Crocker Stearns Extension

A rock thrown up in the air. It loses nothing by coming down, gained nothing by going up.

It just gets too insurmountable to think about and if it weren't for the long work weeks the three jobs I would probably drink more, to sleep through the night, if not for the crying dog 3:00 in the morning. How impossible it is to get back to sleep after. And ten hour day follows twelve hour day and you're still couting the numbers on the calendar, and they say to you

Well he called but I felt awkward cause I knew the whole situation, how you weren't there, and I didn't go. You can hang out with us though.

And to have no idea how many times, thus. To detour around that address because to be left out like that again could positively be The Straw. To feel how fucking tenuous it is, sanity. And how your name comes up at work when you're not there, and how it's impossible to be a private person, and how embarrassing that is -- to not know what htey know and to be unable to defend oneself -- and how there isn't even a way to deal with it. And will it affect who lets me go in? Geared up and airpack on and how do I have any way of knowing what they think about me, really? Not knowing what is said. There is no way to deal with it after the sixty hours and awkwardness of being around people who know more about you than you do about them and not by your doing, at every stroke feeling that it's down to go up. Up up up.

Just sell this place, move on. To be kittied up to someone eight months in only. To have no foothold. Second day and a call at 7:30 his car on the side of the road, second day and at this place there are only a few more chances. To be kittied up so. If it weren't for the work and the bills and the balancing of accounts and the research for future options there would be time to think and that would certainly be terrifying. And when I really let myself stop to think about it, I get swallowed up into this deep loneliness like the world inhabited by the newly blind, grasping with desperation at the last slipping fragment of memory. Of what the world used to be like.

H

The rain, the smell of rain in the morning when we woke and the air perfumed with coffee it was just like Olympia, any one of those winter days that started so slow after a night of downtown and dancing, a langorous walk to the bus wet wool socks and breakfast at Darby's. The smell in some back alley of cooking paregoric. You cannot escape it. Eyes like gravestones and the new bags underneath, they know each other and they seek each other and they find what they are looking for.

I had seen her before, at the hospital. I remembered the grey face dust like a million years of age and in my assessment when I asked her the birthdate the shock when she was five years younger than me. Grey. All the way through, to the core. Back pain and I am allergic to medicines you have not even heard of yet. Boyfriend standing there silent and gruesome and I am almost afraid of him, the way she shudders at his eyebrows, the way those eyebrows move closer toward each other with each question that I ask. And push up the sleeve to read her blood pressure and there they are, gaping mouths little gravestones like pockmarks all the way up to the elbow. Fresh gravestones gaping mouths that are absolutely hungry, starving. She is staring at the floor and I am staring at the velcro of the cuff but we both know. This moment passed between us. I know why she's here and she knows that I know. She is praying that I won't say anything. You can feel it, the sentient supplication. Just let me get what I need to get through, just let me let me.

Three in the morning an apartment we had a hard time finding and not many of us showed up. Least of all anyone comfortable with EMS. So two of us go, I am one of them, up the dimly lit creaking and steep outside staircase. The room has one lamp on the floor just a naked bulb, no shade and there is a mattress against the wall it has no sheets or coverings on it. Two or three others scattered about the room who are of absolutely no help, this time I am on her turf, summoned by someone with a guilty conscience who has long since left the dismal scene. A fresh gravestone like a garnet just below the bend in her arm and her works spread out on the floor next to her. I cannot tell if she's breathing. We take the Reeves to her and this is the hard part, to work in a profession like this and everyone so bitter and jaded against the weak. Don't want to have to endure the condescending comments from the one I'm in there with, can we just get her and get out. There is precisely no room in this world for guppies. You will absolutely be led to slaughter, by everyone. Even by people who have absolutely nothing to gain from the disinterest, and everything to lose. The ones who swear to uphold something more and sit around the table mouths full with their story telling and your life is stock and trade.

I crushed her works under my feet on my approach and ear hovering over the mouth I watched for chest rise and I prayed I would see something. Little snores though they were, respiration is respiration and thank God the other one up there could push the drug and in a few seconds she was gasping sucking for air, breath, life. Onto the Reeves backwards through the apartment to the snores of her closest friends down the creaking stairway and a lecture from the medic and we load her into the squad make the sign of the cross and it's back to the truck and home because it's three o'clock in the morning. Crawl back into bed with the nascent curiosity, is this the right line of work for me. Don't yet have those callouses. I fade into sleep clutching my crucifix and saying a prayer that I don't really want to talk about. Maybe it's the right line of work because I'm not calloused over. And how thin and frail that line really is.

Poseidon's Fury

She had the look of panic in her eyes, and my voice over the falling rain and the rushing water that had washed out the road wasn’t enough to allay the fear I could see in her returned gaze; the fear that we wouldn’t be able to get her out in time. The fear that she had made the worst possible decision and that there was no going back now—the full weight of that realization sinking in and that she might never get home again. Truthfully, I wasn’t yet certain that we’d be able to fight the water and the cold fast enough to save her; who knows how long she had already been in there. A freak thunderstorm after a weekend of record snowfall had turned many of the city streets into rivers of very cold, very high, water. Thankfully the storm hadn’t started until well after midnight and was supposed to end before six a.m., so most of the city’s residents were sleeping peacefully against the sound of distant thunder and wouldn’t find the storm’s damage until morning when the water had time to recede. There were still people who had to be out in it, however, and for some of them the water covered patches of roadway weren’t enough to dissuade them from their normal daily routine, whether that was a commute to work or a drunken drive home from the bar. 911 dispatch beckoned us to assist the travelers whose hubris didn’t translate into safe passage; there were disabled cars in various levels of watery burial all over Lorain County.

She had almost made it through, but missed the curvature of the road and the mistake had sent her car into a ditch, sinking the entire front end into the murky depths. She had managed to get herself to the backseat and rolled down a window from which she reached up and out toward us with grasping hands like hungry baby bird mouths from the nest. We had our turn-out gear on and I wondered about its buoyancy as I made my way through the now thigh-deep water. I felt heavy and the ice cold water rushed into my boots and sent a shockwave through my spine. I focused my attention on the tag line around me and pushed the other thoughts out of my head. I knew the hands at the end of the line and the ones right next to me wouldn’t let me find harm’s way. With one hand under her armpit and the other holding the vice-grip of her frightened hand, we pulled her out of the window and into the water with us. Her lips were blue and her face was ashen and she trembled as we walked her to higher ground, to the awaiting squad. It was one of dozens of similar calls around the county in the six-hour period from the storm’s start to finish; we walked over each others’ radio traffic and donned soaked turn-outs and clenched our teeth each time the engine inched through the stopped water, hoping we would make it. I thought about Buzz and how he died rescuing someone in the exact same situation just ten miles south of us. How that was only six years ago. How that’s just the risk that you sign on to take and how you rarely think about it except in the face of rising flood water or a smoke filled second floor in which you can’t even see the bale on the hose line. And that it’s not about the glory of it, or even for telling the story, but that for that microcosm you are of useful, specific, meaningful purpose. How there is no word yet invented to describe what that feels like.

She was twenty miles west of us, maybe close to the same time that Rob and I traversed the deep dark cold to our first call that night. Her 911 call was probably more pleading than the one we responded to because as she made it her car hadn’t yet found the lowest spot it would settle in and she probably still felt it surging downward, still watched the water bifurcate more and more of her windshield. They searched everywhere in the area that the call came from and everywhere in the vicinity and didn’t find her until the next morning, eight hours later when the enemy had relented enough to allow them to be able to see. She was a nurse and driving to work and probably never thought it would be the last time she’d take that route when she started into the high water. I wish I could go back, find her, and tell her. It’s not at all like driving through snow. When it’s that deep you don’t have the option to just get stuck and wait for a tow truck to come get you out. When it’s that cold the hypothermia steals your body heat and your ability to think clearly and reason along with it. I only hope that it happened quickly. That even if she didn't hear the sirens, that she knew she wasn't alone.