A Thousand Naked Strangers (19 page)

Marty nudges me. “Told you he wasn't dead.”

The bystanders remain by our side. Half-drugged and quite possibly insane, they're down here for any number of reasons.
Boredom and curiosity, for starters. There's also a lunatic fringe convinced they can help, as well as a strange minority pushed to the edge of tears for a man they don't know.

We don't put down our gear because, as with our shoes, it'll stick to the floor. Instead, we treat our patient holding the weight of everything we own, like Atlas. I grab a needle, clench it between my teeth like a pirate, reach into the drug bag, grab our anti-seizure meds, and plunge the needle into the vial. I push in one CC of air, then watch the bubbles ride to the top and draw out a CC of seizure-stopping benzodiazepine. Next I purge the air from the syringe, flick the excess off the needle, and jab it into the patient's leg. I depress the plunger and wait. It's not working. The patient keeps on seizing. The onlookers, with all their medical knowledge, get antsy. They want results, they want a cure. They haven't started making demands and taking action, but they will if— Wait. His convulsions stop. A calm settles over the men in the filthy basement. Then, in reverent tones, a voice: “Damn. That right there is some heavy shit. Heavy fucking shit.”

Right about now is when people make assumptions. Like the assumption that this guy, gurgling and seizing in the basement of a homeless shelter, probably doesn't take his medicine. Or that even if he does, he probably drinks heavily, which negates the effects of his meds. Either way, it's safe to assume that he's another bum letting his life slip through his fingers. But too often assumptions are wrong. While I'm checking vitals, Marty does a quick sweep for injuries. Is he bleeding or broken or injured in some way that suggests he didn't come down here and seize but maybe fell or was thrown down the stairs? Marty is looking for something, anything, to prove that what's going on perhaps
isn't as it appears. He runs his hand beneath the man's head and comes up with a bloody glove. We roll him and Marty finds the laceration—a big fat set of pursed lips on the back of his head. Marty presses on them, and the hard skull beneath gives way. It's been fractured, which means his brain is bleeding, and that's probably why he was seizing and will probably start seizing again. Why he might still die. Time to hurry.

We need help carrying him out, but we're in the basement of a large brick building. No radio reception. No one to call. We're on our own. For five minutes we struggle to get the man immobilized, to suction out his mouth, to get him on oxygen, and painfully, to get him up the stairs. Halfway up, he starts seizing again and needs more medicine.

Upstairs we have light, but things don't get any easier. The crowd closes in. They push and yell, some trying to clear a path, others intentionally stopping progress. They scream at each other, at us. Some ignore the man and ask what we can do for a stomachache. The preacher fights his way through the crowd, steps in front of us, and lays a hand on the man's chest. The patient begins to convulse again. “This man needs prayer,” the preacher says.

I've had enough, and I ram the stretcher into the preacher's gut. “I already prayed,” I tell him, “and God told me to get his ass to the hospital.”

With that, we're gone.

P
eople who know us, who've heard these stories and laughed with us and at us—people who've worried over us—wonder what our days look like. They try to imagine the two of us charging through Atlanta, seeking out the best of the worst. “It's how we've always told it,” I say. “It's exactly the way you think it is.”

•  •  •

Even when you work nights, every day is the same. An ambulance is a conveyor belt, emergency medicine a factory. Hearts, kidneys, lungs, legs—the raw materials of a functioning human—pass down the assembly line. Each is broken and will be fixed. Quickly, though. More are coming. The gears turn, the furnace glows. Smoke puffs into the air.

Salvation through repetition. This I can do because I have done it before—it's half prayer, half truth, a whisper in a hurricane of self-doubt. If the possibility of saving a life comes down to routine, to muscle memory, then every shift must begin the same way. I pack a lunch, shower, and slip into my uniform. Atlanta is beyond hot, it's jungle-humid. Rain is always falling or threatening to fall or maybe just fell, so the leaves hang fat from the trees and clouds of steam rise up from the streets. The
starched collar, the heavy pants, the black boots—I'll sweat all night.

As I hop in the car and leave the neighborhood, I wave to people coming home from work. It's always then, as I'm leaving, that my mind wanders off to the same ghost story. What would happen if someone came to the door, our door? Would the explosion of barking dogs scare them away, would the lock hold, and what about the door itself? Did my wife remember to charge her cell phone, and is it sitting next to her, close enough that she can grab it and call for help as someone kicks in the door, because no, the door won't hold. Not with someone kicking it. They never do. And this man, now that he's in my house, would he stay downstairs, would he steal the TV and the computer, the camera, and then disappear into the night, or would he go upstairs? Is the alarm set, and how fast will the police respond? What about the gun? It's up there, loaded and ready, a shock and awe in miniature that Sabrina and I are licensed to carry but not conceal. I feel better knowing it's there, but in the hysteria and panic that a home invasion surely must be, will Sabrina have the presence of mind to cock it and aim it—to shoot someone? What if she misses? Will there be time for another round, or will that be it? And if that's it, if things end badly, will I ever be able to work this job again? Or will I be too bitter, too angry, too suspicious that the perpetrator—certainly uncaught, because nobody gets caught—is sitting right there, across from me, wincing in pain as I splint his broken arm?

I think this every night, but only as I leave, and each time, as my car pulls out of the neighborhood, I swear I'll stop working nights. But I never do.

The drive is twenty minutes of peace. I listen to a Fresh Air
podcast: Terry Gross's calming voice is worlds away from Grady. I'm somewhere else entirely until I arrive. I pull into the parking deck and walk past the hospital. Patients and family members mill around, and so do the homeless, looking for money or drugs, looking for a way to get back inside and off the street before the sun sets. Inside the EMS area, the day-shift crews sit around talking. One by one the night crews trickle in, and for a brief moment we mingle, night and day, joking and laughing, talking shit, taking shit. We night-shifters joke about their day because it's over, but they never joke about ours because it hasn't yet begun. That's just a rule, simple as that. You can say I suck and that I wouldn't have been able to handle your shit-kicker, but to say you hope I catch one, no. You'd never do that. Not more than once, anyway. After ten minutes of shit talk, the day-shifters go home and we go to work, and after everything that's been said, they still turn to us, look us in the eye, and say, “Be safe,” and when they say it, they mean it.
Be safe.

I clock in and start my prep ritual. I dump my gear by the back door of the ambulance and slip on a pair of gloves, grab a rag and a bottle of disinfectant, and remove all traces of the previous inhabitants. Nothing is spared: the seats, the cabinets, the parts of the stretcher that the patient touches, the parts that only I touch. I clean the door handles and the silver bar mounted on the ceiling that runs the length of the patient compartment, because everyone reaches up and steadies himself on it, taking hold with a bloody and infected hand.

Then I go through the equipment, one piece at a time, to see that it's there and ready to be used. More than that, really, because even if it's there, it needs to be there in the way I want it to be there. Everyone has his own way of running calls, of managing
the unmanageable, a sort of personal arithmetic, and it's this style that dictates how I set up the ambulance. There are people who can't run a call without everything set up just so. I am not one of those people, but I'm close. Once the ambulance is clean, I slip a key into the ignition. The diesel engine rattles to life.

Once Marty arrives, he snaps a battery in the radio and keys up to go in-service. It's five in the afternoon, so the second we appear on the dispatcher's screen, we catch a call. Usually it's something close. Unless the bottom has dropped out and there are no ambulances anywhere—which is to say there are ambulances everywhere—and then we will be sent off to some far corner of the city. Sometimes it's for a toothache that dispatch couldn't hold on to anymore. Sometimes it's a real-life dead person who's been waiting and waiting, and now it takes us twenty minutes to get there.

But not today. Today when we go in-service, there are four available ambulances out of a possible twenty-five, so the call we catch is downtown. It's an alcoholic who made it all the way to the door of the liquor store, shaking and trembling, before his disease said “Fuck it,” and now he's in full-blown withdrawal and seizing on the sidewalk. A fish plucked from the water, left flopping on the ground. It's just a short drive, barely around the corner, so we won't have much time to shake off the rust and slip back into the subtle but constant vigilance born of waiting for the Big One.

When we get out, the sun is blazing. My feet melt inside my big black boots. We give the alcoholic Valium, but he keeps on seizing, never stops seizing. We drop him off at the hospital and nothing has changed, except the nurse has asked Marty out, so at least there's that.

Before we even clear Grady, our radio is chirping. Dispatch has something for us. “It's right out front,” she says. “In the bus stop.”

We ask what's going on, but she's dodgy and uncertain. All she knows is that the scene is safe. “Just drive around front and have a look.”

We find him at a bus stop, waiting. Not for us, but waiting. Waiting to die or for all this to pass. Maybe he's just waiting for his bus, it's hard to say; he isn't much for conversation. I stop about two feet from him and lean against the wall. Marty stays a good ten feet behind me, close enough to know he doesn't want to get any closer. It's hard to blame him. The guy is sitting with his legs crossed, casual as can be, while maggots eat his face.

They've made off with nearly the entire left side, from his nose all the way to his ear, and from his eyebrow down to his jawline. All that skin, all that rotten and rotting flesh, is being consumed—while we watch, while he sits quietly on the bench. There are hundreds of maggots, all jockeying for position, and every few seconds a maggot slips off the cliff edge of his face and tumbles through the air and onto the pavement below. I've never seen anything like it.

From the safety of his observation post, Marty asks what's going on. The man reaches up and presses the back of his left hand into his eye, forcing out a stream of blood and furious white larvae. “Skin cancer,” he says as he wipes his hand on his shirt. He has melanoma and it got infected, but he's tired of the doctors and the nurses and the tests, all of it, and decided to leave. So he walked out and spent the night in the bushes across the street from Grady, where a swarm of flies landed and planted all the babies that have made such short work of his
face. Another squeeze of the eye, another trickle of blood, more angry maggots. Marty backs up.

“You gotta get up,” I say. “You have to come inside.”

“Why?”

“Because you have maggots on your face. Because they're eating you, literally. As we speak, they're devouring you. I think your eye is gone, and who knows what's next, so come on, get up. Please.”

He reaches up again with his left hand, and somewhere behind me, Marty threatens to pass out. The man is unmoved. He's done with hospitals and doctors and procedures. And though it might not be done with him, he's done with cancer. He recrosses his legs, rubs his eye. “I'm not going back in there,” he says. “I don't want to, and I don't have to.”

A bus pulls up. Passengers get on, passengers get off. Atlanta's quotidian life marches on.

We call a doctor. He brings a wheelchair, and from behind it he talks to this man who last night was his patient but now is being eaten by bugs. The doctor speaks in the sweet voice of final authority; he is the man who can, with a shrug, send our patient back to the bushes to be eaten alive. It works. The patient stands and plops down in the wheelchair. I grab the handles and push. Marty trails, careful not to step on any of the maggots, all of them tiny squiggling urns, fat with the remains of a man not yet dead.

•  •  •

That was an intense start to the day, but it's just the start. We've been here two hours. Once we clear Grady, we're sent to a post. We drive to a place where we can stare through the windshield and watch the world pass by. All the while, the radio chatters, it
never stops chattering—the dispatch radio is like a thirteen-year-old girl at a sleepover. Tonight we're lucky; everyone else is getting the calls. Where that leaves us is coverage. The ambulance from Simpson Road catches a call, so we go to Simpson Road. The ambulance downtown catches a call, so we go downtown. We shuffle from post to post for a couple of hours, and slowly, almost accidentally, rush hour is over. The sun dips below the trees. The world recharges, prepares to repurpose itself. So we get a chance to eat dinner, listen to a Braves game. Marty screams at the radio. “Uggla? Again? Fucking Uggla.”

•  •  •

It's ten o'clock and the party's over. The city is refilled and calls are picking up. We catch one and get sucked back into the machine—it'll be two or three before we break free.

They start out as medical calls, chest pain and abdominal pain, dizziness, nausea, seizures. Maybe it's a child with a roach in her ear, which we'll coax out with a flashlight and some saline. None of these are serious, and all of them go to Grady. One after another after another until the triage nurses are cursing and begging us not to come back. Around eleven-thirty the drunks start to call. Or rather, the people with the drunks start to call. People waiting to get into clubs who can't keep their mouth shut, so someone else shuts it for them. Drunks behind the wheel who drifted right, overcorrected, and rolled in the middle of the street. Rag dolls with ignition keys. They get out and are wandering, scared but unharmed, when we arrive. Some of the drunks will be pissed to see us; some won't even notice. A few of the women will be amorous, all sly smiles, fingernails brushing my thigh as they reach for my dick and smile. “Yeah, I'ma get me some of that.”