exercised on this subject. Wally appeared to be among the outraged, and because I’d been following the details on the news pretty carefully — you can imagine how stories of accidental deaths tend to claim my sympathy — I shoved the platter of ribs aside and gave him my full attention.
“I mean, Christ,” Wally was saying as he struggled to open a non-screwtop beer with his hands. “You send up to fifty thousand volts of electricity through a guy’s body — and maybe the guy is freaked out as it is, maybe the guy has a heart condition; he’s angry, he’s terrified. You are pretty much begging for the worst possible outcome.”
“That’s not a screwtop, Wally.”
“I’ve almost got it,” said Wally. He didn’t, but it was a matter of face-saving now.
“Dude,” I said, holding out a bottle opener. “You’re a doctor. Save your hands.”
“So anyway,” continued Wally, accepting it quickly. “They say it’s perfectly safe, right, all this electricity coursing through your body, but for who? An eighteen-year-old maybe. A guy who runs ten K every day and watches his cholesterol. But they have no idea who they might be jazzing, what a guy’s heart might be doing, what kind of shape it might be in. They’re dealing with crackheads? Drug addicts? The guy’s in a state of excited delirium — just holding him down could stop his heart.”
At Wally’s last remark, I responded, as you can imagine, “What?”
“It’s a controversial term, but generally it just means if a guy’s all cranked up his heart could blow. The last thing you want to do is zap him.”
“But what about holding him down?” I said. “You said you can’t even hold him down.”
“It’s not a good idea,” allowed Wally, “with someone in that state.”
I had picked up my own beer once I shoved the ribs aside, but now I placed it on the counter again without taking a swig. “But how do you know? How are you supposed to know if someone’s in that state or not?”
“Well I suppose the dilemma for the cops,” said Wally, “is probably every other guy they wanna taser is in that state.”
“Excited what-did-you-call-it?”
“Excited delirium.”
“And what happens?”
“When?”
“When a guy’s in excited delirium.”
Wally rolled his sleep-deprived eyes to an upper corner of my kitchen and seemed to recite from a memorized textbook. “He’s agitated, violent. Sweats profusely, seems unusually strong — doesn’t really feel pain. I mean, definitely the kind of guy the cops are going to want to tase. But definitely the last guy that you should.”
This painted something of a familiar portrait, would you agree?
“But you said you don’t even need to taser him.”
Wally’s eyes rolled back to me and he leaned on the counter, smiling, making himself comfortable. He seemed to almost wallow now that he had my full attention.
“Just by restraining him, yeah. Because he’s in a heightened state, right? The heart is just flailing, it’s going flat-out, it can’t go any harder, and then you grab him from behind, throw him to the ground. What’s it gonna do next?”
I was in a bit of a heightened state myself at this point. My beer, I noticed, had overflowed after I placed it — gently, I’d thought — on the counter, so I moved on autopilot to get a rag and wipe it up, still firing questions at Wally so he wouldn’t get the idea the conversation was winding down. I kept him there in the kitchen for a while, making him go over a few details of particular interest to me. Pretty soon he stopped wallowing and took on the demeanour of what he actually was, i.e., a guy under interrogation. He’d finished his beer and just stood there and fidgeted, wondering why I wasn’t offering him another, why I wasn’t putting on the ribs and letting him get back to the party. A few of our teammates wandered in from the living room, wanting to know the same thing. I dumped a bunch of chips into a bowl and shoved it at them and told them to go sit down.
“Not you,” I said to Wally, who’d made a move to sort of unobtrusively attach himself to the other two and wander unnoticed from the kitchen.
I didn’t offer him another beer until I was sure I had all the facts straight. Not that the facts of the initial revelation really changed much under my questioning. I just needed them affirmed, and then re-affirmed.