Twelve
So much happens before we are born. We come into being in the middle of the narrative, midway through stories that have been unfolding long before us. We totter in on our fat infant feet and attempt to take our places on the stage, but we know only a fragment of the bewildering plotline, only a sliver of the odd characters we encounter. The big people have been practicing their lines and playing their parts for decades.
I pitied my child from the moment she dropped away from me. Even then, tiny as she was, she tried so hard to understand events that had started decades before her birth. She moved her head, looking from one face to the other, back and forth, trying to read the emotions, the moods, the secret signals that would reveal what had occurred before she came. She was wise. I looked into her eyes and saw that she had come armed with ancient knowledge. But at the same time, so much of what came before was beyond her knowing. This is the worst kind of disability, the primary disadvantage of childhood.
*
But that was much later. At this moment I have outrun all my nightmares. I am a young nurse working at the old brick hospital in the city. There is a saying: “Someone who saves one life is called a hero; someone who saves thousands is a nurse.” It is my guiding principle in these days.
I live in a brightly lit apartment over a Mexican grocery store in the Mission District of San Francisco. This is a mountainous city of dramatic views, great steel bridges rising in either direction, their heads lost in clouds. This is a place where one is shaken awake by earthquakes in the middle of the night. The planet beneath you moves in long liquid waves or quick gasp-inducing shrugs. It jolts you awake and reminds you that this is a precarious spot on the earth’s skin. You wait to see if the bookshelves stop moving. When they do, you go back to sleep.
We are casual about it, but we know that one day the Big One will come, the colossal, catastrophic earthquake that will destroy us. It will snap the bridges like long beans. It will smash the buildings, as if under the invisible foot of a Japanese movie monster. The sea will rise and swallow this place; it is an apocalypse in waiting.
We know all this and are willing to ignore it because we are seduced by these forty-eight square miles. Here are streetcars rushing up and down the sinuous slopes, ferryboats skirting the island of criminals, with dolphins rollicking in their wake, sunshine falling like a blessing of the gods through the whispering fog, raucous crowds in Dolores Park, ice cream worth waiting in block-long lines for, a park that stretches even farther and more luxurious than Central Park, with bison and boats on lakes, street-corner flower shops spilling blossoms onto the streets, and it is all completely magic.
*
On a corner, tucked on a slight hill, is the old brick hospital. I spend my days and nights here, and I’ll tell you this: when you are dying, small and alone in your hospital bed, it will be a nurse who will make your existence horrific or bearable. It will be a nurse who holds the bedpan, catches your quivering hand, gives you the begged-for extra shot of morphine. It will be one of us who shifts the bed those few inches that make the difference between agony and, yes, even pleasure. It will be one of us watching over you as you face the toothed abyss.
I work in the ICU, which can be either a place to heal or an antechamber to death. Not much is beautiful here, and yet there can be a grace, a certain painful dignity that happens to those lucky ones when the time has come. I walk from my apartment for the night shift. On the quiet streets the curtains are drawn. I see a few TV watchers awash in the blue glow; the sight of a shambling hobo with hands sunk deep in his pockets makes me sink my own cold hands deeper. Then I enter the hospital and the night is banished. It is always such a relief to arrive and be encased in these ringing halls, to be enfolded into the multitudes working, living, healing, and dying here.
Here then are the evening’s cases: rival teenage gunshot victims from the Mission in cubicles down the hall from each other; a girl in a room waiting for the rape kit, realizing she is still wearing her rapist’s sweatshirt and screaming anew; an ancient-faced meth-head scratching deep rivets into his legs. I have heard each story a hundred times. I know how to tend their wounds and their souls.