A Thousand Naked Strangers (21 page)

He's waiting. Hoping all the tax dollars spent to train, equip, and pay me will pay off in the form of a story he can tell his friends later tonight. Who knows, maybe if it's good enough, he'll keep it around awhile, use it to drive home his point that dealing with the public is simultaneously enlightening, enthralling, and infuriating and that, as such, retail truly is the tip of the psychoanalytical spear. The people behind me are waiting for a
good story, too, and why not. They're out buying plungers on a Tuesday morning. Anything is better than this.

The question doesn't offend me. Some of my coworkers, if you were to ask them this question, they'd hit you. Others would ignore you. Some would make a big show of explaining why such a question is not merely impolite but flat-out offensive. Me, I don't mind. Though, frankly, it is a strange thing to ask—I mean, do you really want to hear about the child born with fetal alcohol syndrome whose stepfather burned him every day with cigarettes? I wouldn't. There are some brutal motherfuckers out there, why can't we just leave it at that?

But we can't. People ask, and I guess it's because they've never had reason to contemplate the question, so it's not until they begin to hear the answer that they realize how strange a door they've opened. Some of them, before I get going, get squeamish and cut me off. Others lose interest and change the subject, asking me something else while I'm midsentence and in full swing. A small minority walk away, unimpressed. This final group has watched too much TV and they're expecting more—the half-cooked remains of a baby left in the microwave—and anything less is pedestrian. Sometimes they interrupt with their own horror story, followed always by “I bet you ain't never seen nothing like that.” To which I say, “A motherfucker who's not only rude but full of shit? No, I've seen plenty of them.”

So yeah, I answer the question. It's just that I do it my own way. This person, whom I don't even know, has entered uninvited into my world, so he'll get what I feel like giving him, which is never the worst thing I've seen. I was there for the cigarette story, I don't need to retell it. What I give is something I feel like talking about, something I found strange or funny
or interesting. Something that, when I walked away, left me wondering how many truly crazy people are out there. Millions, evidently. Who knows, maybe we're all crazy.

My story has changed a few times through the years, but the one constant is that it's long. You wanna know something, get at the heart of it, you need to sink way down deep. That means details. That means time spent listening, letting it wash over you. Today, for this clerk, it means hearing about Charles.

•  •  •

Charles sat across from me as casually as if we were out for a drink. Right leg crossed over left, hands resting comfortably on the arms of his chair. His face was marked with a fine mist of blood, remnants of the moment his knife sliced through his wife's jugular vein. But it wasn't the blood that made me uptight, or that the crime was so recent, his victim was still warm. It wasn't even the eerie calm of his face. No, what got me were his eyes. Charles had piercing, probing eyes, the kind that sear your skin. The kind of eyes, perhaps, that wouldn't blink as he brutally murdered you. They were a terrifying blue—a striking feature in white people, absolutely mesmerizing in a light-skinned black man. And he just kept staring at me.

Charles and I were in the cramped fourth-floor offices of Atlanta's homicide unit. In an interrogation room, which is nothing more than four walls of battered Sheetrock with a little table and a handful of chairs. He was cuffed and in an orange jumpsuit. His own clothes—the ones soaked with his wife's blood—were stuffed in a paper grocery bag crumpled at his feet.

After a few silent moments, he smiled. “All the angels have been killed,” he said. “Did you know that?”

The reason I was there—called out to the homicide offices to sit across from a man who had just stabbed his wife—was because of a detail you can't invent. I have come to believe that truth is stranger than fiction due to the details. Little things our sane and rational mind is unable to dream up. Like, for instance, that stabbing someone is hard work. That no matter how strong you are or how enraged, even deranged, you are, it takes a lot of force to stick a knife into someone's body. Even then, a knife tends to stop when it hits something solid. A rib, for instance. Or a collarbone.

In Charles's fury, he stabbed his wife more than forty times. After two or three slices, the blood, now splattered across his face and soaking through his clothes, really began to flow. That made the knife slick enough that when he struck bone, it slipped. Still he kept stabbing. His fingers were deeply lacerated. And so there I was with a handful of bandages, staring into the blood-splattered face of a man who'd just slaughtered his wife.

“You want me to bandage those fingers for you?”

Charles barely glanced at his hands. “And the angels,” he said. “They all had blue eyes.”

I set the bandages down. Took a seat across from Charles. “Blue eyes, huh?”

He nodded. “Yup. John Kennedy, November 22, 1963. Robert Kennedy, June 5, 1968. William McKinley, September 6, 1901. Abraham Lincoln, April 15, 1865. John Lennon, December 8, 1980.” He looked down at his hands. “Jesus Christ.”

“I don't think Christ had blue eyes.”

He smiled at me. Then his face turned serious. “She used to look at me, stare at me,” he said. “At my eyes.”

“Who?”

“The victim.” He grunted as he said it, and a strange expression claimed his face. It was the first time he had referred to his wife as the “victim,” and it affected him. The look wasn't remorse or hate but surprise. As though he'd been waiting years for her to assume that title, and at last she'd achieved it. “You can wrap my hands now.”

It's not every day a killer leans back in his chair so you can stand over him and bandage the wounds he received while disemboweling his screaming wife. My hands shook a bit as I grabbed the gauze and walked around the table. He looked into my face, and I tried with all my strength not to stare at his eyes. As I bandaged his hands, covered in his blood, her blood, the smell filling the room, all I could think was:
I'm next. He's gonna catch me looking. He's gonna think about the Kennedys and Lincoln and Lennon. He's gonna think about Jesus. And he's gonna strangle me.

I wondered how long it would take a cop to hear me gurgling in the interrogation room. I wondered how long it would take Charles to kill me. I wondered why the cops had left me in here alone for so long. Maybe the cops were wondering that, too, because as soon as I was done, a detective walked in. Charles looked over, nodded, and said, “I know you.”

And he did. As he played absentmindedly with the bandages, Charles told the cop he recognized him from TV. He remembered his name. The cop, shocked, looked at me, then back to Charles. As it turned out, Charles had mistaken the detective for his father, who'd also been a cop. But Charles was right about having seen him on TV—the detective's father had been the APD spokesman back in the early eighties, when the infamous Atlanta Child Murders were national news. He'd long
since retired, and his son, then only a teenager, had moved up in the ranks and was now the homicide detective standing before us. That Charles had recognized the man from news footage of his father that hadn't aired in over twenty years was a little disturbing.

Would Charles remember me? Would my child someday bump into this man when Charles was old and infirm and paroled because he was no longer considered a threat? Would my child, not knowing his very real and dangerous connection with this man, stare unknowingly into those hypnotic blue eyes and rekindle Charles's long-dormant homicidal delusions?

Probably not. Probably Charles would die in prison and none of us would ever see him again.

Then again, maybe not.

•  •  •

“Anyway, how much do I owe you for the plunger?”

The clerk sniffs as he snaps back to reality. He punches a few buttons, and the price pops up on the screen. He swipes my AmEx. I grab the plunger and head for the door. As I'm leaving, I hear a woman in line say, “Those people have the hardest job.”

The clerk has gathered his senses and says, “That's nothing. This one time . . .”

I
've
been a medic a little over a year. That conversation I had with Chris the day before I took my medic exam—the one when he said I wouldn't kill anyone—seems so long ago. I'm no longer new and untested, no longer scared. I've run enough calls that I can tell the difference between those who think they're dying and those who really are. More important, I know how to handle each. Marty, too, has come a long way, and the two of us have been welcomed into the circle. We aren't merely faces without names. We're Grady medics. And it's now—as we're able to breathe easy, as we're basking in the knowledge that we won't kill anybody—that we manage to do just that.

•  •  •

The call, when it comes, is for a thirty-six-year-old with chest pain. We walk in casually, almost cavalier, and find a guy sweating in an armchair. He's out of breath, nauseated, dizzy, and weak, with the unshakable sense that something bad, something horrible, is about to happen. He is, at this moment, the palest black man on the planet. It doesn't look good. I ask what he's been doing, and he says in between gasps, “Smoking crack.”

“How much?”

“Hundred dollars.”

I'm not sure how much crack a hundred dollars buys, but if a single rock costs a few bucks, a hundred probably buys a lot. He's young to be having a heart attack, and while we'd be skeptical normally, the crack changes all that. I ask where his pain is, and he says it started as back pain, then slowly burrowed through to his chest and is now trying to eat its way out of his stomach. Think
Aliens
. Think a man about to die.

“You need to come with us.”

“Oh, I ain't going to no hospital,” he says. Then, taking a deep breath, he asks, “Can't you just give me something right here?”

We continue to badger him. Tell him he's having a heart attack and there's nothing we can do, that he needs to go to the hospital, because if he stays here, he's going to die. His father sits on the couch, unimpressed with the whole situation. The argument continues—the patient won't go, we won't leave him, his father couldn't give a damn—until the patient relents.

“Yeah, I'll go,” he says, “but not on that thing.” He waves a hand at our stretcher. “I'm a soldier. I'll walk.”

His father laughs. Marty laughs.

“Dude, if you wanna walk, walk. I don't care.”

We give him some aspirin to chew and walk him out. We're talking away, mostly to each other but to the patient as well. And why not? We're feeling pretty good about ourselves: We did our job and convinced a stubborn man to seek help. We're not paying close enough attention, and by the time we reach the ambulance, our patient is gasping. However bad he looked before, he looks infinitely worse now. It's clear we never should've let him walk. With our help he climbs into the ambulance, plops
down on the stretcher, and dies. I'm looking at him, so I see it—he tenses, gurgles, then goes limp. Marty has his head turned, but he hears it. He's standing over the patient. He looks down, then up at me. “Did he just die?”

“I believe so.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Maybe we shouldn't have let him walk.”

“Oh, fuck.”

We're stunned and just stare, which, it turns out, is no way to revive even the recently deceased. Finally, a thought passes between us, vague and slow-moving, a sort of lo-fi telepathy like rope strung between our tin-can brains—we should go ahead and do something. Marty drops the head of the stretcher, I rip off the patient's shirt. Marty fires up the cardiac monitor, presses the paddles to the man's chest. I jump back an instant before he presses the shock button and narrowly avoid being shocked.
POP!
We turn to the monitor and wait. Wait to see if the shock worked, if the guy's going to spring back to life, if he's permanently or just temporarily dead. Thankfully, we see it—the tracing of a heart in distress but beating. Beat. Beat. Beat. I grab his wrist and the pulse is there. Blood is pumping.

What we should be feeling right now is relief. Some things are clear-cut, and anyone in as much distress as our patient was when we happily walked him outside never should have been allowed to walk. Once we convinced him to go, we should've taken a few extra seconds to convince him to ride. But for us, that's an afterthought. Less than that. It's a non-thought. I don't remember walking anybody. What I remember is a man dying and then, quickly and expertly, the two of us bringing him back
to life. What I feel is pride. We're all smiles. I ask Marty if he wants me to call for fire, get him some help for the ride in, but he shakes his head. “Fuck fire,” Marty says. “We saved him once. We can do it twice. Let's just go.”

When I step out of the ambulance, his father is waiting, anxious. I tell him his son died, but now he's alive. We brought him back from the dead.

He nods. “Yeah, okay. Look, he's got cigarettes in his pocket,” he says, poking his head through the door. “Can you grab 'em?”

“Sir, your son just died. We saved him, but he could die again. We need to hurry. To the hospital.”

“But they're right there in his coat pocket.”

Our actions are supposed to engender relief or thankfulness. I won't go so far as to say I'm expecting adulation, but hell, maybe I am. Instead, I get a man looking for cigarettes. I shut the door and walk away.

By the time we get to the ER, the patient is talking. He looks a little surprised, his eyes wild from crack and having been dead. He's asking to leave, but the doctors aren't listening. As they wheel him out of the ER and toward the cath lab, the cardiologist tells him to thank us.“These guys saved your life,” she says.