parts on the clumpy lawn.
“I love what they’ve done with the place,” Erin said, yanking the ambulance’s shifter into park. She dropped the lights and we each pulled a fresh pair of blue latex from the box. I went around back to get the kit, she started toward the officer on the porch, speaking to him in bored tones, preparing for the state of the apparently traumatized skulls inside.
The radios spat, it was otherwise quiet. The officer at the top of the porch bowed, toed open the door. “There’s one in the living room near the fireplace,” he said. “Looks like the other one fought in the kitchen before he gave up.”
Erin stepped up the creaking stairs, through the yawn of the door, a plastic scent like old diapers, a hot bloom of air. I went right behind her.
The light inside was sooty, the wood floor gouged and cross-slashed from years of use, crown molding and naked bulbs. Near a dingy sectional couch was the first patient, skeletal and sallow, with an officer bent over his torso, ramming him with chest compressions.
Erin dropped to the floor by the officer’s side and he understood, pulling his hands back like it was time to wash them. “The second?” Erin asked, even as she started compressions, and the officer nodded toward the kitchen. I went, around the corner, into the stench, it was as if a cat had pissed into a moldering refrigerator. The wall above the stovetop was scorched, something like a war bomb burn, and on the floor a topology of discarded cookware and trash bags, organic refuse, and in the back corner, near the refrigerator, the third officer was negotiating a grizzled rope of a meth addict onto a stool.
The addict was breathing like he’d just surfaced from drowning, but he was breathing, through his tangled roots of goat beard, a face pecked with bloody scabs.
“The fuck is this party,” he said.
I was confused and turned toward the officer. “He looks alive,” I said.
“That’s the problem,” the officer said, his nose red and swollen, it looked like he’d taken a punch there. He jerked the addict by his shirt scruff into a better seating position.
“Any other problems?”
“My mortgage, my kids, your questions,” the officer said. He looked like he was waiting for me to leave. “Maybe check his friend in the living room.”
But I was already gone as he said that, back to where we came in, I saw the baseball bat for the first time on the floor, grip tape blackened with palm sweat, the end pink and spiked with bits of hair. There were fist-sized hamburger wrappers balled all over, an empty bookshelf leaning drunk against the back corner, and there was Erin working on the one who’d been beaten, paddles in her hands. The patient was still on his back, his left leg folded wrong, bent sideways and high. Eyes closed, the blue bloom of his lips.
“Hey, inspector, you want to help here?” Erin said, holding the paddles, and I already had an idea. I dropped to my knees, there was no pulse, not a hint at the carotid or ulnar.
“D-fib isn’t working because his heart isn’t beating,” I said. Now the stink of sweat and urine, there his crusty shirt already yanked up around the splay of his armpits, a dollop of gel at the ribs, another at the pectoral.
“I lost it,” she said, dropping the paddles. “It was there.”
“It’s gone,” I said.
“I know.”
“Airway clear?”
“Fuck you,” she said. “I’m not an idiot. It’s the bat that did this.”
“Maybe the drugs,” I said. “Let’s try again.” I stitched my fingers together, put the edge of my palm into his sternum and compressed, careful to avoid the xiphoid process and the hemorrhage that could follow its snapping. His body: at the beginning it was just him, a man, but my eyes and teeth pinched as I compressed his chest, the oxygenated gasp of everything that moved in him, and then I felt as if I were squinting my brain. He was the him I saw but also a him I felt: I felt the weave of his skin and the buttery chunks of fat underneath, the hush and rush of what could only be his blood, so long and blowing, all of this just a feeling, it was nothing I saw. There were other muddled sensations deeper down, but strongest was an effervescent urge, his body eager to start repairing itself, but even that came and went so quick I still couldn’t separate all the this from the that. There were colors I felt, he had the yellow tarry rush of meth’s hate booming through his veins, then the jagged red memories of anger that came and went like thunderheads inside his skull, a color I’d felt many times before—and all the while the truth of my hands, chest compressions, shoving blood around his husk. I was on my knees and over the patient, my palms at his sternum, dropping my weight down and letting it come back up, one two three four five six seven, on and on and on. The liquid pop of the already broken ribs went like a clock. Something sparked, it certainly wasn’t the compressions, it was only that I was searching, the same as I always am when I do this now, searching and feeling and trying to understand what the injury was, at the same time that I understood what his body should be. I think something had already started—
Erin was saying my name like a chant, her fingers hooked into my right deltoid, I realized she was shaking me. The look I must have given her as I took my hands off the body.
“It’s been five minutes since you started, superhero,” she said. “No change. We need to transport.”
I was breathing hard, as she had been, and I could feel the slick cool sweat patches at my back and chest. But the addict’s body was quiet; everything was finished, wasn’t it. The police officers watched us pull back from the body, the still point of sound when everyone understands.
“Transport,” Erin said again.
She was gone and returned with the gurney, bashing it up the steps with one of the officers, bright metal crashes as it hit each stair. I was still doing compressions until we lifted him into the gurney, then rolled it back down the stairs and into the wide-open back of the ambulance. Erin legged up into the back with the gurney, and had started to close one of the ambulance doors when the patient sat up calmly, spat Erin’s plastic rescue breath guard from his mouth, and said, “Holy, holy, holy.”
We froze: Erin reaching for the still-open door, me about to secure the other, we stared across the gap between the end of the rig where we were and the risen body in the back. Even from that distance I could see the yellow-blue flush had left his skin, the wrinkles shallowing, his hair thicker, it was as if he’d been made younger by fifty years. He looked, in a word, healthy. He curled his spine forward and hacked a wave of vomit onto the snow-white sheet covering his lap.
His mouth was slack. He looked down at his mess, then back up at us, wiped his jaw with his wrist. Glanced again at his lap, where the sheet had swelled into a pyramid with a thick knob at the apex.
“I think I have a boner,” he said. “What happened?”
It was our last call of the shift. We weren’t even sure if we should still take him to the hospital, every vital sign was perfect all of a sudden, nothing to report, and what could we have said that wouldn’t have put us both in the psych ward anyway. But it seemed even worse to leave him there with the officers, who were already folding the other addict into the back of a car, ready to be done with him and back to their desks, the reports. So we took the risen one to the hospital with a single police escort and ran down the situation to the ER staff, who said, “If he isn’t dead he can wait in line with everyone else,” and Erin said, “Thank God,” and the addict demanded cigarettes of everyone that passed our chairs in the waiting room, until a female nurse said, “Jesus Christ, shut up,” and produced a loosey from a desk behind the attendant’s window and placed the cigarette in the addict’s palms like a dog treat. Erin and I started back for the rig and saw the officer’s slow-blinking face and purpling nose as he realized how much longer he’d be the responsible one. We signed our papers and drove out from under it all.
Back at the station Erin cleaned the rig, running through inventory as loud as she could, she wasn’t saying a word, but the slapping of tape rolls and trauma shears and intubation packs in and out of their places, the crackle and squealing zip and scratchy Velcro tears, she was still telling me her opinion. Are we doing this again, I thought, so I waited, leaning against the outside of the rig, behind the open back door, listened to her fumbling with a hose as she moved it back and forth, the fold and rustle of a duffel.
“I’m going to go sit down,” I said as if the door weren’t there. “Maybe just a quick granola bar or something.”
She leaned around the door so she could see me. “You go do your thing.” She flapped a wrist in my general direction. “The way you always do.”
“At least a cup of coffee?” I said. “You look tired.”
“So do you.”
“But I’m not,” I said.
“Right, I forgot, Mr. Invincible.”
“Did I do something to offend you?” I asked. I was always the one that had to be the adult this way, although Erin was two years my senior.
“I knew that addict’s heart had stopped beating,” she said. She moved out of sight, back behind the door, then locked a buckle, the clean clip-sound echoed in the flat morning of the garage, us all alone then for a minute, the other paramedics and EMTs back in the lockers or the kitchen. “And I knew that there was risk to the femoral artery when we were extracting the biker,” she went on, “and I knew not to give insulin to the hypoglycemic drinker. But there you were.” I crossed my arms and waited, it was always better to let her boil over, there was even something to enjoy in it, almost a taste to her fury, when she’d really get going, when she’d call me a snot-nosed book rat or wonder-boy mansplainer, all my attitudes and ass-stuck explanations, she’d been here so much longer and why was it so hard for me to remember that. She came back out of the ambulance.
“You always have to say something, don’t you.”
“Only when I’m right,” I said.
“There you go,” she said. She was finally looking at me, her cheeks hot, a flex and pulse to her throat. Her eyes were ringed with bruise-colored skin. “I can’t wait until you go to med school.” She started toward the side entrance to the station, the hall with the bathrooms where every shift we scrubbed off all the remains of everyone we’d touched that day.
“I don’t know how he came back, either, Erin,” I lied, loud enough for her to hear. “He was almost gone. I don’t know how he came back.”
She stopped walking, but stayed faced away from me.
“But you were following the right procedure,” I said. “The chest compressions.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “You did something.”
I turned back to the ambulance, considered all the stinking howling leaking hours we’d spent in it. What did I do, Erin? Even I was still trying to understand, I only knew that when I touched a broken body, I held an idea of what that body should be, and that idea became the muscle of a heartbeat, or the fusing of bones, or the electrochemical bolts storming through synapses. I’d felt the addict’s body wanting to be repaired, and then the body had done just that, chased the overdose from its own blood and brain.
“All I did was work,” I said. “Just followed procedure.”
We both knew she’d made a mistake with the paddles, I’d seen it in her eyes, the panicked flex of recognition that I had caught the mistake, as much as she had. “You did what you were supposed to,” I said. “I’d say that to anyone who asked.”
She was still facing away, but I saw her exhale.
“Okay,” she said.
“Get some sleep,” I said.
“Fuck you,” she said, but I could hear the ease returning to her.
The night echoed in my head, the burning-cat-piss stink of the meth house, the air of hate and rage between the men inside, the stickiness of death and neglect. And something deeper, the trembling understanding of what I was becoming capable of. I was home now, considering my open refrigerator, all condiments and partially finished boxed mac and cheese. A queasy knot in my stomach. I closed the refrigerator and stared at the biology anatomy chemistry textbooks that were propping up the thrift-store television in the corner.
There had been an effervescence under my skin as I’d come home, popping with excitement at what I’d done, but now, as I stood in the center of the apartment, the energy all slithered away, taking so much strength with it, it was all I could do to move toward my bed, my legs slower with each step, the feeling of being underwater. I got enough of my clothing off before I slumped into bed and plunged through the softness of the mattress into darkness.
When I woke, it was clear some time had passed. The air had moved from morning crisp into the thicker afternoon, the light already thinning outside the window. I checked my watch, three-thirty, turned to look at my bedside table, where I saw a photo-booth strip of pictures, me and Khadeja and her six-year-old daughter, Rika, clumped together like a bouquet in front of the tiny camera, blown out with black-and-white light. The heaviness in me was gone; only that fizzing underneath, all the ideas of what I’d seen. When I sat up and saw the dim, bare truth of my apartment, the excitement within me felt so suddenly incomplete, so bottled and lonely, that I knew I had to get out.
I had my shower and clothes on and hopped a bus to Khadeja’s office.
“You’re outside?” Khadeja asked, after I’d called her from the sidewalk.
“Just for a second,” I said. “Come down.”
The building all glass and steel, polished and blandly imposing, but through the three-story foyer I saw her walking. Khadeja. The boom of her Afro pulled back in a ponytail pompom, eyes full of gleeful intelligence, the draping fabric that floated off her broad arms, the lines of flex in her calves with each clacking step toward me. I can only imagine it was a stupid smile I gave at her arrival, I was stoned for her in that moment.
Five months we’d been seeing each other, met in a bar when she was out for a friend’s birthday and I was winding down with two other guys from work, after that it was us meeting at first at strange times, early-afternoon drinks or lunches during the week, all of which I understood later when she finally had me over and I met Rika. And it worked, we worked, and we’d continued; only now did I think there was enough there that I could do this, show up unannounced at her office.
“What is it?” she asked.
I’d expected a gaze that was annoyed and busy contemplating balance sheets and compounded interest, but she appeared genuinely happy to see me. “I know you’re busy at work,” I said, and she shook her head.
“Company party,” she said. “Celebrating another strong quarter.”
“Vegetable dip with only the celery left,” I said. “Store-brand soft drinks and gas-station wine, a few balloons taped to the sides of the micro-kitchen.”
She laughed. “How did you know?”
I shrugged. “It’s an accounting firm.”
“They were about to start Pictionary.”
“You think you could steal some of that wine?” I asked.
Five minutes later and her purse was warming a bottle of low-grade red, we walked along the streets to the North Park Blocks, evidence of a recent peace vigil: shriveled thumbs of burned-out candles rested on every solid surface, then soggy cardboard signs discarded gently against statues and the legs of benches. Study War No More, they pleaded, and a few of the larger signs had been repurposed as mattresses by the homeless that haunted the park.
“Not my favorite place,” Khadeja admitted.
“What’s not to love?” I said, trying for comedy, suddenly scared I could ruin this feeling I had, rather than expand it to hold us both. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have a plan. I just wanted to see you, is all.”
The simple truth of that brightened us both, for we had both been, when we first met, so much older than those around us, aged with the things nature had asked us to carry—she with Rika, who she’d borne so young, me with my accelerated path through school, the work I was trying to do now—and in that state it had been that much more exciting to find someone else that understood true circumstances, and how much more important that made a present tense you me us we are doing just this that could exist only briefly before we were dragged back into those circumstances.
“Well,” she said with a flash of her teeth, spreading her arms, “I’m here. Entertain me, Mr. Flores, and you better make it fast.”
“So,” I said, scooting over next to her where we sat on the steps of a statue, “did you know I have powers?”
She touched her tongue to her top teeth, still smiling. “That’s right, we’re doing that thing where we still have secrets from each other. Go on, go on.”
“It’s quite simple, actually,” I said, with no idea what I’d say next. “It will require wine.” We’d neglected a corkscrew, but I showed her how to finger the cork back down through the neck until it bobbed in the wine below, we each took a pull straight from the bottle.
“I’m connected to things no one else can see,” I said. I took her lower back into my hand and gently guided her snug against my hip. “Listen,” I whispered into her ear.
And we were quiet, and she heard the birdsong that was emerging, as I had been hearing for blocks at a time already, over the city noise rather than under it, because of what I was. I didn’t think there was any way to amplify it, but I told her again, “Listen,” and what was in the trees came back bright and clear.
“It sounds like they’re searching for each other,” I said. “But if you listen closer . . . none of them are actually lost.”
Khadeja was perfectly still. She had her eyes closed. We both listened, the bird calls went, bouncy and bright. The smell of wet bark, rich and papery, from the recent rain.
Khadeja listened a minute more, then opened her eyes and looked at me. “That’s one of your things,” she said. “Animals.”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
I noticed that she didn’t move, stayed close. “I’m serious,” she said. “Maybe it seems negligent, but when I first saw you act that way—what was it, our second date or something, remember the little dog outside the restaurant, that woman all in yellow that was far too drunk and looking for the elevator?—you did this thing,” she said. “Where you crouched down and just barely brushed the dog. It was going nuts, and when you arrived, it went so calm it might as well have been drugged. That was when I knew you’d be good with Rika.”
“Because I petted a dog gently, I was going to be good with your daughter?” I said. “That is negligent.”
And she laughed. “Don’t tell Rika.”
With a hand gripped on the neck of the wine bottle I gestured off the sidewalk. “Look,” I said. I pointed down to massive puddles that had formed in the soggy ground, bad drainage, and to a cluster of ants there that had made themselves into a lumpy ball, each ant linking to another ant with nothing more than smell and touch to understand the need to survive, and that to do so they’d have to weave together into a fabric thick and solid enough to repel water, and float that way for as long as the water carried them, and that some of them would drown for it. I was narrating it all as we sat there, pulling from the wine, warm and corky, the bits of it that tumbled along our tongues. We both kept spitting the crumbles into the dirt. I was still talking about the ants, I wondered what the world would be like if we were even a fraction as mighty as they were, to build our bodies into a raft for each other—
“That’s it,” Khadeja said, and shook her head, though she still smiled. “That’ll do, Mr. Flores. I didn’t come for a biology-and-holiness seminar.”
I realized how much I’d been talking and was immediately embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t—”
“Just be quiet,” she said, “just for a second.” Then she tilted her head and leaned in to me, our lips finding each other, again and again, until we left the rest of the bottle on the steps and found ourselves wandering back through the damp spring park. We’d made something, just sitting there together, meeting each other over and over, and now whatever it was we’d made echoed off the streets and buildings around us as we walked, our arms hooked into each other and cuddled so fierce that it was almost as if we’d created new bones that joined us at the ribs.