A Thousand Naked Strangers (24 page)

Initially, the growth was suburban, but then came the Olympics and a nationwide resurgence in urban development. It became fashionable to live in the city, and neighborhoods were gentrified and rebuilt. Thousands upon thousands of condo units went up. Home values shot up the way they did everywhere, and people overpaid by a mile for every square foot of city living.

And now the market has crashed. People are losing their jobs and losing their houses, and all the foreclosures are leaving brand-new multi-story condos either empty or half-filled with renters. The people who remain, the ones who bought at overinflated prices and can't get out from under the debt, stay until the bitter end. They pawn their furniture and wait for the lights to be turned out. Maybe they were raised soft and aren't prepared for hard times or have too much pride to work a low-paying job. One day the phone rings and it isn't a friend or even a bill collector but the bank. “We're taking the house,” they say. “The Fulton County marshals will be there in the morning to serve the eviction notice. Please be dressed.”

Unprepared for a life without comforts—unable to let go, hit bottom, and rebuild—they call 911 and say they're considering suicide. Death threat before dishonor.

The first of these runs I make takes me to the eleventh floor of a sparkling-new—and eerily empty—high-rise in the heart of midtown. It's been a long week, a long month, and there's no end in sight. We get off the elevator at the eleventh floor
and walk down the silent hall and into an empty condo. It isn't just empty but barren. There's no furniture, no pictures, no dishes, nothing except a TV mounted on the wall. The cable has been disconnected and the cord hangs limp, a three-and-a-half-foot coaxial reminder of everything that no longer is. Our patient leans against the island, absently shuffling through a stack of letters explaining why the power or water or electricity was cut. There's a summons to appear in court on charges of check fraud. Faced with piling bills and an empty bank account, she started writing bad checks for groceries and let a tough situation go criminal. There's a cell phone on the counter, sitting in a pink cover dotted with rhinestones, the lone hint of a better, more decadent time in this otherwise white and solitary place. The phone's on speaker, and her father, back in Florida, details the situation to a cop who got here a few minutes before we did.

After her eviction notice arrived, our patient called 911 and said she was going to swallow all the Tylenol she could find and wait out the end. She went to the bathroom, opened the bottle, and tipped it over her mouth. Nothing came out. It was gone, just like everything else. Now she says she's changed her mind and wants to stay home, but once you say the word
suicide,
suggest it, even hint at it, you're going. There's no backing away, and this is what the cop is telling her father. When I tell our patient to gather up her belongings, her lips curl into a smile. There's nothing left except the summons. I pick it up, stuff it ceremoniously back in its envelope, and slip it in her coat pocket. She leaves her apartment without a fight.

The calls continue like this, one after another, as the bills stack up and people weigh their narrowing options. It gets to
the point that every time I see a foreclosure notice, I wonder what's going on inside and whether the people living there have resolved to tough it out and rebuild or if they, too, will be carted off in the back of an ambulance.

Not everyone merely threatens suicide.

There's a man who sits behind his closed door with a pistol. When the marshals arrive to evict him, he cocks the hammer, swallows the gun, and pulls the trigger. There's a woman who shoots herself in Piedmont Park whose body is found the next morning by joggers. One woman drops a month's worth of medicine—dozens of giant horse pills popped loose from blister packs—into a blender. She turns it into a slurry and downs the whole thing. I don't know what kind of death she had, but when we arrive, she's blue and bloated on the couch, a long, angry suicide note at her side. Then there's the teenager who hangs himself from a tree in his front yard. His dangling body is so eerie and grotesque—a horror film at the break of dawn—that none of us thinks to knock on the door until his startled grandfather wanders out to stand beside us.

Some people try suicide and fail. Some fake suicide and fail at that, too. This last kind, the unconvincing fakers, we find alive, angry, flopped out on the floor in their own approximation of a death pose.

•  •  •

It's raining when we pull up to the house—a split-level ranch built in the seventies as part of an ambitious in-town development that, long ago, lost even the pretense of promise. The whole area has been left to whoever will claim it, in this case a family of five unruly girls and their aging and eternally put-out
grandmother. The front steps are cracked, the railing has rusted and been bent out of shape, and the yard is nothing but a bowl of wet clay. The driveway is hidden beneath three abandoned cars waiting patiently for help that will never come. I pull up my jacket hood as I step out into the rain. A pack of young girls—frantic and beyond consolation—scrambles down the steps, screaming that their sister has killed herself.

I nod. “Where is she?”

They point toward a set of narrow and unlit stairs. An old woman meets us at the bottom; unlike everyone else in the house, she's calm. My partner and I wait, in this very small hallway, for this very old woman to speak. After a few seconds, she spits a stream of tobacco juice into a plastic cup and opens a bedroom door. Inside there's nothing but dirty laundry and old take-out boxes, never vacuumed carpets, the Sheetrock marinated in decades of mildew and smudged brown by dirty hands. At the far end of the room, our patient is flopped out on a sheetless queen-sized bed. There are roaches everywhere. The old woman shoots out another stream of tobacco juice and says our patient, motionless on the bed, has gone and killed herself again.

“Again?”

“Yup.”

My partner picks his way over and takes a look. I turn to the old woman, but before I can say a word, she sums up our patient's life as a series of bad decisions punctuated by the occasional suicide. By now my partner has assessed our patient and found her to be alive and merely faking death. Our attention can be turned to the tricky art of raising the dead.

There are a number of ways to do this, none medical. Sometimes I use shame. Perhaps the patient, feeling underappreciated,
has gone limp during Easter Mass, slithered out of her pew and died, rather auspiciously, under Jesus's watchful eye. Sometimes just mentioning how much stress this has placed on Nana's aging heart will bring her back. Other times I'll flick the eyelids or squeeze the fingertips between a pen and my thumb. If the faker is truly hard-core, I'll slide an airway device into the right nostril, which tends to wake her in dramatic fashion—think Uma Thurman in
Pulp Fiction.

Before I can decide, the old woman shoots a stream of tobacco juice through her front teeth. “There's usually a suicide note,” she says.

Well, I'll be damned. I scan the dresser, the nightstand, the floor. No note. I step back and take a good look at the patient, who's on the bed, eyes closed, mouth open. Her left arm extends at an unnatural angle, pointing toward a shelf. Sure enough, that's where I find the note.

I grab it and crouch beneath the one working light and start reading. It's a train wreck. Bad penmanship, misspellings, run-on sentences, non-sentences—the whole thing is an unintentional non sequitur. Finally, we reach the how. In bold script accented by a large arrow pointing toward the shelf, the note reads,
And so I swallowed these bullets and them pills
.

I scramble across the bed and find four Tylenols and three .22-caliber bullets. It should be mentioned that a .22 doesn't shoot large bullets. We aren't talking shotgun shells. The dreaded .22 fires a bullet the size of the little red eraser on the end of a pencil. Even with the shell casing, it's smaller than a cashew. The old woman laughs.

But there's real work at hand now. Tylenol seems like a very innocent drug, so it's a common choice for young girls looking
to punish a boyfriend or a parent.
I'll just take a few of these,
the girl says to herself as she swallows twenty Tylenols,
and then they'll be sorry
. And someone
will
be sorry, all right. Too much Tylenol kills the liver. Slowly. And painfully. The ones lucky enough to be found in time can look forward to a rather painful and brutal process called a stomach lavage. The others can look forward to a slow and unnecessary death.

My partner dumps the contents of the bottle on the bed. The pill count printed on the label is twenty-five, and we find eighteen. Subtract the four removed for demonstrative purposes and our patient has taken a total of three tablets. Now we all laugh.

Still our patient feigns death. I read on. More finger-pointing, accompanied by more snickering from the old lady. At the bottom, our patient has signed her name—illegibly—and has been courteous enough to include a P.S. This addendum piques my curiosity. What kind of insight is so important that it has to be included in the suicide note but is trivial enough to be excluded from the main text? I read it aloud. “ ‘Nook Nook will always be in my heart.' ” I lower the note. “Who the hell is Nook Nook?”

The old woman says, “Nook Nook was a real jackass. Used to live down the street.”

I ask how he passed, and she says he didn't. He moved to Charlotte.

There you have it. The wisdom of our age knows no bounds. I toss the note and crawl across the bed. I reach out, lift the dead woman's wig, and tell her we've had enough, that you can't die from swallowing bullets or taking three Tylenols. I say her family's concerned and would be delighted to hear that she's fine. “The game is up. You're alive and we all know it. Open your eyes.”

And she does.

I
'm not sure what day it is, what month, what year. Though I'm not happy now, I know I was once, that I had a good partner. We were friends and I even liked the job. I was good at it. I know all this only because I still feel the absence. I've been adrift so long that someone pulls me aside in Grady and asks with sincerity: “What the hell's happened to you? You don't look good. Are you okay?”

No. I'm angry and miserable and I almost don't even care. I'm burned out.

The late nights and early mornings. The misery of working through the sticky swelter of a Georgia summer and the icy chill of a wet Southern winter. Working weekdays and weekends, the indescribably painful hours spent staring at a windshield when you know everyone you love is at home celebrating Christmas. Grumpy nurses, arrogant doctors, shitty partners—oh, the
parade
of shitty partners—and the sharp smell of urine cleaned with bleach.

And all this before the patients.

The sick ones who will die because of a mistake you made or, more often, because it was their time to go and your time to watch. The unsick ones who whine and complain and call 911
for a toothache or a headache or a cut on the finger, knowing full well the bus driver demands payment up front while the ambulance will send a bill they can ignore.

Like a recurring dream, every working day holds the same frustrations, and the working days never change, they just stretch out for all eternity. For months I've wondered how it will end. Maybe I'll reach my limit and quit. Maybe, like so many others, I'll ruin my back carrying an enormous woman down stairs she had no business climbing in the first place.

I'm tired of the patients, tired of the job, tired of everything. I float from partner to partner for a year, and then relief. A new partner. A good one who could bring me back from the brink, but he's in medic school and quickly upgrades, sending me back into the rotation. Before the start of every shift, I drive to work hoping I'll get someone good, but just before I get to Grady, as I'm pulling off the highway and into the city, my stomach drops and the nausea sets in because I know I won't. I know I'll get someone who hates the job or hates the patients or loves it all but isn't competent. Every day it's partner roulette. I show up praying the barrel will spin to an empty chamber, but I always draw the live round.

It goes like this forever.

All that anger and frustration is bubbling to the surface. I'm no longer merely burned out. Tonight I've drifted over the double-yellow line separating burnouts from Killers. I'm standing in a high-rise, peering through the blue haze of a two-decade-old pack-a-day habit, watching a man slowly gasp, pitch forward, and slump to the floor. The call came out for a patient complaining of a sudden onset of confusion. We drove over, parked out front, and walked in. His apartment was on the top
floor, fourteen stories up, so we should've brought everything. But this building, even this apartment, is the origin of a thousand bullshit calls. I've been here too many times to count, and it's never,
never,
what they say it is. Except tonight. And now I'm standing here empty-handed, fourteen stories and a long elevator ride from my ambulance, from my equipment. And the patient is dying.

When we walked in, he was sitting up. He looked at us, eyebrows raised, and nodded. Before I could say a word, he was out of his chair and facedown on the floor.

“Grab him! Grab him!”

My partner is slow-moving, the kind of guy who never recognizes a situation has gone to hell and it's time to hustle. I drop to my knees and check for a pulse. The man has one, but he's not breathing. I grab the jump bag, yank out the BVM, and give him two quick puffs of room air—the oxygen tank is sitting happily outside in our ambulance. We grab him by the wrists and ankles and toss him on the stretcher. I do another quick check for a pulse and, finding one, start pushing him toward the door.