Jackknife Around My Neck

All of a sudden, there was a lot of noise in the alley between our hospital stalls.

The steady stream of new vendors into our marketplace of injury and disease, punctuated by the recitative, the call and response of nurses and orderlies, doctors and residents meant the bars must be closed.

Lots of pain and suffering, perfect cover. Time to move.

I swung my feet over the edge of the gurney and got my hands underneath me for leverage.

I sounded like one of those street performers that make balloon animals as I pushed myself off the plastic-wrapped mattress.

Looking down at my feet, the floor seemed a long way away.

I could feel something like maple syrup cascade down the inside of my skull. It was thick and slow-moving and, whatever it was, it was responsible for my balance and it was taking its own sweet time finding its way back to wherever it came from.

I turned to look toward the curtain, just to make sure that I wasn't going to be interrupted, and that was a mistake. Like a tractor-trailer rig trying to make a sharp turn, I could feel the fifty feet of trailer jack-knife around my neck and, in an instant, I was face-down across the wrong dimension of the mattress.

That was new.

More balloon animal noises as I pushed off and tried to stand.

It was like the first time I managed to climb on to the roof of our house. It wasn't a big deal, but coming down was terrifying. I had to get on my belly and slide backwards off the edge of the roof while feeling around for the top of a window frame with my foot.

It made the perfect stepping stone on the way up, but never seemed to be where you remembered it being on the way down.

Friction against the asphalt shingles would pull up my shirt and the grit of the shingles would scratch my stomach adding a fine layer of pain to the fear of falling that grew with each flail of my foot in search of that toe-hold.

Sliding backward off that bed in that moment felt just like that.

I squirmed my way backwards, while my foot went on recon for a toehold on the floor. And all the time, with every movement, the squeaking and creaking of the mattress seemed to get louder.

Splashdown!

First one foot and then the other connected with the floor.

I locked my knees and pushed off.

And then, I was standing up.

It didn't last long, but I was standing up.

As my orientation changed from the horizontal to the vertical, the thick maple syrup of balance shifted with it. And, as it left my head, what remained transformed from the bowling ball I carry above my collar to one of those papier-mache-covered balloons that we made in elementary school after the balloon got popped: an empty space covered by a paper-thin layer.

I thought I had locked my knees..., but I hadn't.

The syrup seemed to gain weight as it settled and, when it passed through my knees, heading south, so did I.

My chin hit one of the gurney rails and the back of my head hit something else and that was it.

It didn't feel like an intermission, or a commercial break, it was more like we changed from continuous action to a series of impressions: a kind of a slide show.

I remember how cold the floor felt.

I remember seeing the very practical shoes of the people working in the next stall.

I remember waking up in what must have been the Radiology department. Unlike the harsh, remorseless glare of the Emergency Department, Radiology was lit more like an expensive club or restaurant.

The technician was asking me something, but I don't think I understood because he came over and helped me turn onto my side.

I remember as he rolled me toward him I threw up whatever was left in my stomach.

I remember apologizing.

I don't remember his response.

I remember waking up in a hospital room.

My head hurt. My jaw hurt.

I was next to the window because I could feel the daylight on my face.

I tried opening my eyes.

Big mistake.

It was as though the world in front of my eyes was a giant billboard that was being installed just as I was trying to take it in. The image was sliced into narrow strips from top to bottom and each piece was slid into view from an alternate direction: one strip slid down from the top and the next up from the bottom.

Only the strips didn't stop moving when they lined up, they kept going.

It was too early to be looking at things.

I closed my eyes and tried to force myself to go to sleep.

There was too much light in the room.

I grabbed the flimsy hospital blanket with my left arm and pulled it over my head. It helped a little, but pretty soon, I couldn't breathe.

Maybe if I turned away from the window, it would be dim enough that I could sleep.

I tried to turn onto my left side. I remember the squeaking balloon animal noises.

But I couldn't.

I opened my eyes again to confirm what I already knew.

It took a moment, but the clear image of a pair of handcuffs came sliding into view.

I had to get out of this bed.

Duty of Care

I was outside, but I was not yet out of the woods.

I was going to the hospital and, sooner or later, there were going to be some questions.

I had hoped that they would put me on a gurney and then go back to fighting the fire, but no such luck.

I swear they must be paid by the number of packages of this and that they open.

They put a mask on my face and they stuck a needle in my arm and pumped me full of Godknowswhat. After they hooked me up to a heart monitor and a pulse oximeter I stopped thinking they were practicing medicine and began thinking they were engaged in risk management.

After they had me strapped down and secured me inside the ambulance and just before they closed the doors and headed for the hospital, a police jumped into the back of the wagon and tried to ask me questions.

Couldn't blame them, really.

They had every reason to suspect arson and, because they found me on the wrong side of the door, I was going to be their number one suspect.

It was easy not to pay attention to him, I was too busy worrying about the dog and trying to figure out how I was going to get back to him.

I had a couple of coughing fits and made a couple of attempts to get out of the gurney and that was enough for the paramedic to shut the police down. Questions would have to wait, I needed medical attention.

I didn't really.

And the longer I lay there, with them pumping full of pure oxygen and flooding my system with saline, the better I felt.

Had to keep them from figuring that out.

Not much I could do in the close quarters of the ambulance. The next move would have to wait until we got to the hospital.

What to do?

I needed to figure something out and fast.

As for the dog, he would probably hang around the fire until everyone left and then he would head home.

Not a good choice, but probably the safest for him.

Whoever was hunting me would most likely have my house staked out, but they wouldn't move against the dog until they were ready to come for me, so he was probably safer there than anywhere.

He was probably hungry and a little confused. Couldn't blame him for that, also couldn't help him at the moment.

Soon though.

Soon.

The ambo lurched to a stop and then into reverse before coming to rest outside the hospital's emergency room.

The paramedics, joined by a pair of hospital orderlies, wrestled the gurney out of the wagon and began wheeling me head first through a series of doors.

BAM.

BAM.

Try as I might, I could not keep from wincing.

BAM.

I cracked my eyes open just far enough to see the policeman following along behind.

The smell of a witch's brew of disinfectants and antibiotics, vomit, urine and stale beer made me strangely nostalgic for the many hundreds of hospitals I had had the misfortune to see the inside of over the years.

Nights in the ER are the same all over the world. It's the closest modern equivalent of the marketplace. Stall after stall of independent merchants, each trying to convince a passing doctor or nurse of X-Ray tech about the worth of their wares, the severity of their malady.

And like the markets, there is always a language barrier, always misunderstandings, betrayed confidences, disappointment and yelling.

Everybody yells.

Doctors to nurses; doctors to patients; nurses to orderlies; nurses to patients; orderlies to security; orderlies to custodians; family members to patients; patients to other patients.

It was familiar.

We worked in hospitals, made moves in hospitals and, unfortunately, had to use hospitals. And whether they were First World or Third World, they have the same rhythms and, more or less, the same sounds and the same smells.

These were the places where people having their worst day ran hard into a group of people for whom it was Tuesday; people for whom you were just another barrier between them and going home.

Eventually, we stopped moving.

We pulled into what was to be my stall in this particular marketplace.

It took six of them, but they transferred me from the ambulance gurney to the hospital gurney. It was like being tackled by a football team when you didn't even know you were playing.

And then they all left. All, except the policeman.

I could hear one of the paramedics running down my vital signs for a nurse.

“Smoke Inhalation” was the presumptive diagnosis.

The nurse asked about I.D. and then I heard someone say “John Doe.”

The clock started ticking again.

I needed to get out of there before they figured out who I was.  If my I.D. found its way back to me, anyone looking for me would not be far behind.

I heard the nurse say something in an indiscreet voice about “Indigent Care” and someone else, outside the curtain said something about how that was all they needed and why didn't “those” people have the common courtesy to show up on the next person's shift so she could get home in time to be with her kids.

The cop stepped out of my stall and into the conversation between the nurses.

He was under orders to keep control of the prisoner and he needed to know how long it was going to take before I would be evaluated so he could report.

There was a long sigh followed by one of the nurses explaining to the police that so long as I was stable, I was not a priority. The hospital had a “Duty of Care” but that was all I was going to get unless, or until, someone could produce some kind of proof of “in-surance.”

She actually said “in-surance.”

And then I heard the policeman sigh.

He said something about having to report in and he “deputized” the nurse to watch me while he went to make a call.

She assured the police that she would stay put until he returned.

I heard the squeak of his leather belt and the jingle of keys fade out as he made his way down the hall and then, after a pause, I heard the nurse sigh as she too walked away.

Now was the time.

I had to get out of this bed.

From a Wolf to a Sheep

The decision window was closing rapidly, only there was too much sweaty, pasty ash in my eyes for me to see it.

The sound of the approaching firemen was getting louder.

I kept readjusting my grip on the hammer. The sweat was running down my arms and making the handle slick and sticky at the same time.

And I couldn't stop coughing.

They were going to discover me any second.

It was up to me to decide what they would find.

In my mind, I was running and re-running a variety of scenarios.

In one, the hammer does the talking and I trade places with one unlucky fireman. The hat, the full-face mask and the turnout coat become my passport out of the house.

Again and again I watch me as I drive the iron head of the hammer into his chest and force the air out of his lungs. I step behind him and peel off his mask and helmet as he falls. A couple of half-rolls and he's out of his coat and breather.

Clean, elegant, choreographed.

Used to do it all the time.

Used to....

That's the problem with running scenarios in your head.... The guy in my head is the grandson of the one I see in the mirror.

Head Guy might be able to drop a fireman with one hit, but Mirror Guy...?

And then I thought about something Rollin used to say: “Never do the same trick twice in front of the same audience.”

I dropped the hammer.

And then I dropped to the floor.

My coughing stopped and I was on to the next move.

The would check vitals, put me on oxygen and transport: leave the heavy lifting to the E.R..

Manageable, assuming I don't draw the doc whose car I smoked.

I was almost ready.

I jerked my wallet off my hip and quickly stripped out anything with my name on it.

When I was brought in, they were relentless about this. For a time there, the work was steady, if unpredictable. The phone would ring and you had to be ready to drop your real life in a drawer and become whomever, wherever.

We all had a drawer full of wallets and legends to go with each one.

And they didn't stop with the Diners Club and Chargex cards. There were “family” photos and receipts from places you'd never been for things you'd never bought and business cards from people you'd never met. And in case there was a test, you had to memorize a story for each one.

In those days, having an identity was important, but my present circumstances were very different. I couldn't keep them from finding out who I was, but I didn't have to make it easy for them.

I threw the wallet into the corner and distributed the named items into two packets and I slid each between my belt and the waistband of my pants, one over each hip.

And then I quickly transformed myself from wolf into a sheep.

I could see the pale blue beams of their flashlights against the smoke.

And then one of the beams poked its way into the room, pulling a fireman behind it.

I closed my eyes.

First thing he did was yell at me.

And then, like an eight year-old finding a dead snake, he poked me with his flashlight.

More yelling was followed by the laying on of hands and dragging.

At one point, I remember the feel of the sweat-moistened face mask against my skin.

There was a second pair of hands and then I was being carried down the stairs.

With an arm draped over the shoulders of each fireman, it was an easy matter to drop my ID and other named documents into the flames as we made our way down the stairs.

And then, we were outside.

Hold Out

This was taking too long.

My mystery date should have revealed himself by now.

I had taken us out on a limb, made sure he was closer to the leaves than me, and then started sawing. Anyone in their right mind would be looking for the exit instead of me.

Right mind....

As I sat there in that closet, staring at the phone's small screen, I kept thinking about all of the waiting and all of the watching all over the world.

Ninety percent waiting, ten percent abject terror: that's what they told us in training.

I remember once, very early on, saying something to Phelps about the waiting and the watching. I was a doer, a worker; not a waiter and a watcher. I was so excited to get the assignment to IMF because of what I thought they did. When I found out it was just as much, if not more, waiting and watching, I went to Phelps and complained. He listened without a tell. Like his hair, his face never moved, never gave anything away.

And then he said, “It's not about the waiting, it's about who we're waiting for.”

Like most pieces of wisdom, it was direct and to the point and meant absolutely nothing to me at the time.

That was one reason why I worked mostly with Barney. At least we were always doing something and not waiting for something to do.

I didn't go through all that I went through just to hand him tools, but it was better than spending time in yet another anonymous hotel room with that bitch Cinnamon, waiting for the mark to take the bait.

I kept wiping at my eyes.

The temperature in the closet was going up by the second and that meant the sweat was pouring off my head and into my eyes like sand through an hourglass.

Breathing too was more of a challenge.

A house full of smoke was collecting on the third floor and pushing whatever oxygen might be left back toward the ravenous flames.

I had to stay ready, which meant that I couldn't lie on the floor where the only fresh air was. I had to stay on my feet for when he showed up..., in case he showed up. It was like breathing through a wool scarf and feeling the fibers and they scratched their way up your nose and down your throat.

The fire was changing the biosphere of the house pretty quickly now. It seemed like I was inside a gigantic bowl of Rice Krispies as the snapping and the crackling and the popping of the house got louder and louder.

No way I'm going to hear him when he comes.

And then I lost the feed from the other phone.

I knew it would end like this.

I guess I had always known.

These are the kinds of things that people in my line of work think about. You can't help it. The work you do and the people you go up against, it's never far from your mind. Who you are when your cover is blown, or some piece of one-off technology fails at the critical moment, says a lot about the space between what is true and what is real.

And the longer you're in, the more real life examples you have of people who could hold it together and the much larger percentage of those who could not.

When you start out, you have too little real life and too many movies in your head. You think you're the guy who's going to break the interrogators and the torturers. The more time in, the more you hope that you can hold out long enough. And when you're close to your date with a sheet cake, you start working harder and harder just to keep your head down and you pray that somebody, anybody else's number comes up ahead of yours.

I was going to be the one who made it through: I was bigger, I was stronger and I was tougher.

And I did make it; I had my cake date.

And then somebody, my mystery man, moved the finish line.

Instead of Game Over, I had been fooled by a prolonged time-out. It was like play had been suspended for a car in the street and now the other side had called Game On.

Just when you think you're out....

Out.

He must have gotten out.

But how?!?

I was surprised how long it actually took to think this through—a lot longer than I would have expected—but it turns out I didn't want to go out like this. I wanted to get out too.

The Fire Department had decided to try and save the house.

I knew that because, when the broke the windows at the front and back of the house in order to get water on the fire, the rush of oxygen gave the fire the push it needed to really take hold on the second floor.

I couldn't stay in the closet any more.

The question was what about the other guy?

Operators are superstitious. Stakes are usually high enough on a job that when you find something that works for you, you stick with it. That's how you become successful and it's also how we were able to take so many of them down. The odds were in my favor that if he had come in through this window, he'd go out the same way. I just had to wait him out.

But he wasn't coming.

Maybe he'd gotten out ahead of me? Could that be?

I went to the window and looked out.

Damn!

My dog was still there.

He knew enough to keep his distance from the firemen, but he didn't know enough to go home.

He barked.

I think he saw me.

Damn.

I took in as much fresh air as I could and pulled my head back in.

It didn't look like he had been back through here but it was hard to see and even harder to tell.

I could still hear my dog barking. And I heard something else too: I heard the muffled shouting of firefighters in full face oxygen masks searching the floor below me.

It was going to be over soon. I just had to hold out a little longer.

I made my way across the room to the wall next to the door. Pushing the furniture to one side, I made a space for myself and, with hammer in hand, waited for the next person to come through the door.

Just a little bit longer.