A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,1

the black nothingness we’ve feared all along, then how small we must look to her now. In dying she has crossed over. Or hasn’t.

My partner, unaware she’s dead, has finally come to life. He motions for me to grab the other end of the sheet so we can move her onto our stretcher. I need to tell him, let him decide what comes next, but I don’t trust my own instincts. I’m brand-new at this, I’ve never watched someone die. My experience with the dead—recent or otherwise—is limited. If my partner doesn’t notice, then perhaps she’s not dead. The woman was hardly moving when we arrived and now looks no different. With a yank, we slide her over. He covers her with a sheet, buckles her in, starts pushing. I stare at her chest, her face, looking for signs of life that I know deep down I will not find. We grab her packet, and sure enough, the DNR is stapled to the top. We ride the elevator, step out into the cool night. With a sharp metallic click, the stretcher is snapped into the mount on the floor of the ambulance.

“I think she’s dead,” I say.

My partner stops and looks not at her but at me.

I clear my throat, tell him I don’t think she’s breathing.

He climbs into the ambulance, looks, feels, deflates. In the absence of the DNR, he might do something, but it’s not absent. It’s right there, and this document, drafted and signed with the sole intention of clarifying this woman’s final moments, instead obscures our next move. Had she died in the nursing home, we’d leave her, but she’s here now. Dead on our stretcher. In our ambulance.

We have drifted into murky water.

He calls the nursing home. “We’re in the parking lot,” he says. “Your patient is dead.” “She’s in your ambulance,” the nurse tells him, “she’s yours now.” I stand outside while they argue. Our patient lies in state. What to do with her? The hospital doesn’t take dead bodies, nor does the nursing home. This woman has died and no one wants her. She is a corpse in limbo. My partner hangs up. Fumes. He goes back in to explain, to plead, to threaten. I’m not sure why, but he leaves me in the back with her.

I sit in the ambulance and stare into the woman’s half-open eyes. I grab the packet and flip through. If we are to keep each other company, I should at least know her name. Her birthday. Turns out she is eighty-eight.

There aren’t many things you can do in the back of an ambulance with a dead woman. My cooler sits in the corner, but no. I could talk to her, but frankly, she is so recently dead, so unchanged from before, I feel as if addressing her directly will wake her. Well, not her but the ghost of her, which is worse. This may sound foolish, but I can assure you that all except the most gruesomely killed or severely decomposed look as if they’ll sit up and begin talking at the slightest provocation.

I decide to call home. “Are you still awake?” I ask my wife.

She says she is. She broke down and started watching the latest episode of The Sopranos without me. “You’re gonna love it.” When I say nothing, she asks if I’m mad, and after a second I tell her where I am. Tell her that I’m alone with a woman I’ve watched die and who has become, thanks to my indecision, something of a refugee.

She asks how the woman died, and though I know this isn’t what she means, I say, “Peacefully.”

BOOK ONE

A Change of Plans

1

I’ve Made a Mistake

Six dead bodies. Each unknown to the others—different lives, different endings—stuck in six different morgues. Through the magic of photography, they’ve congregated here—naked, lascivious—in Appendix J of my EMT textbook. The first could be napping. The rest have been either burned or bludgeoned or shot in the face. One is a child. Though no longer alone, they remain nameless, remembered only for their usefulness to Western medicine. Their eyes have been blacked out, but all else is left uncovered. The woman has a huge mound of pubic hair: proof, according to the guy next to me, that she died in the 1970s. From behind us, a girl asks what page we’re looking at, and the pubic hair expert—who hasn’t yet gotten paid and so hasn’t yet bought a textbook, who’s leaning over my shoulder and