A Thousand Naked Strangers

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 breathing tobacco breath into my ear—tells her to flip to Appendix J. Page 310. He says he’s seen plenty of dead people, and these, the ones in our book, they’re nothing. The girl agrees. “You want dead bodies,” she says, “good ones? Go to the Internet.”

They’re kindred spirits, these two, and they gravitate to each other, finally, thankfully, leaving me to my anxiety. I slam the book shut as tiny beads of sweat dot my forehead. I’m hot, dizzy, and my face is flushed. For a second I think I’m about to pass out, but then my mouth starts watering and I realize, no. I’m gonna puke. Swallow hard. A deep breath. Class hasn’t started, the door is open. I can still leave without being noticed. Retreating? No, no, you got it all wrong. I am Richard Fucking Nixon, and this is peace with honor. Then the teacher walks in. The door shuts behind him. Eyes front, there is no escape.

He drops his bag on the table. Hands on his hips, legs spread wide. “Welcome to EMT school. Who’s ready to get started?”

• • •

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, I was a reporter and my wife, Sabrina, whom I’d met in college, was working her way up in the world of ad sales. We lived in a small century-old bungalow on the south side of Atlanta, and everything was great until the world changed. In an instant we were at war. Since I’d graduated years before from The Citadel, many of my friends happened to be in the military. As I attended city council meetings and reported on budget cuts and judicial appointments, my friends were killing and being killed. Sabrina and I had dinner one night with a friend who led the first convoy of marines into Iraq. As he described the desert and the land mines and told stories of helicopters flying so low he could feel the heat coming off the rockets they fired, I thought of all the things I hadn’t done.

I’d had my chances to join the military during college but hadn’t. I thought about it again, but not seriously. Still, I wanted to be tested. I wanted to prove to myself that I could handle the pressure of life-and-death moments. How I’d do that, I couldn’t say. Ultimately, opportunity would present itself in the form of a sewage disaster. The county was deep into an enormous wastewater project, and scaffolding leading down into the yawning tunnel collapsed one night. A half-dozen workers simply disappeared into the earth. My editor sent me to cover the rescue. I spent a long quiet night staring into the hole, hoping to see survivors but knowing there’d be only bodies. I wrote stories about the project, the faulty scaffolding, the dead. I wrote about the rescuers: specially trained fire-medics who carried themselves in a way that said they knew something, if not necessarily about the world, then surely about themselves.

In the summer of 2002, a tiny publisher put out my first book—a short and rambling coming-of-age novel. Once it was out, I quit reporting but stayed with the paper. Because I needed time but also money, I got a night job as a paper boy. In the span of two days, I went from writing newspapers to delivering them. Our friends thought I’d lost my mind. During the long dark nights, as I drove around delivering papers to the far reaches of Fulton County, my thoughts would wander to my friends in Iraq and Afghanistan. Slowly, those stories I’d written about paramedics crept back into my consciousness.

“So go back to school,” Sabrina said one morning when I brought it up.

Shut up and take action—this is her solution to all problems. How nice it must feel to be a type A in a world gone soft. That afternoon I started poking around on the Internet, and by nightfall, almost by accident, I was enrolled in an EMT program at a local technical college.

This was a rash decision. I knew nothing about medicine, and the only experience I’d had dealing with emergencies did not end well. It was the summer of 1997, and I was leading Jet Ski tours when two guys crashed into each other. I didn’t see it, but I heard the thud, and when I got there I found them floating in the water—one startled, the other missing a mouth. His eyes were wide and bulging. His face below the cheekbones was gone; blood and teeth dripped into the water. His skin hung slack where his jaw should’ve been. I was young, scared, overwhelmed. I did the only thing bystanders are asked not to do in an emergency: I panicked.

• • •

Seven years later, here I am. In EMT school. The door is shut, class has started. I’m embarking on a career that will require me not merely to witness emergencies but to participate in the rescue. I can’t help thinking I’ve made a huge mistake.

With me in the classroom are two dozen misfits, all looking for a respectable job. Our instructor is Alan, a lifelong medic who came up when EMS was in its infancy. He tells stories of running calls on dark streets and in cramped apartments. His tales smell of blood and desperation. They’re real and exciting but scary, since eventually the dying patients will be ours. And though we’re a long way from that, the photographs in the book make clear what awaits us. Maybe he can read my mind—hell, maybe I’m not the only one having second thoughts—because Alan tells us, right out of the gate, if we’re not sure we can handle this, now is the time to leave. A couple of people laugh as though the mere suggestion is ridiculous, but I’m not one of them. I didn’t grow up wanting to be an EMT, nor do I know if I’ll like it. What I do know is I want to get hip-deep in the things that matter. I want to know if I’m more than the kid who panicked that summer day in 1997. I want to know if I can be counted on.

So I stay.