Bad Call Read online

  Hi, dear. How are you today. Do you want to come for a ride with us. Mom and Dad can come, too. Everyone is all smiles except the girl, whose name is Lilly. Lilly’s face turns from a pleasant smile to a blank stare to a pout to a frown. Well, surprise, surprise: she doesn’t want to go.

  I don’t think there’s going to be a struggle, and I’m reasonably sure the four of us, Jose, the cops, and I, could take her in a fair fight. We outweigh her by at least seven hundred pounds, give or take. What we have here is a standoff. We’re all cajoling her the best way we know how. Mom, Dad, the cops, Jose, and I are using our best coaxing skills, but they’re not working. She starts smiling again, and we think we may be on the verge of a breakthrough. But we’re not. The smile is inappropriate. It’s a little unsettling. It’s probably good that they called us.

  We look at Mom and Dad. They look at each other. The cops look at Jose and me as if we’re going to pull some kind of solution out of a hat, being the experts on the scene. In the middle of this unspoken game of what do you want to do/I don’t know what do you want to do, I’m aware that Lilly is smiling at me. Really beaming. It’s one of the more beatific smiles I’ve ever seen, and it takes me completely aback. She’s whispering something, and we all crane forward to hear. She says, You’re cute. To me. I am stunned and more than a little embarrassed. Jose makes a low air-sucky sound and elbows me in the ribs.

  Mom and Dad are smiling and I am, too, because now I have an idea. First of all, I thank Lilly for her compliment. Then: Do you want to go to the prom with me, Lilly. I’m going there now. Do you want to come.

  Lilly lights up instantly. Yes. Eureka. We’re in business. I turn sideways and present her with my arm. She knows just what to do and she takes it, like we’ve been going steady for years. Out the apartment door we go, into the elevator, trailing a coterie of parents, police, and Jose.

  Lilly and I, the king and the queen of the prom.

  We’re going down the steps from the lobby to the ambulance when I hear a hoarse sound. It’s very close, and I start to look around but immediately realize it has come from me: a convulsive gasp of breath; the prelude to a sob. I hope no one has noticed, but they must have heard. All the way to Elmhurst General, everyone is very quiet. No one says a thing.

  Not even Jose.

  The Whirlpool

  I know where we are. I’ve been here before. This is the start of my second year on the ambulance, and already I can remember individual calls, where and what and who they were. And God, do I remember this one. I haven’t been able to forget it a single day since. Or night.

  His name is still on the little black-and-white Dymo label by his door buzzer. All caps. I assume they never relet his apartment. At least they could have peeled his label off. Is this supposed to be some kind of cheesy memorial or a subtle reminder to the other tenants not to let that happen again.

  I don’t think they need a message to remind them of what happened here. These people certainly remember. All these people crowded in this elderly woman’s apartment exactly one floor above his apartment. Just exactly above it.

  We got this call as a DIB, difficulty in breathing. The woman is sitting up and not in too much distress. Maybe she could breathe a little easier if the throng of neighbors hovering around her would back off a few feet, thank you. This is turning out to be a pretty routine call. I bring up the stretcher, and we settle her in for the trip to St. John’s. I’m giving her oxygen while I’m thinking about my last trip to this building in Forest Hills, one floor below.

  I was on with Felix, aka the Cat. It was only my second or third week on the ambulance. I had already been on a lot of calls, many of them with Felix. I don’t like working with Felix because he’s so overbearing, but I think my judgment was prejudiced by this particular call.

  It was a miserably hot day in early summer. An early Sunday morning. We got a call, possible DOA in Forest Hills. First call of the day.

  I hadn’t been to this area on a call before. We don’t get a lot of calls in Forest Hills, especially this far south. Felix knew just where it was, though, and had no trouble finding it. We pulled up in front of a substantial dark brick apartment building, maybe eight stories high. Nothing struck me as out of the ordinary until we stepped into the vestibule where the mailboxes were.

  The odor was unlike anything I had ever smelled before. It was incredibly foul, and the heat didn’t help. It was a complicated smell. Like shit mixed with ammonia and natural gas from a stove and rotten meat and vomit all rolled up into one. And it was starting to make me feel sick.

  I felt even sicker when they told us the call was on the sixth floor. The sixth floor. And it smelled that bad down in the lobby.

  Felix had a strange look on his face, like a mask. He didn’t say anything all the way up in the elevator. At least he wasn’t busting my chops. Thank God for small favors. We were ascending with the super, who looked extremely upset. The elevator stank inside.

  When he opened the elevator door, the stench just about knocked us over. It was almost unbearably intense. There were two cops on the floor, all the way down the hall, by an open casement window, talking quietly.

  When we stepped into the hall, they just looked our way and stared, without saying anything. What the hell was this.

  Nobody knew yet. Felix and I were standing in front of an apartment door. No one had been inside so far. No one was sure what was in there, but we all had a good idea. I was getting light-headed from the smell and the heat in the hallway.

  There was something dead in there. It could have been an animal or two, I reminded myself—some dogs someone left behind and never came back to get. Maybe the tenants went out and got killed in a car crash. Maybe they went on vacation. Maybe they skipped town one step ahead of the law and left the pets to starve to death and rot. Maybe a lot of things. Any one of these scenarios has happened many times, I’d been told. As much as I love animals, I hoped it was one of these scenarios.

  Apparently nobody had seen the tenant for quite a while. It looked like we were about to see him now.

  All eyes were on the super as he turned his passkey in the lock. Neither of the cops budged from his post by the open window. Felix stepped back, behind me. It was Mr. Super, me, and Felix. That was the lineup. With Cop 1 and Cop 2 in reserve. The super pushed the door open slowly.

  A stifling, humid, palpable wave of stench punched us in the face, causing us to simultaneously whip our heads to the side to avoid inhaling it. It was too late. It was in our noses and on our clothes and in our mouths. It must have been more than a hundred degrees in the apartment; it was in the nineties outside. Whatever was in there had been festering but good. And then I saw what it was.

  About eight or nine feet away there was a large mass, which used to be a human being, on its side on the floor in front of a couch. The room was full of flies. I mean full. Thousands. Felix asked the super to get a couple of bottles of ammonia to smash against the walls so we could run in and open the windows and the flies would be able to escape.

  I wondered if this would work. I wondered if he had ever done this before. But my wondering was pointless. The super was out of service, standing to the side of the door vomiting in the hall. He wasn’t going anywhere, much less on an errand to fetch ammonia. The cops still hadn’t moved an inch. Well, I could sure see why. They’d been down this street before; I was certain.

  Seeing the super throwing up, I used all my strength not to do the same. Actually, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had been vomiting. I was just about there anyway. It’s a reflex, and I was determined to fight it. Standing there trying to stay composed, I felt a poke in the back. It was Felix the Cat. I turned to see what he wanted.

  Go ahead in there, kid, and take a good look—you’re going to have to get used to it were his exact words.

  Maybe if I had been on the job a little while longer and was a little surer of myself, I would have told him to get screwed and stood my ground outside the apartment. But I was a
newbie. And I was confused and disoriented. It was as if all my synapses were firing at once. I walked into the room and stood over the rotting body. Right over him. Felix never set one foot inside the apartment.

  The smell was so intense that I had two fingers jammed up my nose as far as they would go, but it did no good. I could still smell it. Nothing could block it out. I could taste it clearly. The air was thick with the smell. It had substance. Air is a fluid, just like water. Air has density. I was drinking the air.

  As I looked down at the remains, it seemed like I was very tall and able to take in everything in the room all at once in a wide-angle view while still being able to go macro on the details. The details. The gory details, as they say.

  This man, or what had been a man, was dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt and boxers. It looked like he may have been lying on the couch and somehow ended up on the floor, on his left side, just in front of it. I say on his left side—he had no left side. What had been his left side had grown into the carpet. Just coalesced with the carpet. It was as if he had melted into the carpet, and he and the carpet were all one piece.

  Where his hair ought to have been, there appeared to be long gray-and-white filaments of mold.

  Instead of a face, there was a flat, oval plane covered with maggots. No sign of a nose. Just one wet, gray surface with its seething, ivory-colored veneer of larvae.

  His shoulder was the yellow color of parchment and looked translucent. His legs appeared stuck together and were the color of light terra-cotta with a darker maroon line between them, where they were attached. His feet were bare, and his toes were splayed apart grotesquely.

  There were globs of black matter on the walls and the ceiling. I had been told that decomposing corpses could generate enormous amounts of gas and could actually burst if the gas couldn’t get out naturally. This gas is generated by bacteria that are always present in our bodies. Waiting for the chance to have the last laugh, I suppose. Normally, the skin would gently rupture anyway and let the gases out. Or the gas would pass out of the mouth and anus. I know that late at night, in the morgue, when it’s very quiet, you can hear the bodies fart. But the release can sometimes be dramatic. It was dramatic enough here to leave flesh all over the apartment.

  My mind was in total overload. This man had been somebody’s baby. Cradled in someone’s arms. He could have had a girlfriend who passed him notes in fourth grade. Maybe he had a Holy Communion or a Bar Mitzvah. He had a family that loved him. Now he was alone.

  How do you end up alone and decomposing like this. This. What was this, I wondered, standing staring with my fingers up my nostrils. This is no man. This is garbage. Filthy rotten garbage. Is this what becomes of us. It wasn’t just disgusting. It was unbearably disappointing.

  I was brought up to think of the human body as a beautiful thing. God’s image and likeness. How could God ever look like this.

  I’d been reading a lot of T. S. Eliot and had memorized part of The Waste Land, “Death by Water.” The part about Phlebas the Phoenician, slowly and silently rotting away at the bottom of the sea. Alone and in private, like the man I was looking at now. Experiencing the physical stages of his life in reverse. And I was thinking how, like Phlebas, we’re all so much alike. So proud of our appearance and stature, consumed by our petty illusions, then ending up as nothing, coming apart in the whirlpool.

  That’s you, I thought as I stared at the corpse. You’re Phlebas. Death certainly has taken you down a few pegs, handsome and tall as you may have been. At that moment I perfectly understood that I was Phlebas, too.

  I stood over that corpse for a while; I can’t remember how long. I think I was experiencing something Zen Buddhists call brain chatter. A million thoughts all trying to get a word in edgewise. I do know we left the body there for the medical-examiner crew to remove, which they would do only after the detectives had checked everything out. There was no reason to think this was anything but a natural death. It happens every day like this. A natural death, in every sense of the word.

  I do remember that my clothes stank all day. And that I skipped lunch in the hospital cafeteria. They were serving gray pot roast. Dead meat. It had a funny smell. Or was that me, smelling myself.

  I couldn’t sleep the entire week after that call. I was sick at heart, frightened, and in despair. Is that all we’re meant to become, I asked myself over and over again. It did me no good later that summer to overhear Felix refer to that call as the worst one he had ever seen. It didn’t change anything. It didn’t help in any way.

  When I got back to Vanderbilt that fall to begin my sophomore year, I could hardly study. I couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few moments. I was a couple of weeks away from my nineteenth birthday. I started drinking more. All times of the day. I went to class half drunk. I slept a lot but not well and ate Burger King four times a day, until my room and my clothing reeked of it and I had to buy a new belt.

  I hid all of this as well as I could from Barbara and my family and the few friends I had. Something in me had changed, not for the better, but surely forever.

  I had been inside the whirlpool and returned to tell about it.

  Jesus Speaks

  Lenny and I have been nodding off in the parked ambulance out in the ambulance yard when a call comes in. Female psycho in Jackson Heights. Not a rush. Got to wake up and do this thing. The heat is just about intolerable in here. It’s been a slow day. It’s much easier to keep moving when we’re fairly busy. We can keep up the momentum without too much trouble. Always much harder to start from a dead stop.

  Lenny has been on since six this morning, but I have been here more than thirty hours already, and I am totally zoned out. How is it that I have been on the job for thirty hours straight. Isn’t there a labor law against this or something. What the hell did I join the union for. Oh yeah, I forgot. They made me.

  It gets worse: I still have six hours to go. Then back tomorrow morning at six for another twelve. Here’s how this works.

  As far as I know, I’m the only one who pulls thirty-six-hour shifts. This happens because I’m frequently switched from nights to days, and if I’m on a twenty-four-hour Sunday-to-Monday shift, I will go right from that to a twelve-hour day shift, all day Monday. I get this treatment because I’m the relief man, the summer help, so I’m basically expendable in terms of my physical and mental well-being (going fast), my social life (have none), and my morale (have none of that, either). But I suppose it could be worse. Somebody tell me how.

  If I’m lucky, on one of these thirty-six-hour shifts, I can sleep in the X-ray room, where it’s cool—but I can only do this at night. If I need to catch some z’s in the daytime, I have to go into the back of the bus, parked out in the sun, and pull down the shades and lie on the stretcher, drenched in my own sweat. That’s where I’ve been hanging out today. It’s miserable and pretty much impossible to sleep, but I’ve been slipping into mini-comas for a few minutes at a time. Lenny has decided to keep me company out here, and he’s reading a catalog in the driver’s seat. I think he’s been dozing periodically. I’ve checked out Lenny’s reading matter. It’s the Miles Kimball of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, catalog. Oh Lenny. You animal.

  I sit up on the stretcher and slowly make my way to my seat, and we’re off to Jackson Heights. I am right now not even the least bit curious about the nature of this call. All I can think about is getting some sleep. We’ll see what it is when we get there.

  It’s a little old lady. A little old Italian lady. The inside of her apartment looks like how you might picture the gift shop at the Vatican, if it has one. I’ve never seen so many Blessed Mothers, lenticular Jesuses (who open and shut their eyes as you move your head), and statues of saints and angels. Virtually every square inch of vertical and horizontal space is covered with some type of religious image or sacred objet d’art. She must have spent a fortune on this stuff. (I would say junk, but I’m afraid to call it that. You never know.) She speaks English but with a heavy accent.
So does my father’s mother, but they’re not the least bit alike. Nana is pretty swarthy and authentically peasant looking. Also, quite a tough little gnocchi. This woman seems very refined.

  She sees me staring at a little statue. You know who that is, she says, startling me a bit.

  I think I do. He’s holding crossed candlesticks, so I take an educated guess: Saint Blaise.

  She bursts into a wide smile and says, You such a smart boy. That’s right, you right. He was a doctor, just like you.

  I’m not a doctor, Mama. Do you want to go to see one.

  No, I’m not going nowhere, she says sweetly but firmly.

  Our patient is very pale, with snow-white hair and a somewhat aristocratic mien. Her daughter made the call for an ambulance. Mom won’t take her pills and she’s not acting right —aside from being a religious fanatic—and I think she needs to see the doctor. Well, she’s not acting that funny. We’re only a walk or a short cab ride away from Elmhurst General, which is where we’ll be taking her. The situation is, as it usually is with so-called psychos, that there is a document that says she can be taken in for observation. I’m sure the party who issued this document has advised the daughter about the proper steps to take—do it right and call for help because you never know how Mom will react. Well, I guess it is good advice. Too many of these calls turn weird.

  Dear, it will be okay. We’ll just drive you down the street to Elmhurst Hospital and you’ll see the doctor and you’ll probably be back in no time.