pounds, six and a half feet tall, with bull shoulders that block out the light. Dressed in a windbreaker and dirty khakis, feet stuffed into size-fourteen sneakers with the heels crushed down so they’re not sneakers anymore but slippers. A wild beard and an Afro bristling with lint and dead grass. He stomped over, angry and massive, a rhino escaped from the zoo.
He threatened us, threatened everyone. Told us to do whatever it was we came to do, because he wasn’t cooperating. Marty, growing anxious, was ready to pull the trigger. But these calls require patience, and I’m nothing if not patient. I’m the steady drip that bores through stone. Calm down. Cooperate. Come with us. Or else.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Cordell turned and charged us again. When he stopped a few feet away, we were in his shadow. He leaned forward, and Marty rocked back on his heels. Cordell blinked, and the sharp focus in his eyes softened to a dreamy haze. “Let me get my things.”
So now we’re in the ambulance, me writing a report, Cordell surrounded by a half-dozen overstuffed grocery bags. It’s hard to say what calmed him down. I’ve come to think that all but the most unstable people know something’s not right and, however reluctant, want to be helped. Sometimes I’m wrong. Last month we handled a woman whose body was right here in the Bluff but whose mind was in outer space. A cop had picked her up for walking in the street, and I climbed in the back of the cruiser next to her. Without warning, she pulled out a ten-inch butcher knife and tried to stab me. We were hip to hip in the backseat, her slashing wildly with the knife, me wiggling and scooting and trying not to get disemboweled.
Still. Cordell needs help, and tonight he agrees. There’s only one place we can go. Thirteen.
Any patient who says he’s crazy or that he wants to hurt himself or hurt somebody else or who talks about the government jamming microphones under his skin, he goes to Thirteen. The psych floor. Some buildings don’t have a thirteenth floor, but here, in Atlanta, at Grady—one of the South’s largest public hospitals—Thirteen’s where they house the insane. Thirteen: two magical syllables spat out in contempt or spoken with reverence or whispered in fear. Thirteen.
Cordell says he’s hearing voices. “I can’t listen to them anymore,” he says.
“What are they saying?”
He looks away, nodding and bobbing his shoulders, and the ambulance rocks like a small boat. He hears what I’m saying, but he can’t focus—he’s carrying on two conversations now.
You’re worthless and stupid. Just a piece of shit. Your mama hates you, everyone hates you. So why are you still here? Why are you still talking? Why are you still alive?
“Have you been taking your medicine?”
Why haven’t you killed that cracker-ass medic? Seriously. Nobody would care. Do it. Just do it. Right now. And when you’re done, when he’s dead, open the back door. Leap out of the ambulance. Splatter yourself all over the highway.
“Cordell . . .”
Do it.
Now.
He blinks and returns to the ambulance.
“What are they saying, Cordell?”
“Bad things. Mean things.”
“Are they telling you to hurt yourself?”
He nods, and the ambulance crests another wave.
“They telling you to hurt other people?”
He shrugs. Looks away.
If he doesn’t want to talk specifics, fine. There’s nothing between us but a seat belt. No sense poking the bear.
“Can I ask you this, though?” I glance at the clock. “I’m guessing this didn’t start now. It’s probably been going on a while. So, it’s what? Eleven-thirty? What changed to get you so worked up?”
“I’m rotting inside. I have to be ripped open so the foul can come out. I have to be relieved of this burden. To purge.”
There’s not a whole lot you can say to that.
“But they want me to wait.”
“The voices?”
Another nod. “They said wait until midnight.”
It’s now 11:28. I shift in my seat. “You know, I’m guessing the doctors aren’t gonna want that to happen.” I shrug. “I don’t want that to happen.”
“If you tried to stop me, I’d have to kill you.”
The next fifteen seconds pass in silence. Cordell doesn’t sense my unease. That I’ve picked him up four or five times, that we’ve talked and joked and extended to each other a certain degree of mutual respect, doesn’t, in his mind, preclude sudden senseless violence.
Up front, Marty stops at a red light.
It’s 11:29. We have thirty-one minutes.
While we wait, Cordell crosses his legs so the untied size fourteen