Apparitions

by Luke Boyd

Part 1, Part 3
appear in this issue.

part 2 of 5

Saving lives becomes an obsession, but it’s not every call that puts your heart in your throat, it’s the ones where people should by all rights be dead. These are the scenes where you deliver miracles amidst dancing blue and red silhouettes. But it seems like genuine emergencies are few and far between in Montreal and the longer you work the third shift, the fewer chances you seem to get for any sort of meaningful rescue. Instead it’s mostly the same half-dozen calls each night — mentally deranged sociopaths like old Madame Desjardins who lays down in front of traffic and refuses to move, or Uncle Karnov who takes random pedestrians hostage and accuses them of killing his beloved wife Anya. Then there are the overdoses and drink-a-lots who poison themselves nightly and just want to be left alone.

The unspoken rule that you and your new partner Keith have come up with regarding these people is kind of a three-strikes-you’re-out policy. Once you start seeing the same face over and over again you just make a mental note: Do Not Resuscitate. When you hear the same calling card descriptions pouring out of the dash night after night, you just roll down the volume or tune into 990 AM for Canadiens highlights.

After six months your initial inspiration has been reduced to a neurotic coffee addiction and plenty of free time for reading while you’re the only vehicle parked at the Mount Royal Cemetery. Keith has taken up online chess and sudoku puzzles and the bottom line is you don’t respond to very many calls anymore. Instead there’s a lot of tuning the radio out, pulling dash fuses, and being on the wrong side of the St. Lawrence when you know who calls in every morning at three o’clock.

It may be cruel and immoral but the truth is that there are some people who just don’t deserve to be saved and the easiest way to draw the line between does and doesn’t and be fair about it is by not showing up half the time. You can also justify this in your head by thinking about how much more energy you can devote to each call when you’re only answering half of them. But the truth is that a half pretty quickly turns to a third, and from there it’s so easy to not even show up.

The biggest problem that you and Keith face is that although you’ve both developed these new hobbies, you still get bored pretty much every night. Well, you were getting bored every night until his girlfriend who works in pharmaceuticals started hooking him up with ridiculous amounts of Percocet, Xanax, and generic Valium.

That was in February or March and now its late April or maybe May and you’re working so many hours you already have your rent paid through July. These are the kinds of accidents that start to happen when you’re only sleeping two hours a night at best, and twice in the past month you’ve put another rent check under your landlords door and he’s gotten so sick of putting them back in your mailbox that he just starts keeping them. Unfortunately, you’ve been so preoccupied by getting the rent paid on time you’ve forgotten to pay the phone and cable bills, so now there’s no reason to stay home and you sign up for a few extra shifts at the hospital instead.

In the course of a week you manage to finish Catch 22 and For Whom the Bell Tolls while ignoring dispatches for: two drug overdoses, a hostage situation courtesy of Uncle Karnov, an attempted shotgun suicide, two random attacks on street performers. Then you’re halfway through American Psycho on a painfully slow Thursday night — parked behind Loews with the running lights on while Keith lounges on the sickbed in back playing online chess — when Bonnie’s sweet voice comes over the radio that one of you has obviously forgotten to turn off.

She’s the only dispatcher you really bother to answer anymore and she’s calling for two units to the scene of a house fire. You’re totaling up Patrick Bateman’s dinner bill and reaching to turn the scanner off but then Bonnie calls your unit number, specifically. She says you’re the closest if you’re still hiding out behind the movie theatre on Mansfield, and the fire’s near where she grew up in Westmount and she would consider it a personal favor if you took it. You dog-ear the page, look into the back at Keith who watches you and sips at a double-latte, and then climb into the driver’s seat and take the radio receiver.

You do your best not to sound bored as you tell Bonnie that you’re not parked behind the movie theatre — that was like two hours ago and you just finished dragging Madame Desjardins out of traffic in front of the Hard Rock, but you’ll take the house fire call and you’re on your way right now with full lights. It takes more than just the promise to get you moving though and when you look down at the dash clock you realize its been five minutes and maybe you’re crashing off your dinner of Percocet and tuna fish because you’re still just sitting there with both hands on the steering wheel and the engine idling. Finally Keith climbs up front and hands you a few wannabe-Valiums that you wash down with a swig of his latte.

From that point it seems like the weight of your hands alone pulls the gearshift down into drive. Halfway to you-don’t-even-know-where-you’re-going you start to realize that maybe Keith should be driving because it seems like all the signs are seconds past you before their letters and numbers register. The tapping sound is Keith drumming on the dash with his fingers encased in aluminum fold-over splints. He is butchering the lyrics to White Rabbit and trying to be spooky — the result is equal parts Mr. Rogers, Peewee Herman, and John Wayne Gacy.

You are here:

Driving into a black hole with streaks of light blazing past you on both sides, at one point you catch yourself dozing off while looking out the driver’s side window. Then Keith is screaming and you swerve into or away from a noisy smear of bright light and there is a dull clank somewhere off in the darkness to your left.

Dude, that’s like the third mirror this month, man! What the hell? You are way too juiced — here, just keep this thing straight.

He actually positions your hands at ten and two on the wheel while you stare blankly at him.

I’m getting an adrenalin shot from the back, just like go straight, and speed up, man. You’re going like seven miles an hour.

It feels like a few days before Keith reaches around the seat and jams an intimidating looking syringe into your arm, right through your shirt. For the next few minutes you can tell he is actually doing most of the steering and you know something is wrong with this but it hasn’t all quite come together as a thought yet.

Then things solidify enough for you to realize your arm is numb and there’s a quarter-sized spot of blood soaking through your shirt sleeve. Keith has turned the wheel over to you and he is silent and flat-cardboard looking, placidly smoking a clove cigarette out the window. Things look familiar now as you get your bearings and if it weren’t four in the morning you’d be in trouble because you’re not even on the right side of the median, so you cross over and try to punch Keith with your numb arm but miss badly feeling like you swung right through his shoulder.

He’s got the clove cigarette mashed between his lips and he’s shaking a sandwich bag full of mixed pills like it’s candy and you ask him why he didn’t just drive if he knew you were coming down hard off the Percocet. He looks past you or through you and his face is dead serious but something isn’t right — it’s like he’s made of wax paper, flickering and buzzing like a fluorescent street light at dusk. You finally compose what you want to say, though it comes out foggy and vague, and you tell him if he doesn’t like your driving, he should take over. Otherwise, he should shut up and smoke another clove.

Dude, it wasn’t my turn to drive. Our partnership is like a fragile ecosystem, man, and if I start taking turns for you, then I’ll want you to start taking turns for me, and do you really want that kind of pressure, dude?

You think about what he’s saying and you’re pretty sure you hate him for almost killing the both of you but he’s already past it and lighting another clove with the window down and the air rushing in. Trying to imagine what Yossarian would do, you guess he would see the irony in the situation — what with the two of you almost being killed in an ambulance and all — and Patrick Bateman, well, he would have probably gouged Keith’s eyes out, but either way you resolve to let it go because suddenly Keith doesn’t look at all well. His body seems to be melding with the dark interior and his cigarette ember is the only physical part of him left.

You call in to Bonnie for the address of the house fire again and she’s pissed off and uncooperative because apparently you were supposed to be there fifteen minutes ago. A disembodied voice suggests you tell her you had to skirt blocked streets at McGill University and she finally gives in with an audible sigh and repeats the address which is for an old-mansioned section of Westmount. You blow through a series of intersections and from two blocks away you can already see a thick plume of smoke rising against a field of brilliant northern stars.

Proceed to part 3...