Holding Still for as Long as Possible (3 page)

“Ready for another night?”
Diane asked. Her long brown ponytail was slightly askew, and her eyes betrayed signs of sleep deprivation.

I muttered, “Uh-huh.”

I had known I could do this job as soon as I did my first ride-out as a student. I just felt it. Capable. It was terrifying and exhilarating, and it felt right.

Tonight we pulled out onto Markham Street and Dispatch called in 10-26 for a higher priority closer by. It was an Echo, for a twenty-five-year-old
VSA
. Our pagers glared abbreviated details about a seven-year-old who'd called 911 for his father. While Diane sped down Dufferin, I ran through all the protocols in my head, making sure I knew what I was doing. Possible
VSA
s still got my adrenaline going.

“It's probably bullshit,” said Diane, just as I was thinking the dude was dead. Dead for sure.

“I'm so sick of Alphas turning out to be Deltas and vice versa,” Diane said, veering around a car that refused to move right, muttering “fucking moron”
and laying on the angry-horn. Sometimes I wished I had a pocket-size angry-horn in everyday life, so I could just press it when people walked too slow in front of me or refused to give up their seat for an old lady on the bus.

The streets were mostly empty. Everyone walking alone looked exaggeratedly lonely. We pulled up in front of a high-rise on Jameson where I'd done a few calls before. In the building's front hall there was a small kid, with sprigs of brown curls jumping from his skull, wearing a Superman costume and no shoes. He was clutching a cordless phone and shaking violently, like he was really cold.

I crouched down to look at him and introduce myself. I hated talking to kids in situations like this. It was like two films started happening simultaneously in my head. The one starring attentive live-wire Josh, with the elevated heart rate and dilated pupils, body preparing itself to deal with the dad upstairs who might be dead already. The other one featuring calm, reassuring Josh, who could deal with the kid experiencing the most frightening moment of his life. It was always better to be calm, and not let the adrenaline cloud your judgement.

The kid identified himself as Kevin. I heard myself say, “You did the right thing calling 911, Kevin. Good job. Where's your dad? We're going to take care of him now.”

Kevin led us to the elevator and pressed seven. He spoke with almost no pauses. “Mydadcameinfromsmoking and ( gasp! ) fellonthecouch! ( gasp! ) Hewastwitchingand ( gasp! ) thenIcouldn'twakehimup! ( Gasp. )”

Diane and I rolled the stretcher down the hallway. Kevin ran ahead towards the open door of 7B, his cape flying behind him. I heard Diane stifle a giggle. That's another reason I liked her — the inappropriate laughter. We followed Kevin through the door, which opened into an L-shaped living room. A shirtless man who looked like an aging raver and wore threadbare track pants lay starfish on a couch. Still. I assumed,
VSA
. The room was furnished with a
TV
blaring the same
ER
episode we'd been watching at the station, and a coffee table strewn with glasses and ashtrays. This likely had happened fast but had felt really slow.

Kevin turned to me. “Can you just call my mom? Can I go to my mom's house now?” He was done playing this boring game of Dad Killing Himself.

Diane responded, “Go find your favourite toy in the other room, okay? I know you're scared but soon we'll call your mom.” She was good with kids, and that was a plus. I could handle the crying families, she could talk “child.”

I took the dad's radial pulse and found it full and bounding. Happy that he wasn't circling the drain entirely, I rubbed his sternum with a gloved fist, attempting to arouse him from unconsciousness. Just then, he opened his eyes. Screamed. We both jumped back as he kicked his muscled legs in the air.

The 10-2s and Fire arrived with movie-like timing. Calls were rarely this cinematic — I'd yet to witness a moment that could be punctuated with symphonic crescendos. It was just one of those days.

I asked the cops to restrain dad while I got the oxygen ready, and automatically repeated the same words we always do: “We're paramedics and we're here to help you. We're paramedics and we're trying to help you. Tell us what happened. What did you take?”

The guy continued to scream, and when the cops strapped him down he started muttering: “Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy.” Fire stood around like a circle of trees providing shade. Let me tell you, it was incredibly weird to have a huge tattooed guy gorked out of his head on drugs, probably capable of killing you without remorse, screaming for his mother.

Kevin poked at me with the antenna of a cordless phone. “Can you call my mom now? I want to go home.”

I brought him over to one of the cops. At this point I tried to summon the detached exterior I'd cultivated in order to be a medic. There were calls you laughed about later, ones you learned not to care about despite the abject misery. There were only so many drunk guys you could pull out of their puke before you started to feel not much of anything besides annoyed. Like,
Stop fucking whining already and let's go get you a sandwich. Stop drinking the hand sanitizer and get in the truck already.

But looking at Kevin, I felt the images begin to save themselves in my memory. Bouncing curls, hands shaking around the phone, tiny chapped lips.
Fuck this. This is fucked up
. My brain was a jumble of expletives and terrible thoughts about how so many people just shouldn't be allowed to have kids. But I guess I wouldn't be here, if that were the case, right? My mom was barely seventeen when she had me. My dad was twenty and loved drugs more than anything else, and still did. They both still lived like they were twenty-five, just like this crackhead, who moaned on and on. I wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up, to kick him in the middle of his useless chest. I tried to summon compassion but came up dry.

Instead, I went back to asking questions. Getting him on the stretcher. Checking with Dispatch about where to take him. The practical, mundane motions of life-saving happen slowly. This job had taught me to be patient. There's so much standing around, waiting, because some things you can't rush.

My first call ever was a twenty-two-year-old male shot in the head. I was so brilliantly wide-eyed and determined, with empathy reserves likes a fat-cheeked squirrel, watching the city race by on the way to the call. We waited outside the high-rise building for the 10-2s, who arrived only to amble up the long concrete walk, bitching about how they were just about to book off shift when they got this call. A parade of cars following them, pulling up on the lawn, followed quickly by the
TV
cameras.

“You just starting
?”
the taller one asked us as we got into the elevator.

“Yeah, it's our first call.” I didn't tell them it was my first call
ever
.

I felt as if my shoulders were attached by strings to the elevator wall, pulling me up straighter. The Canadian flags on our uniforms, the shiny yellow
EMS
stitches, letters aglow — it was as if we were action figures, hollowed out but purposeful. I felt proud, and totally, absolutely terrified.

At the door I stepped to the right while the cops knocked with their nightsticks. I'd been instructed to never stand right in front of the door, to avoid contact with fists, bottles, spit, bullets, a myriad of possible projectiles. My partner, Carl, a mid-thirties joker type, seemed completely relaxed. In my right pocket were a pair of pink panties Amy had folded in three. A good-luck charm. My mouth tasted like coffee whitener. The hallway of this particular high-rise smelled like cumin, paint, and mould. Carl shifted his weight from right to left and swore. He was not excited to be working with me. I was trying very hard to look like I knew exactly what I was doing. I put on my institutional green latex gloves that I carried in my left pocket. They felt inadequate.

After what seemed like five hours, the door opened slowly. Our patient was not, as anticipated, lying in a pool of his own blood next to a screaming girlfriend, but rather standing, facing us. A shining round black hole between his eyes.

“Holy fuck,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Holy fuck indeed,” said Carl, sighing.

I heard the pound of more cops arriving, treading down the hall. I couldn't take my eyes away from the gunshot in the victim's forehead. I managed to bring into focus a girl behind him, who stood up from a bright red futon couch, reaching out her arms, as though about to cheerlead.

“Jesus!” she said to us. “It's Jesus. Jay-Jay is the second coming of Christ. It's the only possible explanation.”

Jay-Jay / Jesus told her to shut the fuck up. She sat back down, spread her hands over her face, eyes popping between the Vs of two long fingers. The 10-2s talked to the girl, who seemed more shook up than the victim, while we boarded and collared Jay-Jay / Jesus. The bullet was somewhere unknown in his body, and we wanted to protect his spine.

Other cops sectioned off the area. I felt like the solid centre of a wasps' nest, tunnelling my sight to the victim. Carl attended, asking the patient what had happened, what his pain was like, his medical history. I attached a C-collar around his neck, and fastened him to a board with a series of complicated seatbelt straps. Jay-Jay was on a cell phone to his mother up until the very second I bookended his head with tightly rolled and taped salmon-coloured sheets. Jay-Jay / Jesus spoke as lucidly as you or I, telling his mom to calm the fuck down, that he was all right, and answering Carl's questions.

I knew then, as Jay-Jay swore at me, at his girlfriend, at his mother on the phone, that I was going to have to cultivate a firm belief in something. That not believing in anything was going to be more of a hassle, every day of this job, than accepting things as they were in front of me.

Carl looked at me as we rolled the patient out of the lobby. “Get used to it, kid. You're gonna see some freaky shit.”

Carl sat in the back of the ambulance monitoring Jay-Jay while I drove. I thought about how maybe I'd end up learning that sometimes the worst people got second chances, while some of the kindest dealt with humiliation only a body betraying you could provide. Or maybe it wouldn't be that black and white. I had to admit my reasons for wanting to do this job were related to a few wanting-to-be-a-hero daydreams from childhood. I imagined God telling me to lighten up, and I switched on the radio. “We Don't Need Another Hero.”
Carl sang along. “
Love and compassion, their day is coming.
”

“Fucking cocksucker,
”
Jay-Jay yelled at Carl, breaking through the song. “Anyone can do your fucking job.”

“Oh yeah?” I yelled, slamming on the brakes too hard. “Seems to me if you were a better drug dealer you wouldn't have a bullet in your head right now. Eh? Huh?”

I looked back through the opening. Both Carl and Jay-Jay sort of smiled as a response.

“How old are you, babyface driver? Too young to wipe your own ass.”

I told this story of my first call a lot, when people got curious. But that call didn't teach me anything, really. Except that a call has to be extraordinary to be remembered. And usually not in a good way. But I knew then that I could do the job. I'd been a squeamish little kid so I had thought I'd pass out the first time I saw a crushed limb, an eyeball hanging. But I didn't. While people fell apart, I could be there, helping. I could hack it. I might even get really good at it.

The rest of that first shift passed slowly — mostly transfer calls and minor bullshit. Gradually I started to feel less like an imposter. In the waiting room at Toronto Western I asked Carl to tell me about his weirdest call.

He ran his hand through his scruffy brown hair and chewed at the lip of his coffee cup. Then he placed the cup on a little table strewn with newspapers. “Oh, okay. Easy one. A 911 hang-up call out at Yonge and Summerhill. You know, I'm talking a big mansion. We had to go check it out. We got there before the cops, like tonight, right, and the door was wide open. We were young, you know, and curious and so we yelled, ‘Ambulance!' No answer, so we went inside, and there was a pool of blood in the kitchen and a trail leading upstairs. So we followed it up to the bathroom and there was a body all chopped up in the tub.”

“No way!”

“Seriously! The weirdest thing, though, was that there was, like, Cheerios and Froot Loops and everything sprinkled in the blood on the floor. My partner was, like, do you think it's a serial killer?” Carl took a long drink from his Tim Hortons cup and shifted in the cold brown shell-chair. He looked over at the stretcher where our nursing-home patient was fast asleep and got up to check her vitals. He glanced back at me, smiling.

“Well . . . was it a serial killer? How come I never heard about it?”

“It was a
cereal
killer, get it? A
cereal
killer!”

I laughed, not because it was funny but because it was four-thirty in the morning.

“That's what I say whenever I get asked about my strangest call,” Carl said, “ 'cause I'm fucking tired of answering that question.”