A Thousand Naked Strangers (12 page)

Counted among those killed in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, were forty-three paramedics and EMTs.

Godspeed.

T
he Fulton County Department of Public Health is a strange place to have an existential crisis, but here I am. Three days ago I was stuck with a dirty needle, and now I'm waiting on the results of my blood test. The possibility that I could be killed on the job has always been there, however remote, but that it could happen like this? By accident? A simple mistake on a routine call? It's an insult. All the more so because it will be willfully ignored, because if even the 9/11 EMS dead don't rate remembrance, what then of a lonely EMT who dies from a needle stick? So what I want to know—aside from whether I have hepatitis or AIDS—is whether it's worth it.

Is it?

That I'd question whether a job is worth dying for hints at the myriad of ways I've changed, at how strange a year this has been. Looking at it now, I can see the signs. They've been there a while, I just had no reason to step back and take stock. Now that I have, I'd say the first hint that things were different—that life wouldn't, couldn't, go back to the way it used to be—was the day I found a skull fragment in my boot.

We'd run a shooting near the end of the shift, a gruesome but fairly standard dead guy with the left side of his head blown off.
His skull was obliterated, and the skin hung slack like a dodge ball with the air let out. There was nothing to do but look. He'd bled everywhere, and I was careful not to step in anything, but evidently not careful enough. For the last hour of the shift, I heard a faint click with every other step, like something small but hard—a pebble, perhaps—was stuck in the tread of my right boot. I was tired, and it had been a long day, so I ignored it until I got home, where it wasn't a click I heard but a scratch. The pebble was damaging the wood floor. Sabrina heard it first, though by that time I'd been walking around for ten minutes. I sat in a chair, pulled off my boot, and pried out what looked like a small piece of broken glass. It was thick and off-white, a shard from a broken plate, maybe. Except it wasn't. It was a skull fragment I'd stepped on at the shooting scene. I'd carried it around and brought it home, and here it was. In my hand. I laughed and said we should keep it. Sabrina wasn't amused. I apologized and promised not to wear my boots in the house. Then I flung the fragment into the neighbor's yard.

The second sign that I'd evolved into someone else? My new take on the Volkswagen Beetle. Chris and I spend an incredible amount of time kneeling in the street. Ostensibly we're treating patients, but really what we're doing is listening for—and occasionally hearing—the scream of tires as a car flies around the corner. Chris and I agree that the terrifying prospect of death by automobile is amplified by the fact that we know exactly what the car would do to our bodies: how the bones will break, where we'll land, which of the sleepy medics from Zone Three will marvel at having accidentally touched our brains.

Maybe it's a defense mechanism, maybe it's a gradual desensitizing, but we've developed a game: Of all the cars on the road,
which one would you least like to be killed by? Chris says something big, a truck, maybe, with a plow on the front that would splatter him into unrecognizable paste to be hosed into the gutter by the fire department. For me it's the Beetle. Not the old ones, with the fading paint and the bubbly engine whine. The new ones. Brightly colored, with a matching daisy poking up from a vase stuck in the dash. How horrible to be mowed down by a happy little car with its own matching, factory-installed flower. It's undignified.

One night, while eating dinner with Sabrina and my mother, I throw out the question: What car would you least like to be killed by? In return, I get only blank stares. “You think I'm being ridiculous, but it could happen. Look around the next time you're driving. Nobody is paying attention. They're on the phone or rubbernecking or arguing. They're singing, eating—hell, roadhead is a thing that happens.”

My mother isn't amused.

The third sign comes while I'm lending my friend John a postmortem hand. John's death came as a surprise but not a shock. He'd been sick for a while, and what started as a cold became pneumonia, and from there it all happened very quickly. He stopped going to work, then stopped answering his door, and one day he died. Or rather, one day we learned he was dead. He was home alone when he collapsed. He rotted for a week before anyone found him. That John died alone and remained there for seven days is tough to hear. I'm still reeling when the question comes: Someone has to go in there, open some windows, let out the stink of decomposition. Will I do it?

When I arrive, a neighbor is there with a key to the back door. He hands it to me almost apologetically and gets back into
his car. As soon as I walk in, I see exactly where John fell. A body left untended for a few days leaves marks—if not indelible, then at least unmistakable. The floor is stained by the brown smudge of decomposition.

There's a long list of the things John was. An unrepentant gunslinger who nearly shot himself twirling a .38. A practical joker who once convinced Ted Turner that he was the spokesman for a Native American group planning to protest Braves games. A recognized genius who abandoned his career at one of Atlanta's most prestigious architectural firms to work in a hardware store. Now he's dead. He hasn't passed away or gone to a better place. He simply died in the basement. I wait for revulsion, tears, anything. But nothing comes. A year ago this would've been out of the question. Opening the windows, thumbing through his books, unloading his pistol—it would have been too much. A year ago I would've been outside in the car with my neighbor. Today it's just another call.

Medicine's great magic trick is how it convinces us we're here saving lives when more often what we're doing is witnessing death. Over time, shock wears thin, empathy recedes, and a human being becomes nothing more than something I carry home in the tread of my right boot. This is my new normal, the resting heart rate of my psyche. It's my state of mind as I wonder whether this job's worth it.

•  •  •

My needle stick happened the way they all do. I was distracted, looked away, let my focus drift, and—

“Shit.”

I looked down and saw a small hole in the ring finger of my
right glove. I yanked it off, and there, below the middle knuckle, was a tiny pinprick. A red dot of blood.

“Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit.”

I staggered out of the ambulance. We had no hand sanitizer, only sterilizing wipes with a label that warned against using them on babies, food, and bare skin. I scrubbed my finger raw. At the hospital the nurses all looked at me sadly, apologetically. They'd talk to the patient, talk to the administration, gain access to her records, and get permission to test her.

“Test for what?”

“To see if she has, well, you know . . . AIDS.”

My knees wobbled.

One of the nurses pulled me aside, said she'd been there, knew what it felt like. “Of course,” she said, “my patient was an old woman. Thank God. I knew right away she didn't have anything. But still . . .”

My boss was cavalier. He drove me to get my blood drawn, then dropped me off at the station so I could get my car. Someone else was already on my ambulance, already running my calls. By now, everyone knew why. I wasn't even dead, and already my obituary had been written. My boss said he'd call me with updates on the patient: It turned out they couldn't force her to submit to a blood test, she had to agree to one. If she didn't, they could take her to court, but who knew how long that would take. Either way, I couldn't work until my results came back. “Go home,” he said. “Relax, whatever.” I got out. He unrolled his window, leaned out. “If you bang your wife tonight? Make sure you double-bag it.”

Sabrina wanted to know who it was. What kind of person. I told her it was a twenty-two-year-old who lived in a project
and was pregnant for the fifth time. Sabrina slumped onto the couch, half-mad, half-grief-stricken.

I've spent three long days waiting and the results are in. A receptionist calls me back. She leads me through the swinging double doors and into the main treatment center. We pass through a small clinic—me breathless, her shuffling along—and then through another set of doors, and everything goes quiet. This is an old wing of an old building, all but forgotten by everyone except those called back here to have their fortunes read. There are posters on the walls, PSAs about drugs and premarital sex, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases. My heart is pounding so hard that my gums start to tingle. I'm seeing spots, sweating, a little nauseous. The joints in my knees loosen, so I'm not walking as much as jangling, and right about then the floor drops out from under me. The receptionist speaks, but her words come from somewhere deep under the surface of a pool.

I'm sitting in a tiny office of Sheetrock walls. The filing cabinets are overstuffed, the metal-frame desk is crowded with stacks of folders. Behind it, opposite me, is a guy in his thirties with dreads and a soft smile. He's holding a file, my file, and he asks me—the words in slow motion at first but picking up speed—if I have any questions.
Yes, I have questions. What the fuck do you think? My results. I want to know my results.

“Oh. Fine. All good. They didn't tell you over the phone?”

“No.”

Turns out I'm clean, as is the patient. She's had so many children spread out over so many years that the hospital has an ongoing record of her medical history. Every birth, every illness, every hiccup. Not one communicable disease has ever been found.

I let out a sigh of relief and a small grateful laugh at having been sentenced to death only to receive a last-second pardon.

As for whether the job is worth it, I have only this. When I leave, I make two calls—the first is to Sabrina, saying I'm okay. The second is to my supervisor, asking him to put me back on the schedule.

I
t's my first shift back, and Chris and I have been dispatched to a pedestrian hit by a car. He's facedown when we find him, dead in front of Red Lobster. Even as we're pronouncing him, a cop lazily strings yellow police tape around us. It's dark, and people have begun to wander over, but the crowd isn't big yet—not pushing on the tape, straining to catch a glimpse.

In the relative peace, we have time to stop and consider the dead man's teeth, which have come out—like fleshy dentures—nearly in one piece. How this could happen, I have no clue. It's just one of those inexplicable things that happen when something big and heavy and fast slams into your fleshy parts. There's nothing for us to do here, so I'm heading for the ambulance when I see a flash go off behind me. I turn. Chris has the camera in his hand, and he seems almost surprised. He looks at me, the body, the camera. Neither of us says a word, but the message is clear: We've spent so much time looking for carnage and taking pictures of oddities that the two have merged. He hasn't taken a picture of the body, just the teeth—perfect and disembodied, lying in the road like a windup gag toy. What would we even do with such a picture?

No time to think. Our radios light up again.

Our lights flash red off the passing buildings. The strobes flicker in the night. Chris is speeding. The dispatcher's voice crackles over the radio. A high school dance has just let out, and all hell's breaking loose. When the call first comes, it's for a single person shot, but they're still shooting and the number increases to two. Then three. We get there almost before the shooting stops.

We park, get out, and take in the scene—dozens of panicked students screaming, dozens more pulling up in cars, a gas station attendant locking his doors, police trying unsuccessfully to cordon off the area, a news helicopter already buzzing on the horizon, and in the middle of it all, three patients,
our
patients, bleeding and alone. We grab our bag but leave the stretcher. With each step, we crunch spent shell casings—cops are reporting over ninety shots fired, a number that doesn't seem possible.

When we reach our patients, two are standing and one is sitting quietly on the ground. There's a tall kid, nervous and jangly, who's been shot through the right shoulder and left leg. Next to him is a kid who took one bullet through the tip of his nose and another through his upper lip; that bullet passed through his teeth and lodged in his hard palate. He doesn't say a word, just stares at us with big open eyes. The third patient is a big mass of childhood obesity who's been shot through the arm. He's the calmest, the least critical, and nods to each of our questions. We call him the Buddha.

We're waiting for a second unit, but the scene is an absolute madhouse. A fire crew has arrived, and they're panicking—one of them steps on the Buddha, and the captain, who never gets closer than five feet, keeps screaming pointlessly into his radio
for a transport helicopter. High school kids are arriving by the carload, each group more agitated than the last. A second news helicopter arrives, procreates with the first, and together they give birth to a dozen more. And then there's the recurring ghost story, yelled every few seconds, that the shooters, whoever they are, have come back. Each time it sends waves of panic through the crowd. The scene is loud, hot, messy, and stinks of gasoline and blood. Bystanders are screaming, our patients are screaming, the fire captain—“Where is my damn medevac!”—is screaming.

“Fuck it,” Chris says. “Let's take 'em all.”

“All three? You wanna take all three?”

“You're right,” he says. “Let's take two. Which one you wanna leave?”

Thirty seconds later, we have everyone loaded into the ambulance. The tall one can't shut his mouth, and the kid shot in the face can't be still. The Buddha sits quietly on the end of the bench. Chris nods to me, and I jump up front and roar off. All told, we're on-scene fewer than seven minutes. Chris bounces off the walls as he struggles to cut off clothes, bandage, start IVs, call the hospital, and reassess. When we arrive, I jump out and grab a passing medic, who helps us wagon-train the three of them through the triage area and straight back to the trauma rooms. The whole world is waiting for us back there, and it's nothing but blinding lights and questions, nurses, doctors, phlebotomists, x-ray techs, registration clerks, surgeons. Cops trail in behind us, asking their own questions. Clear bags with twine drawstrings are filled with clothes, wallets, watches, rings, necklaces, phones, belts, shoes, and—