Suture

Scott Pomfret

The medic wanted to ask the yodeling protester whether protests were always like this, but he didn’t want to betray he was a rookie or be perceived as casting negative judgment on the chaos. His roommate had advised him not to ask too many questions. Instead, the medic offered her one of the few bottles of water he’d rescued from the cops who’d gutted his supply with their bowie knives.

He said, “I don’t really get what’s happening.”

“Me neither, man. No fucking idea.” She seemed overjoyed by her own ignorance.

The stench of diesel, burning rubber, piss, and motorcycle exhaust weighed on the day’s lingering heat. Counter-protestors riding the sideboards of jeeps and SUVs brandished automatic weapons, but the protestors jeered as fearlessly as if the counter-protestors had been carrying only kindling.

The medic dove into the scrum.

“You ok? You’re fine? You need water? I have water.” He used the Cuban Spanish his abuelita had taught him. Speaking Spanish typically tended to darken his skin in the eyes of others, but in this crowd, it was a bonus. Some saluted him or bumped fists in brotherhood.

Like the rest of them, he, too, was riding a kind of high. He was a wilderness emergency medical technician. His day job was to teach hikers, campers, and backcountry skiers to survive against nature up in the mountains three hours plus from the city. It was his first protest. Neither principle nor injustice had compelled him to come down from the mountains. Logic alone had pointed the way. As he saw it, the forecast was hot in the city, and therefore people were going to become dehydrated and suffer sunstroke. Projectiles were likely to fly and therefore people were going to bleed. He had a couple days off and the necessary skill set to address these particular problems. Simple logic. 2 + 2 = 4. Basic math. He felt himself part of an elementary and ancient equation.

He thanked his lucky stars he hadn’t listened to his roommate, a self-described veteran of many protests, a lanky limping survivalist with ringlets of gray hair and coal-dark, red-rimmed eyes. His roommate had asked whether the medic was sure he really wanted to get involved in other people’s fights.

The medic had looked at his roommate as if he were speaking Khmer. He had literally no idea what his point was. 

“It’s not a race thing, is it?” his roommate has asked.          

It wasn’t, and never had been, but it had been easier to let his roommate think so. He said, “I’m a quarter Cuban.” 

“I knew it!” His roommate had slapped his knee triumphantly, as if he’d just figured out the secret to eternal life. “I wasn’t going to say anything. Doesn’t matter to me.”

Logically, if his roommate had to say it didn’t matter, it probably did matter. But the medic had confidence that the lies his roommate told himself were likely safer than the truth. He suspected there was still some cop in his roommate’s heart. Some redneck. The medic couldn’t be sure. They never talked politics or sex lives. Though drawn to each other and unable to understand or resist the attraction that had kept them shacked up the last seven months, they sometimes tried hanging with other dudes up in the mountains, but it never worked out. What was certain was that neither he nor his roommate was a jamonero.

Up ahead, police massed around the federal courthouse and the police precinct building adjacent. Both had become the object of much community ire, because the protestors saw the buildings as the locus of so much destruction of Black and brown families through overpolicing, overincarceration, and targeting people of color and the poor of all colors and creeds. As a result, the ring of police was in turn ringed in by a throng of protestors. Young men in masks yanked at some mesh fencing around the courthouse. Others smashed windows. A burst of color tagged the courthouse wall and then another.

A water bottle traced an arc through the dusk and landed on a helmet. The crowd cheered. The cop shuddered. Too late, he lashed at the air around him and hit no one.

Dismayed, the medic resorted to the comfort of logic and math. He calculated the velocity of the bottle and the force of gravity. His abuelita had insisted on his studying math and science and had been disappointed he hadn’t become an engineer. “Not yet,” he’d assured her on her deathbed, and this falsehood still counted as one of the most shameful episodes of his life.

Data was more reliable. Data never lied.

A column of horseback cops charged through the crowd, seeking to open a corridor to the police precinct building. Their assault was a lifeline, sort of like clearing a breathing passage for a choking victim, which was something the medic could appreciate.

“Sit down, sit down, sit down,” yelled protestors, because the common wisdom was that horses wouldn’t trample seated people.

Still mesmerized and slow on the uptake, the medic didn’t sit. Protestors escaping the horses’ path surged and elbowed and trampled him. A horse’s flank passed before his face. Horse sweat and fear filled his nostrils.

That hurt, he thought. He inspected the bruises and abrasions on his body with a mixture of outrage and pride. For the first time, he processed the idea that he himself might be injured. His roommate had told him that the number one rule for medics in a protest — or really any setting — was Look out for number one. You can’t help anyone if you’re bleeding. This logic made perfect sense. The medic had no qualms about a certain benevolent selfishness. In all his life, he’d never once contemplated that today — any of his todays — might be his last on earth. It was, he supposed, a rare privilege not to have to think of such things. 

Protestors nearby rammed a flaming dumpster up against the courthouse like a battering ram in the days of ancient Troy. The flames licked and climbed. Masked young people muttered among themselves, glanced at the courthouse, and then conferred again. A flock of birds exploded from a nearby tree. A gas canister screamed overhead. Some unconventional armament — beanbags? — were shot the medic’s way: pock-pock-pock. Everything was airborne. He, too, had lost touch with terra firma and only hovered over the sidewalk. 

The crowd seemed to have its own hive mind. It was a single organism. Messages passed from one end to the other like nerve impulses and synapses. The crowd swarmed the courthouse. The medic surrendered to the current, which carried him through the busted-open doors once the police gave way. 

Inside, protestors tore paintings of old white guys from the walls. Fire extinguishers were used as hammers. Trash cans sailed through interior windows scattering a gravel of opaque glass. One rioter rushed past with a prize: a judge’s gavel in each hand. He beat on a desktop computer as if it were an anvil. A raided closet yielded a trove of judicial robes, which the protestors pulled over themselves until it seemed a murder of giant crows had joined their ranks. The electricity flickered and went out. Giddily, the medic heard his abuelita reading from Genesis: End of the first day, and God saw that it was good.

People surrounded him, but still he felt as if he had the privacy he enjoyed in the mountains, because no one paid any attention to him, and they were happy and excited. The courthouse was a cameo, containing its own little wilderness, like a fishbowl or a glass terrarium teeming with life, that captured in miniature those great expansive feelings the medic experienced out in the mountains, the deep lungfuls of frosty breath at dawn, his loud exultant yawps as he bounded down the scree.

He roamed the halls like he owned them. Under the light of his headlamp, the medic wrapped a rioter’s finger that had been cut by glass. He splinted a sprained thumb. He rinsed eyes ruined by pepper spray or tear gas. He listened to what could only be the yodeler in a distant section of the building. He worked efficiently, methodically. Mobile phone flashlights were a swarm of fireflies around his head. The dark walls seemed mossy.

Little governments formed. Kings rose and fell. Trivial slights, reports of things said and not said, glances misinterpreted, shortsighted people blamed for not seeing the distance, apparent abuses and rudeness were exchanged and grudgingly borne. People hugged and high-fived and helped each other pile furniture against the exterior doors. Questions arose of what to do with the courthouse. The rioters betrayed varying levels of ambition. Torch the place. Occupy. Housing for the poor. Establish a more just and equitable legal system. 

Race and class and economic theory weren’t the medic’s thing. What his roommate and the other protestors said about capitalism or racism or patriarchy seemed reasonable, but beside the point. The medic wasn’t the type of guy to philosophize and strategize. What he had to offer was just some modest skill with a needle and thread, gauze and bandages. Nothing more complicated. He reminded himself of the four things most important to wilderness survival: Warmth. Hydration. Sustenance. Shelter. This was what he loved about the wilderness. So elemental. Stripped of distractions. Governments he could take or leave.

Warmth? It was hot as hell in the courthouse. Warmth wasn’t a problem.

Hydration? The medic raided fridges and vending machines.

Sustenance? He distributed Snickers and a few energy bars from his pack.

The question of shelter took primary importance just a moment later, when an ominous silence descended over the crowd. It reminded the medic of that moment before a storm when the birds and critters fled for cover, when the profundity and awesomeness of nature’s silence could stupefy a man with satisfactory thoughts of his own puniness. But from personal experience, the medic knew such a mesmerizing lull had the capacity to kill, by delaying preparations that ought to be taken immediately, like pitching a tent, preparing for a flood, or starting a fire. He looked around for something to do. He reminded himself, Don’t be a hero. Look out for number one. You’re no good to anyone if you’re bleeding.

The medic locked himself into a bathroom for the disabled. He felt prepared. Bear attacks, pulverized bodies at the base of cliff faces, burns where melted tent fabric makes a new skin, abrasions, contusions — it was no picnic in the mountains. No retreat from the world. He’d like to have told someone this, if anyone had been around to ask. He was no jamonero. He had balls.

The cops returned through an underground passage from the precinct that was typically used to transport prisoners. Their jackboots boomed, their officers barked, and a scuffle-shout-yelp-smothering followed each time they seized an unfortunate protestor. 

The medic heard sweat run down his forehead. He heard his joint pop. A trickle in the toilet tank threatened to give him away. He sensed a breathing and listening on the other side of the door. It reminded the medic of the forest — how it was always breathing, listening, scurrying, and never completely still.

Eventually, the presence receded. The medic breathed. He’d gotten lucky. He couldn’t hide forever. He clambered up on the toilet seat, popped a ceiling tile, and hauled himself up into the plenum space, which was jammed with vents and electrical wires. Keeping his weight on the frame and avoiding the ceiling tiles, the medic crawled in the direction of the staircase. It was like crossing thin ice.

After a couple of minutes, to judge his progress, the medic raised a ceiling tile. Below him was a small hearing room with a couple of rows of seats, two counsel tables, and a raised dais for the judge. He leaned over to see whether the chamber’s hallway door was closed. In a flash, he lost his balance. He attempted to brace himself on a ceiling tile, but it gave way. He fell.

The white-hot pain at first made the medic think he had broken his back, but in fact the jagged shaft of a flagpole on the dais had pierced his thigh near the groin. Instinctively, he wrenched the shaft from the wound. Arterial blood spurts shot from the wound in time with his racing heart.

From his training, the medic knew the average human body contained about ten pints of blood. It was possible to bleed to death in fewer than five minutes. The medic checked his watch. He judged it had been maybe two minutes since he fell. He ran through the symptoms of blood loss in his head: pale, cold or clammy skin, rapid heart rate, weak pulse, rapid, shallow breathing, lightheadedness, dizziness, confusion, and finally unconsciousness. How much blood had he already lost? He felt around the slick floor for his headlamp or his phone, so he could better assess the situation, but he’d lost both in the fall. How stupid to have ripped out the shaft. He should have left it in the wound, where it might have served as its own tourniquet, putting pressure on the wound and keeping the bleeding in check.

Focus. Tearing open his medical kit, the medic dumped out sheets of gauze. He stuffed them in the wound. He tore off his shirt, tied it around the leg, and thrust the broken shaft of the flagpole into the knot and twisted. The spurts slowed to a trickle. Amen.

Should he shout for help? The cops would be obligated to help, right? Then he remembered the cop shouting Fuck you, faggot, in his face as he plunged a knife into the medic’s water bottles and spilled them on the ground. God helps those who help themselves, his abuelita used to say. He located his phone. He balanced it against his medical bag so that the flashlight shone on the wound. He checked his watch. Five minutes since he fell.

The lighting was poor. Or maybe his eyesight had already begun to dim. The medic again recited the symptoms: pale, cold or clammy skin, rapid heart rate, weak pulse, rapid, shallow breathing, lightheadedness, dizziness, confusion and unconsciousness. Of all these, he dreaded confusion. He was a logical person. Confusion meant that shit had gotten muy serious. 

He inventoried his suture kit. Needle driver. Tissue forceps. Scissors. Sterilized needle and thread. He doused the wound with bottled water to clean it. Biting his tongue to keep from crying out, he probed the jagged cut with his fingers to ensure no debris from the flagpole remained in the skin. He nearly puked from the pain. 

The medic lined up the edges of the wound as best he could. Using the driver, he pushed the needle through the skin just above the fat in the middle of the wound. He left a small amount of thread on the side he started, looped back through it and pulled tight until the knot lay flat against the skin. He clipped the excess suture and moved a quarter inch to the right and began again. 

Easy does it. Panic kills. Haste makes waste. Gracias, abuelita, gracias. The medic began to think it was likely he’d yet make it to the rendezvous point with the other volunteer medics. He’d have a story to tell. A story he’d repeat to his roommate when he got back to the mountains while they were lying in bed. He’d try to tell it in a way that made fun of himself.

What were the odds? he’d ask. A few inches difference and it could have been his throat that was pierced or just a bruised ego, no more. But he’d also play up his coolness under fire. Amaze them with it, in fact.

Then he remembered his hasty incompetence pulling the shard from the wound. He blushed without heat. The needle slipped out of his grasp and fell to the floor. 

Coño! Maybe he wouldn’t tell them at all.

A group of cops passed by the door. The medic was tempted to call out to them, but instead he wasted another full minute re-sterilizing the needle in the flame of a lighter. He had to squint to see properly. He had certainly lost a lot of blood.

I could die here, he thought for the first time. This was the actual logical progression. He had omitted the final step: pale, cold or clammy skin, rapid heart rate, weak pulse, rapid, shallow breathing, lightheadedness, dizziness, confusion and unconsciousness. And then death. He imagined his new medic volunteer friends wondering why he wasn’t at the rendezvous point. His spirit would show up, but his new friends — atheists and agnostics all — wouldn’t recognize it for what it was. To them, he would be just an eddy of steam or smoke, which they’d try to disperse. 

The medic’s speculations puzzled him. Unlike his abuelita, he had never been a religious person. Concern with God or spirits or life after death was for old ladies and priests and bishops. He was too logical. Too science-based. He had seen too much shit out in the wilderness. There was no such thing as ghosts.

The medic held the needle up in front of him. His fingers were cold and bloodless. His body swayed. He tried to force the thread through the eye, but his thread hand shook wildly, and he couldn’t quite make out his target. It was pure guesswork. He’d been a fool to think he could close the wound himself. It only proved he’d been confused before he’d even started.

The medic slid his hands beneath his rump so his own bodyweight would stop the tremors. He took a deep breath. He counted to ten. He tried again to thread the needle. Miraculously, purely by accident, it worked. His luck made the medic optimistic that fate herself had his back. 

Again he pushed the needle through his skin. Then he froze. The door of the hearing room had swung open. A robotic dog with a police department logo pasted on its side nosed through. The beast was backlit, and some engine or current driving it hummed quietly. 

Was he imagining this space-age creature? Was he hallucinating? Was the robot-dog just another sign of bloodloss-induced confusion?

It eased into the room. The medic imagined it wagged its tail, but it had no tail. Terrified the robot would alert the police to his presence, the medic stitched faster. The dog’s head angled toward the movement of his hands. It blinded him with a flash of blue light. The medic’s hand jerked, and he tore the skin around the wound. He sweat into the wound. By that time, he had drunk all the irrigation water and had nothing to clean it out.

Most people die of infections, he thought. That was how people lost limbs. Gangrene. Sepsis. The medic imagined himself limbless. Helpless. What good was a wilderness EMT in a wheelchair? But then he remembered the impressive paralympic sprinters with blades for legs. Bionic men. A job worth doing was worth doing right.

Stay calm, chico, he told himself. Stay calm.

The robot dog clacked away down the hall. Had it just been sniffing for bombs? Water bombs? Water balloons? What was it the cops had said about water bottles? That they were bombs. Hard plastic. Dangerous. One cop had taken a Poland Springs bottle, knocked it against the top of his helmet, punctured it with his knife, and then tossed it aside. Which was a complete waste. The medic was thirsty. The wound was bleeding. The air was hot. He stabbed himself with the needle to drive the drowsiness away. He stabbed himself again and again. Little mosquito bites. Somewhere a radio played Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

“Why hold back?” the medic asked the mosquito. “Why don’t you do what God made you for?”

“You should get a medic, man,” the mosquito said. “You should see a doctor.”

His roommate’s chiding voice said, “You’re no good to anyone if you’re bleeding, chump.”

Somewhat confused by the ignorance of his roommate and his mosquito, the medic confessed to the latter about his lack of involvement in past protests, about how he wanted to help but was far in the mountains, how he wasn’t a man of theory but a man of action. But, above all, a man.

The mosquito’s thousand eyes glazed over — or was that houseflies with the thousand eyes? — but the medic couldn’t stop talking, even though his tongue was parched and sandblasted. He felt as if there was some important point at the end of all these words that he must convey. He willed the mosquito to appreciate him, to understand, to affirm. 

“You don’t even understand your own needs,” thundered a familiar voice from the mosquito’s mouth with a force that was strong enough to draw blood. It was the voice of his abuelita, a woman of infinite sagacity, stubbornness, wisdom, and faith, whom the medic had loved more than life itself. Abuelita had come to the United States on the Muriel boatlift. She’d made a life for herself. She’d never ceased praying to an unmoved God. She’d never been discouraged or ever complained.

“Fuck off, faggot,” snarled the voice of his roommate. Or maybe it was the robotic dog that snarled. Or the cop driving his bowie knife into an unoffending bottle of water that was also an airborne bomb. Gravity. Velocity. 2 + 2 = 4. It was hard to say, but it was all a matter of mathematics. 

The cold moved from the medic’s limbs to his core. He shook a pouch containing a mylar space blanket from his kit. He held the packet in his teeth, but his fingers were so cold and lifeless, they got no purchase. He jabbed the needle through the plastic pouch in hopes of rending it open. He knew there was something else he was supposed to be doing with the needle, but he couldn’t remember what.

The medic now heard Cuban festival music and saw multicolored water balloons swelling overhead. He pricked them with the needle. Water cascaded into his mouth and down over his bare chest, as if he was waist-deep under a waterfall high in a frigid mountain stream.

The medic leveraged himself to standing, but dizziness threw him down. The wound tore open. The blood gushed, but more slowly now.

I need to get out of here, he thought.

He squirmed over to counsel’s table and hauled himself up by its leg. He tottered. He fell. He thought: I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have moved. He was too weak now to cry out. He felt neither regret nor terror, but only an odd, flat, desiccated joy. He was going to die here in the courthouse. He’d be found eventually, though hopefully not by the robotic dog. He pictured it sniffing at his corpse. He heard a mechanical bark. He imagined the dog raising its hind leg and peeing on his body, which reminded the medic how thirsty he was. How damned thirsty. He rolled over and lapped at his own blood. In ecstasy, he closed his eyes, and his abuelita hummed the hymns of his childhood, whose words he could not forget.