Holding Still for as Long as Possible Read Online Free Page B

every day of this job, than accepting things as they were in front of me.
    Carl looked at me as we rolled the patient out of the lobby. “Get used to it, kid. You’re gonna see some freaky shit.”
    Carl sat in the back of the ambulance monitoring Jay-Jay while I drove. I thought about how maybe I’d end up learning that sometimes the worst people got second chances, while some of the kindest dealt with humiliation only a body betraying you could provide. Or maybe it wouldn’t be that black and white. I had to admit my reasons for wanting to do this job were related to a few wanting-to-be-a-hero daydreams from childhood. I imagined God telling me to lighten up, and I switched on the radio. “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” Carl sang along. “ Love and compassion, their day is coming. ”
    â€œFucking cocksucker, ” Jay-Jay yelled at Carl, breaking through the song. “Anyone can do your fucking job.”
    â€œOh yeah?” I yelled, slamming on the brakes too hard. “Seems to me if you were a better drug dealer you wouldn’t have a bullet in your head right now. Eh? Huh?”
    I looked back through the opening. Both Carl and Jay-Jay sort of smiled as a response.
    â€œHow old are you, babyface driver? Too young to wipe your own ass.”
    I told this story of my first call a lot, when people got curious. But that call didn’t teach me anything, really. Except that a call has to be extraordinary to be remembered. And usually not in a good way. But I knew then that I could do the job. I’d been a squeamish little kid so I had thought I’d pass out the first time I saw a crushed limb, an eyeball hanging. But I didn’t. While people fell apart, I could be there, helping. I could hack it. I might even get really good at it.
    The rest of that first shift passed slowly — mostly transfer calls and minor bullshit. Gradually I started to feel less like an imposter. In the waiting room at Toronto Western I asked Carl to tell me about his weirdest call.
    He ran his hand through his scruffy brown hair and chewed at the lip of his coffee cup. Then he placed the cup on a little table strewn with newspapers. “Oh, okay. Easy one. A 911 hang-up call out at Yonge and Summerhill. You know, I’m talking a big mansion. We had to go check it out. We got there before the cops, like tonight, right, and the door was wide open. We were young, you know, and curious and so we yelled, ‘Ambulance!’ No answer, so we went inside, and there was a pool of blood in the kitchen and a trail leading upstairs. So we followed it up to the bathroom and there was a body all chopped up in the tub.”
    â€œNo way!”
    â€œSeriously! The weirdest thing, though, was that there was, like, Cheerios and Froot Loops and everything sprinkled in the blood on the floor. My partner was, like, do you think it’s a serial killer?” Carl took a long drink from his Tim Hortons cup and shifted in the cold brown shell-chair. He looked over at the stretcher where our nursing-home patient was fast asleep and got up to check her vitals. He glanced back at me, smiling.
    â€œWell . . . was it a serial killer? How come I never heard about it?”
    â€œIt was a cereal killer, get it? A cereal killer!”
    I laughed, not because it was funny but because it was four-thirty in the morning.
    â€œThat’s what I say whenever I get asked about my strangest call,” Carl said, “ ’cause I’m fucking tired of answering that question.”
    â€œWhat was your first dead body?” I asked him.
    â€œA twelve-year-old in Rosedale. Hung himself with a phone cord. The note said he hated his parents for ignoring him. They didn’t find him for two weeks, because they’d gone away and left him alone. I’ll never forget that.” Carl paused and then glanced over at the pretty triage nurse. She nodded at him, politely, a red flush in her