Sunday, 11 January 2004 | Aftermath

The emergency room wasn't clean. Underneath his gurney alone, which was framed by a yellow-white wall and a curtain poised on metal tracks, there was an abandoned crutch, an unwrapped (and unused, I think) maxi pad, and a pool of watery blood that had landed there while they were washing his beat-up face. Whenever they moved his gurney, the crutch got in the way, but rather than pick it up, they just rolled over it, or left the gurney at an angle. I watched as one of them kicked the maxi pad further under the bed.

We walked to the hospital after he did what I'd thought of doing a hundred times—he fell down concrete subway stairs, catching himself with his face. He lay there motionless for a moment, face-down, until I flipped him over and made him talk, his mouth full of blood and his voice gurgley. I used his phone to call the friends we'd just left and they met me on the stairs.

He looks like a boxer. His upper lip is swollen like a Hollywood collagen dream, his left eye is puffy and rimmed with a red streak, the skin on his chin has been peeled away, and his orthodonically straight teeth have been pummeled; one of his two front teeth now resembles the tooth of a shark. His forehead, swollen and red, has a patch of Frankenstein stitches, which I watched get tugged through his skin. With each tug, his feet helplessly shifted in response.

His boxing opponent barely looks any different, beyond a smattering of blood stains that are not its own. I imagine the stain will draw quiet attention, making commuters wonder whether it was violent blood, if it had always been there and they'd just failed to notice.

The medical student who put the thread through his forehead and lip did not appear to know what he was doing. He kept asking passers-by to confirm his actions, and he carried a book around with him titled Emergency Medicine. He wore rubber gloves but constantly coughed on his hands, and kept asking me to help by handing him this or that. "Be careful not to touch the sterile part!" he warned. He was nice, and he was fond of calling his patient "buddy."

Before we would leave at 11 a.m. on Saturday (we'd arrived at about 3:30 a.m.), I would make beds out of several of the least comfortable chairs on the planet. Because they anticipate sleepers, they purposely make the chairs sleep-unfriendly, by adding arm rests and building the chairs out of cold, hard metal. Before we would leave at 11 a.m., I would hate everyone.

For a meager but semi-pleasant thirty minutes, I found a reclining home on an unused gurney I spotted in a quiet hallway. I eyed it for a while before answering its beckon, sure that I would be told to move as soon as someone saw me. But instead, the only comment I heard was, "Aw, she found a bed." Just before I moved to the bed, I was contorted on a high counter top with a sink. (Before that, I'd just given up trying to write, and I'd picked all the fuzz off of my warmest winter coat.)

He's going to be fine, eventually. It's not clear what bad news the dentist will have for him, but I'm not worried, because dentists are magicians. I imagine they turn shark teeth into human teeth every night in their sleep.

...

Apparently there were a record number (4,500) of heat-related complaints throughout the city yesterday; certainly at least one of them was placed using a telephone within my building. Although the radiator has been much louder than usual (imagine how it would sound if someone repeatedly struck the metal radiator casing with a hammer), my apartment is currently 47.5 degrees. (Is that legal?) When I bought a pair of fingerless gloves, I had no idea I'd get the most use out of them while inside my apartment.