Field Day

The last day of training is actually the hardest. Most people would expect it would be the first day, with all the new information and procedures to absorb, not to mention the graphic pictures. I still remember my first day, when Forani rushed out of the room when the slide of the necrotic gangrene came up on the view screen -- I saw her run for the sanctuaria because I was thinking of doing that myself. Even after three years of teaching, the pictures make me cringe inside -- all those mortal sufferings captured on a static image, far removed from the mortal itself, with no relief to be provided. The child lying in the rain with the flies forever walking on her eyelids, the asthma patient always in midgasp, the woman in labor pushing pushing pushing with no baby to come of her efforts...

But the last day is the hardest -- field day when you put everything you learned into practice. It's not just diagrams and theories and rules in the classroom where your errors are insulated, but real people in the real world where your actions and decisions change their lives. It's frighteningly like playing God -- because you don't have the omniscience or the surety to back you up.

Reena's field day was going to be a rough one. She drew the blue chit -- ER duty. I saw her face blanch and her lips tighten when she realized what color she had. Lots of pain and suffering, lots of anxiety, lots of distractions, lots of decisions to make.

"Listen," I said. "The good thing about ER duty is that you start out in the triage area and if you muck up anything too bad for me to fix, the medical staff is there to intervene."

Then her chin went up and I saw that kick-ass glint in her eye -- good girl -- she wasn't going to be defeated before she started. Still, it's a scary start for a novice angel of death.

She grabbed her bag of tricks, I opened a hole in the ether, and we stepped through to the hospital waiting room.

The Life And Death Of Keyes

I was never sure if Stephen chose the life he lived, or if it was the only one he could have had. I still don’t know, but I’ve decided it hardly matters. He loved his life, and he died happy. Happier than most.

When I met Stephen, he was already dying. Those final stages of life were ripping through him like a knife-point, and no one knew it. In the back of our minds, perhaps we understood that living like he was, one couldn’t really last very long. Flat on his back on the bed he claimed his mother had left him before she died, connected to tubes and monitors that would regulate his blood sugar and, for the most part, keep his brain from going into shock.

I’m sure if any of us had been asked, we would have told you we didn’t see him living another five years, and we might have had the same answer if the question had even been about a single year, but the truth was none of us really thought about it. We had a phenomenon, our own little oddity to study in whichever way we wanted, to show to the world in whichever light we chose. And when he was gone, it left us all wondering just what we’d had.

We were the ones who sat in his room with pen and paper, waiting patiently sometimes and impatiently sometimes, for him to wake up. For him to look into our eyes and answer our questions. So we could write down a few choice sentences that fit our needs, nodding while he spoke but never really listening to what he said. We were the reporters, the journalists, the newsmen. We saw, we judged, we wrote. And I stopped being a part of the “we” when the rest of them left Stephen alone, and I still came to visit. They left him to die alone, and I didn’t.

I wrote a story about him. I wrote it for the kind of newspaper tabloid you see in every checkout line, the kind bought by people desperately hoping that this life offers something more than can be explained in a classroom. The story was called “Dreaming Man from Jersey Lives In Other World,” and it was the first story I ever regretted writing. Because for the first time in my career, I had a legitimate story. A real phenomenon. An experience beyond those that generally happen in the real world.

But I hammed up the story. I altered events, characters, places. I turned it into something any intelligent person would immediately see was fabricated. I turned the unbelievable reality of what I had witnessed into something completely ridiculous. I told the wrong story, when the right one could have done so much good. I told myself that that’s what the readers wanted, a story so out there it took them far away from any reality they might be trying to escape. And even though I had justified it, I still knew it was wrong. Stephen taught me something incredible, and I wasted it because I was too afraid to share who Stephen really was. Or who I really was.

I’m changing that now though.

I really hope I’m changing that now.