I was thinking, but I have no answer. I fidget. My eyes flick around the room as I try to imagine what I’ll say to Sabrina when I call. That I’ve been fired? That I’ve been arrested? That things are about to change because I couldn’t keep my hands off the radio?
“I’m going to make this simple,” she says, hands pressed flat against her desk. “Tell me exactly what you said. Word for word.” She holds up a written complaint. “Because this? It doesn’t make sense.”
“I mean, all I said, really, it was only two words.” I’m stammering, hands up in a defensive posture. “Unless you want to be technical, because technically, it was eighteen words. Give or take.”
Her mouth slips open like she’s forgotten it’s there.
I clear my throat. “See, it was, um, it was Sunday morning. And you know how those are.”
Of course she knows. We all know. Sundays are easy. Working a Sunday is a gift to EMS. A small thank-you for the long hours, for carrying fat people down stairs, for stepping in the still-warm turd your patient dropped in the hallway, and what’s more, for never mentioning it. Sundays are a reward for remaining calm despite being outgunned and remaining on duty despite residing—permanently—on the lowest rung of the caregiver pay scale. Sundays are relaxing, and so long as nobody dies in church, Sunday is a good day. But Sunday can also be boring. Most of us are at Grady because Grady is always busy. We never stop, we’re up in the middle of it all—the city, the trauma, the excitement, everything. Until Sunday. When it gets slow. And there’s nothing but the quiet of a phone that never rings, the boredom of a call that isn’t dispatched. Time stretches on forever. And we wait.
And wait.
And waiting isn’t necessarily a good thing for someone who’s wired to never stop moving. They say idle hands are the devil’s workshop, but what they don’t say is when it comes time to explain yourself, the devil’s never around to help. So I’m alone, explaining the inexplicable, and basically, the story goes like this.
The day it all happens, I’m working an eight-hour overtime shift. I’m paired with an EMT I get along with, so right from the start, we’re in a good mood. When we go in-service, dispatch sends us to the southeastern corner of the city. There’s nothing down here but a handful of housing projects and some rowdy apartments, but it’s early when we roll in, and it’ll be a few hours before they get out of bed and start acting up. We park across the street from the federal penitentiary.
Forget the barbed wire and guard towers, the searchlights, the guns, the unspeakable past of its inmates, and Atlanta’s federal pen isn’t menacing. It was built in 1902 and has a precise, austere beauty. From our spot across the street, it looks less like the onetime home of Al Capone than a branch of the Federal Reserve. We sit for a while in silence. The stereo doesn’t work, and the gas station doesn’t have any newspapers. We talk until we run out of things to say and then, almost absentmindedly, I pick up the radio mike. Some of the newer trucks don’t have this feature, but on the older ones, there’s a switch that turns the radio into a PA. Flip it to radio and I’m talking to the dispatcher. Flip it to PA and I’m talking to the world. I don’t have a plan, this isn’t thought out, and I have no intention of making a statement. I just flip it on. Key up and let go, key up and let go, sending little metallic clicks out into the morning.
After a few minutes, I key up and whisper a long and dreamy hello. At the beginning, everything seems innocent, so we keep it up—whispering, singing, issuing commands in a heavy, almost indecipherable Scottish accent. When this, too, gets boring, we set it down. But no calls come out, and there’s nothing to do, and it’s just sitting there, waiting. What harm could possibly come from going back one more time? I switch the radio back to PA and key up the mike. The speaker clicks on and I pause, broadcasting dead air and my own breath out into the neighborhood. And then—on a quiet Sunday morning not even a block away from the federal penitentiary—I tell everyone within earshot the worst has happened.
“May I have your