myriad of ways I’ve changed, at how strange a year this has been. Looking at it now, I can see the signs. They’ve been there a while, I just had no reason to step back and take stock. Now that I have, I’d say the first hint that things were different—that life wouldn’t, couldn’t, go back to the way it used to be—was the day I found a skull fragment in my boot.
We’d run a shooting near the end of the shift, a gruesome but fairly standard dead guy with the left side of his head blown off. His skull was obliterated, and the skin hung slack like a dodge ball with the air let out. There was nothing to do but look. He’d bled everywhere, and I was careful not to step in anything, but evidently not careful enough. For the last hour of the shift, I heard a faint click with every other step, like something small but hard—a pebble, perhaps—was stuck in the tread of my right boot. I was tired, and it had been a long day, so I ignored it until I got home, where it wasn’t a click I heard but a scratch. The pebble was damaging the wood floor. Sabrina heard it first, though by that time I’d been walking around for ten minutes. I sat in a chair, pulled off my boot, and pried out what looked like a small piece of broken glass. It was thick and off-white, a shard from a broken plate, maybe. Except it wasn’t. It was a skull fragment I’d stepped on at the shooting scene. I’d carried it around and brought it home, and here it was. In my hand. I laughed and said we should keep it. Sabrina wasn’t amused. I apologized and promised not to wear my boots in the house. Then I flung the fragment into the neighbor’s yard.
The second sign that I’d evolved into someone else? My new take on the Volkswagen Beetle. Chris and I spend an incredible amount of time kneeling in the street. Ostensibly we’re treating patients, but really what we’re doing is listening for—and occasionally hearing—the scream of tires as a car flies around the corner. Chris and I agree that the terrifying prospect of death by automobile is amplified by the fact that we know exactly what the car would do to our bodies: how the bones will break, where we’ll land, which of the sleepy medics from Zone Three will marvel at having accidentally touched our brains.
Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, maybe it’s a gradual desensitizing, but we’ve developed a game: Of all the cars on the road, which one would you least like to be killed by? Chris says something big, a truck, maybe, with a plow on the front that would splatter him into unrecognizable paste to be hosed into the gutter by the fire department. For me it’s the Beetle. Not the old ones, with the fading paint and the bubbly engine whine. The new ones. Brightly colored, with a matching daisy poking up from a vase stuck in the dash. How horrible to be mowed down by a happy little car with its own matching, factory-installed flower. It’s undignified.
One night, while eating dinner with Sabrina and my mother, I throw out the question: What car would you least like to be killed by? In return, I get only blank stares. “You think I’m being ridiculous, but it could happen. Look around the next time you’re driving. Nobody is paying attention. They’re on the phone or rubbernecking or arguing. They’re singing, eating—hell, roadhead is a thing that happens.”
My mother isn’t amused.
The third sign comes while I’m lending my friend John a postmortem hand. John’s death came as a surprise but not a shock. He’d been sick for a while, and what started as a cold became pneumonia, and from there it all happened very quickly. He stopped going to work, then stopped answering his door, and one day he died. Or rather, one day we learned he was dead. He was home alone when he collapsed. He rotted for a week before anyone found him. That John died alone and remained there for seven days is tough to hear. I’m still reeling when the question comes: Someone has to go in there, open some windows, let out the stink of decomposition. Will I do it?
When I arrive, a neighbor is there with a key to the back door. He hands it to me