personal arithmetic, and it’s this style that dictates how I set up the ambulance. There are people who can’t run a call without everything set up just so. I am not one of those people, but I’m close. Once the ambulance is clean, I slip a key into the ignition. The diesel engine rattles to life.
Once Marty arrives, he snaps a battery in the radio and keys up to go in-service. It’s five in the afternoon, so the second we appear on the dispatcher’s screen, we catch a call. Usually it’s something close. Unless the bottom has dropped out and there are no ambulances anywhere—which is to say there are ambulances everywhere—and then we will be sent off to some far corner of the city. Sometimes it’s for a toothache that dispatch couldn’t hold on to anymore. Sometimes it’s a real-life dead person who’s been waiting and waiting, and now it takes us twenty minutes to get there.
But not today. Today when we go in-service, there are four available ambulances out of a possible twenty-five, so the call we catch is downtown. It’s an alcoholic who made it all the way to the door of the liquor store, shaking and trembling, before his disease said “Fuck it,” and now he’s in full-blown withdrawal and seizing on the sidewalk. A fish plucked from the water, left flopping on the ground. It’s just a short drive, barely around the corner, so we won’t have much time to shake off the rust and slip back into the subtle but constant vigilance born of waiting for the Big One.
When we get out, the sun is blazing. My feet melt inside my big black boots. We give the alcoholic Valium, but he keeps on seizing, never stops seizing. We drop him off at the hospital and nothing has changed, except the nurse has asked Marty out, so at least there’s that.
Before we even clear Grady, our radio is chirping. Dispatch has something for us. “It’s right out front,” she says. “In the bus stop.”
We ask what’s going on, but she’s dodgy and uncertain. All she knows is that the scene is safe. “Just drive around front and have a look.”
We find him at a bus stop, waiting. Not for us, but waiting. Waiting to die or for all this to pass. Maybe he’s just waiting for his bus, it’s hard to say; he isn’t much for conversation. I stop about two feet from him and lean against the wall. Marty stays a good ten feet behind me, close enough to know he doesn’t want to get any closer. It’s hard to blame him. The guy is sitting with his legs crossed, casual as can be, while maggots eat his face.
They’ve made off with nearly the entire left side, from his nose all the way to his ear, and from his eyebrow down to his jawline. All that skin, all that rotten and rotting flesh, is being consumed—while we watch, while he sits quietly on the bench. There are hundreds of maggots, all jockeying for position, and every few seconds a maggot slips off the cliff edge of his face and tumbles through the air and onto the pavement below. I’ve never seen anything like it.
From the safety of his observation post, Marty asks what’s going on. The man reaches up and presses the back of his left hand into his eye, forcing out a stream of blood and furious white larvae. “Skin cancer,” he says as he wipes his hand on his shirt. He has melanoma and it got infected, but he’s tired of the doctors and the nurses and the tests, all of it, and decided to leave. So he walked out and spent the night in the bushes across the street from Grady, where a swarm of flies landed and planted all the babies that have made such short work of his face. Another squeeze of the eye, another trickle of blood, more angry maggots. Marty backs up.
“You gotta get up,” I say. “You have to come inside.”
“Why?”
“Because you have maggots on your face. Because they’re eating you, literally. As we speak, they’re devouring you. I think your eye is gone, and who knows what’s next, so come on, get up. Please.”
He reaches up again with his left hand, and somewhere behind me, Marty threatens to pass out. The man is unmoved. He’s done with hospitals and doctors and procedures. And though it might not be done with him, he’s done with cancer.