A Thousand Naked Strangers (18 page)

“Next!”

I watch with vague interest as Cordell empties his pockets and the contents of his bags are cataloged. At last we're through and it's on to psychiatric triage.

Eleven-fifty. Ten minutes to go.

The staff tries to keep this area as calm as possible, but there's only so much they can do. It smells like dirty socks and is packed with people who, for one reason or another, need immediate psychiatric help. In the middle of the room is a glass-walled nurse's station, transparent and unhidden, so if a patient attacks the nurse, someone will see it right away. Tonight, naturally, it's empty. Where the nurse has gone or when she'll return, I have no idea. Cordell is starting to pace again. I tell him to relax, that we have all the time in the world. He just shakes his head. It's getting close to midnight and he knows it.

Cordell tries to sit, but the seats are taken. He backs against the wall, arms folded over his stomach. He's anxious, and the crowd in here isn't helping.

There's a woman wrapped in blankets spread out across three chairs, a man covered in grass and mud whom no one wants to sit next to, a furious-looking teenager talking to himself, and a couple—completely cracked out—pretending they don't need to be here. A lone man paces the room. His Members Only jacket is zipped up all the way, and his hat has
CIA
printed across the front in big yellow letters. He eases up next to me and leans in close. “I've lost my documents,” he whispers. “All of them. My mints are gone, too.”

It's 11:55 now, and Cordell throws a shoulder into the wall, shakes his head at some ethereal accusation, and stares at me with red, wild eyes. “I can't take this anymore,” he stammers as sweat runs down his face. “I gotta do something.”

“Just . . . just be cool. I'll get the nurse. Stay here.”

I throw open the doors leading to an area marked
STAFF ONLY
and bang on the first door I come to. A slow-moving sleepy-eyed woman answers. “Look,” I tell her, “you have a patient in triage who's threatening to kill himself. I need to speak to the nurse.”

If she senses my urgency, it doesn't register on her face. She tells me flatly that the nurse will be with us in a moment. I look down at my watch. Thirty seconds. Maybe Marty was right. Maybe I should've sedated Cordell. I run back to triage, but when I get there, Cordell is nowhere to be found. The CIA man is still there, though.

“You haven't seen my mints, have you?”

I spin around, looking for a place a three-hundred-pound
man could hide. And there it is: the bathroom. I rush over and grab the handle, but the door's locked.

Three, two, one. Midnight.

And then a calm voice from beyond the door. “Who's there?”

“Cordell? What are you doing?”

“Relieving myself.”

“You're what?” I ask.

“I'm relieving myself.”

I laugh. My back is covered with nervous sweat, and I lean my head against the wood.

“I haven't had a good movement in a week,” he says. “The gasoline, it binds me up. And this is the only place they can't infiltrate.”

“So that's what you meant by . . . Good. Good. That's really good news, Cordell.”

“Can I have some privacy?”

“Sure.”

•  •  •

I don't know what happened to Cordell after we left. I don't know what treatment he underwent, how long it took to silence the voices, how long he remained on Thirteen. It's hard to keep track of any patient, let alone one locked behind the padded walls of Grady's psych ward. I do know we saw him again, but everything that preceded our next meeting had been lost amid the shifting sands of his chemically imbalanced mind. It's not so for everyone. Some people love to talk, need to talk. Deacon Brown is one of those people. He's been on Thirteen, and he'll share his story with anyone who'll listen.

“My name's Deacon Brown. I was abducted by aliens.”

Right now he's got a man by the arm and is telling his story. “I'm not kidding,” he says. “Aliens. Snatched me right up.” Deacon's the first to admit he's an alcoholic. He's also, unapologetically, a repeat offender. “I'm a mess,” he says, staring into the man's face with those big yellow eyes. “Look at me. Sheeit, I'm wearin' someone else's pants.” None of that matters. He's crazy and he's got problems, maybe, but that doesn't make him a liar. “Aliens,” he says. “Honest to Christ.”

His abduction happened on Ponce. He was sleeping off a bender in a little patch of weeds next to the grocery store when, out of nowhere, a flash of light. Blinding. Whole damn world lit up. And then, before he knew it, hands. A whole mess of them. Reaching out from the big nothing, grabbing him, lifting him. He didn't go easy. Aliens or not, you weren't just gonna snatch Deacon Brown from a good sleep. He kicked, he yelled, he threw a few punches, but what can one man do? Against aliens. Nobody goes through the trouble of flying in from another galaxy to be fought off by a single drunk. So up he went. Levitation.

And then he was aboard the ship. Nothing but blaring lights and cold steel. The aliens held his arms and his legs, took his clothes, even took away his box cutter. Then they tied him down. Above he saw a glimmer: something long and sharp and probably lethal coming right at him. He screamed. His skin was pierced and he felt a burning sensation, as if being cooked from the inside. The last thing he remembered was a terrible salty taste in his mouth, as if the whole ocean had washed over him. And then he passed out.

The noise woke him. Then there was the motion, constant
and jarring. How long he'd been out, where he was, he couldn't say. He knew only that he was alive, and whether that was a good thing, he also couldn't say. He opened his eyes in time to see his left arm pinched off and once again everything going black. They weren't done with him. More arrived, too many to count—lines of them, waves, like Chinese soldiers cresting a hill. Each time he looked up, more had been let loose upon him. His skin was pierced again and again. Even his dick, man, they put something up his dick, and whatever you wanna say about creatures that travel halfway across the universe just to fuck with a dude, you enter a whole new realm when you touch a man's dick.

Days later, months later, maybe a year later, he woke up here. At Grady. He's lost weight, he thinks. He knows for sure he's a good two inches shorter. Whatever it was they did to his left arm, it's back on, stronger than ever. They cured him of the booze, too, but he'd kill for a cigarette.

“That's it,” he says. “Start to finish. Aliens snatched me up, and I don't know where they took me, but I'm here now.” Deacon leans back, spreads his arms. “I don't know a motherfucking thing. Except I'm broke. So, you got a dollar? Maybe two?”

Marty and I are just showing up at work. And though we don't hear the story, we see the hand extended, the awkward smile of the man Deacon has cornered. The guy has wide, terrified eyes. He's a tourist, maybe, or the uncle of a patient, and he's just in town to deliver flowers or dinner, and then he's off, back in his car to leave Atlanta and all its madness behind.

We
could
tell him. We could explain this is just Deacon, that he drinks but never takes his medicine and sometimes he has to be picked up and brought in. We could say that we brought
Deacon here two days ago. We could point out that the story he's telling now, about the aliens and the probes, the bright lights, that was us. But we don't.

Instead, we walk a wide arc. We keep going and the man stays where he is, simultaneously transfixed and terrified. This story, this moment, will live on forever. He'll tell his grandkids this story. And it'll all be true.

“I was abducted by aliens,” Deacon says. “Snatched me right up. Honest to Christ.”

M
arty doesn't think anybody's dead. He's shaking his head at the dispatcher, as if she's not just a voice but right here with us. “This is bullshit,” he says as he flips on the sirens. We're on our way to Pine Street, the city's largest homeless shelter, for a man who's down and possibly dead. Or not. “I'm deader than this motherfucker is,” Marty says, shaking his head again. “I can promise you that.”

“Can you stop saying that?” I'm treating patients tonight and Marty's driving, which means if this guy is really dead, I'll be the one to deal with it. “You're gonna jinx us.”

He's undeterred. “These guys call all the time,” he says. “And it's always bullshit. Dude's not dead.”

“Feel good enough to bet on that?”

“That he's not dead?”

“That he's not dead.”

He smiles as he blows through an intersection, sirens screaming. “Okay. Yeah.” He's nodding. Confident. “If he's dead, I'll run the whole call.”

“Paperwork, too,” I add.

“Fine.”

We shake. “But you're gonna lose,” Marty says. “Because this dude's not dead.”

He's probably right. We bet all day—that someone's not dead or that the psych patient in the library won't be wearing pants—and from experience, I can say that I've likely made a bad bet. When someone calls 911, a dispatcher answers and asks a series of leading questions to determine the nature of the emergency. Most people will, when asked, say the symptoms are worse than they are. So bleeding is always heavy, pain is always severe, and birth is always imminent, even when it's not. Sometimes it's because callers are hysterical and overreact, but often it's because if they say it's anything other than a full-on emergency it'll take an ambulance twenty minutes longer to arrive. If they say he's dying, it'll only take six.

Marty whips the ambulance up to the shelter and groans. It's massive and in the middle of the city, long ago condemned but, inexplicably, still open. It specializes in loitering. During the day, hundreds of men crowd the surrounding blocks, arguing, fighting, pissing, getting high, getting arrested. It's worse at night. Those who fail to get a bed, those who got a bed but now want out because their skin is crawling and they need more, those who never wanted a bed, just another hit, they're all wandering the streets. They crowd the vacant lots, pour from the surrounding crack motels, and creep through the shadows of Renaissance Park.

There are only two entrances to the shelter. Marty grabs the radio and asks the dispatcher which side our patient is on. She isn't sure and tells us to stand by. We're hoping to hear he's by the main entrance. The main entrance leads to the upstairs, where there are fewer people. The upstairs is also home to a strange vortex—a large open room divided into plywood cubicles serving as permanent residences for a lucky few. There are
truths in this universe so confounding, they were never meant to be revealed. How a man becomes a permanent resident of a homeless shelter—is he still homeless?—is one of them. So I don't ask. But the front door is in and out; it's quick and painless and as easy as a call here can get. The side door is something different altogether.

The dispatcher comes over the air. “Use the side entrance,” she says. “Someone's waiting for you there.”

Shit.

We weave down the steep slope of the side street—taking care not to run over any of the jaywalkers—then step out of the ambulance and onto the stained pavement. We're immediately assaulted by a wave of sounds and smells, a flowing river of humans living but just barely. Here the double doors are swung wide, but it's so dark, we can't see beyond the airless threshold. A man in a black shirt that says
ENFORCEMENT
leans against the wall smoking. He is probably our guide, but it's hard to say. He ignores us—uniforms, ambulance, all of it—until we enter his personal space and confirm that we've arrived because someone called 911. He nods and finishes his cigarette, then crushes it out. “Yeah, all right,” he says. “Y'all follow me.”

A few seconds later, we're in the dayroom. Hundreds of men sleeping in chairs, playing cards, talking to themselves. Some spend their days arguing, others—feverish sentries—stand guard over their bags. The careless few will have their prescription drugs stolen by the sharks who prey on the weak. The lighting is dim, and everything's made of crumbling concrete. The air is heavy with stink and activity. We can hardly see to pick our way through.

Every few feet someone yells, “Here go your patient!” to the
delight of his friends. Others shuffle up alongside us, ghosts in the musty air, and ask about boils, cuts, abscessed teeth, gangrenous fingers. We push on into the dark, past the yelling, laughing, cussing, and horrible tubercular coughing. Past the makeshift altar where a chubby preacher shouts over the noise: “And you must say unto Him, Lord Jesus, I give myself over to You, for Thou art King!”

We do a quick sweep of the dayroom, the bunk room, and the showers. Enforcement has a radio in his hand, and he's talking into it, but whoever's on the other end has no better idea where our patient is than he does. Finally, he stops and says, “Guess he's in the basement, then.”

Lucky us.

And so we descend, step by step, into the black nothing. We weave through halls stinking of mold and filthy bodies, boots sticking to the floor with each step, telling ourselves, as if we need reminding, that this is
not
how we wanted to start the day. On the stairwell, weighed down with forty or fifty pounds of equipment, we pass a ghost—bone-thin and wearing ragged clothes—who shakes his head and says, “Motherfucker don't look good at all.” Anticipation is usually the most dramatic part of a call, but sometimes when we get there—especially when our escape route is this treacherous, the onlookers this curious—the moment lives up to its billing. Like today. Our patient is sprawled on the basement floor, violently convulsing. He's surrounded by a crowd of gawkers and medical theorizers:
I seen that shit before. That shit right there AIDS
.