Holding Still for as Long as Possible (15 page)

Diane and I had been temped in together again, and were starting to get into a rhythm. It was the last day of our C-shift, lovingly referred to as
the shaft.
Five 12-hour days in a row, and this particular rotation was all night shifts.

I'm not kidding when I say we hadn't had a single life-or-death emergency that entire week. In fact, we'd had repeated calls from a woman who liked to use us as a taxi service no matter how many times we explained what 911 is for. She would just complain that she hurt “all over” but that she never got any help from the
ER
docs. They would send her home, and she'd call again the next day. It made me want to bang my head against the dashboard. Plus, this was the beginning of the Christmas season, so psych calls were up. Diane talked about her Christmas vacation plans, and I told her I was bummed about having to work. But really, I was relieved. Working over Christmas meant I didn't have to go to Amy's family party and pretend things were totally fine between us. The pressure of the holiday was starting to get to me.

We'd taken a call from someone who'd broken a nail and passed out. We'd taken calls to deal with a few drunks. And then there'd been a guy who got punched in the face at the Brunswick House on Bloor Street and had fallen down. The bartender had called us, which made things difficult. When injured people called us themselves, they wanted us there. When other people stepped in, we were like the meddling much-resented presence of evil authority.

Let me tell you, most guys who get punched in the face deserve it. I would say maybe eighty percent of them fully deserve what's coming to them. Maybe the other ten percent could've used a good tongue lashing instead. This guy was one of those people I wished I could've taken out myself. Every second word out of his mouth was
faggot
and he'd uttered a variety of rotating racial slurs. He smelled like a decomposing liver.

When Diane and I had walked into the pub, which was full of university students, the crowd parted for us. People waved us through, pointing towards the punched guy. If I'd walked through this room wearing a jeans and T-shirt, people might have been hostile, but when I was in uniform it was a whole different story. I'd be lying if I didn't admit this was empowering, especially at first. A power trip.

I told Amy my statistical assumptions re: punched out guys yesterday morning and she said,
No one deserves to be hit, Josh.
She didn't catch that I was commenting on my job, the absurdity of it, the way it sometimes made me hate people. When I dropped in at Roxy's place later and told Billy the same thing, she said, “Yeah, fucking totally. I see what you mean. I totally wanted to punch a guy at work today who made me redo his latte three times before I told him to get a fucking hobby.”

“Have you ever hit anyone?” I asked. I half-expected either answer. I could see Billy just losing it on someone. I could see her as a person who'd had a scrappy childhood — an older-sister type who'd punch a bully in the playground for picking on her younger sibling. I could also picture her as being too aloof to get into it with anyone.

“No,” Billy said. “I actually don't even know how.”

So I taught her some basic moves. She practised on my forearms.

This morning Diane and I were back at the station at 6:00 a.m., and praying for the phone not to ring.
FYI
, it's best not to have an emergency at 6:45 — a.m. or p.m. If you do, you're guaranteed to get some grumpy, exhausted medic.

Of course, at 6:28 we got an Echo. A guy found his uncle not breathing, was doing
CPR
on him. The uncle was seventy years old, and lived a few blocks away in a two-storey apartment above a restaurant on Bloor.

“I just talked to him on the phone twenty minutes ago!” swore the nephew, who looked to be about forty, as he ran up the dank staircase and into a nearly empty apartment. “I came to check on him and make sure he was eating breakfast!”

It was clear by the position of the body that the uncle had been dead for a few hours already. He was lying on the couch, limbs extended like a crab, stiff. The smell was telltale. The apartment was filthy; I thought it was perhaps the perfect visual representation of loneliness. The man owned hardly any objects, so there wasn't much clutter. A line of brownish dirt was smeared around the baseboards, and beyond the smell of death was something else vile. The 10-2s arrived, and then the coroner. There was crying. I think that's what makes me most uncomfortable — family members crying. I know how to talk to them now and not appear uncomfortable, but it's difficult. The nephew continued to insist he'd spoken to the uncle on the phone only twenty minutes earlier.

It was clear that the only thing this man had loved was his cats. I could see and count about fifteen, all grey and white. Eight of them sat on the stairs to the second floor, each in the same upright position, as if a sculptor had made vases in a cat shape. The animals peered at us with huge yellow eyes, their faces betraying concern. As I got closer, a dozen or so kittens, maybe six months old, poked their heads through the upstairs banister, surveying us, one after the other, as if their moves were synchronized.

While one cop talked to the nephew, who slowly sobbed while he spoke, another stood beside me at the window we'd pried open. We looked over Bloor Street as the sun rose, gasping for cleaner air. A flatbed truck piled with Christmas trees was stopped, blocking traffic, trying to rescue a fallen clump of wired-up trees from the road.

“Good he came by, it's always the worst when the cats start snacking on 'em,” the cop said.

A cat jumped up on the windowsill, and rubbed against me. I hoped the cop was joking.

[ 13 ]

Amy

After a few teasing snows that melted right away, the drifts were now ankle-deep and stubborn. I'd never before felt that wintry dread most Canadians speak of, but this year I wanted to tunnel inside warm places and stay there until March.

I was sorting laundry in the basement. Stacks of black, green, and blue. One stack of argyle plaid, a couple of hoodies with pink stars and rockets. To either side of my head hung
EMS
uniform shirts suspended from pipes on plastic hangers. I was ignoring the blinking of my phone, which sat next to me on top of the detergent box.

I folded with so much care, stacking shirts then pants, creating perfect fists of matching socks. I love doing laundry. Maybe because I had a maid growing up, and never had to do it. I find laundry relaxing. It makes me feel accomplished.

I heard the door open and saw Josh standing at the top of the stairs, holding two glasses. He looked like he was rehearsing what he might say.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

He looked at me. The land-line began to ring and he turned.

Above the washing machine was a calendar. I tried to remember the last time Josh and I had had sex. Besides the quickie on the couch a month ago, I noted it was probably the time we both got drunk at a dinner party and afterwards had the laziest sex in the world, as if we had happened to bump into each other while masturbating. We might as well have been in separate rooms.

Yesterday a man at the Whole Foods salad bar caught my eye. He was picking single green beans out of a corn, cabbage, and green bean mix. He had one of those indie-rock near-beards, an old Descendants T-shirt, and faded designer jeans. He passed me the balsamic vinegar and when I said thank-you, he replied, “I'd do anything for the most beautiful woman in the world.”

I blushed. Normally, I would have shrugged, rolled my eyes, had a snappy come-back. But I felt all bones as he kept looking at me. I walked away and pretended to look at cheese, all the while contemplating something else to say to him, imagining doing something impulsive such as suggesting he come down to my car in the parking garage to make out. But when I turned away from the aged cheddars, he was gone.

Now I looked up at the doorway, and Josh was gone. I heard him cackling with laughter on the phone. I leaned against the dryer, and tried to picture having sex with Descendants man. I moved the stacks of carefully folded colours onto the washing machine and perched on top of the warm buzz. This usually did the trick. I imagined taking off the salad-bar man's shirt. Put a girl in the picture, watching us. Nothing. Made Descendants man watch, and put the girl on a motorcycle. Still nothing. I jumped off the dryer, and twisted my ankle upon landing. Hopped on one foot and whipped my head back into one of the many blue shirts, pushed at it with my hand and sent the folded laundry tumbling to the floor.
Fuck. Motherfuck.

Josh clomped heavy-footed down the uneven wooden stairs. “You okay?”

His concern was infuriating. I pulled each blue shirt down, one by one, until there were eight on the cold, dirty, cement floor. I kept my eyes locked on him.

“
I'm fine, Josh. I just wish you would for once actually take your shirts upstairs once they are dry instead of dressing down here in the mornings.”

“Drink?”

“
Your shirts. Pick them up.”

Josh handed me a drink.

I sniffed it. I tried to stand on the twisted ankle. The pain faded. “It's 10 a.m.,” I said.

“I'm on nights. Come upstairs. I think we should talk on the porch.”

“Why?”

“ 'Cause it's sunny out finally.”

“But why the talk?”

“Well, when was the last time we talked?”

I didn't answer. Josh started up the stairs, and I picked up the shirts, rolling them into a ball. At the top of the stairs I reached my right hand out to place the drink on the kitchen counter and I let the shirts drop on top of the closed garbage can. Josh was already outside, smoking.

When he first became a paramedic, he was supposed to quit. How can you see so much cancer and not quit? But now he smoked more than ever.

The last time we fought I'd yelled at him, “What do you actually give a fuck about, Josh? Like, besides getting drunk on your days off?”

“Oh, you're so precious. Your life is so full of meaning,” he'd sneered.

I sat hunched on top of the picnic table, close to where Josh had carved our initials inside a heart when we first moved in. Josh took off his bulky ski jacket and draped it over my shoulders.

We drank and smoked and stared at each other. Then Josh stood.

“It's over.”

“Yup.”

Josh went inside, kicked off his boots in a snowy mess, took two Gravol from the canister beside the coffee machine, and climbed upstairs to bed.

I mopped up the slush on the floor and walked his boots to the front alcove. I took a bottle of Maker's Mark into the living room, sat at the computer, and tried to buy two tickets to a Cuban resort for Tina and me. The computer kept stalling. I gave up.

I retrieved Josh's shirts from the kitchen, and folded them again in front of the
TV
. On MuchMoreMusic they were showing videos from the '90s on
Where Are They Now?
Hilary Stevenson's “Bottom of My Ocean Heart” came up.
“I wonder whatever happened to her,” said the male
VJ
. “She was really hot.”

The female
VJ
punched him on the arm. “For god's sake! She was sixteen.”

[ 14 ]

Billy

Walking towards Toronto Western Hospital, I flipped the bird at a guy in a minivan who yelled,
Nice as
s!
I noted the empty car-seats in the back, sighed, and said a quick prayer for his children's welfare. Onlookers would've surmised,
Confident.
I walked liked I used to walk, full of attitude, shoulders back as if they held wings, smirking, making eye contact. As though I was playing the part of myself in my younger years.

It was a good show, except for the fact that I was certain my organs were grey. Standing at the light at Dundas and Bathurst, I squished a half-smoked cigarette beneath the pointed arrow of my red shoe and stretched out my hand, revealing the thin layer of skin wrapping my wrists. It appeared yellow in the harsh smoggy grey of downtown Toronto. I imagined the skin simply tiring out and eventually tearing, like the rubber of a worn-out balloon. I stared at the blueness of my veins.
Good Will.
I pulled my mittens out of my coat pocket and put them on.

I was not alive. I hadn't thrived in months. The business of my body continued on without my brain. I was a passenger in my own body, driven recklessly around the city by anxiety. And anxiety nearly got me hit by a cab because I was staring at my wrist and the mess inside it. The driver screamed at me in a language I didn't understand. Even though I was in the wrong, I gave him the finger.

I was on my way to see my therapist, Dr. Harris, for a one-on-one. I usually go to her office concerned that I have poor life skills and leave an hour later absolutely sure of it. This time, after two minutes, during which I was certain she couldn't remember who I was from my last session, Dr. Harris tried to convince me to take pills.