We went on for a minute, things here and there about neighbors, a couple of people I knew from high school that Dad saw at the airport, working security jobs or ticket-counter jobs or as flight attendants. There was a training program he was hoping to get into, so that he could move into a flight-mechanic position. “All those guys is badasses,” he said. “Marines and all that. I should have gone military.”
“So you could be yelled at by haole guys with skinhead haircuts for, like, six years or something? Come on, Dad.”
“I coulda seen the world, though,” Dad said. “Got real skills, you know? They learn things there, at least.”
“Yeah, they learn how to shoot other brown people,” I said.
“Okay, okay,” Dad said. “I get it, you know everything now that you been at college for a semester or two, yeah yeah yeah. I love you. Here’s your mother.”
The phone tumbled from hand to hand.
“You’re doing okay,” Mom said, barely a question.
“Of course,” I said. “Did some great climbing last week with Van-guys.”
“Climbing,” she said. “I hope you don’t think you’re just there to party.”
“I just got all this from Dad,” I said. “I know what I’m here for.”
She cleared her throat. “How are classes, then?”
“Hard,” I said. “But I like engineering.”
“Good,” she said. “At least you’re not studying, I don’t know, American history of comic books or something like that.”
“Right.”
“You getting enough sleep? Enough food?”
When I can afford it, I wanted to say. But I already knew where the call was going. It didn’t matter what I said, so I stayed quiet, so that we could get where we were going faster.
“You talk to Noa lately?” she asked. There you go. Didn’t take as long as I thought.
“I mean, maybe,” I said.
“How’s he doing?”
“Didn’t you just talk to him?”
“We did,” Mom said. “But you know, kids don’t always tell their parents things.”
If only you knew me, Mom, I wanted to say. I’ve felt the midnight crush at a strip club, me and Van and Hao and Katarina there almost like a joke, but still pulled in by it, the red lights and sweat and gritty beats. Did you know I’d been so many times drunk or stoned or snowed, trying not to trip my numb legs on themselves while walking dark o’clock streets. Or did you know I’d climbed without a rope at terminal heights at least a few times, just me and air and death.
“Don’t be worried,” I told her. “We’re fine.”
“I hope so,” she said. “We did a lot to get you there, you know.”
She had to stick it in, right? She never said shit like this to the boys, only to me. Like I was supposed to be guilty of ambition while they were just living their full potential. “I know, Mom,” I said.
“We miss all of you,” she said.
And I said I did, too—and I did. But feeling it then, the missing was different than I expected. Less desperate, I guess. And getting smaller all the time.
8
NAINOA, 2008
Portland
I recognized the house even though I’d never seen it before, recognized it even if the two police cars hadn’t been there, they were all the same these days (the places we went): the bedsheeted windows, the trash-choked clapboard siding, the greasy scatter of engine parts on the clumpy lawn.
“I love what they’ve done with the place,” Erin said, yanking the ambulance’s shifter into park. She dropped the lights and we each pulled a fresh pair of blue latex from the box. I went around back to get the kit, she started toward the officer on the porch, speaking to him in bored tones, preparing for the state of the apparently traumatized skulls inside.
The radios spat, it was otherwise quiet. The officer at the top of the porch bowed, toed open the door. “There’s one in the living room near the fireplace,” he said. “Looks like the other one fought in the kitchen before he gave up.”
Erin stepped up the creaking stairs, through the yawn of the door, a plastic scent like old diapers, a hot bloom of air. I went right behind her.
The light inside was sooty, the wood floor gouged and cross-slashed from years of use, crown molding and naked bulbs. Near a dingy sectional couch was the first patient, skeletal and sallow, with an officer bent over his torso, ramming him with chest compressions.
Erin dropped to the floor by the officer’s side and he understood, pulling his hands back like it was time to wash them. “The second?” Erin asked, even as she started compressions, and the officer nodded toward the kitchen. I went, around the corner, into the stench, it was as if a cat had pissed into a moldering refrigerator. The wall above the stovetop was scorched, something like a war bomb burn, and on the floor a topology of discarded cookware and trash bags, organic refuse, and in the back corner, near the refrigerator, the third officer was negotiating a grizzled rope of a meth addict onto a stool.
The addict was breathing like he’d just surfaced from drowning, but he was breathing, through his tangled roots of goat beard, a face pecked with bloody scabs.
“The fuck is this party,” he said.
I was confused and turned toward the officer. “He looks alive,” I said.
“That’s the problem,” the officer said, his nose red and swollen, it looked like he’d taken a punch there. He jerked the addict by his shirt scruff into a better seating position.
“Any other problems?”
“My mortgage, my kids, your questions,” the officer said. He looked like he was waiting for me to leave. “Maybe check his friend in the living room.”
But I was already gone as he said that, back to where we came in, I saw the baseball bat for the first time on the floor, grip tape blackened with palm sweat, the end pink and spiked with bits of hair. There were fist-sized hamburger wrappers balled all over, an empty bookshelf leaning drunk against the back corner, and there was Erin working on the one who’d been beaten, paddles in her hands. The patient was still on his back, his left leg folded wrong, bent sideways and high. Eyes closed, the blue bloom of his lips.
“Hey, inspector, you want to help here?” Erin said, holding the paddles, and I already had an idea. I dropped to my knees, there was no pulse, not a hint at the carotid or ulnar.
“D-fib isn’t working because his heart isn’t beating,” I said. Now the stink of sweat and urine, there his crusty shirt already yanked up around the splay of his armpits, a dollop of gel at the ribs, another at the pectoral.
“I lost it,” she said, dropping the paddles. “It was there.”
“It’s gone,” I said.
“I know.”
“Airway clear?”
“Fuck you,” she said. “I’m not an idiot. It’s the bat that did this.”
“Maybe the drugs,” I said. “Let’s try again.” I stitched my fingers together, put the edge of my palm into his sternum and compressed, careful to avoid the xiphoid process and the hemorrhage that could follow its snapping. His body: at the beginning it was just him, a man, but my eyes and teeth pinched as I compressed his chest, the oxygenated gasp of everything that moved in him, and then I felt as if I were squinting my brain. He was the him I saw but also a him I felt: I felt the weave of his skin and the buttery chunks of fat underneath, the hush and rush of what could only be his blood, so long and blowing, all of this just a feeling, it was nothing I saw. There were other muddled sensations deeper down, but strongest was an effervescent urge, his body eager to start repairing itself, but even that came and went so quick I still couldn’t separate all the this from the that. There were colors I felt, he had the yellow tarry rush of meth’s hate booming through his veins, then the jagged red memories of anger that came and went like thunderheads inside his skull, a color I’d felt many times before—and all the while the truth of my hands, chest compressions, shoving blood around his husk. I was on my knees and over the patient, my palms at his sternum, dropping my weight down and letting it come back up, one two three four five six seven, on and on and on. The liquid pop of the already broken ribs went like a clock. Something sparked, it certainly wasn’t the compressions, it was only that I was searching, the same as I always am when I do this now, searching and feeling and trying to understand what the injury was, at the same time that I understood what his body should be. I think something had already started—