John Gapper - A Fatal Debt

In the moment, all I knew was excruciating pain and fear that a crazy person was ending my life, alone in this park, far from home.

Then darkness.

Then nothing.

When I regained consciousness a minute or two later, another man was bending over me, holding a wad of tissues to the wound on my head.

“Can you hear me? Are you okay?” he asked.

He had short gray hair and was wearing an orange jacket with security written on it. His face looked reassuringly worn and experienced. I tried to nod, but it hurt the muscles in my neck.

“I’m all right,” I mumbled.

“I’ve called an ambulance. You’re lucky I heard you. That guy wasn’t messing around.”

My head was throbbing with pain, but the tissue had stanched the bleeding. I reached up and checked my face with my hand, feeling for wounds. My features seemed to be intact, but I felt bruising and swelling around my right eye, where I’d been struck. I tried to remember what had happened, checking myself for concussion. All wasn’t clear, but my brain was functioning well enough for me to know that the damage wasn’t severe.

After a while, I heard the insistent squawk of the ambulance and its red lights reflected on the man’s face as he examined me. They reminded me of the glow on Anna’s face only half an hour before, and the memory made me wince. Then the paramedics came and, after checking my pupils for signs of brain injury, carried me up the slope and into the ambulance. I felt it hurtle north through the park and tried to sit up to check with the paramedic next to me where we were going, but I found I couldn’t move-they’d strapped me to the gurney to keep me from falling off. I’d seen a lot of schizophrenics brought into the psych ER like that and been happy they were restrained, but I didn’t like it myself.

“Don’t move,” the paramedic said sharply, inflating the pad he’d placed on my arm to check my blood pressure.

The ambulance swung to the right-eastward-and exited the park on the Upper East Side. I knew where we were going then. It was somehow inevitable, and there was nothing to do but lie back and accept the ride, ironic as it was. The paramedic leaned across me casually and took my wallet from the pocket of my jacket, which was strewn across my feet. He seemed to want to check for himself who I was.

“Wow. Hello, Doc,” he said, looking at my Episcopal ID card. “Relax, we’ll take care of you.”

“Who attacked me?” I said.

“Security guy didn’t know. Said he’d shouted at him, but he’d run away. You get all kinds in the park. You were lucky.”

I saw the tall shadow of Episcopal from the window, and then we drove into the ambulance entrance and they wheeled me into the medical ER. We were greeted by a resident and directed to one of the cubicles. They left me there alone and I rested for a few minutes, wondering what could be keeping them. Eventually, the curtain parted and a female doctor walked in, wearing green scrubs and a blue surgical cap, and picked up my notes.

It was my ex-girlfriend.

“Oh God,” I said, craning my head up to see her.

“Great to see you, too,” Rebecca replied briskly. “I’m on call and I got paged. For some reason, they thought I’d be worried.”

“Why would they think that?”

She paused as if collecting herself and exhaled through her nose, gazing down at me on the gurney. I could see her eyes soften into the old Rebecca. Then she pulled off her cap and I saw that she’d had her auburn hair cropped, making her eyes look larger and more vulnerable. She’d lost weight, too: misery at not having me around, I flattered myself.

“I leave you on your own for five minutes and this happens. Can’t you take care of yourself?” She sounded affectionately exasperated.

“I like your hair,” I said from my horizontal position.

“Thanks,” she said, containing a smile and glancing down at the foot of the gurney. “Can you move your toes?”

“My spine’s fine. Everything’s working.”

“Then sit up and I’ll take care of that cut. You lost consciousness, they said. Do you remember anything?”

“Quite a lot. I don’t think I’m badly concussed.”

“You’d better have a CT all the same.”

She let down the side of the gurney and I sat up with my legs over the side to let her remove the makeshift dressing and clean the wound on my forehead. Then she held the two sides of the cut in place and sealed it with Steri-Strips. I could feel her fingers working on me expertly and dispassionately, trying to make the scar as small as possible, and I thanked God for her medical training and professionalism. No matter what she felt about me, I was sure she’d do the job well.

“There,” she said, standing back to take a look at her handiwork and stripping off her surgical gloves. “You’re not pretty at the moment, but you’ll be as good as new in a couple of weeks. Who did this to you?”

“I thought you’d sent him.”

“Funny guy. You always told me not to go in Central Park at night, that it was full of your patients. What were you doing there? Night out?”

My head was starting to throb heavily and I didn’t have any idea of how to answer that. A woman asked me to come for a walk in the park and then she kissed me-just before I got attacked . I didn’t think so. I met her skeptical gaze-the look of an old lover with a lingering interest.

“I felt like a walk.”

Rebecca looked unconvinced but unwilling to push it much further in case she found out something hurtful. Instead, she looked down and scribbled on my chart, as if to bring our session to a close. As she did, I felt anxious. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t tell her what I’d been doing in the park. I didn’t know why my attacker had picked on me. He’d left my wallet in my pocket, so he was either a bad thief or not a thief at all. Maybe he’d been a paranoid schizophrenic, but it had felt as if he’d known what he was doing.

“Listen, Ben. Are you okay? I heard about that Wall Street guy. I meant to call you, but …” Her voice trailed off and she shrugged regretfully.

“It’ll be sorted out. Don’t worry.” It felt better to be handing out that advice rather than receiving it, although no more convincing.

“I hope so,” she said, hanging the chart back on the gurney. “They will take you for the scan and then I’m admitting you for the night. We ought to watch you for concussion. You’ve been acting strangely.”

The sheets were welcomingly clean and crisp. Harry hadn’t thought much of them, but they worked for me. After the scan, which revealed nothing of concern going on inside my brain, they wheeled me up to a private room on the eighth floor that no one was using that night, rejecting my offer to walk. With Vicodin inside me and the familiar hum of the equipment by the bed, I soon fell asleep.

I didn’t take to the breakfast-a floppy pancake with fake maple syrup and apple juice in a sealed plastic container, washed down with tasteless coffee. The stuff had usually been cleared long before I got to see the patients, and it made me understand why some of them were so grumpy about the place by the time I arrived. The sun shone through the corner window, and I lay on my bed with The New York Times , waiting for the bureaucracy to grind its way toward signing me out again. My head hurt and I hadn’t enjoyed the first sight of my battered face in the bathroom mirror, but I’d survived.

There was a knock at nine thirty a.m. and I put down the paper, half expecting Rebecca to reappear, but Jim Whitehead stuck his head around the door instead. He’d given no warning of his arrival and it didn’t fill me with enthusiasm, but I didn’t have much choice. I couldn’t refuse my department head the right to check on me.