Whirl Away

by Russell Wangersky

  Dave could feel the rough concrete steps through his pants up against the back of his legs, and against the heels of both of his hands where he’d set his pyramid of body and arms, fixed in place and upright, leaning slightly backwards so that he felt solid. He hadn’t fallen. It was important to tell them that he hadn’t fallen. They’d ask. Halfway down the hill on Prescott, there were five short steps in the sidewalk because the grade was too steep. He’d just sort of slid down slowly, not letting go of the railing until he was fully settled. He felt like he was some kind of giant advertising balloon, but with a leak, the air running out as he bent and eased down. It was an ordered collapse—no rush, because it was so familiar to him. The air getting short, the edges of everything starting towards dark, and then someone noticing and asking if he needed help. Making the call for him, sending the ambulance on its way from the bay at the Health Sciences Centre.

  He had waved her away afterwards, a young woman in a knee-length brown skirt and a square businesslike jacket, her face clearly caught halfway between concern about him and the need to already be somewhere else. She’d half knelt there next to him, one sharp nyloned knee out through the slit in her skirt, a hand on his shoulder briefly as if that short contact was the only first aid she knew how to give, as though mere comfort could be cure. He told her he’d be all right, that he’d be all right to just wait for the ambulance, saying that she could go on, that there “must be other things you’ve got to be doing.” Said it short, in bursts, two or three words at a time, the pauses measured as he tried to catch his breath. People like to help, but they like to be let off the hook too, Dave knew. To know that they’ve done their duty but can be released from it before anything nasty or messy happens, anything that it might be hard to forget later.

  Dave watched the woman walk away, caught her turning once to look at him at the corner of Prescott and Bond, looking back like she was afraid she might see him toppled over on his side. I’d wave if I had enough energy to lift my hand, Dave thought, but he didn’t.

  He felt the cool air against the damp of his skin. Dave listened to his breath rushing in and out, trying to make each breath come evenly, trying to stay calm, trying to will his throat to open. They’d say that too—“Stay calm, sir, just stay calm”—as if the panic were something you could simply wish away, as if being out of control were as easily dealt with as deciding to be back in control again. But it wasn’t that easy.

  There was sun in the maples on the other side of the street. Dave squinted over at them and decided he liked the way the light worked through the leaves, the way some were a brighter green—but just for a second—carved up by the light and the shadows of other leaves playing across them, so that the shapes weren’t so much maple leaves as they were an assembly of countless and untrackable shards of different leaves, moving across one another in haphazard order. Like there was a message in there, even if the message was that the order everybody is always looking for is just a lie, Dave thought.

  He could hear the siren now, distant and a little fractured, like the ambulance was going past occasional square buildings that blocked the rising and falling sound. He tried to imagine the paramedics in the front seats, the way they must ride along totally used to the sound of the siren, so that it didn’t have any urgency at all, the one in the passenger seat with a cup of coffee, his body pressed hard up against the door so that the motion of the ambulance didn’t even slop the coffee over the edges of the cup.

  A lot depends on the dispatchers, Dave realized. A lot depends on how they interpret what they’re hearing over the phone, the sound of his voice on the other end of the line, and it’s not right that their decision should be so subjective—that they could decide what kind of urgency an ambulance would have. Dave knew they could make the ambulance just sing—that they could go on the radio and say a few words and anyone who was riding with a coffee would be rolling down the window and throwing it outside, coffee and cup and lid and all, and they’d have their gloves on long before they stopped, even if the driver had to hold the steering wheel with his knees while he struggled to push the awkward fingers into place. And Dave suspected it was better now when he didn’t make the call himself, if someone else took out their cellphone and pressed the three quick buttons, explaining in fast sentences just what it was they had come across.

  He looked around, noticing—as he had before—how bright the colours were, how every single thing seemed more distinct and intense. Some part of him checking things off, sure that this was his last opportunity to gather it all in. Across the street, there was a cat in a front window, watching him.

  What do cats see through windows? Dave considered it. Do they think they’re looking at a real world, or is it just like television to them—motion and flat colour and little more? Dave watched the cat stare at him and then look away, uninterested. A man walked by on the sidewalk, fast, talking deliberately on his cellphone, making it clear he had no time to be disturbed. He brushed by where Dave was sitting and didn’t look back. Dave was leaning over towards the railing by then, watching the little stars gathering and whirling at the edges of his vision. Little flaring sparkles that you couldn’t grasp if you tried to look straight at them. Like a moving frame around his field of vision, and now it was as though he was looking at the street through a long tunnel.

  Dave could feel his throat closing over even more; he could feel it as simply as that. He thought this must be like what people feel if they’re allergic to bees or peanuts and got that haphazard nut or sting. That clear consciousness, that distinct awareness of your body’s betrayal, that few minutes’ knowledge that you’re the victim of a knee-jerk physical reaction gone all wrong.

  Dave watched the ambulance round the corner at the bottom of Prescott Street, and when it did, he felt the weight in his chest lighten a bit, as though his body had realized there wasn’t much waiting left, as though it didn’t have to steel itself, as if it didn’t have to keep rationing air. He watched the staggered flash of the white and red and yellow lights, and he wondered when they’d added the yellow ones; he knew he’d seen them before, he couldn’t remember when he’d seen them first. Newer ambulances now, more equipment—but you still sometimes got one of the old ones. Dave always looked around the inside of those older ones like he was recognizing an old friend, full of shiny surfaces and rattling, banging pieces of equipment.

  They’d gotten new jackets too, the paramedics, sometime in the past two years. New jackets with a lot more yellow in them, reflective patterns on the back that made the paramedics stand out garishly like cut-outs of themselves, especially at night. Dave wondered if they minded being that obvious, or whether it was like any other uniform—the sort of thing you didn’t mind, because it was a sign of what you did and where you fit.

  Dave could remember when there was a place where he fit. Not with a single formal uniform as much as with an understanding of what it was he was supposed to wear. White or light blue shirts with a collar, a necktie—the more staid, the better—and pants with a sharp crease. At least, with a sharp crease first thing in the morning. All of it saying that the world was under control—in fact, everything was under control, restrained, fastened, buttoned down.

  He’d been with the city, in the planning department, deep into the world of easements and green space. Then there was a new mayor with a background in business and a public mantra that the only thing you could really control was the size of your expenses. Then, everyone was talking about “the economy contracting,” and there began to be empty desks, although at first it was just the part-timers and the co-op students.

  Dave thought it felt exactly like a contraction: a sharp muscular squeeze, impossible to resist. Like the world suddenly bore down, pushed, and popped him right straight out into another, very different place with a week’s pay for every year on the job. He remembered how, in the good moments, he’d been sure there would be another job long before the severance ran out.

  The moment they’d told hi
m, they were already looking over him, past him and on to the next thing. Dave remembered what it had been like with other layoffs, knew the way everyone else in the room didn’t even have time to think about how unfair it was because they were so keenly aware about how glad they were it wasn’t happening to them.

  Linda hung on for a while. Dave knew she might have stayed in the marriage longer if he’d managed to cut back on their expenses quicker, if he’d looked ahead and asked, “What if something doesn’t come along?” But Dave hadn’t wanted to do that. It struck him all at once when the severance was almost gone, unemployment insurance looming, and he’d found himself at the checkout in the liquor store, buying exactly the same single malt Scotch he always had. “One small luxury,” he had told Linda when he started buying it years earlier, when there was enough of a cushion for tolerance. “That’s all I need.”

  Every evening, he’d have one small glass of the peaty brown Scotch—nothing special about the glass, either, just a juice glass with a single ice cube in it—and thinking back, Dave wondered what was important about it, whether it was the Scotch itself or the idea of it. The idea of going into the living room with the glass, sitting in his chair with the newspaper while the ice cube melted slowly, the ice occasionally splitting with an audible crack, the order of the world set as carefully as if it had been framed up and poured with concrete.

  Dave wondered where that chair was now, and he wondered where Linda was too. Neither of them were in the rooming house he shared with six other people, two of them recently released from the mental hospital. Social Services paid Dave’s rent but little more, and he found it was easier to be outside walking than to stay in the whirlwind of the house, a place where everything seemed completely beyond his control. If he wanted to read a book, there was no guarantee there wouldn’t be someone screaming insults in their room, or knocking on his door to see if he could help with a problem one of the other residents was having with welfare or the landlord. “You know numbers, Dave,” would be the half-apologetic explanation for involving him in something that could take the rest of the day. It was easier to be away from the building, easier to keep his thoughts in their own order.

  Dave looked down at his knees, at the grey of his trousers and the grey of the concrete step set into the sidewalk. Any trace of a pleat was gone from the fabric; even something as simple as that was beyond him now. His breathing sharp and short, so that his throat was suddenly dry and sore.

  The ambulance was up by the curb, and the two paramedics came out through the doors, and when they saw him, when they recognized him, it was like they lost a half step of urgency. It was a man and a woman, and the man said, “Hi, Dave,” as he set the bright orange trauma kit down on the steps. “Same thing, Dave?”

  “Hi Tony,” Dave said, his breath rasping. “Same thing.”

  “Didn’t know it was going to be you again,” the female paramedic said. Her name patch said Patricia, but everyone called her Patty. “We must have brought you in ten times by now.”

  “Thanks,” was all Dave could manage. Then Patty was bringing the gurney from the back of the ambulance, and as they wheeled him to the doors, the clear plastic oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, Dave was surprised at how bright the sky was.

  Tony was driving, and Dave heard him jog the radio microphone off its rest into his right hand and call the hospital. “Male, fiftyish, vitals good. Trouble breathing.” Then there was a short break, as if Tony was trying to make up his mind about what to say. Looking up from where he was lying on his back, Dave could just make out the shape of the driver against the bright windshield.

  “We’ve got the Gasper, folks,” Tony said. “No lights, no siren.”

  And Dave was sure he heard the resignation in Tony’s voice when he said it.

  The back of the ambulance was full of the grumble of the big diesel engine and the hiss of the oxygen through the mask. The ceiling light was on, and Dave could see the ambulance rocking left and right as it made its way around corners. He watched Patty’s body lean back and forth involuntarily with each turn, watched her muscles brace and relax. She didn’t look at him, didn’t look at the monitors they had him connected to. Once or twice she looked down at her hands in the blue vinyl gloves, her mouth pursed small, but she didn’t say anything.

  In ten minutes, they were at the hospital, and the two attendants pulled the gurney out and let the wheels beneath it drop hard into place and lock. Dave watched the roof of the ambulance bay and then the ceiling of the hospital rolling by as he was wheeled into the emergency room. And Tony was talking to the triage nurse, giving her the quick rundown on Dave’s symptoms and vital signs. Dave knew enough to know they were treating him differently than they would other patients—no notes, no careful handover with plenty of explanation—and in a way it made him feel smaller.

  “We’ll take you down to a room until a doctor can see you,” the nurse said. “You breathing all right with the oxygen?”

  Dave could only nod, not enough air left to even speak, but the intensity was sliding away, as if his bronchial tubes were fingers that he could feel flexing and easing. Now that it was softening, he knew he’d soon be past it.

  The doctor was brief—drive-by medicine with other patients to see. “Are you taking your prescription, Mr. Simpson? Because it’s pretty clear you’re having a panic attack again. You’ve got to get this under control—you’ve been here half a dozen times already this month.”

  Dave didn’t tell the doctor that there weren’t enough dollars left at the end of the month to keep him in pills, or that he was suddenly entranced by the simple feel of the cool, smooth, clean sheets under the side of his face.

  There must have been something about the look on his face then, because the doctor looked up from the chart and stared at him for a moment or two, his face inscrutable. “We’re not that busy here today, Mr. Simpson,” the doctor said, finishing the chart and hanging it back on the end of the bed, pen quickly back into the pocket on his jacket. “Stay here on the oxygen for a while until you feel up to it. I’ll get you discharged after that.”

  Dave stayed on his side, studying the weave of the sheet, the lines where the threads came together and the tiny holes between. He put his hand out to feel the rough-washed scrape of the fabric and, deciding his fingers wouldn’t be able to feel it well enough, turned his hand over and dragged the back of it across the small hills and valleys, caught up in that one action.

  Over the gentle hiss of air from his mask, Dave could hear scattered noises from other parts of the emergency room: the clicking of a piece of nearby equipment, a regular beeping sound and, from across the hall, the sound of someone crying. The other hospital is older, Dave thought, but it’s quieter. Like the walls are thicker or something—like different things used to be important. St. Clare’s was a little more careworn, chipped paint and older beds. It’s funny, he thought, to actually be thinking about which hospital you like better.

  Half an hour later, one of the nurses brought a small box of apple juice, the L-shaped straw sticking out of the top. “Just check in with us when you’re ready to go,” she said.

  Half an hour after that, the drinking box empty, Dave pulled the oxygen mask off his face and swung his legs down over the side of the bed. When he was outside, he saw three ambulances by the bay, and Tony and Patty had the doors open on theirs, sliding the gurney into the back. He watched for a moment, wavering slightly, and then they saw him. The sun had passed through noon, and Dave squinted to look out across the plain of the parking lot. It was like the sun had gotten whiter while he was in the hospital, the colours of the cars and the trees all flatter than they had been. At least it wasn’t raining.

  “Cry wolf enough, Dave, and we might not be there when you really need us,” Tony said.

  Patty spoke up from the other end of the gurney. “The dispatchers all know your voice by now,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t call,” Dave said. “I wouldn’t call if I didn’t have
to. But thanks.”

  He braced himself to start across the parking lot. It would be a long walk, he thought. It always was.

  Dave saw a quick look pass between the two, but it was Tony who spoke. “Want a run back downtown, Dave? We’re heading to St. Clare’s for a patient transfer anyway.”

  Five days later, he was on Water Street, nursing a large coffee, sitting on a stool in a street-front coffee shop. It was raining, large flat drops blowing in against the glass and sliding down in long streaks.

  Dave’s eyes focused on the running drops, then on the people passing by, his eyes flicking back and forth as they locked onto the changing images, his attention caught by each individual motion. With every passing pedestrian, he thought there was a little bit of each face that seemed familiar—not like he knew them in particular, but as if there was some reason why he thought he should know them. They passed like water in a river, he thought, heading in their own directions, each one with their own piece of the world safe and sound and trusted. He envied them that, whether it was blind faith or foolish confidence or just plain ignorance.

  There’s so much you can’t control, Dave thought, the coffee cup warm in his hands, no matter what you think, no matter how fast you make your way down the street.

  Then he felt the sharp shear, the familiar tightening in his chest.

  “Excuse me,” he said, smiling up at the waitress. “I’m . . . I’m not feeling well. Can you call an ambulance?”

  I LIKE

  T HERE IS SO LITTLE left to be dancing for, Keith thought—and when there was dancing, it was him doing soft-shoe in the kitchen, alone, from stove to fridge and back again, getting out an onion, a carrot, the lemons.

  Somewhere in the wall, the water was running, a hissing rush he knew better than most other sounds in the house. Was it the pipes that made the sound, he wondered, or the choke point of the tap, toning the pressure down? When it was flowing, the sound of the water radiated from the pipes to wherever he was in the house, so that anything from the dishwasher to the shower could make its own throat clearing and steady comment.