A Thousand Naked Strangers (16 page)

For once it's Marty who ends the call. “I gotta go.” He hangs up, phone still to his ear.

For a few seconds nobody moves—the shooter, his victim, Marty, or me—as if none of this is permanent, as if a little quiet will undo what's just been done.

This isn't how it normally goes. Normally, this sort of thing happens near but not close, maybe heard but never seen. The dispatch radio chirps, and a voice comes over the air to say something terrible has happened and could we hurry on over to take a look. Today it's different. Today we've watched it.

Finally, as if insisting his injury is serious, as if to prove he's truly in mortal danger, that he's been shot and not merely insulted, the man staggers back. He puts a hand over his throat, and his knees buckle. Then he starts running.

“Where's he going?”

“He's running.”

“Why's he running?”

The man turns, and for an instant it looks like he's running to us.

“Is he running to us? Why's he running to us?”

“Well, this is an ambulance . . .”

Oh.

But he's not running to us. He struggles on at a slow trot, blood streaming down his arm and trickling into the parking lot.

“Now where's he going?”

“Should we follow him?”

“Yeah.”

Marty puts the truck in gear and takes his foot off the brake. We start rolling forward, and when we catch up to him, what am I supposed to say? Marty has to remind me to roll my window down. Once it's open, I lean out. “Hey, uh, you wanna get in?”

The guy looks over—eyes bulging, tongue out. Blood runs through his fingers. I don't know how long he can keep this up.

Marty leans over my seat. “You're shot, dude!”

The guy stops, but we keep going, roll right past him like he's nothing but a ghost in the side mirror. Finally, brake lights. The ambulance rocks to a halt. We step out into the parking lot. I've seen plenty of people who've
been
shot, but I haven't seen anyone
get
shot. Until now. This is a whole new experience, and as I grab the patient's arm, I feel a tingle at the base of my spine, evolution's genetic heirloom—someone tried to kill this man, and standing next to him, saving him, I'm prey, too. I look up to see if we're in the crosshairs, but to my shock, the car washer—the shooter—is calmly picking up his buckets and mops. He stacks his cones neatly in a pile, then sits on the bumper and pulls out his phone. Ultimately, it's the shooter who calls 911.

It's curious, really, but there's no time to think about it. We hustle the patient into the back and start driving. This man, it turns out, is lucky beyond measure. The bullet passed through his neck but left his airway and spine intact. He can breathe, he can move, he can talk.

Which is convenient, because the cops meet us at the hospital, and they have questions of their own. Mainly, why the guy who shot him never ran. The patient gives his side of the story—that he was the victim of an attempted robbery. The cops aren't buying it. They ask why a man washing cars in a parking lot would rob a vagrant. And why would he call the police from his own phone and, more, why would he sit calmly on the bumper of his van and wait for the police to arrive?

“I'm the one who got shot!” our patient yells.

One of the cops takes out a pair of handcuffs. “Because you tried to rob him,” he says as he cuffs our patient to the bed.

“My word against his.”

The cop shakes his head. “The innocent don't run.”

Marty and I walk outside. I'm shaking from the adrenaline, giddy from the weirdness. I look to see if Marty's thinking the same thing, to see if he, too, is scared and excited and . . . He's got his eyes closed, chin tucked in. A bird has flown low overhead.

•  •  •

Two shifts later and money is on the line.

“How much are we talking here?”

“To eat the entire bottle of mustard?”

“Yeah.”

“Ten dollars.”

“Ten dollars.”

“Yeah.”

“How long do I have?”

Marty thinks he can eat an entire bottle of mustard, start to finish, without stopping. He's so confident that he thinks he can
do it now, in the ambulance, while the city crumbles around us. I know he can't, so I want to see him try.

“I think five minutes is fair,” I say.

“That doesn't seem like much time. Gimme ten.”

“Ten dollars for one bottle of mustard in five minutes.”

“Fine.”

We drive to a Kroger, and Marty buys a bottle of store-brand stone-ground mustard. He gets a plastic spoon from the deli. We sit in the ambulance and he pours himself a big wobbly spoonful, begins to think this was a bad idea, and eats it. The mustard doesn't go down well. He tries another spoonful, smaller than the first, with more reservation. He chokes it down, takes a deep breath, goes for a third. It gets stuck in his throat.

“Try it without the spoon. Maybe if you can't see it, it won't be so bad.”

He tips the bottle to his mouth. Squeezes. Tears run down his cheeks. He shakes his head like a dog that's been dunked in a bath. Drops the bottle on the floor between his feet. “Uh-unh. Nope. Done. I'm done.”

I'm driving now, but I'm not watching the road. “You're done?”

“Done.”

“Gimme ten bucks.”

“Pull over.”

“Huh?”

“Pull over.”

“Why?”

“I'm gonna puke.”

I whip into a gas station. Marty jumps out and throws up in the parking lot. A homeless guy leans against the wall, washing
with water from an old two-liter bottle. He stops and watches, his bathwater splashing onto the blacktop. Marty sees him, apologizes. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm better now. I'm done. Sorry.”

The homeless guy resumes washing and Marty pitches forward, hurls again. The homeless guy, disgusted, grabs his stuff and shuffles away. Marty puts a hand up, tries to apologize, to explain, but he can't stop puking.

And here, in the ambulance, I can't stop laughing. Because he's puking, yes. But also because he's publicly and unabashedly making a fool of himself. Because he did something so stupid simply since he thought it'd be funny. I'm laughing because this, at last, is someone I can get along with.

“You okay, Marty?”

“Yup.”

“You don't look okay.”

“That's because I'm not.”

I tell him to take his time, get it all out, I'll wait. As soon as I say this, the dispatcher's voice rings out. “Two-ten,” she says over the radio.

I key up the mike. “Go ahead for two-ten.”

“I have a call for you.”

M
arty doesn't know anything. Not about how much mustard he can eat and certainly not about this job. He'll be the first to admit it. In fact, that
was
the first thing he admitted when we started working together. As a reminder, he's saying it again now.

“Seriously.” He's behind the wheel in his brand-new uniform and untied boots. We've been through this before, but evidently, we need to go through it again. “I don't know anything.” He looks at me, serious but unshaken by the admission. “Not a thing.”

Marty's saying all this because I haven't been correcting him or guiding him. He reminds me that he and his first partner had what he calls issues. And by
issues,
he means neither of them had any idea what the hell they were doing. That nobody was harmed, killed, or left where they fell because those two couldn't locate the address is pure luck. They knew so little that they couldn't even ask for help—whoever showed up wouldn't have known where to start. So, rather than ask for help, they got lost, got into fights, and treated patients who—miraculously—survived. Eventually, by chance and to the relief of the city's ailing citizens, they got split up. But that's over, and here he is, ready to work, ready to learn. Problem is, who am
I to teach him? I haven't been here a year. Most of the medics here have forgotten more than I've learned. In a vague sense, I'm scared. Scared he'll fuck up, scared I'll fuck up. Scared for our patients, for our jobs. I could bring this up, but there's no point. Because people don't stop getting hurt just because the medics on the other end of the phone aren't ready. The calls will come in and we'll have to run them. More than that, I don't say anything because though Marty claims he doesn't know anything—and he truly doesn't—that fact doesn't bother him. I don't know where it comes from, but he's bubbling over with confidence. He's young and naive and totally devoid of body hair, and yet here—saddled with a tough job he admits he's not ready for—he's more relaxed than I am. He swigs from a Coke bottle, blue Grady hat on backward.

“I'll figure it out,” he says, “but in the meantime? Let me know if I do anything stupid.”

•  •  •

The dispatcher is chattering away in our ear, but we're no longer listening. Once she gave us the complaint—person down, not breathing, possible overdose—we tuned her out. There's nothing left to say. I'm driving, so Marty's the one who'll treat the patient, the one who'll write the paperwork. Ultimately, the one responsible. There's a rhythm to working an overdose, a sort of easy glide that's nothing like the usual stomp and shuffle of a patient found not breathing. With an overdose, the situation is bad but doesn't have to end badly. The trick is in understanding that though the patient isn't breathing and may be a step away from dead, if we get there fast and do everything right, if we keep calm and don't panic—and
so many
people panic—we can save
him. Marty doesn't know any of this because he doesn't know anything. Sure, he's heard of the drugs people OD on, but he doesn't know what sort of evidence they leave behind. He doesn't know what to look for or where to find it, and when he can't, he doesn't know how to tease the details from nervous bystanders. He doesn't know which of the six things that all need to happen
right fucking now
he should do first. He just doesn't know how to run an overdose. And yet from the moment we arrive, he's a natural, a soothsayer, as if he's stepped outside of himself and is the only person capable of running this call.

It starts right away, as we're walking across the lawn. There's a guy standing at the door, big and doughy like Vince Vaughn in
Wedding Crashers
. He's frantic and trying to block our way. He's telling us that even though he's the one who called 911, he doesn't know anything, can't tell us anything. He wasn't here when it happened. And the patient? The one lying inside on the floor? They hardly know each other. Marty ignores him, doesn't say a word, simply pushes past the guy and goes in first, drug bag slung over his shoulder, arms slack at his sides.

The guy yells at Marty to stop and listen, to acknowledge that we understand that whatever happened here is—from a legal standpoint—not his fault. Marty keeps going, disappears into the house, a one-man armada navigating by instinct. The guy at the door is thrown off, his whole defense shot to hell because nobody's listening, nobody's hearing. The guy looks at me, desperate, as Marty aimlessly wanders the house, Moses trekking quietly across the linoleum. Finally, from somewhere inside, Marty's voice: “This him?”

The guy, flustered, follows. “Well . . . shit. Hold on.”

I follow the guy into the house. We reach the bathroom and
there, on the tile floor, is our patient. There's a pulse, but he's not breathing.

“I don't know what happened,” the guy says.

I suggest perhaps he fell from the sky. The guy looks at me, incredulous, and says, “You don't think it was an overdose?”

“Could be.”

An overdose is almost mystical. It hinges on the slightest variation in dose or concentration or bad luck or something so inexplicable that we peg it to a full moon. It's one of Donald Rumsfeld's known unknowns. But there are hints. The trick is figuring out what the patient has taken based on what's lying around, since bystanders, friends, and family, however concerned they are, aren't going to rat out their friends.

Among the most popular drugs in Atlanta for plunging to the bottom of an ugly rabbit hole is GHB. It is, inconceivably, both a party drug and a date-rape drug. What got you high today may leave you unconscious tomorrow. Except more than unconscious—dead and unwakeable, a zombie in the depths of Haitian voodoo. On an ambulance, GHB appears in the form of a lifeless stripper we drag from the floor of a men's room, or a twenty-year-old we find facedown behind a midtown bathhouse. GHB is ingested and leaves no trace. We never know it's GHB but guess because the story fits. This story—a guy in his own house at five in the afternoon—doesn't fit.

That leaves opiates. They come in prescription form, but heroin is a whole lot cheaper, so that's usually what we see. Heroin is sold in black neighborhoods, but for whatever reason, it's consumed mostly by whites—cooks and waiters, generally, but also the occasional bored high school kid. What heroin does is calm the central nervous system. It says everything's okay, just
slow down and don't worry. About anything. Not even that nagging voice somewhere deep inside that says it's been a while since I took a breath and maybe I ought to go ahead and take another. Just enough heroin is being kissed by God. Too much is a gentle ride to a breathless sleep.

This is what has happened to our patient, and upon seeing him, his friend has gotten dizzy. I push past, and he slumps against the doorway as we do our initial assessment. A quick scan of the room reveals a patient—painted asphyxiation blue—and a canvas shaving kit someone has tried to kick behind the toilet. I go for the shaving kit as Marty kneels over the patient, who's flat on his back, arms draped over his face—a giant despondent Smurf. I peek in the bag. Marty opens the airway. The bag is full of needles and heroin's powdery shadow; the airway is full of fluid.