Break in Case of Emergency

by Jessica Winter

  “Who is ‘we’?” Pam asked.

  “Oh, sorry, ‘we’ is the foundation. LIFt.”

  “Right, okay.”

  “So, first of all, I want to be totally honest with you: I’m asking you not just because you’re awesome and amazing and I think you’d be perfect for this, but because I’m in a bind. I need to find one more person to participate in the video series by tomorrow—long story, the deadlines got all messed up. I didn’t ask you in the first place because I was hesitant about mixing up our friendship with my stuff at work. But even though I’m in a spot now, I promise that I wouldn’t be asking you now if I didn’t think you’d be really, really great for this.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” Pam said. Jen could hear both affection and irritation in her voice. “What exactly do you need from me?”

  “Well, so you’d be on camera talking about—about the accident—your accident—and your recovery from it,” Jen said. “So that would be the adversity you had overcome. You could say a lot of the things we’ve talked about in the last year or so, about how too many healthy people in their twenties and thirties don’t have health insurance, how bike safety in the city is atrocious, how the cops don’t follow up on drivers who hurt cyclists—all that stuff. You’ve always wanted people to be more aware of all these things.”

  “Yeah, I’ve just never known how to do it,” Pam said. “I don’t have any community-organizer skills.”

  “Okay, but you’d be doing that just by talking about it in a public forum like this.” Jen could hear a hectoring impatience hardening her voice, and tried to knead it into something softer. A column of sweat streamed across her hairline past her ear on one side, then the other. “You could talk about your art, too.”

  “I could,” Pam said.

  “Your story is just so compelling because it really happened to you, and it could happen to anyone,” Jen said. A vise was tightening around her skull. “Almost like—like this was a bad thing that happened, but look at the good that could come out of it because you can take control of the situation and make meaning out of it. I mean, not that, but something like that.”

  “That sounds a little Zen Rand to me,” Pam said.

  “No, no, more matter-of-fact than that,” Jen said, without knowing what she meant.

  “No, I get it,” Pam said, kindly. “So it’s a bunch of videos of women overcoming adversity. Who else is being interviewed?”

  “Let’s see,” Jen said. “There’s a woman who spent some time in jail for substance-related charges, and now she’s in law school because she wants to become an advocate for women in prison on nonviolent drug-related offenses.”

  “Oh, that’s cool,” Pam said. “So the adversity she overcame was addiction?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Jen said. Gray baubles of sweat were dropping soundlessly onto her desk. Invisible crystals of freezing rain stung her eyes. Her stomach lurched up and over. Her internal organs were calcifying into jagged rocks.

  “Jen?”

  “Sorry, we cut out for a second. You know, I don’t have the exact details on all of the interviewees, but I can get them for you if it’s helpful.”

  “No, that’s okay, sounds like a good story,” Pam said. “Do you have just the basic info on a couple of the others?”

  “Um, there’s a woman whose house burned down, and she sort of learned how to let go of her possessions, stop being so materialist.”

  “That one isn’t as good,” Pam said.

  “Yeah, honestly, I think yours would be the best one, by far,” Jen said. She imagined the cord on the phone as the lifeline in her grip as she disappeared into a quicksand of sewage. Revulsion flattened and stretched her facial muscles. “You know, it’s obnoxious for me to say this,” she said to Pam, “but it could be a really good platform for you. We’ll have someone do your hair and makeup, and my colleague Donna will be interviewing you, and she’s amazing—”

  “Wait, Donna? The life coach?”

  Jen’s stomach grumbled and reared up again, this time in dire warning. Pam had an excellent memory. She listened to what you said and remembered it. It was one of the reasons Jen loved her.

  “Yeah, I know,” Jen said, “but she’s great, she really is.”

  “What will the series be called?” Pam asked.

  Jen rested her forehead on her desk, two hands pressing the phone to her ear. The sweat on her brow and on her desk caused her to slide forward, mashing her nose against the particleboard. “We’re not sure yet,” she said.

  Jen could hear Pam thinking.

  “Can I sleep on it?”

  “I—I—I guess you could—but—” Jen stammered. She rested her head across from the phone receiver in a pantomime of sickbed pillow talk.

  “You need to know now, I get it,” Pam said.

  “Well, it’s just that we’re shooting the interviews tomorrow,” Jen said.

  “I’ll do it,” Pam said. “Why not? I’ll do it.”

  Behind the phone, the package of saltines swam into view, and Jen squeezed her eyes shut to make them disappear. Just palpable amid the gusts of nausea that pinned her tightly to her desk surface, Jen discerned a serene and lilting fatalism. She had willed herself to catch a disease, and then she gave it to her friend, as if it were a gift.

  Lessons in Zen Rand

  Jen could not account for the next twenty-four hours, not even directly after they’d elapsed. She knew there had to have been two legs of a commute, and seven or so hours of sleep, and sweaty, messy attempts at dinner and then breakfast and lunch; there had to have been conference calls and emails; there had to have been bolts to the bathroom; there had to have been some kind of frantic pitch session in Karina’s office wherein Jen marketed her friend Pam as a LIFt-worthy package of strength, vulnerability, creativity, tragedy, and good optics. She knew she had welcomed Pam into the LIFt offices, ushered her into the soundproof video studio, introduced her to Donna, and coaxed her to submit to the makeup artist’s entreaties, “just for a touch-up.” But Jen could never have sourced a single specific freeze-frame or intertitle from these twenty-four hours. In her memory’s telling, she hung up the phone with Pam and looked up and Pam was standing in front of her desk.

  “What the fuck?” Pam said in a stage whisper. Her eyes, framed with heavy mascara and liner, glittered with fury; a horrified smile strained her features. She had turned a deep red, burning through the heavy pancake makeup up to her hairline. Large-eyed and large-mouthed and painted, breathless and zipped up in one of her Champion sweatshirts, her hair raked back in a makeshift knot, she summoned in Jen’s addled mind a ballerina who’d been pushed offstage to a skidding stop, still spinning with emotion and adrenaline after a truncated, tumultuous performance.

  “Pam, hi, what?”

  “What the fuck was that?” Pam was asking. Hissing.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?” Jen stood, started to reach for Pam’s arm, then thought better of it. She sensed Daisy to her left rising from her cubicle and slipping quietly away.

  “I just got interrogated on camera about how God himself sent the angel Gabriel down to earth to personally pulverize my bones with his divine truck and teach me an important lesson about owning my power. The fuck, Jen?”

  “The interview? Pam, I’m sorry—what—”

  “You know, this is my own fault. I thought I was going to be talking about fucking health-insurance deductibles and protected bike lanes. I should have known it would be this faux-Buddhist libertarian bullshit.”

  “Zen Rand,” Jen said, almost to herself.

  “You knew,” Pam was saying. She suddenly seemed calmer, more in control of herself. Her affect was reflattening. “You work here. You knew these people. Jennifer, this woman was one step away from telling me I’d invited this into my life to give me a motherfucking purpose. Do you know how infuriating that is to me?”

  “I can’t even imagine, Pam. I’m sorry.”

  “You tricked me into exploiting myself so
that you could finish an assignment.”

  “No. No, Pam, calm down, I would never—”

  “I’m perfectly calm.” Pam did sound perfectly calm. The red was fading. “You’re either too stupid not to know this would happen, or you did this with malice. I have never known you to be stupid, so that leaves malice.”

  “Pam, no, please, I can explain—”

  “I don’t need you to explain. I’m leaving now. I can find my own way out.”

  Jen turned and watched helplessly as Pam walked across the office floor and vanished through the glass doors to the elevator bank. Jen locked eyes with Jules the intern, who had swiveled around in her chair and was scrunching her face into a shoulder-squeeze of sympathy. Jen did not react, and turned and took her seat again. She folded her hands on her desk. She was comfortably seated in a still pocket of time, no turbulence, 70 degrees Fahrenheit, pH balance of seven. This pocket of time would expire in ten to fifteen minutes. The pocket of time walled itself off from dread about the moment of its expiration, the moment that the pocket of time would run out of oxygen; her amygdala would remain sound asleep until then, until the alarm rang. Jen could peer wonderingly at her steady hands with dry eyes and no apprehension. Even the pain in her lower abdomen, which had been building all afternoon, receded a bit. She heard Daisy reinstall herself in her cubicle.

  whatDaisyknew: Didn’t mean to eavesdrop but is everything ok

  jenski1848: Is there someone who could send me a link to the interview Donna did with Pam, the last-minute addition?

  whatDaisyknew: Sure, I’ve already seen it, it sort of looks like a hostage video shot in a realtor’s office in Palm Springs

  —

  As the raw video began, Pam was rubbing her teeth with one finger, unaccustomed as she was to lipstick. The makeup artist had already performed a rhinoplasty of contouring. The hairdresser had straightened Pam’s hair, which Jen knew must have taken at least an hour or more. Pam was wearing a ruffled tangerine blouse that Jen had never seen before—Jen assumed it was borrowed from Leora’s ad-hoc clothing-storage space, which Daisy had stumbled upon one day while searching for padded envelopes and which Petra had then started using instead of the handicapped stall to pump breast milk. The ruffled tangerine blouse was further embellished by a chunky, brassy necklace that Jen recognized from Leora’s Opening Statement!™ jewelry line. Off-camera, Donna was asking Pam if she was ready to begin. Jen could hear Donna taking off her bracelets.

  All right, good, let’s start. So, Pam. It’s been nearly a year and a half now. Can you tell us what happened?

  Sure—and thanks for having me here today, Donna, and thanks to, um, the foundation. So, let’s see, I was riding my bicycle to a gallery on a Saturday afternoon. I was making a turn at an intersection, and, as far as I can piece it together, a van was speeding to make the light, hit me from behind, and threw me from the bike. I’ll probably never know exactly what happened, because the van drove away and the cops never really followed up on it.

  What were your injuries?

  Well, my left leg was shattered. Just wrecked. I had a compound fracture of the femur and a smashed tibia, and my ankle was beyond—I mean, the pedal had slashed clean through it. It was pretty gross. I also dislocated my shoulder and cracked a couple of ribs—but on my right side. So my injuries were ambidextrous, you could say.

  Aha, so you had found a new equilibrium!

  Ha, yes, you could say that. But it was my leg that was the big problem.

  What do you remember of the first days after the accident?

  I remember coming in and out of this bluey consciousness—everything seemed underwater and tinted blue, with tinges of red at the edges, like, um, like the curling of fingers, or seaweed. And I remember pain, just excruciating pain, like every cell in my body was being crushed over and over again. The pain was so bad I was surprised I was alive. It was so bad I was sort of in awe of it, you know? Like I could behold it from a slight distance, and I guess I got that distance because of the medication they were giving me. If I had been inside that pain, I would have gone crazy.

  But you made it, Pam. You made it. Tell us about your road to recovery.

  Well, I don’t know how much detail you want me to go into, but they basically had to reassemble my leg, which took a lot of time and operations and then recovery time between the operations. That was, in a way, the most dispiriting part—every time I’d have recovered enough from an operation to start to sort of feel like myself again, another operation would come around the bend. And then I basically had to learn to walk again, with a leg that felt uncomfortably new and unfamiliar, but also old and over it—over life, you know? My leg was depressed, which was depressing to me. My leg and I had to get to know each other again. And my two different legs had to learn to get along.

  And now?

  Things are pretty good. My leg gives me trouble when it’s cold, or when it rains. This past winter was hard at times, going up stairs and stuff. And I have a lot of scars on my leg, but I kind of like them now. They’ve healed and smoothed over, and they’re sort of cool-looking. They’re a story.

  Battle scars.

  Something like that. I don’t really think of it as a battle. I’m sad that I can’t really run like I used to anymore. Maybe someday. I could ride a bike, but I don’t want to.

  A fear you need to conquer.

  Yeah, maybe—well, I don’t know about that. I don’t know that I need to conquer it, actually. I mean, why would anyone want to get back on a bike after what happened?

  What did you learn about yourself during the months you spent recovering?

  Well, it’s interesting. One thing I didn’t know is that the femur is the only bone in the human thigh. Isn’t that weird to think about? We’ve got fourteen bones in our face, twenty-nine bones in our skull, and just that one lonely bone accounting for about a quarter of our height. So, anyway, with a femoral fracture, what happens is—

  Pam, I’m going to stop you there—I meant more on a personal level, a spiritual level. What did you learn about yourself during this time?

  Oh, okay. Let’s see. I don’t really know.

  We’ve talked a lot about the physical. What about the metaphysical, the spiritual?

  I don’t—I don’t believe in God, so—

  We don’t necessarily have to be talking about a god. Let me put it another way: When this accident happened, what did you think the universe was trying to tell you?

  I don’t know. I don’t—it’s sort of hard for me to think in those terms. Sorry, I know you need stuff for the interview. Um—huh, I don’t know. It was just the thing that happened. I don’t think it was, like, a sign. Or like a divine message. Is that what you mean?

  Maybe you were the message, and this event was the messenger.

  Yeah, I don’t know.

  Because you do have a message, don’t you?

  Yes, I do. First of all, I want people in their twenties and thirties who don’t have health insurance to make sure they have it. The only reason I had health insurance when this happened was because I was at a party one time and I mentioned I didn’t have health insurance—it was almost like a brag, like a bit of bravado. Bravada? And this woman I’d just met turned to me and told me about her brother, who was diagnosed with cancer at the age of twenty-six. If he hadn’t had health insurance, she said, he would have bankrupted their entire family and their lives never would have been the same. She told me that story and I got health insurance the next day. It wasn’t great insurance and it was really expensive and it had a high deductible, but it was something. This accident happened just over a year after that. I want to sort of be like that woman’s brother for people who think they can squeeze by without insurance.

  The second important issue here is that I think if a pedestrian or cyclist gets hit by a car in the city where I live, or any city, there should be a police investigation, always, without exception. Because in my case—in my case—

  —You put your l
ife into the hands of the justice system, and you felt the justice system let you down.

  Well, no, it didn’t even get as far as the courts. I thought I would be in court saying, “This driver was negligent, and the burden is on me to prove it, and I think I can prove it, but it’s up to the justice system to decide.” But the police were the gatekeepers to the justice system, and they closed the gate. They had multiple witnesses, tire tracks all over the place, even most of the license plate, and they might have even had security-camera footage, but we’ll never know because they didn’t follow up, they didn’t even find out if the footage existed. They probably would have investigated properly if I had died—and isn’t that crazy, that that’s the threshold for an investigation? Death? But instead it was like, “Well, whoops, it was an accident, sucks for you, but what can we do?”

  Hey, you know what, Donna, could I do that part over again? I think I can do it more concisely and be more articulate. I shouldn’t say “sucks”!

  Well, actually, Pam, I was going to stop you anyway, because—keep in mind that we are aiming for a very diverse nationwide audience, so we may not want to drill down so much into specifics on these points, which are very, well, specialized. Police matters and so forth. It might be fruitful to paint with a broader brush. Not so local, you see?

  I think so. Yeah, no, you’re right, I can boil it down to talking points. I should be better at this—I watched so many cable-TV talk shows in the hospital.

  Okay, let’s regroup and start again.

  Sounds good.

  Pam, what was the message this accident was sending you?

  The message I have is—oh, wait, that wasn’t your question. Sorry.

  Let’s try again. You’re doing really well. Okay. Pam, what was the higher purpose of this accident? Why did it happen?

  I don’t—I don’t understand the question, I’m sorry.

  Well, do you think the accident happened for a reason?

  N-no. No, I don’t think the accident happened for a reason. I think I’ve tried to make some good come out of the accident, but it didn’t happen for a reason.