The Accident

I remember there was a nurse in the ambulance I was brought over to. She kept trying to calm me down, but I think she was more scared than I was. She put a blanket over my shoulders and told me to lie down in the back of the ambulance so she could put an ice pack on my head. I remember lying down and pressing the ice to my forehead while she was turned away and made herself seem busy with the medical tools in her plastic case. Then I asked if she had anything I could use to wipe my cheek with, and I remember her choking back a horrified squeak when she looked over and saw that there was still a spot of blood on it. She had to keep her cool, I understand. She seemed new at what she was doing, probably fresh out of training.
Hell of a way to start a career, I remember thinking, wiping the blood off my cheek and telling her my personal information. Other than that one squeak, her voice never wavered, and she sounded so confident, the way they teach you to sound while you’re going through medical school. You have to deal with all sorts of people and all the hysterics involved at the scenes of accidents, and you have to be ready for everything. You have to learn how to console without becoming attached, how to calm people down and explain that everything will be okay when really everything is fucked beyond all recognition and nothing’s going to be the same. There’s a perfect tone you have to be able to strike, a melody in your voice somewhere between soothing and discordant, that jars the patient back to reality and forces them to deal with the situation. It’s a sort of heavy, unintimidating voice that the nurse had down perfectly.
Her hands, though, were a dead giveaway to how she really felt. They shook and shivered more and more as the night wore on, and whether or not she heard me tell her my student ID number and the dorm I lived in and where I had been heading when the accident had occurred, what she wound up writing on that sheet was nothing but a mass of black scribbles. I guess they’re not as strict about ambulance handwriting etiquette in medical school. Points for trying, lady. A-minus for effort.

I left the nurse with the shaky hands and talked to a police officer. He was an older guy, I remember, on the short side, with a bushy mustache and sunken brown eyes. He said his name was Officer Margaret, and I knew it was out of place but I laughed, because what kind of a tough-guy police officer has the last name Margaret? He glared at me, and the red-and-blue light from the ambulances and police car cast a dark shadow across his brow and over his deep eyes. I stopped laughing. Not because he had scared me, but because behind him I saw a large black bag being loaded on a stretcher into the back of an ambulance, and there was suddenly nothing to laugh at anymore.

The next thing I remember is that I was sitting on the bumper of the police car and watching the mass of officers in uniforms gathered in clusters here and there, all buzzing with energy in spite of the thick, nocturnal August heat that hung around them. They were sharing what little information they had with one another, and I felt sickened by them and by the whole scene. All of them spoke with such rote, casual voices. This was all in a day’s work for them. There were a dozen cases like this every year. Tomorrow they’d continue working on this case, and then when it was done they’d move on to the next. At least the nurse in the ambulance, her hands shaking beyond her control, had shown some human decency, some display that she understood the depth of what had happened, even though she had been taught by the higher-ups at her medical school to suppress those kinds of natural feelings. These men were talking about what they’d be doing back at the office while just a few feet away specialists were taking precise measurements of the deep red spatter that drenched the sidewalk outside the science building. They either didn’t care or were trying to force themselves not to care, and I kept thinking about how careless they all were, and I felt a roiling hatred burn in the pit of my stomach.
And I sat there festering, my hands clenched tight into pathetic fists, and the acid in my stomach heaved into a spiteful froth until I couldn’t bear their indifference anymore. I bolted into the bushes nearby and puked. I hadn’t eaten since I left the athletic center that afternoon, but I felt as though I spat out every organ in my body into a bloody pile there on that lawn, and I wanted them to watch, to see what they should all be feeling, as people, in response to something like this. I felt like I was the teacher for a moment, trying to instill in them some barbaric moral principle that they had all abandoned in pursuit of the badge and pistol. As I propped a shaking hand against a nearby tree and spat into the marsh grass, my mind was flooded with a sudden impromptu lecture.
Here’s our first lesson: human emotion comes in many forms, and often the strongest of these forms occurs after witnessing a traumatic or disturbing event. It’s only natural – no, it is encouraged – to display strong emotions after something like this occurs. To emote is human. To feel disgust and to acknowledge that disgust is healthy in these kinds of situations. Don’t shy away from what you feel.
I glanced up and saw three or four police officers looking in my direction, all with uniform expressions of resigned pity. They weren’t paying attention to my presentation. None of them were attempting to understand what they were seeing. They felt that they knew all there was to know about me and about the scene, that they had gone through the proper training and could say, with all certainty, what was and was not essential about processing a site like this. I had a weak stomach, I’m sure they all thought, and the blood and the stench and the trauma of what I had witnessed must’ve gotten to me. If I were in their shoes, they were thinking, I’d be used to it by now, and a single accident wouldn’t send me into fits of vomiting like I was doing now.
One of them came over to me with another goddamn blanket like the nurse had in the ambulance, and he placed it over me and put a strong hand on my shoulder. I didn’t look him in the eyes. The blanket was scratchy and it was already too warm outside. He wasn’t even trying to learn anything. He was coasting on what he already knew, trying to pass without taking any more notes, afraid of thinking something he hadn’t already been taught to think. No participation points. See me after class.