Afterward, I stepped around the platform restlessly, not scared, but jittery, excited. The train had just nicked my shoulder. I was glad it had. I smiled when I saw the white button on the dirty pavement.
Our first job that day was for a seventy-year-old woman found in bed holding a dirty bucket, gobs of yellow phlegm sloshing around in gray water. I stepped into the bedroom, glanced at the old woman, and something collapsed inside. I didn’t give a fuck about the woman. I didn’t care about anything, and I thought, I’m through being a paramedic. It was pathetic. It had taken Rutkovsky twenty years to get to that point of indifference. It took me eleven months. I turned my back to the patient and sat in the window and looked out through snow flurries at the gray street. In the reflection I could see the patient’s son and grandson looking back and forth between each other. They had no idea what to think of that. Medic arrives and sits and stares out the window. A moment later Verdis walked in. He understood in a moment what was going on. He’d seen it coming for weeks. He pretended as if it were normal, as if it was my job to sit in the window and not treat. Verdis put the paperwork in front of me, then knelt to the woman. He talked to her. He took her blood pressure. He did the physical exam. And then he did the paperwork himself. When he was finished I stood from the window and without a word I walked back down to the ambulance, Verdis carrying everything, the woman walking behind in her bathrobe and slippers. I drove to the ER and once we were there I didn’t even get out of the ambulance. Verdis went in with the woman. I sat in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead. Five minutes later the chief walked over. He looked at me. Then went on past and went into the ER.Then he came back out with Verdis. He came to the window of the ambulance and motioned for me to roll it down.
“There’s a guy inside. Pissed off. Shouting he’s gonna sue us. Wants to fill out a complaint. Says you went into his apartment and sat there. Didn’t treat.”
I didn’t say anything. Just looked away.
“That true?”
Verdis was standing behind the chief. He said, “It’s not true, chief. They don’t understand. One person does the paperwork. One person treats. They want to make it into some racial thing. Cross did the paperwork. I was the tech. She’s hardly sick,” he said, in a way he never spoke. “They think we should be coddling her.”
“Is that true?You did the ACR?” the chief asked me.
“Yes.”
If he looked at the paperwork he would have seen Verdis’s handwriting. But he didn’t look. Verdis never lied.
“We did our job,” Verdis said. “She has the flu. Big deal.”
The chief looked at Verdis, who nodded as if to say, Yes, it’s true. Then the chief looked at me. I didn’t say anything, and wasn’t about to—after a moment the chief turned and went back to the station, grumbling to himself, only half believing our story.
The next job was for a sixty-year-old woman found lying in front of the Harlem River Projects with a splash of bright red blood around her head. She was facedown, her bare legs showing above her slippers. At first we thought she was shot, but then saw blood oozing from her mouth and Verdis said, “G.I. bleed,” and ran to her with the stretcher, tossing me the keys, shouting, “I got her, I got her. Go on, Cross. Drive.”
I walked to the front, waited till Verdis loaded the patient in with the help of the cops. Then I adjusted the seat and drove to the hospital slowly. I made sure the ambulance was straight before I parked, that I was exactly between the two white lines. I got out of the ambulance. I walked around back and opened the doors to see blood all over the stretcher and bloody twenty- and hundred-dollar bills scattered over the floor and blood sprayed up on the cabinets and all over Verdis, who was huffing and puffing over the woman’s flabby, naked body, doing CPR.
“She had the money around her neck in a pouch,” he said. “When I cut her clothes off I got the pouch. Must be twenty-five hundred dollars here.”
Tens and twenties and fifties and hundred-dollar bills were scattered over the stretcher and stuck in puddles on the floor. We pulled the stretcher out, wheeling it over the money, and brought the woman into the trauma room, leaving two wavering red lines on the tiles. The doctors took over. I returned to the ambulance and looked in the back. Streaked, splashed blood was everywhere. Aerosolized blood from her lungs had stuck to every surface. And there was all that money. I shut the door, walked up front, and sat. Ten minutes went by and Verdis came out, wiping sweat from his forehead.
“Esophageal varices,” he said.
“Dead?”
He nodded. Then added quickly, “You did a good job, Cross. Most guys drive like maniacs. You can’t even do CPR. You gave a nice slow steady ride so I could do everything I wanted. Good job,” he said again.
I knew he was trying to show that he understood what was going on with me, that he didn’t blame me. I just sat there, stone-faced, gazing out the window. All that compassion grated. I wished he’d scream or punch me or tell me to fuck off. Verdis thanked me again, then went to the back and collected all the money, put it in a biohazard bag, and brought it to the cops. While he was gone some old guy, maybe seventy years old, with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a hooded parka over his bathrobe, knocked on the side window. I could see he was crying. At first I thought of ignoring him, but he was right there, not going away. I rolled the window down.
“What?”
“My wife. She’s dead. You were the ambulance for her. She had our rent money. If it doesn’t go in today they’ll evict me.”
“My partner took the money to the cops. They hold it for the next of kin.”
“I’m the next of kin. When can I get it?”
“I don’t know. A few weeks. A month.”
“I’ll be evicted if I don’t get it now. It’s why she died. The stress of gettin’ that money together. It killed her.”
“Talk to the cops.”
I rolled the window up. He stood looking through the glass. “Talk to the cops,” I yelled again, and he walked inside. I went to the back of the ambulance and opened the door. It was a mess back there. Plastic from IV’s, bags of saline, intubation wire, everything thrown all over the place. In the hospital that patient would have had five people working on her.Verdis had done everything himself. Alongside the bench there was a hundred-dollar bill that Verdis had missed. I picked it up, wiped it off with a piece of tissue, and put it in my pocket. Through the pneumatic glass doors I saw Verdis talking to the old guy. I started to go in to give him the hundred, and then thought, Fuck it. Skel’s probably trying to con us. I walked back to the front seat. I put the money in my breast pocket. Then I looked straight through the windshield and waited.
As the driver it was my job to clean up the back of the ambulance, but I didn’t do it. Verdis came back, saw the mess, and without a word he got a bucket of water, a mop, and disinfectant. He cleaned the back, then restocked the drug bag and the cabinet. It took forty minutes to do the whole thing. Afterward, Verdis jumped in, wiping his forehead with a four-by-four. He smiled at me, as if it was completely normal for me to make him do all the work. As we pulled from the ER bay we saw the old guy again. He waved to us. Verdis rolled his window down. The guy was standing there in his slippers and bathrobe, bare head in the falling snow, still crying.
“I showed them my ID, everything. They wouldn’t gimme the money. That was all we had. I don’t even have money for food.”
Verdis didn’t hesitate. He reached in his wallet and gave the guy two twenties.
“I’d give you more, but my wife would kill me. I got three kids.”
“Thank you. God bless.”
Verdis glanced at me.
“You wanna help him out, Cross?”
I gave him a look like, You gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me. Verdis didn’t say anything. He just jumped out and talked to the old guy, apologized for not being able to save his wife, told him everything was done that could have been done, that it was her time, that it happened quickly, was painless. He hugged th
e old guy good-bye. Then he got back in the ambulance and I drove us out to the Harlem River. We sat at the water’s edge. Verdis didn’t say anything. I didn’t either. We both looked out at the rocking gray water, Verdis, huffing and puffing a little, taking his jacket off. He’d been doing CPR, and then scrubbed and washed the splattered and aerosolized blood out of the back of the ambulance. That was hard work. There were more beads of sweat on his forehead. I saw this and turned the heat up, just to fuck with him. Verdis looked like he’d say something, but didn’t.
“I’m cold,” I said.
“Yeah, no problem,” he said.
He left the heat blowing. I could see the sweat coming down his cheeks.
“Are you still cold?” he asked after five minutes.
“Yes,” I said.
“OK.”
He turned it up higher. It was really blasting. I was hot, too.
“Are you still cold?”
“Yeah.”
“You must have a fever or something,” he said.
He turned the heat up even higher. Sweat was soaking through his shirt, streaming down his face. I waited for him to say something. He didn’t. Verdis was wiping his face, smiling embarrassedly, as if it were his fault he was sweating. Another minute went by. I turned the heat up as high as it would go. Verdis wiped his face again. He was smiling and seemed sheepish. And then, suddenly, he wasn’t smiling anymore. He turned and studied me in that penetrating, clear-eyed way, the same way he’d looked for that moment in my apartment when he’d come to talk about Rutkovsky. He said, “Think about it, Cross.” That was all he said. I looked away. I expected him to turn the heat down or say something more, but he didn’t. I waited a little while longer. Still, he didn’t say anything. After another minute I reached out and lowered the heat myself. I looked out the window. I turned the heat off. I sat there watching the gray water slip past. I felt awful. I’d started up on the ambulance imagining I’d help people, save lives, be a hero. Eleven months had passed. That’s it. Eleven months. I sat there. I thought about what I’d done that day. Ignoring the patient. Driving slowly to the hospital. Taking the hundred dollar bill. I put the ambulance into drive and went back to the ER bay. I sat there a minute. Then I jumped out. I walked inside. I looked for the old guy. I went to the trauma room. I saw his dead wife lying on a stretcher. There was a red spot on the sheet near her head. I went into the lobby. I ran out into the street. I drove back to the old guy’s apartment. He wasn’t there. I ran back down to the courtyard and sat on a bench and thought fuck it. I don’t care. I don’t care at all. I took the money out. I crumpled it and threw it on the ground. Then I picked it up. I ran up to the apartment and flattened the money out on the tiles, and slid the bill beneath the door.
On the next job when Verdis reached for the equipment I reached for it, too.
Most newborns begin breathing on their own. Others need to be suctioned and stimulated. The most common method of stimulation is inverting the newborn, holding it by its feet, and slapping it firmly on the buttocks. A baby’s squalling cry is often the first sign that it’s alive.
Slowly, in those days after that moment along the river with Verdis, some essential element that gave life sense and meaning and purpose that had dropped out of me started seeping back inside, but in a new form, and in a guise I was almost ashamed of. I began to imitate Verdis. I tried to do the whole physical exam like he did. I tried to be earnest and helpful with the patients. It felt corny to be that way and I was not consistent. Some days I was more altruistic than Verdis, other days I suddenly felt flat again. And it was particularly hard for me to see LaFontaine, who watched my transformation with an offhand, mocking attitude. When I was around LaFontaine I took on a joking, self-deprecating tone. I couldn’t help it. LaFontaine cajoled me into half agreeing with his extreme ideas, and there was a kind of allure to his simplistic, cut-and-dried mentality. It’s not what I really believed. But it was a piece of myself somewhere inside, a part that could be persuasive, and LaFontaine knew how to bring it out. My friendship with LaFontaine might have affected the way everything turned out for me, but unexpectedly, LaFontaine left for all of February, which was nothing less than a reprieve from his influence.
Basically, I got lucky.
A shooting on 137th Street. Verdis got in the driver’s seat and Marmol and I jumped in the back with the patient. It was a tall, slender woman in a short skirt and fishnet hose, shot in the butt. She was screaming, “Why’d they have to do it? Why? Why?” Marmol was shouting, “How many shots did you hear? How many times were you hit? Was it only one? One shot?” I was bent over her arm, starting an IV, when Marmol said, “Hey, this’s China.”
“What?”
“LaFontaine’s friend. You know, his five-dollar friend. You’re China, right?”
Lying back on the stretcher, she held a hand out to shake. “Charmed,” she said, then started screaming again, “Why? Why?”
I went on with the IV and I heard Marmol say, “I’m sorry about this,” and cut her clothes off, looking for other gunshot wounds. Suddenly Marmol stopped cutting. He was looking down at her. I did, too. We both just stared at her and then at each other. A bewildered mirth passed between us. Marmol bit his lip. We were pulling into the ER bay.
Five minutes later we’d transferred China to the ER doctors and even before he filled out the paperwork, Marmol ran across the street to the station, burst in, and shouted, “China’s got a dick! China’s got a dick! LaFontaine’s girl China’s got a dick!”
There must have been a lot of built-up resentment in the station about LaFontaine, about his boisterous, fuck-you attitude, about his racist views—because a wildfire of poorly suppressed amusement ran through everyone, even the people like Rivett who I thought were LaFontaine’s friends. Within an hour Marmol had sketched a drawing of a squirrel standing on its hind legs with an erection. The caption on the drawing read: El Chino, Formerly Known as China. The sketch of the squirrel with the hard-on was taped up in the lounge and Rivett made sure it stayed up there for weeks.
The next day LaFontaine went out sick. He didn’t come back for a month and for all that time I worked with Verdis and only with him.
Dusk in early March, a warm day, almost fifty degrees, and the ambulance was parked out on 138th Street below Riverside Drive, near the community garden. In a slow moment between jobs Verdis, had walked down to the garden, and with his radio wedged upright in the black dirt was cleaning up dead plants and old leaves. His wife, a lanky woman with glasses, in a blue sweatshirt and a Knicks hat with a pom-pom, knelt in the dirt nearby and went at the dirt with a claw-shaped instrument and a little spade. Their three boys, six and four and three, were gathering old, dried-up plants, tearing them out and tossing them into a bedraggled brown pile on the gray concrete. I was sitting in the ambulance, paging through my MCAT book for the first time in months, looking up occasionally to see Verdis correcting his kids, showing them what was dead and needed to be pulled up, and what looked dead but was still alive. Then he went back to raking in the flower garden. All five of them, Verdis, his wife, and his three kids, clearing the garden in the cold dusk, not saying a whole lot, while I sat watching through glass, feeling like it was the first normal thing I’d seen in years, feeling like, slowly, after going far away, I was coming back to the ordinary world.
A heavy woman in a sleeveless nightgown woke from a nap with a headache, feeling dizzy. As she was telling us what happened her face twitched. She lay her right arm to the side. Then her face contorted and her mouth opened in a crooked, terrible way, as if she were about to scream. Her eyes slid to the left and stuck there. She tried to move her eyes back to the center, but they were stuck in the corner. She began jerking her head to the left and making unrecognizable moaning noises—terrible, eerie sounds, like a whale. “Seizure,” Verdis said, and we started working frantically—vitals, IV, nitro spray. After a minute, her hand stopped jerking. Her head slowed and was still. She moved her right arm a little. A twit
ch of the finger. “Look,” Verdis said. Her index finger popped up and down. Then the whole hand spread. Slowly, her pupils returned to the center of her eyes, the right side of her face lifted, and she sighed, and looked around, stunned. The whole thing had taken less than thirty seconds.
“How do you feel?” I asked her.
“Better.”
“Are you in pain?”
“I had a headache for a minute.”
That was all. A headache. For a minute.
Verdis asked her to move her arms, stick out her tongue, wiggle her toes. There was no deficit at all. It was a TIA—a ministroke. One minute seizing and paralyzed, and the next looking about in this perplexed way, as if she’d woken from a horrible dream.
“I know exactly how you feel,” I said.
About two weeks later I walked over to the Macomb’s Projects on 147th Street. It was a four-story, dirty brick building in the shape of a square, the sort of projects where you walked through a tunnel to a courtyard with benches and a few scraggly trees and a jungle gym over interconnected pads of rubber. I walked up three flights, heads appearing out of doorways as I went up and knocked at the last door on the very top. After a moment, a child’s voice said, “Who is it?”
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