Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  "Rog! Grab him! He's— Ah! The fucker bit me!"

  The White Woman stumbled back, grabbed the key from the floor, and fled down the hall. By the time I'd reached his back and was pummeling him, he'd managed to get the key into the lock. We both fell into Alistair's bedroom as the door opened inward.

  I don't know what I expected to see. It was just Alistair in bed. On his back, faceup, his hands on either side of him, the sheet and light cotton blanket pulled to his chin.

  The two—then as Wally came in, three—of us became still, oddly respectful.

  Orkney crawled to Alistair and took his hand. Evidently it was pretty cold. I couldn't see any indication of breathing. Orkney lowered his ear over Alistair's half-open mouth.

  "He's still alive," he whispered. He jumped up to his feet and began to pull Alistair off the bed, along the bedroom floor.

  "What the hell are you doing?" I cried out.

  "Have to get him breathing!" he explained. He'd dragged Alistair along the floor halfway out the room before we could stop him. Alistair's T-shirt had been pulled back to his armpits, revealing his skeletal torso spotted with dark lesions.

  Seeing his poor, disease-ravaged body, I panicked. "Stop! Stop!" I pried Orkney's hands off Alistair.

  "Have to get him moving," he kept repeating mechanically.

  "You'll just kill him faster!"

  "Nine-one-one. I'll call nine—" The White Woman dropped Alistair's arm, which hit the wooden floor with a thud. He turned toward the phone on the bed table. But I'd foreseen that move, stumbled to my feet, and got there first. As he reached for it, I ripped the cord out of the phone, then out of the wall.

  "Call nine-one-one!" he continued to mutter. Moving back from me, he half tripped over Alistair in his haste to get out of the room.

  "Wally, stop hi—" The White Woman managed to dash out the door. He slammed it shut on Wally, catching him on the nose.

  "Son of a bitch!" Wally was jumping around.

  I was seriously irate now. I got past Wally and Alistair's body on the floor, opened the door, and charged down the hall to the living room. The White Woman was there, holding the phone, dialing, and he wasn't sufficiently prepared for my anger. I flung myself directly at the receiver, ripped it out of his hands, threw it on the floor, pulled the cord out, pulled the other cord out of the wall, and began hammering the receiver against the metal edge of the TV set. Orkney scuttled off, still muttering, and I ran for the kitchen, getting there a fraction of a second ahead of him, in time to rip that receiver too out of the wall unit and tear it too apart.

  "Here! Fucker! Use this!" I threw it at him.

  He looked at it. "Murderer!" he shouted. Tears streaked his cheeks, he suddenly looked like an old woman: an old peasant woman fending off Cossacks.

  He fled—I assumed to the building hallway, possibly to awaken the neighbors and try to use one of their phones. I also ran to the apartment door, intending to block his way. He was there all right, and we wrestled hard for control of the apartment door. Meanwhile, at the other end of the corridor, I could see Wally bending over Alistair's body, checking his breathing, straightening out his T-shirt. The apartment looked like a war zone. How could this be happening?

  It finally seemed that the White Woman was running out of steam. After he was unable to dislodge me with a particularly vicious rabbit punch, he moaned loudly and fell onto his hands and knees upon the hall carpet. Holding his head in his hands, he kept moaning and repeating, "I can't let you!" over and over.

  Suddenly he was up again, rushing into the living room. I tried to guess where he was headed next, what he was planning to do next. I knew I shouldn't move away from the front door. Then, he was out of sight, aimed for the kitchen. Probably planning to shout out the window and wake up the neighborhood.

  "Wals! Grab him before he gets us arrested, will you?"

  As Wally entered the kitchen, the White Woman leapt out past him, across the hall into the study; and from the study into the living room, back and forth across the hall, totally lunatic.

  Suddenly there was silence—no motion, no sound. I edged away from the apartment door, listening, slowly headed for the living room. The White Woman suddenly dashed out, followed by Wally, and I ran back to the front door.

  Just as he'd planned. He feinted for the door, then, as I fell against it with my entire body, he instead dashed for the wall phone to the front desk, a few feet away, but just beyond my reach. Before Wally or I could say or do a thing, he shouted into the receiver, "Stanley. This is Sixteen-J. Get EMS. Do you hear? It's an emergency. We need an EMS upstairs! Now!"

  Wally was so outraged by this trick, all the Taurus in him suddenly emerged: he began to paw at the hallway parquet with his black Patrick-shod feet the way a bull paws at the earth just before charging, inching forward all the while, his head lowered, his face so screwed up with fury I expected steam to start pouring out of his nose and ears.

  The White Woman was still shouting instructions into the receiver when Wally hauled off and socked him. I could see the surprise on Wally's face at how much the punch hurt his own knuckles as he connected on a superb uppercut to Orkney's big, solid jaw. The punch made a sort of clunncck!—oddly metallic for bones, I thought. But it sure worked. The White Woman's head snapped back, his eyes fluttered wildly, and when Wally reactively withdrew his bruised fist, the White Woman's head snapped forward and his entire body collapsed under it, a marionette instantly cut from its strings.

  I moved into line to catch him. He might be a complete turd, but I didn't want him damaging his head. All that dead weight falling on me brought me into a kneeling position on the hallway floor. In this pietà pose, I began to check through the disarray of flopping limbs and Jap pajamas in my arms for pulse, breathing, and blood pressure. Everything seemed okay. Except, of course, he was out cold.

  "My hero!" I overdramatized to Wally.

  He was still shaking his fist as though he'd burned it. "Jeez! Nobody ever said it would hurt so much!" Then re the White Woman: "He all right? I didn't mean to..."

  "You'd better get some iodine and a bandage on your hand."

  "I thought he'd never stop," Wally said.

  "He'll be okay." I got up and began drawing the unconscious body by the shoulders into the study, toward the divan.

  "He wouldn' t stop," Wally was complaining.

  "It's o-kay! Wals! You did what you had to."

  "He was like fucking Alien!"

  "Fix your hand. I'll try to get him comfortable."

  I sort of heaped the body onto the divan. Alistair sure knew how to choose 'em. Who ever thought the White Woman would be this loyal? Who dreamed he would even dirty his hands to protect Alistair? Not me, I had to admit.

  Suddenly I had a seven-year-old's desire to lift up the PJs and look at his dick.

  "Tales... calculated," I began aloud, remembering a magazine title from a time only shortly after I'd actually been seven years old, "to drive you Madddddddd!"

  I left the study door slightly ajar so we could hear when he woke up. And there, where we'd left; him on the floor of the bedroom, was Alistair.

  Wally had wrapped his hand with toilet paper when I pulled him out of the john to help me. We were just bending over Alistair's body, our arms out, our knees bent, our bodies poised to lift him as gingerly as possible so as to avoid any further marks of damage and yet still get him back onto the bed; I was suddenly flashing on how much in doing this the three of us resembled a line drawing by John Flaxman, an illustration he'd done for the Iliad late in the eighteenth century, titled, I believe, "Sleep and Death bear off the corpse of Ajax," which I'd first seen and been impressed by as a teenager... when the apartment door burst open.

  Stanley, the downstairs lobby clerk, wielding his enormous set of keys. Behind him, two heavyset guys in V-necked pink shirts and loose-fitting pants, a variety of utensils at their necks. Despite my amazement at their sudden appearance, I knew them instantly: EMS.

  We almost d
ropped Alistair.

  "Jeez! You were right!" Stanley shouted. "You called just in time. Their truck was just passing by. He still alive?"

  Wally and I were swept off Alistair's body by the two. I stumbled over one leg of the bed table and reached to keep it from falling: lour Tuinals and an empty glass of water right there!

  The Latino medic dropped to a knee over Alistair, feeling for a pulse. The shorter guy—balding, with a tiara of Clarabelle-orange hair—glommed onto the Tueys about a second after I did.

  "Pink and blues!" he said in a staccato voice. "Self-inflicted."

  These two looked very professional. I had to do something to delay them.

  "He threatened suicide before!" I said. "He has AIDS!" I added, for maximum shock effect.

  It sure worked on Stanley, who had stepped forward out of natural human curiosity and who now fell back against the hallway wall as though someone had sprayed the deadly virus into the air. It worked on the EMS guys only for a second. The one kneeling down pulled on a pair of rubber gloves before he shoved two fingers into Alistair's mouth.

  "He's breathin'. But shallow. Pulse's a butterfly. I figure hour. Two."

  "Bad news!" Clarabelle replied. "Gotta get a tube in an' pump 'im!"

  "That may not be a good idea," I said. "He had candidiasis of the esophagus a few months back. He sustained damage. You might rupture it if you put a tube in."

  The Latino looked up. "If we can keep 'im breathin' till ER..."

  He was out of the apartment. A minute later, he was shoving past Stanley, carrying a metal contraption he shook open into a gurney.

  I exchanged glances with Wally: desperation.

  "You seem to know a lot about his health," Clarabelle said.

  "I'm his cousin."

  "Next of kin?"

  "Yes. He's been hospitalized. He's been close to death... several times already," I said in a tight voice. "Obviously... tonight he meant to... We'd talked about this and... What I'm saying is I don't know how extreme the methods you use should be...." I clammed up, feeling guilty as shit under his cold, unwavering, judgmental gaze.

  "I hear you. But the fact is, whenever we get a call for service like this, by law there's stuff we have to do. Heart. Lungs. You got a problem with him breathing better?"

  What the hell could I answer?

  "Once he's at Roosevelt, you can tell 'em whether you want extraordinary methods or not," he added in a less accusatory tone.

  "Fine. I'm coming with you." I'd make certain nothing extraordinary was done to "save" him.

  They opened the gurney and lifted Alistair onto it, surprised by how lightweight he was. The Latino rubbed Vaseline on Alistair's lips, then managed gently to insert a ribbed tube into Alistair's mouth. He attached it to a small hand-driven pump. The tube suddenly swelled, thick, opaque, like the shaft of an Alien's cock.

  We moved down the hallway.

  "You hear it?" Clarabelle asked as we passed the study door.

  The White Woman moaning, evidently coming to.

  "The dog." I shut the door all the way. "You'll take care of Dorky while we're gone, Wals? Won't you?"

  Stanley was in the building corridor, holding the elevator door. At the sight of Alistair in better light, he was shocked and disgusted. The gurney fit into the lift by a thirty-second of an inch.

  Wally grabbed the keys out of the apartment door and locked it. All of us crammed inside the elevator and it dropped. I kept my fingers crossed, expecting at any minute for the doorman to remember that someone else lived up there. He didn't.

  In the lobby, the EMS guys wheeled Alistair out to the van.

  Wally grabbed me by the arm. "What are you going to do?"

  "Who knows? What a nightmare this has turned out to be! You?"

  "I'd better stay here. Go back upstairs. As soon as the Dork's better, we'll come over to Roosevelt. I'll bring your jacket."

  "He took them, Wals. He took fifty-six fucking Tuinals tonight! He really wanted to die. He expected to die! What if he doesn't die tonight, Wals? What then?"

  "Be strong. Do whatever you can." Wally hugged me.

  "You comin' or what?" Clarabelle shouted at me.

  "I'll be right there," I yelled back. "What do. I say if he wakes up?"

  "Tell him we tried...!"

  We tried. That's what Wally said. Seeing Alistair like that, he'd come to accept his decision, and to support me in my decision. Despite this agony of frustration, I'd never felt so close to him.

  One door was open to the back of the EMS van. As I began to climb in, Clarabelle shouted, "Wait a min' huh?"

  He and the Latino were at Alistair's head. The gurney had been fixed to the floor and walls. The Alien-cock tube was now attached to a fixture on one interior wall. Something was happening: the two of them were grunting messages at each other in a verbal shorthand. It was only when I twisted my neck and peered deep into the far corner of the van that I got a hint—the other end of the tube in Alistair's mouth entered a compression chamber. The two of them were drawing a gauze bandage around Alistair's head and tying it to the tube to keep it in place, further taping down the tube's winglike flaps to Alistair's chin. I guessed what had happened and asked anyway.

  "He stopped breathing," the Latino said. "He'll be okay once we get him to ER."

  "You better drive, Nestor," Clarabelle said. "I'll stay back here."

  Nestor got out and I got in. Clarabelle had a little pull-out seat attached to the front interior wall of the van. My own seat pulled out of the back door once it was shut. I knew he didn't trust me: that's why he was staying here instead of driving.

  The van was filled with machines. The oxygen compressor seemed to be the only one on, and it was making a lot of noise. Its loud rhythms reminded me of Darth Vader. As I sat down, a little square window slid open in the front wall. I could see half of Nestor's face, his expressive brown eyes, before he moved away.

  "We all ready?" he asked. Given the phony sound, he must have been using a connecting mike.

  "All ready!" Clarabelle spoke through the window, then hammered on the connecting wall.

  The van took off, headed west. The siren began, despite the early-morning hour and the probably thin traffic. I calculated our route: we'd turn left at Columbus Avenue, zip into Broadway at 68th Street, then down Ninth Avenue and into the Roosevelt emergency room at 58th. It would take ten, maybe twelve minutes.

  And so it seemed, at first, though I couldn't see where we were going, with Clarabelle's big head blocking the tiny window view. The van turned left sharply, picked up speed on the avenue, swerved a bit left to right, obviously getting out of the way of slowpoke drivers, slowed down for cross traffic—some idiot not quite awake—sailed past the complex of lights where Broadway entered, sped on—and came to a screeching halt.

  At the same time, I heard what sounded like two skyscrapers collapsing against each other. One—or both—hit the ground with a tremendous, an explosive, a scarifying thud, not far in front of the van.

  "Jesús! María! Y su amor Her-man!"

  Nestor wasn't through with his imprecation when we heard another thud.

  Clarabelle got up and began shouting through the window, asking what the hell was going on. Just then the van was battered on the left side, then even more soundly battered on the right.

  "Nestor! What the hell is going on?"

  "Oh, my God! The crane fell down. What a disaster!" Nestor was shouting through the microphone. "The whole thing tipped over! Sixty, seventy feet!"

  "Can't you get around it?"

  "It's blocking Ninth Avenue."

  "Backup. Back up!"

  "I can't. There's cars everywhere."

  "Put on the siren and back up!"

  Nestor did as he was told. We felt the van move a few feet back before it hit something. In a second, Clarabelle was past me, to fling open the door.

  We were some twenty feet in from the corners where Columbus became Ninth Avenue and crossed Broadway. I could make out
most of Avery Fisher Hall to our left in the paling darkness. Behind us was a sea of headlights—not only directly behind us and at odd angles to us and to one another, but farther behind, lined up all the way back for a mile.

  Clarabelle jumped off the back of the van and began going to the cars, shouting, trying to direct them to back off. But the crane, in falling upon some cars ahead of us, had evidently led to an immovable three-lane pileup all around, with minor accidents. One middle-aged man got out of his car, holding his head, and almost collapsed onto the hood of the Caprice next to him. Nobody was paying attention to the EMS van, our siren, or Clarabelle's shouting.

  A minute later, the siren slewed to silence. Nestor emerged.

  "He okay?" he asked about Alistair, shoving me deeper inside as he hunted through the inside fender lockers.

  "I guess."

  "You stay with him. Watch that monitor. You see? If anything happens to his breathing, turn it up. You see there? If anything happens to the machine, hit the red button. It restarts the motor. Got it?"

  "Where...?"

  He'd already pulled out a thick blanket; now he grabbed a metal valise, then another, which he thrust out of the van's back door.

  "We got two men hurt at the crane," he shouted, explaining to both me and Clarabelle. "It's bad. I phoned them into ER. They'll get us out of here."

  And they were gone.

  I stepped out of the van door, edged along the back bumper to the side, surrounded by a knee-high blanket of headlights. People were yelling, horns blowing. Not thirty feet ahead in the dark blue morning, I could make out the shadow of a giant openwork metal structure fallen at what looked like a sickeningly wrong angle. What a mess!

  After a few minutes, I was chilled by the morning air and got back into the van. When I closed the door, it damped the noise considerably. I shivered upon the front pull-out seat, where I could stare down directly on Alistair's face—that terrible tube!

  "Well, Cuz!" I said aloud, hearing trembling in my voice. "I wouldn't have guessed it possible. But we seem to be alone. Now what?"

  I looked at the compressor. Clearly, if something were to be done, that was where it would have to be initiated. Where? How?