Sometimes it’s worse than it looks.
• • •
It’s almost three. The hours between two and four go one of two ways: Either the city releases us from its grip and we scurry to a corner for fitful rest; or it doesn’t. And this time of night, when it doesn’t let us go, what it gives us is something strange.
I usually forget everything I do after three A.M. Amnesia brought on by exhaustion, by the impenetrable darkness of a road with no streetlights. There are entire calls, start to finish, that will never leave me. My three A.M. calls won’t be among them. Recently, someone asked if I remembered running a white guy in an all-black neighborhood. “You remember,” the guy said, “he was dead for so long, he was stuck to the carpet. Remember that?” I didn’t remember. Not that he was stuck to the carpet, or that when the cops showed up, everybody in the house claimed not to know who this white stranger was or how long he’d been dead on the floor. I’d forgotten it all.
This morning we catch a call for a woman with back pain. We drive over, get out, and knock on the door. She yells for us to come in. We walk to the bedroom and find her lying naked in bed. She’s got the sheets thrown back, goose bumps run over her arms, her bare legs, and across her stomach. Marty is shocked, scandalized, and embarrassed. He looks away, face red.“Uh . . . ”
I’m behind him, holding our bag. I gently ease around him. Smile. In my experience, the more you try to pretend you aren’t staring, the more it looks like you’re staring. We are, after all, professionals. Besides, if she’s not embarrassed, why should I be? I’m not naked.
“What’s going on?” I ask, casual, like this is any other call.
“I threw my back out masturbating,” she says. “That’s my dildo.” She points to the nightstand. We look, and sure enough, her giant rubbery dildo winks at us from its perch. For a moment the only sound is the soft rumble of its vibration. It’s three-thirty in the morning.
Now I’m embarrassed.
“Um . . .”
She smiles. “Is this common?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Then again, I don’t use one. But I’ve never seen this, if that’s what you mean.” I clear my throat. “Would you like me to cover you up?”
“Why? Would it help? Ya know, the heat?”
“No.”
“Then I’m fine.” She curls her toes, and I stare at her feet, trying to ignore her breasts, trying to pretend I haven’t noticed it’s time for another Brazilian. “If I start nipping out, you’ll know I’m cold.”
I’ve seen hundreds of people too sick to care that they’re naked. This woman is one of only two who has seemed to enjoy it.
“So we need to get you onto our stretcher. Can you slide over, or do we need to pick you up?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t sit up at all. Whole back’s locked up.”
We crawl over to get her, and now it’s the three of us in bed together—her naked, us in our purple rubber gloves. The mattress is soft and worn out, so it’s almost a waterbed, and our weight creates a big cozy depression. We sink in. We slide down and there’s no stopping it. It’s like wrestling in outer space—we’re slow and awkward and unable to stop ourselves from falling on the bed, on her, on each other. I’d laugh if this weren’t so awkward, so outrageously inappropriate.
Finally, she’s out of bed and onto our stretcher. She’s covered with a sheet and buckled in. Marty grabs her robe, drops it on her lap. We turn off the lights but leave the vibrator on. It rumbles away as we walk out the door. Mmmmmmmmm . . .
• • •
Around four A.M. is when people wake up dead. A woman rolls over and notices her husband is cold and stiff, too silent to be anything but gone. Maybe Aunt Gladys got up in the middle of the night, and it’s not until four-thirty that someone hears her gurgling in the bathroom. It’s hard to run a call like that at this hour because we’re exhausted, and the last thing we want is to slip-slide through two-hour-old urine to drag Aunt Gladys out of the bathroom in her wet robe while she strokes out.
Every blip of the radio makes my heart pound with fear. Please, God, do not let us catch a