—
Mostly knickknacks. Every now and then I overreached. Once, at the Ridgedale Projects, we found a teenage boy in a hoodie standing outside a redbrick tower, wearing headphones and blowing bubblegum bubbles.
“Did you call 911?” Karen asked.
The boy shook his head. We’d already reached the elevator when he said, “Mom did.”
On the way up, Karen said, “Is it your dad?”
“Sort of,” the boy said.
A grossly overweight woman wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe over a diaphanous nightgown over a brownish sweatsuit greeted us in the hall. “Done it again,” she said. We followed her into a cluttered apartment, where she began leisurely picking up toys off the floor, clucking with annoyance every time she bent over. Children watched an action film. None turned to look at us.
The man was in the bedroom, supine on the covers. He was unusually small—his underwear, which was all he had on, looked baggy, diaperish—unconscious, and experiencing severe respiratory depression. Every ten seconds or so, he’d snort a gnarly breath through his nose, a terrific snore. His lips were blue, skin devoid of oxygenated flush. The nightstand was covered with pill bottles: mostly painkillers, a lot of opioids.
“For my aches,” the woman explained. “But did he think about that either?”
Karen went around to the far side of the bed with the O2 and the oropharyngeal airway. When she planted her knee on the mattress to lean over the man, the mattress gave beneath her, billowing out in liquid undulations, lifting him on its squishy swell. Karen pitched forward and the water continued to glug from one side of the bed to the other, raising and dropping her, the man. Ordinarily, this would have been a supreme occasion to ridicule Karen; I was distracted, however. Among the pill bottles on the nightstand was a large fountain soda cup, no top, brown soda beads clinging to its waxed interior. Held down by the cup was a handwritten note.
“Papadopoulos,” Karen said.
She’d managed to kind of calm the bed and was bobbing gently beside the man. I opened the drug box, prepared a bolus of naloxone, inserted the needle, and drove home the plunger. The action was almost instantaneous. While we were still trying to bounce him onto the backboard, the man began to gag on the airway and slap at the oxygen mask strapped to his face. By the time we’d transferred him to the stretcher, he was back in the world and not the least pleased.
“Why’d you do that?” he asked us.
“Oh, fuck you, Marty, you fucking shithead,” the woman said, quietly, and left the room.
I rewarded the man with another hit of naloxone, which made him even more alive, even less happy. Karen was busy with the gear, and I thought for sure the coast was clear. It wasn’t. As soon as I put the note in my pocket, I saw the boy. He stood in the doorway, watching me with a basically impassive expression. He chewed his gum. He blew a splendid bubble.
“Let’s move,” Karen said, and the boy mutely watched us wheel his sort-of dad away.
The note was all run-of-the-mill, derivative material. A lot of I love you so much, a lot of I’m so sorry. Still, after that day, I carried it with me everywhere.
—
If I drank too much, I’d sometimes knock over the IV stand during the night, inverting my gravitational relationship to the bag of saline. In the morning I’d find it jiggling on the floor, still hooked to my arm, full of my fluid. I’d raise the bag above my head and squeeze it in my fist until the whole pink cocktail drained back down the tubing, into me, where it belonged. I’d yank the catheter from my vein, sit up on my cot, stumble past the floor-to-ceiling shelves, enter the combination on the drug cabinet, and open her up. Typically, what I required was a vasodilator/muscle-relaxer medley: the former to stimulate cranial blood flow, the latter to break the grip of the savage claws sunk into my face, determined to unmask my skull.
Often, I’d cough. If so, I’d scour the shelves for something to spit into—some gauze or a sterile eye pad would do. I’d inspect the sample, a squashed bug on the white cotton, with satisfaction. I’d seal it in a biohazard bag. I’d write the date.
One morning, the supply-closet door opened and Captain Finkbiner walked in. I gulped the pills in my palm, then turned to face him. He glared at me, Finkbiner, in his manner. He appeared to subscribe to the theory that if you wanted to unnerve a man you didn’t look him in the eye, you did the opposite: avoid the eye by looking at his earlobe.
“Papaluffagus,” he said.
I tried to say something respectful. One of the pills, however, had caught in my throat.
“No jokes, clown?” Finkbiner asked.
“I was just doing inventory,” I said.
“He was just doing inventory,” Finkbiner said, addressing my earlobe as if it were a neutral party, sympathetic to his contempt for me.
Right then, First Sergeant Diaz joined us. He looked at me, looked at Finkbiner, looked back at me. He said, “Did you finish that inventory?”
It was Saturday, a drill weekend. Soldiers were trickling in from Brooklyn, Harlem, Queens, the Bronx. I folded up my cot and gathered the medical platoon in a dark corner of the armory, out of view of the grunts. Nobody wanted to be there. Specialist Chen had brought a Box O’ Joe from Dunkin’ Donuts. We filled small paper cups and discussed the best way for me to dislodge the tablet from my esophagus. Sergeant Pavone seemed to have the most experience. A girl with whom he’d once had unprotected sex had suffered the same problem with a morning-after pill. All day, Pavone had plied the girl with water and milk, hot tea, balled-up bread and honey. He’d massaged her neck, made her hop on one foot, held her upside down, commanded her to yodel.
“So what worked?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“So what happened to her?”
“Who?”
“The girl.”
“The girl with the pill?”
“Yes.”
Pavone shrugged and sipped his coffee.
It was peacetime, more or less. At 1300, we had a domestic-abuse-prevention training. At 1500, we had a driving-under-the-influence-prevention training. At 1700, we had a suicide-and-self-harm-prevention training.
“Look like you’re doing something,” I instructed the platoon before heading to the bodega for milk.
“Like what?” Specialist Chen asked.
“Training.”
When I got back, they were working on Harvey, our Human Patient Simulator, a computerized mannequin that had a heartbeat, blinked, and breathed. One of the new privates, an outdoorsy type from Long Island, was struggling to perform a needle-chest decompression. At last, Harvey’s torso ceased to inflate. The private tried to make light. No one laughed. Instead, Sergeant Pavone articulated the elbow hinge and pressed two fingers to Harvey’s wrist, feeling for whatever widget was supposed to throb.
—
Karen had aced the civil-service exam, securing a spot at the police academy. Now, whenever we entered a crime scene, she sized up the place, noting suspicious blood trails, signs of struggle. One day, law enforcement received complaints of a man head-butting concrete walls in an alley. When Karen and I got there, we found an emotionally disturbed person keeping two officers at bay with sharp, deft karate kicks. He was well turned out for an EDP. He wore a tasteful suit, an understated tie, polished wingtips; every time he brandished a foot at one of the cops his pant leg hiked up, exposing colorful striped socks. The only sign of emotional disturbance was a purple hematoma from his hairline to his eyebrows.
“What do we got?” Karen asked, employing one of her favorite Law & Order lines.
“Guy versus wall.”
Karen nodded. She was still nodding when the EDP, with remarkable athleticism, feinted right, rolled left, and sprinted by us, up the alley.
We got the next call twenty minutes later. The cops had pursued the man into a residential neighborhood, where he’d bounded through the unlocked door of a brick-and-vinyl-sided duplex. Seemed he’d made for the kitchen, extracted a chef’s knife from a
heap of dirty dishes in the sink, and slit his throat. By the time we arrived, so much blood had pooled on the linoleum, I could see my dark reflection peering up at me, Karen’s peering up at her. The EDP had very nearly decapitated himself, transecting both jugulars and the trachea. The cops crouched over him, pressing red dishrags to his neck. Their sleeves were sopping. They looked relieved to see us.
I kneeled above the man’s head, intubated him straight through the laceration in his windpipe, connected a bag-valve to the tube, and told one of the cops to squeeze it each time he took a breath himself. By then, Karen was ready with the dressings; when we tipped the man onto his side, however, a bucket’s worth of blood dumped out. I mean enough blood to make a splash. It looked like we’d exsanguinated a pig or two. I glanced up, searching for a towel or fire hose, I guess, and that was when I saw them sitting in the dining room.
The dining room met the kitchen via a wide, arched doorway, and the doorway neatly framed the young couple, who sat across from each other at a square table. In front of each was a wineglass with ice water, and a plate of greens. A cube-shaped candle glowed on a ceramic plate. I noticed now the pleasant sound of jazz piano issuing from a stereo.
Both the man and the woman held rigid attitudes of astonishment. The woman had brought her hand to her mouth; the man had turned slightly in his chair. It was as if, by running into their house, grabbing their knife, and murdering himself, the EDP had bewitched the couple. I felt pity and a kind of kinship. That might as well have been me in there, transfixed; it might as well have been my wife.
The look on their faces.
It made me want to warn them.
—
A few evenings later, at a bar on Third Avenue, First Sergeant Diaz said, “By the way, did you mail a biohazard bag full of lung butter to the PO box for the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund?”
“What kind of a question is that?” I demanded.
Diaz sipped his beer. He waved. “Never trusted that outfit. Follow the money, right?”
Not long afterward, the supervisor accosted Karen and me in the garage. “Either of you two take a snow globe from that house on Waring Ave?” he asked.
Karen said nothing.
“A what?” I said.
“A snow globe.”
“A snow globe?”
“Homeowners claim it’s missing.”
“Guy practically cuts his head off in their kitchen, they’re worried about a snow globe?”
The supervisor shrugged, checked his watch. “I said I’d ask; I’ve asked.” He walked away.
“Believe that?” I said.
Karen was gazing at me sadly. “You need help, Papadopoulos,” she said. “I say that as your friend, your partner, and as a future law-enforcement officer.”
I barely heard her. It was Wednesday—I was thinking about Mrs. Olenski, her cookies. Olenski, however, didn’t call. She didn’t call the next Wednesday either, or the one after that. Finally, I suggested we stop by, and Karen, her investigative instincts eclipsing her dislike, allowed, “Something doesn’t smell right.”
Prescient words.
The stench reached into the hall. The TV was on. Through the walls, we could hear Rod Roddy urging someone to come on down. Fire joined us. Police. When they jimmied the door, we found Mrs. Olenski rotting on the couch, remote control in her translucent hand.
While Karen chatted with the cops, musing on the possibility of foul play, I wandered down the hall, into the bedroom. The bed was elaborately made; against the headboard, lace pillows were stacked in order of descending size, from enormous to tiny. By the window, a long-handled shoehorn leaned against a wicker chair, and several pairs of what must have been Mr. Olenski’s shoes, thick-soled loafers and white orthopedic sneakers, warmed near an electric heater. I went to the bureau and opened the drawers. I peeked in the bathroom. I checked the closet. Karen was calling. “Just a minute!” I shouted. What was I looking for? I was about to leave when I noticed, there on the nightstand, the dentures soaking in a glass of water.
—
Next drill weekend, Finkbiner was on the warpath. Seemed somebody had stolen his mandible. I corralled the platoon in the medical-supply closet and shut the door. “Get comfortable,” I told them. We sat on ammo boxes, cots, and totes, dozing and eating the everything bagels Specialist Chen had brought. At some point, the private from Long Island, the one who’d let Harvey die, asked Sergeant Pavone, “What’s the worst, craziest, most fucked-up thing you ever saw?” And Sergeant Pavone (whose two best friends had been crossing a bridge when an RPG engulfed their Humvee in flames and knocked it into the river—who, after learning that their skin had been charred and their lungs filled with water, had asked me, over and over, with a kind of awe, “Burned and drowned?”) said, “Your mother’s box.”
I lay down on the floor and fell asleep. When I woke, it was to laughter. The private from Long Island had something in his hand. A set of teeth. The private was clacking them. As I sat up, the private aimed the teeth at me, clacked them, and barked. I must not have looked amused. The laughter stopped; Pavone cleared his throat. “Are they yours, Sergeant?” the private asked.
I lay back down. I went back to sleep.
—
My time at the armory was coming to an end. After the jawbone disappeared, Finkbiner bought a surveillance camera. He informed Diaz, who informed me, that it would be installed the following week.
The house where my wife lived—where we had lived together—was two trains and a short bus ride away. I found Elijah, our neighbor, exactly as I’d left him: shoulder-deep in the engine of his Chevy, defiantly exhibiting his bottom. When he saw me, he straightened. “Back from the dead,” he said, dragging two black palm prints across his tank top.
I waved and kept moving. When I got to our door, I was surprised to find it padlocked with a heavy steel latch. I lifted the mail slot and peered inside. Another surprise. All the furniture was gone, the living room empty. A few packing peanuts were scattered on the floor; a bulbless lamp stood unplugged.
Elijah was out on the sidewalk, a wrench in his hand, watching me. I walked back to him.
“Where’d she go?” I said.
“Arizona. Nevada. Someplace like that.”
“Why?”
“Mike had another opportunity, a fellowship or grant or something.” Elijah tapped his brow with the wrench. “Sharp, that Mike. A genius, if you ask me.”
“Who’s Mike?” I said.
“You know,” Elijah said. “Mike.”
I thought about that. “When’d they leave?”
“Four, five months ago?” Elijah cocked his head and squinted at me. “So, what, you get sent over there again? I thought we were done with all that.”
“We are,” I said.
Elijah nodded. “About time,” he said. Then he frowned in a serious way and extended his greasy hand. I took it. “Welcome home,” Elijah said.
—
It was Karen’s last month on the bus, her last month as a paramedic. No, I was not happy for her. Every chance I got, I cut her leathers. “Did I ever tell you about Jim Volkmann?” I said. Jim Volkmann was regular army. He died in Baghdad, in my arms, two weeks before the end of his tour. “Look,” I said, pulling out the dog tag I’d taken from Jim’s chain. (Understandably, Karen was unimpressed: it was literally a dog tag—shaped like a bone, with the name Lucy engraved on it.) “Did I ever tell you about Freddy Nevins?” I said. Freddy Nevins, like me, had joined the national guard when it was still the national guard: adult Boy Scouts, money for college, a reprieve from the city one weekend a month. On the last day of our last deployment, Nevins was in the turret of an MRAP, climbing a small hill to bid farewell to the Afghan Army soldiers who manned the observation post on top. A high-voltage, low-hanging electrical wire caught Nevins right between his flak and Kevlar, right where it could kill him.
“Just saying,” I told Karen.
She smiled. You couldn’t nick her with a chain sa
w. “I’ve heard that one,” she said. “Only his name wasn’t Freddy Nevins. And there were no Afghan soldiers. And it wasn’t a wire.”
A few days before her final shift, they sent us to the projects. I recognized the building and apartment number instantly. It was the small man: that fucking shithead, Marty.
Once again, the boy in the hoodie met us outside the lobby, and once again the obese woman wearily led us to the bedroom. She wore the same bathrobe as before, and the same nightgown—but her sweatsuit, this time, was purplish, not brownish. Little else had changed. The action on the TV continued. The children glowed on.
As I injected the man with yet another bolus of naloxone, I looked at the boy in the hoodie. He chewed his gum, blew his bubbles, and said nothing.
En route to the hospital, I sat behind the man, monitoring his vitals. “Why’d you do that?” he kept asking. “Why’d you have to go and do that?”
After we delivered him, I changed the sheets on the stretcher and got a fresh backboard from the locker in the ambulance bay. I took out my wallet. I felt the note. I rubbed the paper between my thumb and finger. I brought the paper out. I smelled it. I unfolded it. I was just about to read it—I don’t know, I wanted to read it—when Karen, wild-eyed, hopped down from the back of the bus.
“Where’s the drug box?” she said.
These Heroic, Happy Dead Page 6
