almost imperceptible

almost imperceptible

When I was firefighter, I exceeded all the other volunteers in my ability to project my own baggage onto the lives of those with the misfortune not to have accidentally dialed 9-1-2. A bit like the Couvade Syndrome I so proudly displayed during the birth of our first child, putting on 40 pounds and offering Jehovah’s Witnesses $40 if they’d rub my swollen ankles. I didn’t just feel their pain, but found the gaping hole and poked around if the wound didn’t seem small enough for my time. The paramedics told us how to torment alcoholics and wife-beaters without leaving any marks. ‘Run ordinary tap water through the IV,’ they’d say, and laugh at each other knowingly. As an EMT, I couldn’t run an IV line, so I had to limit my equalization to emotional vicariousness.

It takes some time to gain a paramedic’s trust to the point where he’s willing to share this kind of insight. I rode a full 6 hours with two old pros from town with neither saying one word to me. I sat in the back rattling against the side of the rig with the oxygen tanks, wishing I had a cigarette. We finished a call in the middle of the forest, a hand-carved gate guarding the property, the architecture of which reminded me of the woodwork in the Maramures region of Romania. I said as much, mostly to myself.

What do you know about Romania? the one of them asked.

I talked about the year I lived there.

The other of them asked me more questions, before finally spilling that the character of a very important book they were both reading was Romanian.

Which book?

Left Behind.

I’m smart enough never to laugh, and when a firefighter tells you a joke, you respond by saying matter-of-factly, without the least hint of a smile, ‘That’s funny,’ as though all the physical manifestation of joy burned up long ago, because it did, I was there. It was that surround-and-drown blaze on 156th in November started by old wiring buried in lathe-and-plaster. All the humor went up in smoke that day, and we kept running out of water, partly because I got the tender stuck while trying to figure out how to suck water into the tank by creating a vacuum in the pump, and I forgot to keep at least two wheels on the pavement. It rained the next day. That was funny.

Left Behind. Haven’t read it.

They opened up good, these two, and explained the Bible to me frontwards and backwards, and I didn’t tell them my joke about how God had to explain 7 times to Noah why he didn’t need to collect two of each FISH, or my old man’s thesis on how Judas was in fact the only believer of them all, the only one with the fidelity to stand up for his beliefs. And it’s well I didn’t. Because these two men’s lives were changed by Left Behind, and if I was lucky, they’d let me in on the secret. I managed to read two chapters before my shift was over, apparently not nearly enough for epiphany.

* * *

In three years I was fortunate enough to only respond to one potential child-abuse call. The whole business about innocence until proven otherwise doesn’t apply to Frontier Justice, and rural firefighters are like so many Marshall Dillons, but with even shorter fuses and poorer aim. Everyone was fuming in the rig on the way to the house.

I assessed the baby while the volunteers glowered. The mother shot accusing glances towards the husband, an elegant looking man, a bit frail, and tired. The baby seemed absolutely fine.

'What about this?' she asked, a slightly foreign accent on the tip of her tongue. She was pointing at a fleck of blood on the baby’s nose, almost imperceptible.

I recognized this wound. Our own son had done this to himself many times, his fingernails potent like the ironically named safety razors, the old ones that you used to find in the little tin boxes behind your grandfather’s medicine cabinet mirror, never having been thrown away even though he passed on years ago. It was 1977.

‘You might want to tie some socks around his hands,’ I said. ‘This is what we did with our kid,’ I added, trying to make that elusive connection you’re not supposed to make with the patient.

She went on to try and explain how it was the husband who had bloodied the child, and as she spoke on and on with her odd invectives, the volunteers stopped glowering and rolled their eyes, leaving me to complete the paperwork. I caught the husband watching her, hopelessly. I could tell that look. He was thinking, ‘Loving this girl is like standing on the old Mississippi River Bridge in Cape Girardeau, wanting desperately to jump, full knowing that no one’s ever survived that alluring fall, but utterly convinced that you’ll be the first, because, in any case, you know you’re not walking away without tasting that water.’

When I went for the door, she asked, ‘You’re just going to leave me with this monster?’

Before I could answer, he said, ‘You could have him tie some socks around my hands.’

That was funny.