They push Julian into a tiny room where the lethargic lady wraps a blood pressure cuff around his skinny arm. When it beeps, she murmurs something to the bearded guy, and suddenly no one’s casual anymore. Seeing them morph from bored to frenzied is terrifying.
A dozen hospital workers seem to appear out of nowhere and move in tandem, somehow never bumping into each other, speaking fast in a shorthand I don’t understand. I flatten against the wall, trying to stay out of the way.
One woman plunges a needle into the top of Julian’s hand and tapes it down while someone else attaches an oxygen mask to his face. A tall man in black scrubs rolls a giant square machine into the room, then quickly covers Julian’s chest with round white stickers. Each circle has a silver nipple that he attaches to a wire that runs into his machine. Someone else takes the long dangling cord from the blood pressure cuff still attached to Julian’s arm and connects him to a different machine. Another nurse tapes a white clothespin to his index finger; from the tip runs a long, thin wire.
In under five minutes he’s efficiently tethered to a dozen machines by a hundred wires. He’s a cyborg. A science experiment.
Abruptly, everyone parts for a young man in blue scrubs. He leans into Julian’s face, peels back his eyelid with his thumb, and shines a light into one eye. Julian blinks, opens his mouth like he’s going to speak, then passes out again.
The doctor addresses me while still looking at Julian. “What happened to him?”
My story’s a little more coherent now: A trunk. I found him in a trunk. Then he asks for details I can’t give. I don’t know how long he was inside. I don’t know when he last ate or drank. I don’t know how he got all the cuts and bruises.
The man in black plucks the wires from Julian’s chest, leaves the stickers on, and pronounces the EKG normal.
“What’s that mean?”
“His heart,” the doctor explains, “looks fine. But his blood pressure is too low.”
I follow the cords running from Julian’s arm to a black screen with rows of flashing green numbers.
A small woman rolls in a cartful of test tubes. I get squeamish as she takes vial after vial of blood from Julian’s arm. Then she’s off, adding five full tubes to her collection.
A new woman arrives with a plastic bag of fluid that she swiftly attaches to the silver coatrack by the bed. She runs a narrow plastic tube from the bag to the needle in Julian’s hand.
Julian. Jesus. He’s always been thin, but now he’s emaciated, every rib grotesquely pronounced, his heart almost visible through his skin.
“He’s going to be okay?” I murmur out loud.
“We’ll know more when we get the blood work back.” The doctor’s expression doesn’t fill me with much confidence. “I’d also like to run a CT scan and an MRI.”
“A CT scan? Why—”
Before I can finish, a nurse takes me by the shoulder and asks if I could step into the hall. Just outside are three police officers with crackling walkie-talkies. One of them, massive and scowling, marches toward me.
“ARE YOU ACTUALLY a cop?” I ask.
He glares and flashes his badge.
“So you’re not about to rip all your clothes off and start dancing?” Why I just asked that, I have no freakin clue. Maybe I’m having a mental breakdown. Officer Clark—according to the silver tag on his lapel—looks more like a stripper than a real police officer, or maybe his uniform just shrank in the wash. If he wasn’t pissed before, he definitely is now.
He crowds me against the wall, snarling, “Shut up, and hand me your ID.” I pull my license from my wallet, and he scrutinizes it carefully like it might contain clues, then passes it to another cop. “You’re the one that found him?”
“Yeah.”
“I need you to tell me exactly what happened.”
My story makes more sense this time around, but it still doesn’t make a lot of sense.
“You broke into his house?”
“Yes.”
“Because you had a bad feeling?”
“Yes.”
“And why did you have this bad feeling?”
I tell him that a few months ago Julian’s uncle hit him, so yes, I had a bad feeling.
“You report that?”
“No.”
There’s no obvious censure in his face—it’s the same exact glare he’s had all along—but I feel the criticism anyway. I should have reported it. I know that.
Then he asks: “Where are his parents?”
“Dead.”
“Any other family?”
“No.”
There’s something painfully bleak about saying that out loud. He has no family. None.
Then Clark starts asking me questions I don’t know the answer to: “Where does Russell work?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. I really need to go back in there—”
“No, you need to answer my questions.”
I squeeze my head with both hands, resisting the compulsion to rip out my hair. “I don’t know.”