A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,59

then every shift must begin the same way. I pack a lunch, shower, and slip into my uniform. Atlanta is beyond hot, it’s jungle-humid. Rain is always falling or threatening to fall or maybe just fell, so the leaves hang fat from the trees and clouds of steam rise up from the streets. The starched collar, the heavy pants, the black boots—I’ll sweat all night.

As I hop in the car and leave the neighborhood, I wave to people coming home from work. It’s always then, as I’m leaving, that my mind wanders off to the same ghost story. What would happen if someone came to the door, our door? Would the explosion of barking dogs scare them away, would the lock hold, and what about the door itself? Did my wife remember to charge her cell phone, and is it sitting next to her, close enough that she can grab it and call for help as someone kicks in the door, because no, the door won’t hold. Not with someone kicking it. They never do. And this man, now that he’s in my house, would he stay downstairs, would he steal the TV and the computer, the camera, and then disappear into the night, or would he go upstairs? Is the alarm set, and how fast will the police respond? What about the gun? It’s up there, loaded and ready, a shock and awe in miniature that Sabrina and I are licensed to carry but not conceal. I feel better knowing it’s there, but in the hysteria and panic that a home invasion surely must be, will Sabrina have the presence of mind to cock it and aim it—to shoot someone? What if she misses? Will there be time for another round, or will that be it? And if that’s it, if things end badly, will I ever be able to work this job again? Or will I be too bitter, too angry, too suspicious that the perpetrator—certainly uncaught, because nobody gets caught—is sitting right there, across from me, wincing in pain as I splint his broken arm?

I think this every night, but only as I leave, and each time, as my car pulls out of the neighborhood, I swear I’ll stop working nights. But I never do.

The drive is twenty minutes of peace. I listen to a Fresh Air podcast: Terry Gross’s calming voice is worlds away from Grady. I’m somewhere else entirely until I arrive. I pull into the parking deck and walk past the hospital. Patients and family members mill around, and so do the homeless, looking for money or drugs, looking for a way to get back inside and off the street before the sun sets. Inside the EMS area, the day-shift crews sit around talking. One by one the night crews trickle in, and for a brief moment we mingle, night and day, joking and laughing, talking shit, taking shit. We night-shifters joke about their day because it’s over, but they never joke about ours because it hasn’t yet begun. That’s just a rule, simple as that. You can say I suck and that I wouldn’t have been able to handle your shit-kicker, but to say you hope I catch one, no. You’d never do that. Not more than once, anyway. After ten minutes of shit talk, the day-shifters go home and we go to work, and after everything that’s been said, they still turn to us, look us in the eye, and say, “Be safe,” and when they say it, they mean it. Be safe.

I clock in and start my prep ritual. I dump my gear by the back door of the ambulance and slip on a pair of gloves, grab a rag and a bottle of disinfectant, and remove all traces of the previous inhabitants. Nothing is spared: the seats, the cabinets, the parts of the stretcher that the patient touches, the parts that only I touch. I clean the door handles and the silver bar mounted on the ceiling that runs the length of the patient compartment, because everyone reaches up and steadies himself on it, taking hold with a bloody and infected hand.

Then I go through the equipment, one piece at a time, to see that it’s there and ready to be used. More than that, really, because even if it’s there, it needs to be there in the way I want it to be there. Everyone has his own way of running calls, of managing the unmanageable, a sort of