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It’s like a live demo of surface tension, a steady drip of water into a glass that’s already too full. For a while, all is well, the convex meniscus holding in spite of each addition in volume. Eventually, though: a flood.
Samira is always watching him these days, so she sees the precise moment the flood comes for Jack.
Admittedly, she expects it sooner, around the time he informs a patient they’ll have to amputate his leg. It’s a freak accident, a ruptured artery and partial degloving from a misaligned seam in a waterslide, and after bearing witness to cursing and wailing, Jack leaves Trauma 2 with his pant leg still partially rolled up from where he’d shown the patient his prosthetic in solidarity. It’s his only outward signal to others that things may not be as they seem; that and the way he instinctively reaches for his dog tags under his scrub top, running his fingers over the cool metal grooves the way someone might the beads of a rosary.
Still, he box-breathes his way through burns and retinal detachments and traumatic brain injuries, even the peak of an alcohol-related MVC.
Then the power goes out.
NFPA requirements are such that it only takes ten seconds for the emergency department’s backup generators to kick in.
Plenty can happen in ten seconds, though, and plenty does. The ensuing maw of silence — beeping, whirring, hissing, groaning, all interrupted without ceremony — is almost worse than the explosion of noise that follows. Almost worse, that is, until the kid in Pedes who nearly drowned at Grandpa’s cookout proclaims a fear of the dark with a surprised scream that sets off the toddler accompanying the facial lac patient in North 11. Unmuted, individual voices are suddenly indistinguishable because everyone, Samira included, is moving on instinct, calling out to one another in raised voices, assessing, doubling down.
Everyone except Jack, who bolts.
“Dr. Abbot?”
Five things you can see — but the skyline is dimensionless, darker than it should be. Where are the lights, the fireworks? In their stead are shocks of stars, flickering like the static in his head. Any other day and it might have been beautiful.
“Dr. Abbot.”
Four things you can touch — at his back, the railing intended to keep errant attendings like himself away from the roof’s edge. The noose-like weight of his stethoscope around his neck, slack for now. His wedding ring. He spins it with his thumb once, twice. I’m not okay, Annie. I’m still not okay.
His leg, the right one. He swears he can feel it.
Three things you can hear —
“Jack.”
Does she know? His name in her mouth like that — it leaves him feeling like he’s been butterflied, spread open in a trauma bay somewhere, under her steady hand. She could. He would let her. It could only be a good thing, a sign that he was still alive and that she was close by.
“Go back inside, Dr. Mohan.”
(Does he know? How to keep a good thing close?)
She rocks on her heels. Bites the inside of her cheek.
“Is that an order, sir?”
He can’t help it; the mix of deference and cheek in her tone has him peeking at her over his shoulder. Five things you can see, and this time it’s all Samira, his field of vision narrowed to only her. Would that it could be this way always. She’d sounded far away, under water, but she’s closer than he expected — within touching distance, studying him intently. Triaging, he recognizes.
He wonders mournfully what she sees.
(Rapid blinking, pupils dilated. Perspiration at his temples. His masseter drawn tight, his pulse jumping under the jut of his jaw. A guilty man, one condemned.)
“No,” he says, looking straight ahead again. “No, it isn’t.”
She nods, a barely-there bob of her head, before dipping under the guardrail to join him. His hand lifts at his side, twitchy instinct impelling him to keep her back: from the edge, from himself. He forces it down.
“Ahmad’s saying the power grid’s overloaded from the heat,” she apprises after a moment, a direct appeal to his amygdala. “The whole city’s in a blackout. Emergency lights are running now—” He’d dimly registered them flicking on as he made his way through Chairs, fighting to keep the teeming mass of memory at bay. “—but we’ve lost A/C and the computers. We’re analog until further notice.”
In the distance, they both hear the familiar wail of a siren. Soon, there will be whole choruses of them, waves of patients suffering heat strokes and collisions and in-home hospice equipment failure. Soon, there will be more blood, the copper tang thick in the Pitt’s unconditioned air.
Two things you can smell, he thinks, a weary attempt at rerouting — hot asphalt and turpentine from the cork trees across the street. And Samira, closer still. She smells like antiseptic and sweat and something sharper, something citrusy: peppercorn maybe, or bergamot, a scent he knows from the cup of earl grey Annie used to make for herself each morning. How she’d take a deep inhale of the teabag before submerging it in the boiling water.
If Jack’s ability to keep good things close were to be questioned in court, the first witness called to testify would be his sister Emma.
When he thinks of Emma, he pictures her in a yellow cotton dress: her favorite, with oversized daisy appliqués at the waist and hem. He pictures the two of them laying in the front yard, elbows stained with chlorophyll, and can still hear her excited whisper — Jackie! Go get Mama to come see! — at a swallowtail landing on one of the fabric flowers in a misguided search for nectar.
At four, she had been the center of his world: a year older, with tall tales of kindergarten to regale him and baby Carrie with. All he’d ever wanted was to make her proud.
Only — he clambers to his feet too quickly. Startles the butterfly, which flees to safety.
When he thinks of Emma, his foremost feeling is dread, even decades later. He pictures her scrunched up face as she takes off running, her ruddy cheeks streaked with tears. It’s the first memory he has of letting someone down, and it comes rushing back now as he thinks of their colleagues and patients in the basement. He is supposed to be the one who can perform in pitch dark and remain steady under fire; he is supposed to be able to save his brothers; he is supposed to be the spouse who dies prematurely. Yet here he is, heart tachy, unable to catch his breath.
He hadn’t realized he’s said any of it aloud, or maybe he hasn’t and she’s just that attentive, but as if on cue, her fingers alight on his radial pulse. His ensuing grin is half grimace, self-deprecating. “Can’t get it to stop racing.”
“Propranolol?”
“Already down the hatch. Diazepam, too.” His high hopes for this shift hadn’t precluded him from sliding the blister packs into a pocket of his cargos before leaving the house. He claws at his chest. “Nothing to do now but wait.”
Could he do said waiting at home? Certainly. He knows no one would fault him for it. To her credit, though, Samira doesn’t suggest as much. She knows better than that, knows him better than that, and just nods again, thinking for a moment before asking, “Do you trust me?”
(One thing you can taste, and he doesn’t yet know it will be her at the end of their shift. Doesn’t yet know that after walking her to her car, she’ll turn to him and ask him the same question and finish what had started on the roof, before the chirp of her pager caused them stumble apart; or that she’ll ask, her lips against his, if he’s okay to go home alone, and that his answer will be yes, and. Yes, I can, and I am choosing not to. I am choosing to keep a good thing close. I am choosing you.
For now, though, it’s less about what he tastes and more about what he doesn’t: the bitter taste of panic that had previously coated his tongue has begun to fade, continues to do so with every second she holds his gaze.)
“With my life,” he answers.
The previous year, he’d fled to his cabin in Laurel Highlands for the Fourth. Even with prazosin and trazodone, his sleep had been fitful, his brain prematurely and repeatedly pulling him from a dream of Samira he wished to reside in. It was nothing base, nothing vulgar, just the simple pleasure of holding her, their limbs contorted around each other like something out of a Klimt painting. He’d woken painfully alone, sure he’d never recreate the embrace.
Yet — what are they doing now if not precisely that, Samira instructing him to cross his arms over his chest then stepping in even closer, closer than ever before. She touches him then, two beautiful, capable hands carefully placed atop his.
He has more than a passing familiarity with EMDR, so he knows a good deal about bilateral stimulation, enough to recognize what they’re doing — what she’s taken upon herself to do for him — even before she begins recounting the study of somatic therapies for child flood victims that she read in a back issue of IJSM, or the origin story of the butterfly hug technique she’s employing now: that a four-year-old who lost his family to Hurricane Pauline asked the humanitarian worker giving him a goodbye hug, When you return to your home, who is going to embrace me?
And Jack is supposed to be riffling through affirmations now, or at least listening to the ones she’s murmuring sweetly in his ear, yet all he can think about as she taps, left, right, left, right, is his own echo of that child’s question. How Samira has answered it for him, like she does with all his others. He has no means of knowing how long they’ve been on the roof, but even when his hands slip from under hers and come to rest on her waist as if they were crafted for that sole purpose, hers never stop tapping. She must feel his heart begin to race again, though, because even with their height difference, she dips her head to meet his eye — a move so patently him that it makes his chest ache with the unfurling of a long-tied knot — and says quietly, the kindest admonition he’s ever received: “Come on, Jack. Keep breathing with me.”
Overhead, the fireworks boast their return in crackles of green and red and gold. He pays them no mind and breathes.