“Nah, I didn’t know that.”
“You did a good job.”
“It was nothing.”
“It was quick thinking. You were pretty cool about it.”
I shrugged, but inside I warmed from the praise.
“That nurse talked to you?” he asked.
I said she did.
“You mention me?”
“Fuck no.”
“Did she know I was EMS?”
“I doubt it.”
He looked at me for a moment.
“We’ll have something else going on soon. Some real thing.”
I was quiet.
“Not that I’d blame you for tellin me to fuck off. But damn . . . You’re a natural.”
I couldn’t help smiling.
“Talk to me later.”
“Yeah yeah. All right. We’ll talk about it later.”
He seemed relieved in a way. I think there was a part of him that felt guilty about getting me involved. But there was another part that thought, Why not? He ground his cigarette on the concrete.
“You sure you ain’t with the AIDS girl?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“You ain’t kissed her or nothin?”
“No.”
He hesitated.
“She a junkie?”
“I don’t think so.”
“White girl, college girl, how’d she get it?”
“I don’t even know.”
“Well, if she’s a junkie I know someone who can hook her up. You might even make yourself a commission.”
24
A four-story brownstone and Burnett and I walked up the stairway slowly. We could smell our patient from the lobby, and with each floor the smell grew stronger, more stifling. At the third floor a cop in uniform leaned out a window, waving fresh air toward his face. Above him, from an open door, his partner bolted out with a hand over his mouth, and clambered past us, panting, “The dog got to him.”
Deadpan, Burnett turned, and said, “Think we can save him, Frank?”
A few black flies buzzed into the hallway. Burnett set the equipment on the stairs.
“You wanna go?” he asked, and before I could answer, he said, “Why the fuck’m I asking? Of course you wanna go.”
As I stepped past the cop, he said, “You’re about three days too late.”
I entered a hallway thirty feet long, with an open doorway at the end. The floor was dotted with piles of feces. Everywhere there were large brown print marks. A mad scraping of claws on tiles. Behind a locked door, a repetitive thudding at waist height. A deep, short, angry bark. I checked the door to make sure it was locked, then tiptoed onward. As I neared the far room I got an obstructed view of dark bare legs. I could hear the dog behind me, whining, scrabbling. I reached for my camera. Through the viewfinder the entire shape of the man came into view. I stepped up to him—focused, objective, alert—and began taking pictures.
25
Walking along the East River near the Williamsburg Bridge.
“So how’d you get it?”
She answered without hesitating.
“The normal way. I slept with someone.”
“Someone you knew well?”
“Not really,” she said.
The concrete out there was tilted and uneven. Weeds grew up in cracks, and the London planes, which lost their leaves early, were stark, bare. The abandoned factories were dark and silent on the other side of the river.
“He was a fencing coach.”
“Ah.”
“One of the seasonal guys. I wasn’t a prude or anything. I liked him, he liked me. We were drunk. It happened.”
“You’d think he’d tell you,” I said.
“We were drunk,” she said again, as if that excused him. “The chances aren’t that great. He probably thought it wouldn’t happen.”
She tossed a pebble at the metal rail that ran along the river. The pebble tinged and skipped into the water.
“How long before you found out?”
“I was a senior. He was already dead. So it was hard to be angry at him. You know, him being dead.”
“Had you been with anyone else?”
“Not so they’d get it.”
She tossed a pebble at the smooth trunk of a maple. She missed the trunk. She found another pebble and tossed it. She missed again. I tossed a pebble and hit the trunk.
“Ya bastard,” she said.
She tried a third time with a pebble. Again she missed. I hit it. I’d won the tossed pebble game. She swore and swatted my arm, then squeezed it. We started walking. I could feel the place she’d squeezed. We walked side by side.
“What’d you do afterwards?” I asked.
“I didn’t do anything.” She picked pebbles here and there from the sidewalk. “I didn’t do what he did, though. I always told people. I never hid it.”
“Did they want to be with you after that? After you told them?”
“No,” she said. “Not really.”
She stopped and nodded toward a tree trunk.
“You ready?”
I said I was, and we both tossed pebbles.
We walked up and down the riverbank, along the green, oily water, talking about her illness, and then moving past the subject. When she bent down to pick up pebbles I noticed how small and deft her hands were. Dark stones piled up in her little white palm.
26
She sat at the kitchen table in a neatly kept apartment in Washington Heights. A shelf of colored glass knickknacks in the opening between the kitchen and living room, a photograph of the woman, as a girl, in front of canefields and surrounded by a large family, only a few of them wearing shoes. I noticed a black leather briefcase in the hallway, a fancy umbrella with a wooden handle, a framed MBA diploma from NYU on the wall. The woman herself looked exhausted, ashen; I went into the bathroom to see the bowl filled with black liquid, and as I came back out Burnett was holding a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol. He shook it to show it was empty.
“The whole bottle,” he said. “Three days ago.” Then, “What’s it look like?”
“Tar. Ink,” I said, and he nodded.
“Another success story,” he said.
The woman did not look up when we came back into the doorway. She had a little overnight bag at her feet, and a manila folder with computer printouts of her entire medical history so we did not have to ask her any questions.
“Looks like you’ve been through this before,” Burnett said. “Let’s go.”
She was quiet in the back of the ambulance, and I was quiet sitting on the bench. I read her entire medical history and copied the information I needed onto my paperwork. I thought she did not want me to talk, and I didn’t really want to talk to her, but as we neared the hospital she looked up and said, “So that’s it? I’m dying?”
I could see she wanted to know.
“I think you are,” I said.
“I’ve tried before.”
“I saw that,” I said. “You used aspirin before. A bottle of aspirin won’t kill you. But twenty of those Tylenol could do it. And you took fifty.”
She nodded slowly.
“They won’t be able to save me?”
“If you’d come in when you first took them they could have. Now you have no liver function. They’ll try to get you a transplant.”
“Can I refuse?”
“Yes. They won’t want to waste a liver if you don’t want it.”
She did not say anything to this, but faintly, she smiled, and turned her head. Again, she was quiet. So was I. We were passing the George Washington Bridge.
“Are you glad?” I asked, after a moment. “Now that you’ve done it, that it’s inevitable, do you regret it?”
“Why would I?”
This answer pleased me.
27
Washington Square Park at dusk. I had high-speed film if I needed it, but I didn’t see anyone I really wanted to take a shot of. I just kept circling around, scanning th
e park, looking over at Coles Gymnasium, where I knew Emily worked out sometimes. I thought I wanted to call her and I also thought I shouldn’t call her. Once I stopped at the pay phone near the library and lifted the receiver, but then I remembered us walking along the river and the way she’d touched my arm. I hung up without dialing and went back to my apartment and into the darkroom. I turned on the safelight. I could have worked on some prints but I didn’t feel like it. I drank a beer slowly. I thought I might cry, felt it welling up inside me, but then it didn’t come. I lay there without doing anything, one arm thrown over my head, lips parted, staring at the ceiling.
28
All the trees were bare. Everyone wore winter jackets, hats, and scarves. Burnett and I were at 157th and Broadway, watching the women come from the subway.
“You haven’t seen her?” Burnett said.
“Fuck no.”
“Haven’t even talked to her?”
“Not for . . . almost two weeks.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“You fuck her and get scared?”
“Nah.”
“You kiss her?”
“Nah, nah. Never touched her.”
“I’m surprised, Frank. Way you are. Thought you’d be into it.”
“What do you mean, into it?”
“I mean you like sick people. That turns you on.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Admit it, Frank”
“I don’t know if I need to admit it or not.”
“Well, it’s true.” He put a hand behind his neck. His big, square, yellowed teeth showed over his brown goatee. “So what’d you say to her?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You must’ve said something.”
“I just stopped calling her.”
“That’s the best way. Don’t explain. Just stop talking. End of story.” He watched some young woman with a briefcase in a business suit walk out of the subway. “I don’t have anything against her. But . . . if she’s positive, she needs to find someone else who’s positive. And you ask me, she seemed dumb anyway.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Cause she didn’t wanna go to court. She coulda made a lotta fuckin money, but she just said fuck it. You ask me, that’s pretty dumb,” he said.
29
“You can take me home.”
“All right,” I said.
“I’m not . . . trying to take advantage or anything. You asked if I needed anything.”
“I know what I said. I meant it. Here.” I felt his hand on my arm. He was blind. We walked slowly from the park. “You don’t have a dog?”
“I can’t afford the food.”
“Medicare won’t cover it?”
“You making some kind of joke?” he said. “Anyway, I got a cane. Cane’s as good as a dog if you know where you’re going. I don’t need no seeing-eye dog.”
He lived three or four blocks away. Some apartment on Carmine Street. He’d probably been there fifty years. In the lobby he let go of my arm and went to the mailboxes, found his box by touch, inserted the key, got his mail, and then shut it. He started up the stairway holding on to the railing, not saying anything.
“Are you coming?” he said when he was halfway up.
“Yes,” I said, and hurried after him.
I followed him into his apartment. In the living area there was a large table with many stacked papers, books in Braille, and a radio. As soon as he entered he reached for the coatrack, found it, and hung up his jacket. I tried to help him but he went on himself.
“I know where it is. I know my own apartment. As long as nothing’s moved.”
He walked to the windows, which were heavily draped, and beneath them ran a long, low table lined with wigs on Styrofoam heads. Blond, brunette, redhead, curly, straight, permed. Nine different wigs. He felt his way along from the wall and took the third from the left, a red-haired wig. He set it on the coffee table in front of the couch and ran his fingers through the wig slowly, his head up, tilted at an angle.
“It’s hair,” he said.
“I know what it is.”
“I mean, it’s real hair. Feel it.”
I put my fingers in the fine red hair. A certain ache opened up inside me.
“They were my wife’s,” he said.
“Was she blind?”
“No. She was always knocking things about. Even more than me. Moving everything around. But not blind.”
“She’s—”
“Eighty-eight,” he said. “Two years ago. I got rid of all her things. It was too cluttered. But I kept her hair.” He bent down and sniffed. “You can still smell her. Hair holds a smell.”
“Can I take a picture of that?”
“Yeah, sure. That’s what you’re here for, right?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Just like that. Just stay like that.”
I took the shot quickly before he moved.
“Can you feel the flash?” I asked him afterward.
“No. I’m completely blind. I can hear the shutter. But I see nothing. And the flash doesn’t have weight. Not like sound.”
I took pictures for ten minutes. I got him feeling the hair, sniffing it, sitting calmly along the row of wigs. When I was done I sat back with the camera on the table.
“You’re leaving now?” he asked me.
“If you want me to.”
“Stay,” he said.
“I’ll stay a minute.”
He made coffee, measuring the grounds, pouring hot water into a French press. He knew where everything was. And I watched it all openly, studying him. I wondered if he could feel me watching, if that had weight.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-three.”
“Agh,” he waved a hand at me. “You should be out. Meeting people. Having a good time.” He held his hands up. “Come here,” he said. I got up and took a step. “No. Right here.” He reached up and felt my face. He bent my head down and smelled my hair, then let me go. “What do you do? Do you have a job?”
“Paramedic.”
“An exciting life.”
“I guess.”
“Well, this is my life. What you see here. This is it.”
“It seems like a good one.”
“I know bullshit when I hear it.”
“Really,” I said. “I see a lot of people. You’re not doing too bad.”
I put my camera away. I said I was going.
“Send me a copy.”
I shook his hand. A dry, strong grip. He held me a moment. When he let go I stepped outside his doorway. I heard him locking the door behind me.
Half a floor down a potted geranium rested on the windowsill, and through the dirty window, a garbage-littered courtyard. Someone was calling Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, from a window further up. I waited until the calling stopped. Then I walked down slowly.
30
Hock and I entered the little lobby of Kagans Liquors.
“How much money you got?” Hock asked me. “We could get that Rumpleminze shit.”
“Yeah o.k.”
“Or you want Seagrams? That sound better?”
“Whatever.”
“Don’t know why I’m asking. You don’t give a fuck.”
“I’d go with the pint,” some aged, diminutive man said behind us.
“That right?”
“Other’s too sweet. Fuck your stomach up.”
“Take it from the expert,” Hock said to me, and the older guy nodded, seeing it as a compliment. This guy was not much more than five feet tall, with an underbite and crooked yellowed teeth that stuck up a quarter-inch above his lower lip. He wore thick glasses with black rims and his right thumb jutted out at an angle as if it had been broken and healed incorrectly. Hock eyed him, then pulled his medic cap down, showing him.
“I brought you in, haven’t I?” Hock said.
/> “Probably.”
“I brought you in drunk.”
“Probably,” the old man said.
“How you doin? You gonna be sick tonight?”
“I guess we’ll have to see bout that. For both of us,” he added.
“Guess that’s right,” Hock said.
The clerk came back with the Seagrams in a bag. Thick, graffiti-covered glass surrounded the register. We handed the money through the revolving door and the Seagrams was given back with change.
Outside the store Hock threw the bag on the ground. It was late, about midnight, and there were only a few people wandering back and forth on the sidewalk. Some guy sprawled below the neon sign with an empty two-dollar bottle.
“You wanna go first?” Hock said.
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I was fingering a paper cup. I held it out, like he’d pour me some, but he just gripped the pint and put his thumb halfway. “This’s yours,” he said, indicating the lower half. Then, keeping his thumb on that spot, he tilted the bottle up and drank for about fifteen seconds. When he lowered it his eyes were watery and the liquid sloshed at the exact level of his thumb. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and screwed the cap back on, handing me the bottle.
“Rest is yours,” he said.
“Jesus,” I said.
The older guy with the underbite came out of the store. He looked at me holding the half-empty bottle. A yellow-toothed grin as he raised his own.
“You be careful out there, ya hear?”
“Yeah yeah,” Hock said.
We walked toward the loading bays where there was a group of medics waiting—Burnett, a Dominican guy named Rogero, a Haitian named Geroux. Others came and went. There was a bottle of rum, upright, on the hood of Hock’s Buick. Stacked paper cups upside down. We’d been gone about five minutes. Geroux looked at the half-empty pint.
“That wasn’t me,” I said.
Hock stood calmly, an eyebrow cocked. Geroux, who was a short guy with a little black mustache, put a hand on Hock’s shoulder.
“You better take’t easy, my man.”
“Fuck it. I’ll sleep’n the car.”
“There you go,” Burnett said, and, taking the pint from me, tilted it quickly. He handed the pint back and I drank, then turned away. I made a face.
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