Surviving six years in most jobs does not grant a person veteran status. Auto mechanics, engineers, veterinarians, six years in they’re just getting started. I remember reading once where old world tailors could spend a decade or more as apprentices. Blacksmiths, same. But six years in this work? You’ve seen some shit. Ten years? You’re reading your monthly pension statement like, I think I can actually get by on this. 

It’s not the gore or the disease, or even the sadness. It is, or course. Death is sad. But for me it’s the myopia that takes a toll, humanity’s general inability to foresee consequence. 

Encapsulated:

Dude: What’s this thing do? 

Thing: Ka-boom. 

Radio: Station 6 respond.

And then we show up to find a guy blubbering over the spot where his buddy had been standing just before he struck the match. 

            It takes my paint off. 

There’s the guy, for example, we found with a plastic bag over his head and a belt around his neck, pants around his knees, fingers wrapped around the (surprise!) unintentionally fastened belt buckle... me standing over him thinking, dude, all you had to do was rip the plastic bag off! Or the three-year-old boy asphyxiated under the weight of the quad his father let him ride all by himself while he drank beers on his porch with buddies…or the woman who tried to hang herself but tied the rope too long and broke both her femurs when she hit the ground and died from internal bleeding instead. 

            I have a particular antipathy to teenage males doing stupid shit, probably because I was one, and did stupid shit myself. What ages me most is that teenage males so rarely suffer the consequences of their absent frontal cortex themselves. It’s always the family of four, or the old lady, the neighbor’s cat. My enmity for these young Tiresiases manifests in an acerbic, condescending tone, apparently, according to Mrs. Harriman in HR, citing the complaints she’s received. It is not my “job,” she says, to voice my opinion to the egg, or to comment on the idiocy of an egg sitting sit on top of a wall in the first place, nor to even put the pieces of said egg back together again when said egg inevitably falls, because it’s oval and on a wall! Mine is simply to gather the pieces without comment and carry them to those who are paid very well to put avoidable messes back together again. 

So yes.  I struggle with the part of my “job” that says I can’t speak my truths, as a half-dozen notes in my personnel file attest. I’ve been working on it, though. I didn’t say a word, for example, to the man who ran himself over with his own car. And barely a peep to the woman who climbed a ladder in flip-flops to clear a drain, slipped, and dangled from the downspout by her broken forearm until her husband got home from work three hours later. But this? This? 

They can only ask so much.       

* * * * * * * * * *

“At times like these," I announced to the Impenetrable Joshua Betts as I approached the guard rail against which he was leaning, "I find myself pondering the fundamental questions. I can see by the look on your face that you are as well." I waved my hand across the ruins as any great orator would and declared to my audient, “The difference... oh ye of thumotic youth and folly... is fortune alone.”

(It also happens to be how I plan to make it to retirement without a debilitating back injury.)

The Impenetrable Joshua Betts of course said nothing.

Perhaps he felt insult – not from me but from misfortune. By the looks of the debris field the accident had been dramatic. Perhaps he felt cheated. Perhaps he imagined something bigger, more impressive, a wow finish for a screaming crowd instead of the creaking of cooling metal on a soft night in the middle of nowhere. There hadn’t even been any passersby.

Mine wasn't to demean, simply to express my sincere beliefs on a topic of infinite philosophical dimension, namely that providence seems to play the determining factor between the living and the dead, the dullard and the genius, the nerd and the beauty. Given Joshua Betts' present detachment however, I gathered he’d either already achieved his spiritual salvation or he didn’t share my interest in metaphysics – which would be ironic since they were so clearly impinging on his being right then.

In fact no matter what ontology I invoked he straight-faced me – which of course impelled me to extract whatever facial expression I could. I asked his opinion on Kant’s phenomena/noumena construct. Nothing. Paley’s pocket watch proof for the existence of God? Nothing.

“The Buddha taught his followers to imagine no difference at all between the myriad things, to imagine ourselves as the homogeneous contents of a universal soup, to consider the possibility that our very belief in our individuality precludes us from spiritual liberation.”

Nothing.

“Look here Ben Spinoza, I will argue tomorrow morning that this was not your fault. I will stand before the intellects of antiquity and the fire department coffee club and posit that you are the victim of a causal chain that was outside your command.” I waved my arm Biblically across the tattered landscape of his making. “And oh how they will rise against me in opposition! Lo! will they cry out their indignation to affirm that you chose this fate and brought this malignancy upon yourself!” I counted them off on my fingers. “William James, John Stuart Mill, my partner Nick, Shift Captain Grunyan...”

“How I wish I could believe in the freedom of will they champion, to swim against the unrelenting tide of causation, to hold the fundamental difference between individual destinies to be the contrast of our choices. How much quieter would I sleep knowing that the quality of my decisions would bear the fruit of permanence and prosperity. But I have a wife and a child, Joshua Betts. I have a cat. Faith alone prevents their ruin? Belief unadorned protects my flock from such catastrophe as that which has befallen you?"

“It does not, Joshua Betts. It cannot. Because I know, Nick my partner knows, the police officers know, everyone out here knows, deep down, the difference between you and me, you and them, Joshua Betts ten-feet-tall-and-made-of-steel? Pure. Dumb. Luck.”

I waited for the Impenetrable Joshua Betts to respond. Nothing. Or more accurately, nothingness. He just stared at me. Or at least his head stared at me. His body lay another two hundred yards up the highway. The rest of his motorcycle presumably lay somewhere beyond that.

* * * * * * * * * *

The first set of skid marks began at the crest of a lonely overpass on a two lane highway where the road rose and fell gently over a four-lane highway below, just a smudge of rubber in the middle of nowhere made when the rear tire lost contact with the road. In EMS we call this the, “Osh…” As in, “Oh sh --!” Or in Joshua Betts’ case, considering the distance between the skid mark and the stanchion which eventually brought his slide to a stop, quartering his body and severing his head – the “ohshitohshitohshitohshit. . . ” moment.

A second set of marks beyond the first bore resemblance to giant claw marks gouging the pavement courtesy of five hundred pounds of tumbling motorcycle and a hundred and seventy pounds of tumbling rider traveling – don’t quote me on this, just the number that pops in my head – a hundred and forty miles per hour? A hundred and fifty?

Fast. Moronically fast. The call came in as a simple motor vehicle crash reported by an elderly woman living in a distant farmhouse, awakened by the scree of scraping metal and rubber somewhere in the night. It took us three minutes to get the ambulance out (Nick’s prostate), another six to arrive in the general area, and four more minutes to actually locate the accident itself…all to discover that time was not much of a factor in this one.

What was left of our hero was most indubitably dead on arrival.

My first reaction? I laughed. I mean, like, I pointed and ba-ha laughed. Spit on the windshield laughed. Nicky lit a cigarette. The Impenetrable Joshua Betts of course failed to see the humor – which of course made me laugh that much harder. Between him and Nicky – I held my arms out framing the scene. Arm here, leg there? Come on, man! It’s hilarious!

Tough crowd.

Of course Nicky can hold his deadpan with the best decapitees around. He didn’t even grin when we found the head looking off into the distance all shocked, all Man-on-the-Moon. Not even a smirk. Well I did, boy. I couldn’t get myself together. That expression! It was priceless. “Ohhhh!” Like he’d finally resolved the mystery, only it wasn’t what he expected. Like he could smack himself on the forehead if only he had hands.

That’s how it all works!

I’m telling you, hilarious.

* * * * * * * * * *

People who meet me now assume I’m numb because of the job, amused by other people’s demise, insensate to suffering and earthly foible. That’s unfair to the job. For the record I have since childhood suffered from the relentless grip of the giggles during the most improper, and usually somber settings – weddings, funerals, heartfelt conversations with significant others. My episodes are universally unprompted, rarely foreseen and never controllable, all of which has garnered me a reputation as an eccentric that I’ve carried into adulthood. You think a blushing bride looks cross when her nephew spews from the groom’s side of the lectern? Try your Officer-in-Command when you blow spit on your notebook during a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing.

With that said, to show that I’m not completely inhumane, I’d like to point out that I used to remember every dead body I’d ever seen, back when I started this job six whole years ago. It’s the first question people usually ask paramedics; do you see a lot of dead people? Veteran paramedics, including me now, offer non-committal diversion. “Sometimes, sure. But not as much as you’d think.” Which is true. But when asked that question once as a rookie by my own civilian friends, over dinner and wine, intrigued by my departure from the world of cubicles, trying to understand why I left them for severed heads on deserted highways, I obliged them by actually producing a number.

“I’ve seen eleven dead people,” I bragged with just the right mix of pride and resignation. It makes me cringe to remember now.

A better answer I now understand, three thousand calls later, would have been, “Define dead.” Is six shallow breaths per minute in a stroke victim dead? Is respiratory and neurological arrest in the heroin overdose dead if his heart is still beating ten, twenty, thirty minutes later? How about the ninety-five year-old war veteran, bedridden for twenty years, eating and urinating through tubes? Is he dead or alive during those years?

Anyway, it took me a year after coming to this job to realize it wasn’t the laughing per se that caused my colleagues to question my sanity. It was the giggling, the volcanic eruptions of hilarity, without preface and sometimes without discernible cause. Laughter? Part of the job, that’s okay. But giggling? Totally inappropriate and decidedly unmasculine, which is why I laugh now instead. A hearty HA HA, vs. a girlish tee hee! Does that make sense? I’ve tried to explain it to my friends but they give me the same stunned look as the Impenetrable Joshua Betts here. To which I snap my fingers and say, “Exactly!” But they don’t get it. Which starts me giggling anew.

It’s a vicious cycle.

            So now I laugh robustly at my colleagues’ jokes and tell my friends what they want to hear about my job, that it’s not as bad as you’d think, that it doesn’t feel real, that my job is about the living, not the dead.

But when my first patient contact all of a sudden there in the cone of the headlights is an arm? Just an arm? Damn right it makes me laugh. It makes me howl.

Just like it will someday to the paramedic who finds my arm, my leg, my head, too.

* * * * * * * * * *

At any rate this particular arm, Joshua Betts’ arm, lay in the middle of the road, palm up, braided with the remains of a leather biker’s jacket. The fingers themselves were contracted and white but also paradoxically relaxed and soft – exsanguinated if you want the technical term. My real mistake is I pointed it out to my partner, forty-four year old Nicholas Proctor – ten years older than me but with twenty years more experience, and always, always, more professional and somber.

“Arm!” I declared (invoking of course the Chinese Hua-Yen school in which Tu-shun addressed his taut, expectant audience by holding up a daisy and proclaiming, “Flower!”). Nick didn’t get it but neither did he drive over the arm while looking out the side window into the woods, which among other things would be very bad form, but also a lot of paperwork (and it goes without saying, very funny, which, it goes without saying, I did not need.)

At my announcement Nick rolled his eyes. He considered the appendage with the air of someone who not only saw the arm already, but who’d see it all already, even though I’d fall over if he’d seen this particularly. So I looked back out the windshield as if to say, yeah? Well maybe I’ve see it all too, then, maybe.

Too late. I had already insulted him. He said, “You sure, Jay? You sure it’s an arm?”

“Yes, Nick. That’s an arm.”

“Could be a leg, Jay.”

“No, Nick. It’s an arm. It has a finger.”

“Could be a toe.”

“It’s a finger.”

“Which finger, Jay?”

“Ring finger.”

“What’s the name of the ring finger?”

“The second metacarpal phalanges.”

“Could be the second metatarsal phalanges, Jay. . . ”

“It’s not a metatarsal phalanges . . . ”

And so on until I finally said, “You’re right, Nick. It could be a leg.” (Which by that point I meant. As the Bodhisattva said, if everything arises out of emptiness, how can we know with any – )

“It’s an arm,” Nicky nodded as he gloved up. “That’s a shoulder and that, hanging on there,” he snapped his glove, “pectoral muscle.”

So maybe he had seen it all before. We parked the ambulance and stepped out into the night, still but for the clicking of our light bar. The most ominous sign – my opinion, probably Nicky’s too but he’d never say it – no pool of blood. Either the rider was dead when the arm came off or the pool of blood was far from where this arm came to rest or it was atomized into a fine mist that we were now breathing in. Fifty yards further, walking side-by-side by flashlight, we came to the helmeted head, the Impenetrable Joshua Betts, resting upright just off the pavement in the grass of the median, mouth open, eyes open.

I felt a familiar wave of laughter bubbling up. I held it together by thinking about how it would feel to have my own head pop off – not funny at all – until I found myself pondering – not like I’d act on it, just a passing thought – whether I should take a picture to send to the helmet manufacturer. Hey, you know, thought you’d be interested to see how your product held up. Great work. That kind of thing. I spent some time in quality assurance. We used to worry all the time about how our stuff was holding up.

Nicky shined his light on the head from an angle that, unintentionlly, accentuated the victim’s masculine features and, frankly, flattered his visage. I bowed my head. Nicky thought I was paying respects. I made a little hand gesture in that direction. “How would you label that expression on his face there, Nicky?”

“Puzzled,” he said in all seriousness. “Perplexed. Puzzled? Perturbed.”

I spewed. I was done. I did it to myself.

“Brother,” Nicky said. “I really believe you were struck in the head.”

The Buddha was a psychologist.

* * * * * * * * * *

As we inched around in the darkness looking for the place where Joshua Betts ended and the Impenetrable Joshua Betts began, the red and white flashes of fire trucks and police cruisers began to fill the scene. We’d already radioed the incoming units to slow their response, that we had a priority four – translating in this context to “a quite obviously dead person,” so the engines pulled up casually and without sirens. It gave the scene a milieu.

With the stadium lights raised we could finally consider the incident as a whole. The “scene,” we saw clearly now, extended a thousand yards starting back at the smudge on the crest of the overpass and ending in the far distance in the cooling ruins of a Japanese motorcycle. In between, the remains of bike and rider lay tossed about the road like the contents of an overturned pickup truck. Here a taillight, there a hand, that over there looked like maybe a seat, or was it a boot? Because that could be a bit of cushion, but it could also be skin. Hard to tell. A hundred yards back somebody found the torso still attached to the other arm and one leg, pretzled around the stanchion of the guardrail and tied in a knot. Nick and I had driven right past it. Nick groaned. I did too. We were parked right in the middle of the debris field.

Of course everybody else, including OIC Grunyan, sleepy and humorless as ever, and likely wearing pajamas under his turnout gear, gathered back there, at the torso, the heart, the eternal center. Nick cursed. “Well I’m not going back there now,” he said and took a stance that told me he was staying with the head. He didn’t have to tell me what that meant. I walked off to sweep for an ejected passenger. Kicking through the grass, puddles, shining my light in holes, I found nothing – thank God. How funny would it have been to find two mangled bodies in the night?

I returned feeling vaguely dissatisfied (explain that to Grandma over Thanksgiving dinner) only to find Nicky – God bless him, he is human – assessing the head and asking earnestly, “Okay son, what’s your medical history? Allergies to medicines? What hurts, your back? Neck? Anything else?”

Could it be? I thought. Is Nicky actually apologizing to me? I clicked my pen open to write on my glove. “What you got, Nicky?”

Nick shrugged in disgust. “Kid’s refusing to answer my questions.”

“Head injury?”

“I think so. I’ll intubate. You start the IV.”

            “Okay.” I started to turn away, deadpan. I turned back. “Nicky?”

“Yeah?”

“Where’s the arm?”

“You’ll have to use the jugular. I think I saw it over there in the grass.”

“Right.” I turned, stopped. “Nicky?”

“Yes, Jay?”

I pointed my light down at the pearly column of vertebrae at my feet. “Grab a collar. I’ll hold C-Spine.”

* * * * * * * * * *

“Joshua, Joshua, Joshua,” Nicky said, shaking his head.

“You know this kid?” asked a State Trooper walking up behind us.

“Joshua Betts, eighteen years old. Lives in Dames Quarter. No, I don’t know him. We found his wallet. Still has his student ID. Just graduated.”

The cop drew his gun and pointed it at the head as if it had moved. “On the ground, tough guy. Put your hands up.”

Which cued his partner to say, “Settle down, Corporal. He looks ‘armless to me.”

A Deputy jabbed the Trooper. “Better cuff him anyway. You Staties are so slow you couldn’t catch him if he rolled away!”

In the background Nicky began whistling the old Patsy Cline song, “I Fall to Pieces.”

I laughed. The cops laughed. Even Nicky laughed. Joshua, Joshua, Joshua. Forgive us? We’re staring at meat.

Then to everyone’s horror and bewilderment a cell phone rang from a pocket of what remained of the leather jacket, cheesy ringtone, and all comedy ceased. We froze, understanding in concert that a loved one was somewhere worried, calling beyond all hope that Joshua Betts would answer. Even to us it seemed disrespectful to mock that kind of desperation. Until a firefighter standing back with the twisted torso called over, pretending to answer, “Tell her he’s all tied up right now!”

Another round of laughter until the medical examiner arrived and objected, “Hey, take it easy, will you?” pointing to the helmet again. “Brain-injured patients are at increased risk for stroke.”

So yeah I laughed. I cracked jokes. I said all the right things. Ha ha. And my urge to spew passed. And at the next dinner party I’ll water the story down and say it was nothing, you get used to it, you see it all the time. What I won’t say is that if it hadn’t been three in the morning I would have called my wife just to hear her voice. Just because she was eight weeks pregnant with our second child, a daughter we hadn’t told anybody about yet, not even Nicky, both of us harboring a healthy superstition that can best be summarized as, “Braggarts make fun targets for God.” Ten fingers, ten toes, dear Lord. If it suits you.

What I won’t say is that it will take me weeks to sleep soundly again and months to feel comfortable with the face of the Impenetrable Joshua Betts materializing in front of me whenever it pleased.

What I won’t say is that I am haunted by the thought of his mother and father sleeping somewhere, or sitting up reading, trying to act like they’re not worried about their son’s late arrival. Do they know? Did they wake up from a dream? Are they peering down the lane?

Nicky doesn’t always understand me but he felt my mood change maybe even before I did and pulled me off to the side, “You okay, brother?”

“I’ll be okay, Nick, yeah. Thanks. It just caught up with me. You?”

“Couldn’t be better.” He saw that I saw and flicked the ashes off his cigarette. Then he said, “You know Jay, sometimes I really don’t know how I feel. Or if I even do.” He stopped, embarrassed to have said this. “What do you have to say to that, college kid? Nick Proctor’s Deep Thought of the Day.”

I thought back to a night when I, at the age of seventeen, drove my father’s Oldsmobile into a four-wheel slide at a hundred and thirty-five miles an hour.

“I think sometimes guardrails come at you pretty fast.”

“Amen, brother. Amen.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Back in my bunk, trying to think of anything but Joshua Betts’ shredded pectoral muscle, I found myself remembering a motor vehicle collision Nicky and I ran one clear morning where we arrived to find a Lincoln Town Car impaled on the back of a logging truck, two fifty-foot-long trees running through the passenger compartment out the back window, the car dangling above the ground suspended by its roof. No driver to be seen, only a splat of blood where the driver’s head would have been, in the impact pattern of a paintball. Instinctively we both looked back down the road to see if the head lay somewhere back there but found nothing. Gathering our equipment out of the ambulance leisurely – because as Nicky pointed out, “It’ll fall back to earth sometime!” – we discussed his son’s school play from the night before.

“He was cast as celery in the food pyramid. You believe that?”

“Sounds cute.”

“Liberals are brainwashing my kid.”

“Into being celery?”

“Into thinking it’s wrong to eat meat.”

I looked at him sideways, causing me to take note of a complimentary splat of blood on the end of the log protruding from the back of the car. He saw the smart-ass creeping into my smile.

“Suck balls, college kid. You know what I mean.”

I hit Nicky on the arm. “Look at this guy.” A fresh-faced cop was running towards us wearing a panicked expression.

Nicky snorted. “Guess he’s never seen a driver’s head nebulized by a tree before.”

The young cop ignored our expressions of bemusement to report simply, breathlessly, “Excuse me sirs, but the driver ducked! She’s alive!”

Nicky and I looked at each other in bewilderment and started running ourselves. We found an eighty-nine year old woman curled up in the driver’s seat, saved by her dowager hump, her scalp scored by the passing tree, bloody, but otherwise unharmed.

“Ma’am, does anything hurt?”

“Ellen?” Her daughter’s name. She thought I was her daughter. “Is that you honey? This is so embarrassing. I’ve lost my glasses down here somewhere. Can you help me find them?”

On the way back to the firehouse Nicky said, “That woman thought you were a girl.”

“No more seaweed wraps for me. How many more candles on that cake, you figure?”

“With luck like that? Ten at least.”

Only she died three months later after missing the toilet and breaking her hip.

Out of respect, I did not attend the funeral.

* * * * * * * * * *

From his bunk, in the dark, Nicky said, “So this paramedic walks up to the Pearly Gates, limping, bruised, clothes torn and burnt, and says to St. Peter, ‘But this is impossible! What happened?’”

“And St. Peter says, ‘You were driving to work behind a tanker truck. Just when you pulled around to pass, a beautiful, naked woman ran out in the road. When the tanker swerved to miss her, it rolled over onto your car and exploded, killing you and knocking the naked woman unconscious.’”

“‘Damn it!’ the paramedic said.”

“Confused, St. Peter said, ‘But you’re in Heaven now! Why are you cursing?'”

“‘Because I miss all the good calls.’”

I smiled in the dark but said nothing because I knew what was coming. “You figure he had time to think about it, Jay?”

I didn’t answer. We both knew he did. It was clear from the skid marks that he hit the ground at an adequately oblique angle to slide, slide, slide until he stopped forever. Pow. Just enough time for that one final thought. And I’ll bet my hat he thought of his mother, how she’d been correct about that motorcycle after all.

I believe every paramedic must harbor the same latent fears I do, the terror of entrapment, of drowning, of waking up in fire, something long and tortuous, or something quick but not instant – something that gives me time to think. If I were to write the paramedic’s prayer I would start it, Dear Lord, please let me get shot in the back of the head or struck by a car I never saw coming or hit by lightning or. . . but even as I’m praying, I see my terminal vision floating before me, the scene I’ll play over and over in my head a thousand times before I die. . .

. . . I see my wife and son waiting for me by the door, wondering why I’m late.

“What will you think of?” I asked.

Nicky exhaled. Sometimes when he talked about his own wife and kids, recounting some little thing they had done over the weekend, he would tear up, telling me he’d crush my nuts in my sleep if I told anybody. Hell, he blubbered five full minutes the first time his daughter told him she loved him over the phone.

“Jay, I’m going to think about the seventy-one virgins waiting for me in heaven, dressed in white high heels and nursing hats – ”

I smiled. “ – pillow fighting.”

“Pillow fighting, that’s right. No more worries for me.”

A martyr’s paradise.

But a martyr to what cause, I wondered.

I whispered goodnight to my wife and son and to my unborn daughter. I put them safely back to bed, sheltered from the cold world by walls and windows and faith. Then I said goodnight to the Impenetrable Joshua Betts too, the first time of many, his stunned face hovering over me, frozen forever, watching, wondering.