Apparitions

by Luke Boyd

conclusion

The nice part about the open shift is that there are two other ambulances running — you’re just an extra in case things get busy. You can spend most of the night parked in the hospital lot or over at Second Cup as long as you leave your radio on, but the first thing you do is yank a handful of dash fuses from behind the panel then replace them one-by-one until all the lights and sirens work but the CB doesn’t.

You scan through the AM until you land on a 990 Canadiens re-broadcast from the afternoon. It’s somehow soothing knowing that there are always highlights and taped games — a whole season laid out in front of you whenever you want it.

It’s the highlights and scores from around the league that make it great — you don’t even have to pay attention to get everything. There’s no waiting around for someone to score, no downtime, no commercials. You can go on with your work, your friends, your problems, and the whole time there’s someone keeping track of the good stuff you’ve missed — compiling and editing highlights together with such precision that later on you don’t even miss the real game.

You start to wonder if there’s even such a thing as the real game.

You are here:

Parked up at Westmount Cemetery looking out across a thousand pinpoints of light, the Canadiens are up 3-0 on L.A., and you’ve got a pint of lo mein greasing the dash and steaming up the windshield. The unlit ribbon of the St. Lawrence is wide and divides the city like a sleeping black snake.

From a wax-paper bag you pull a fortune cookie, snap it in half and unravel the strip inside. Like a DNA strand of future coiled inside a shell you can only crack once, there’s no peeking and pretending you never looked.

In the glow from your watchface: Keep your broken arm inside your sleeve. Instinctively you look down at yours, there’s a dark brown circle on the arm. Dried blood — it doesn’t seem right. You feel sick even though you haven’t eaten any lo mein yet and the cloying smell of bitter cloves assaults your nostrils.

You bail out of the ambulance with a hand clamped over your mouth, watery vomit leaking through your fingers. On your hands and knees in the lot, you throw up half a dozen times into the dirt and stones.

Your head gets that hangover feeling of violent throbbing, made worse each time you try to move or get to your feet. Resting your face on a starving patch of grass the cold sweat from your armpits is sour and soaks through your shirt and jumpsuit. For ten minutes you wonder if you’re going to die until finally your stomach stops clenching and in front of you in the dirt is a perfect little lake of bile clustered with colorful floating buoys.

Pills.

Several prescriptions worth. All different shapes and sizes — some which you recognize and some totally foreign. You can’t even stop to think where these may have come from, you just know you have to get to the hospital now so you hoist yourself up by the side mirror bracket on the open ambulance door. It snaps off in your clammy wet hands.

At the breaking point there’s an amputated lump of resin or epoxy. The mirror in your hand doesn’t look right either — it’s not one of the massive square ones that belong on here. You stumble to the other side of the ambulance to compare and the broken one looks more like a cheap toy. It almost makes you laugh until a lurch in your stomach doubles you over. Back in the ambulance, wiping your mouth off on the sleeve of your jumpsuit you feel disoriented, betrayed, fated.

The tapping sound you hear is your phone vibrating against the spare change in your pocket. It takes a minute for you to get your bearings, but you eventually dig it out and flip it open, expecting it to be Bonnie demanding you explain why you haven’t answered a single dispatch tonight.

Hello? You try to sound irritated — like maybe you’re stuck in traffic, or you have a flat tire.

Hey, it’s me. I left as soon as I could even though I could barely understand your message.

What? The voice is someone you know, but it’s out of place in this setting. You stall, Oh, the message. Well, I was driving under a bridge...? And...

Stephen, you were crying. You tried to tell me your name was Chloe, and that Stephen needed help... and then you said something about my sketches and my clothes and... do you even know what I’m talking about?

Panic registers as: the instant constriction of your throat when you realize it’s Sachaa on the phone and you don’t remember calling her. Or taking the pills you threw up, trashing her clothes, mutilating your high school yearbook...

Who am I? You don’t mean to say it aloud, but you do and then it’s too late to take it back.

A few seconds of worried silence, then,

Listen, I’m about an hour from your place. Just go home and wait for me and we can talk about everything when I get there. Okay? Gage is with me, but he doesn’t have to come in if you don’t want...

Gage? Why is Gage with you? This is beyond bizarre and you feel totally paranoid. You get low in the seat and look out the window at a wet patch of dirt littered with undigested pills

Stephen, he’s my husband. Listen, we’ve been through this and I want to help you but you can’t do this anymore — the letters from your new girlfriend, the screwy up phone calls...

You drop the phone in your lap and exhale a long breath — it’s then that the whole fishbowl idea reveals itself to you. You can hear Sachaa’s tiny voice from the phone yelling your name, crying, screaming that she’s hanging up to call the police.

It occurs to you after a moment that there is no way around a crushing confrontation with cops, therapists, Sachaa, with yourself.

You can only imagine how the highlights will look later.

The wax paper shreds easily between your fingers and the shell of the second fortune cookie disintegrates. You unravel the second strand: He who is drowned is not troubled by the rain. You twist the two fortunes together — a crude double-helix that you stuff into the ashtray and incinerate with the dash lighter.

The city is ghostly calm and the drive down to the pier seems like a movie, a scene you need to nail perfectly. It doesn’t seem right to leave loose ends, no explanation — something went very wrong and you feel like people need to know that.

No question marks.
No theories.
No mysteries.

The tape recorder for accident scene reports and witness accounts is in the glove box but there aren’t any blank tapes so you stuff paper into the top slots of one of Al’s tapes Classic Hits of the Silver Screen and rewind it to the beginning. As you cruise along the water with your running lights on everything is okay. The air coming in from the river smells like honest work and redemption. A chain link gate blocks the entrance to the pier but it readily gives away when you push against it with the nose of the ambulance.

There are sirens floating to you from somewhere far away in the darkness, ethereal but still a reminder of the urgency of your errand. Every few minutes the face of your phone lights up as Sachaa tries to call you back, like maybe the sixteenth time you’ll answer. Still, you feel bad for her, so you finally just turn it off and slide the carton of lo mein off the dash. It’s cold and starting to congeal but your stomach is starting to spasm again so you hope the lo mein quiets it for these last few minutes.

You need to be thinking clearly to do this — it’s ironic how people think this makes you crazy but it actually takes a lot of composure and nerve. It feels good to know you are in complete control for the first time you can remember, and you relish the thought of the water rushing into the passenger compartment.

From a cabinet in the back you retrieve the water-tight lockbox and put it on your lap with the recorder in your hand. You push play and wait for a few bars of music Somewhere Over The Rainbow so your voice won’t get cut off. The music is pacifying and you start thinking that maybe this isn’t even real right now, maybe you’ll hit the water and wake up in Chicago with Sachaa or back home in snowy Wisconsin.

As you leave your explanation on the tape the voice doesn’t really sound like you either. It sounds metallic and monotone coming from your mouth but the words come easy enough. Your consciousness kind of melts away and soon you’re flipping to side two as visible police cruisers are snaking their way down toward the docks with searchlights scanning the water. Still speaking into the recorder you unlace your heavy boots, knot them together, then pause for a minute to loop them over a piling just outside your window.

Your feet are so white against the floor, like two cold trembling doves. In the rearview there is a blinding flash, then a spotlight moving down the pier with a crown of frantic red and blue lights bearing down on you.

Your foot reflexively goes to the gas and this might only be a dream anyway as your front end is weightless and then plummets. You run your fingers across the row of switches and the night goes mad with bouncing noise and sound, alternating hot and cold warnings to the sentinel fishing trawlers and speedboats in their berths.

Hitting the water is like wet concrete and the tapping sound you hear is your windshield spidering at lightning speed from the pressure. Breaking glass and rushing water is the last sound on tape as the sirens and lights blink out one by one.