In Case of Emergency (23 page)

“I wouldn’t.”

“Right, of course not. What’s the name of that call again?”

“GSW,” I say reluctantly.

“Is that supposed to be shorthand? ‘G-S-W.’ That’s two more syllables than just saying ‘gunshot wound.’”

“Ryan.” I say it quiet and fierce, like I’m going to release a stinging rebuttal. But I can’t think of one. He won’t let me get off the phone until I agree to see him tonight. Despite my frustration, it is with some reluctance that I hang up.

After lying there for several more minutes, I climb out of bed and pull my EMT textbook off the bookshelf. Toward the beginning, there’s a section about coping mechanisms. The EMT must make sure to get adequate
sleep, exercise, and have a proper diet. Signs that someone is not dealing well with the stress of the job include, but are not limited to, loss of sleep or appetite, nightmares, abrupt mood changes, irritability, guilt, and isolation. How comforting. I already had all the signs and symptoms of not dealing adequately with stress before I ever started the job.

When my phone rings again it’s Ayla. I decide I will listen to the voice-mail later.

I look at the section again and start counting. There are four hundred words. In a textbook that’s 1,210 pages, less than two of those pages are spent describing how to cope with stressful incidents. Things like treating victims of rape, domestic abuse, amputations, burns, suicide attempts, stillborn births, mass-casualty incidents, and dying or dead children or infants. I slam the book shut, put it back on the shelf, and shuffle around my room, hoping the friction of my socks against the carpet will create a spark of static electricity. Perhaps static electricity is a sign of stress.

32

Ryan picks me up in his restored Volkswagen bug, which has been painted an iridescent green, still has a tape deck, and needs new upholstery. On the way to Culver City it backfires in protest as he yanks us in and out of a traffic-filled carpool lane. I ignore his grumbling and search for the right radio station. My music interests have changed. Gone are the days of indie rock; none of my bands make sense anymore. Lately I listen to what the birthplace of gangster rap booms and hums on a daily basis: Ghostface Killa, Immortal Technique, Lloyd Banks. Much to Ryan’s chagrin, I’ve even started to memorize the lyrics. I know almost all the words to J Dilla’s “Reality Check.”

“There can’t be anything worse than a white girl trying to rap,” Ryan
says after I manage to utter a few streams of compressed lyrics.

At his house I make his favorite drink, a mix of Kahlúa, Coke, Galliano liqueur, and club soda—which tastes like sugary shit but when I’m with him I drink it anyway—and he makes us sourdough toast. This is what we do when we drink together: we eat thick slices of buttered toast, we drink sugary cocktails, and at the end of the evening he always tells me to take two Advil with a glass of water to prevent tomorrow’s hangover and I say, “What are you, my mother?” Then we hug goodbye even though we don’t usually, because the buzz of alcohol has loosened us up.

He serves the toast on one large burgundy plate and we eat standing, bent over the counter, melting butter sliding on my tongue, the cracking sound of crust being bitten into.

I borrow a soft hooded sweatshirt from his closet and disappear into it, into the smell of my brother, into the shape that his shoulders have transferred to the threadbare cotton. We take our drinks to the backyard, a plot of grass with a couple of trees and a weatherproof table set. With his usual grace Ryan manages to sit and then lie down in the hammock without spilling at all, and I slouch into a chair that’s planted next to a barbecue so clean-looking you would think it was unused. For a while there’s just the sound of ice clinking against glass. Even though it’s not cold I pull the hood up over my head. Even though it isn’t dark Ryan waves his arm so the motion detector porch light will stay on. He tells me that Malcolm is working late again. Malcolm is on a new case. A Beverly Hills homeowner has discovered a beehive in her walls, the bees are trafficking all over her house, but she isn’t allowed to kill them or remove the hive because honeybees are protected under California law.

“So what’s she supposed to do?”

“Wait until they swarm, and then a beekeeper will come remove them. But she doesn’t want to wait. Her entire house reeks of honey. Malcolm said the furniture smells like it’s been dipped in it.”

Ryan asks about the GSW. I keep it brief. Just the act of telling him what happened makes me feel as though I am losing something, like the sound and rhythm of my speech pattern will codify the experience, will turn it into a story you can tell in your brother’s backyard as though it is just a story. My mom left. My ex was fucking my friend behind my back. A teenager got shot in the head.

Ryan sways in the hammock. He’s looking up at the sky, where not a single star is showing. He says, “What if you knew for certain he was a gangbanger, would that make a difference? If you knew he’d killed other kids?”

“You sound like William.”

“I’m not saying he deserved to die. I’m trying to figure out where you’re at with all this.”

“I don’t know. It’s their lives, it’s real. It doesn’t help that no one gives a shit about them—his death wasn’t even reported on the news. The kid who died a few hours later wasn’t either. Of course what they’re doing is stupid and horrible, but lots of wars are stupid.”

“I heard there’s something like four hundred gangs in LA now, even though undercover cops brought down a bunch. Now there’s a scary job—stay away from that one.”

“Not to worry.”

We nurse our drinks to their last watery traces and I make another round. Ryan reaches up to take the glass I hand him. “For a while I had this thing,” he says, “where I wanted to be the loud drunk girl at the party. You know the one? She’s fearless. She’s always having fun.”

I sit down and stretch my legs out in front of me, trying to position the seat cushion of the metal chair so it pads my tailbone. After a few minutes the porch light goes out. I can still make out my brother’s shape on the swaying hammock.

“The loud drunk girl isn’t ever the least bit apologetic for being loud and obnoxious,” Ryan says, “or maybe she isn’t even aware she’s loud and
obnoxious. The point is, she’s impossible
not
to pay attention to, and the next day, out of everyone you met at the party, she’s the one you’re talking about. In college I always ended up dating or being friends with someone like that.” He takes a sip. “Malcolm and I have been seeing this therapist. Terry thinks I hide behind other people. Like I’m afraid to bring attention to myself even though it’s what I really want, and I’ve probably been like that since I was a kid.”

“Not everything has to do with—”

“No, I know. I just thought it was interesting.” He lifts a hand high and waves it until the porch light comes back on. There’s no breeze; the grass blades are as still as sculptures. I remember the nine-year-old boy and his broken arm and realize William might have been right. That little boy probably already knew the violence that would happen later, which was why he played hooky and went tagging. I press the cold glass against my ear.

“Pipes, are you getting enough to eat?”

“Are you going to come cook for me if I say no?”

“Are you sleeping enough?”

It sounds like Ryan did his research. Like he found a website that’s just like my textbook.
Signs of stress include…
I realize I’m exhausted. I tell him I’ve been sleeping just fine.

Ryan swings his legs over the edge of the hammock. He takes my glass from my hand and says, “It’s time you learned to poach an egg.”

We work in a dim kitchen, guided only by the square yellow light over the stove. He pulls out the carton of eggs from the fridge and on the counter lines up a medium pot, a silver teaspoon, a bottle of rice vinegar, and a slotted rubber spoon. I make another round of drinks and complain. “Cooking will kill my buzz,” I whine.

“Hush,” he says. “This will be good for you.” He tells me to fill the pot with a shallow bed of water and set the burner on medium-high heat. “Keep an eye on it. You put the egg in just before the water boils.”

He explains how I mustn’t break the yolk and mimes the correct way to crack and split an egg one-handed. The tap is sharp, deliberate. Flip the halves apart right over the water to release the contents. I open the carton and discover I have three chances to get it right.

“It’s almost boiling, Ry.”

“Add the vinegar. Two teaspoons.”

I stir in the vinegar. He tells me to keep stirring until it looks like a whirlpool; I will drop the egg into the center pocket of the swirling water and lower the heat immediately. The egg slides out raw and viscous, a transparent slime except for the yolk and the large fragment of eggshell I get in there by accident.

“It’s all right,” he says.

The quickly coagulating egg white splays out like the tentacles of a twirling jellyfish, but the motion of the circling water wraps the egg back around on itself, holding it together.

When we were kids and had a lot of time to ourselves, Ryan and I got into a kind of ritual, especially on the mornings when Dad had already left for work. We’d push the alarm time later and later and then race to get ready, sliding on the banister down the stairs, using a variety of dismounts, including a kind of belly-slide-to-handstand flip that I rarely succeeded at, and when we reached the kitchen Ryan would wait at the threshold while I made a big show of climbing up on a stool, the kitchen timer in my hand, forcing him to wait for my signal. It took Ryan a little over a minute to make breakfast smoothies, and only about three minutes to pack our lunches. He’d yell and run around the kitchen, trying to beat his time from the day before, and I would stand on the stool chanting,
go go go go
.

“Did you know Mom was going to leave us?” I dip the silver spoon back
into the water, trying to reattach a bit of egg white that has wandered off. “I mean, I know we’ve talked about this before, but I just… well, you were older,” I finish lamely. “Could you tell what was going to happen?”

“Leave it, no poking. Let it cook and we’ll do another one.” He sets a timer for four minutes and places it on the counter. He asks me to repeat the question. I tell him to forget it.

The water slows its swirl; the egg wobbles and grows brighter colored, more substantial. I’ve lost track of the eggshell fragment. Ryan wishes he could be loud and drunk and not care who sees; what he knows is how to make the perfect poached egg.

“No,” he says. “I couldn’t tell. After she left, I thought about those weeks leading up to it, thought about them over and over. She used to have those long conversations on the phone—”

“In the walk-in closet.”

“Yeah. And I remember her hugging us a lot. I used to push her away, wipe off her kisses. She seemed choked up, more emotional than usual, but… happy, too. Like anything you or I did could set her off and she’d start crying or laughing. But no. I didn’t see it coming.”

Ryan gets a bowl out of the cabinet and I pick up the slotted spoon, poised for an egg lift. “Do we add vinegar again?”

“No more. Pipes, things are good between you and Ayla, right?”

“She’s amazing. She really is.”

“Good. Then don’t let her go.”

33

Before Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis there were alienists, acupuncturists, healers, massage therapists, medicine men, shamans, and witches. Some Chinese historians think the first medicinal tools originated as far
back as 4000 BCE. During the Stone Age, a Paleolithic caveman (who has since been named “Bian”) was the first to sharpen a stone with the intent to cure. He was the first to think of pressing on the source of someone’s physical pain, cutting at it, and draining what was underneath. One wonders how long he survived his newfound line of work.

These days you can use a certain amount of historical hindsight to consider types of treatment. No one really ponders Franz Mesmer’s “animal magnetism” technique anymore, even though it was wildly appreciated in the late 1700s. Mesmer’s patients would tie themselves, eight at a time, to a specially designed wooden bathtub and watch in terrible suspense as he glided around in gold slippers and lilac robes. By waving a magnetic wand over the willingly trapped, Mesmer induced trances, convulsions, vomiting, seizures, and hysterical laughter.

On the other hand, those living in the Nordic and Antarctic regions are familiar with light therapy boxes to ease depression in the long winter months. The idea of light as a healing power can be traced to all ancient civilizations: Greeks, Romans, Incas, Aztecs, and the designers of Stonehenge in 2000 BCE Britain. The Egyptians built temples where sunlight was spectrally diffused, with the help of gems, in order to assign a color to each room; people were placed according to what ailed them. Red to stimulate circulation. Blue to soothe pain. Green to heal systemic problems. And so on.

Besides today’s use of light, acupuncture, music, and massage, there are also the ever-blossoming forms of what must surely be an ancient idea: nature therapy, wilderness therapy, adventure therapy.

In sum, if you wish to heal what ails you, the best possible thing would be for you to receive a massage with the aid of aromatherapy and essential oils while soft tunes played in the background, surrounded on all sides by a beatific wild landscape, feeling the sunlight on your skin, the acupuncture needles in your hands and feet, the colored gems arranged on your body’s
meridian channels, and, of course, while incorporating the psychiatric analysis of the childhood roots of all your stress and anxiety.