Michael Christie - The Beggar's Garden

Dear Paramedic,

You saved my life! (Just kidding) But I just wanted to say you are the best and most caring paramedic on the force (are you a force?) and I appreciate everything you did for me. I’m very interested in getting to know you better. Coffee? Airplane ride? (more kidding) Maya

I didn’t write my phone number because I didn’t want to be pushy. We’d probably write them down on a piece ripped from the envelope — this way we would be more spontaneous.

Got everything? Sideburns asked when I came out.

All packed, I said.

Can you make it to the ambulance?

I think so, I said.

On the way out through the lobby, I saw Marvin, an elderly man who lives in my building, sitting in his chair. His eyelids droop so much that wet crescents of pink are visible always. I’ll be back in a few days, I said, feeling like a movie star with my entourage, an imaginary animal fur twining around my neck, but Martin didn’t once look up from his racetrack papers because he is a certified compulsive gambler as well as the nastiest person on two legs.

The sun made me woozy and I asked the ambulance driver to take my arm.

Up you get, he said, and boosted me into the rear of the vehicle.

I lay down on the stretcher. He threw a white cotton blanket over me, which at first I wanted to kick off then realized I needed when the doors shut and the air conditioning kicked in. It felt dangerous to be wearing my shoes in bed even if it wasn’t a real bed. The old guy was driving and I prayed he wasn’t one of those old people who’d rather maim someone or kill himself than admit he couldn’t recall the rules of the road anymore.

Are you going to strap me down?

Didn’t plan on it, Sideburns said.

What if we were in an accident? Aren’t these straps like seat-belts for the patient?

You’re the boss, he said, and leaned over to buckle me tightly across my thighs and chest, which reminded me of my chest pains that had by then mercifully subsided. With my heart attack ancient history, the straps had me feeling all gathered in, a scattered thing at long last collected.

Yes, this suicide business was technically a lie. I did not crave death, not immediately anyway, but I’d always trusted myself to reject immortality if it were offered to me so this lent what I’d said a partial truth. I lay conjuring the unbearable climate of an actually suicidal mind and stayed focused on that, pitying this person who loathed life for reasons unexplainable to others. I decided that while locating my paramedic and giving him his card, I would help the paramedics and doctors out by providing free training for dealing with suicidal people, and the performance of this good deed would detoxify any and all of the lies necessary to unite us.

Oxygen bottles clinked and plastic bags of life-giving juices swung with the potholes and turns and I crossed my arms contentedly over the straps.

Friday night, said Sideburns, offering this as explanation for the packed waiting area.

I sat in one of the only empty seats and watched him chat with the intake nurses. Then he and the old paramedic went outside to hack down halves of cigarettes, spitting through their teeth and telling each other funny stories, some probably about me, before departing in their ambulance without a goodbye. Just like policemen, there are good paramedics and bad paramedics. If there weren’t, the good ones wouldn’t be so heaven-sent, and at that moment even for this I was grateful.

There was plenty else to look at while I kept my other eye on the ambulance parking area: people in flip-flops and shorts, others in pyjamas, still others swathed in elegant black for nights on the town cut short. People get hurt on weekends because they let their guard down when they try to be carefree. They forget their guard is often what keeps things from going awfully wrong. I wondered whether my guard was up or down right then and decided it was both. An ambulance pulled in but it wasn’t him. Some paramedics I loosely recognized pushed through the crowd of people with a stretcher, on it a muttering old woman who looked to be sculpted of ash. They disappeared through some doors marked No Entry.

On the televisions hanging from the ceiling, people’s pets were getting makeovers from a man wearing a kimono and a golden top hat. The owners put their hands to their cheeks and couldn’t believe their pets were their pets.

Do I look sick? a man beside me asked.

That depends, I said.

On what?

On what you’re supposed to look like normally.

At this he raked at the reddened turf of his scalp with his fingers. He had a deep, fat-man voice and a kind, puddingy face that I felt the unbearable urge to jostle in some way.

They tell me I got nothing wrong with me but I got this pain in my guts. Won’t stop. He patted where his shirt strained to envelop a large, hard belly that seemed to me deeply powerful like a sizzling cartoon bomb. I saw the crater-like dent in his shirt demarking his belly button.

You don’t look sick, you look good to me, I said, squinching my eyes, resisting the urge to pat his belly while giving him an appraising once over. He smacked his lips, about to disagree.

Maya? said a large woman in a cream cardigan and a ton of silver jewellery.

That’s me, I said, standing, then remembered my suicidalness and bent my smile back into a hyphen of despair.

She asked for my health number, which I recited from memory. The nurse shrugged like number-taking was the mostloathsome chore in the world. Some hate the efficient memories of others because their own are shot to hell. She probably found herself at least two nights of the week in the middle of her living room wearing only one slipper, carrying an egg beater, without the faintest idea what she was supposed to be doing. I decided to pity her.

She asked about my medical history, which I won’t tell you because it’s mostly boring. The paramedics had already explained my current situation and I was pleased I didn’t have to talk about harming myself again because since I’d been there around all these caring and interesting people, I was feeling much better.

Emergency contact? she said.

What? I said.

Someone who we can notify in case something, you know, transpires.

I sat, pausing, but actually thinking this time. She had a picture atop her computer monitor of a kid in a judo uniform who shared her brassy hair and fatigued expression. The truth was I had nobody — who would give a hoot if I died, I mean. Sure, like everyone I had parents, and even a sibling or two, but they were petty, disinterested people in a faraway town, people to whom I hadn’t spoken since the advent of caller ID.

No, there was only my paramedic, who, when he learned of my untimely death, would scuttle himself on a series of all-night drunks, spending hours transfixed by the digits of his alarm clock, guessing when the numbers would turn — saying, Now, no … okay, now — all in an effort to flee the searing fact that he’d, just one week ago, overlooked the unmistakable warning signs of my fatal sadness. Can mine be 911? I said.

Funny, she said, as if what I said was the negative of funny. What we mean is family, next of kin, close friends, relatives — Can I pass? I said. She nodded knowingly, kept typing.

Back in the waiting area I found the same chair and watched for ambulances, hoping I hadn’t been gone long enough to miss him. I lifted my feet for a turbaned janitor making spirals with a mop. I’ve never smelled the janitorial products of a hospital anywhere else, and I figure the company that supplies them must be a good investment because the smells have never changed, not since I was a kid. The gut guy was gone and I read my new ID wristband a few times, just my name and DOB written there beneath soft vinyl. The date wasn’t so long ago but at that moment seemed ancient. I’ve always liked how they make the ID bands impossible to remove without destroying them, how for this reason you could never wear the bracelet of another, how they, and the belonging they bestow, must be earned. I felt unique and proud to have one, even though my mission there at the hospital was ultimately a selfish one.