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Brass Tax


I didn’t see that the hot pot cord was tangled in the pillows.  It was easy to miss the white cord caught up in the white fabric, in there like a cruel surprise.

I wasn’t thinking about the just-boiled water in the pot, the chaotic molecules I was about to sit down underneath.

But, when I leaned back on those pillows the cord shortened and suddenly the pot toppled from over my head, pouring scalding water straight into my lap.

The impact left a track of hot wet fabric from my neck to my hip, and underneath that fabric, pain.

I remember looking at Bob as my skin started to burn.  This moment was why I loved him. 

In his mind, he lived close to this kind of crisis all the time.  After he’d finished his EMT training he took to wearing rubber gloves in a little pouch on his belt, to protect himself from HIV in case he ever came upon a bleeding person who needed help.

Early in that first year of school in Seattle, months before I’d find out I had kidney disease, months before I’d leave him, we’d borrowed a car from a friend and taken a ride out to Discovery Park on the city’s western edge.  We were tired of living in dorm rooms and needed air. 

Crossing a bridge by the Ballard Locks we’d seen a man crash his car into the guard rails on the side of the road.  Before the car had skidded to a halt Bob was pulling over into the breakdown lane. 

He was the first person at the smoking car, opening the door to reveal a man lying over the steering wheel, blood pouring down his face.  The man was delirious, and kept repeating, “My bag, my bag, don’t touch it, call the police.”  On the passenger seat was an open brief case and inside that a velvet bag, out of which spilled diamonds.  Bob held the man’s head until the ambulance arrived and I watched the bag.

But during my own accident all I could watch was him.  Looking at his eyes as the water scalded my skin I remember thinking that I’d be fine, that the hurt I was feeling was somehow inevitable, a test of what we’d practiced together for years.

I remembered what Bob had told me after one of his classes years earlier: scald burns can keep burning as long as there is fabric to hold the water against the skin.
 
As I stripped off my bra and my jeans, he held my eyes right back, as if he could will me to remember his training.  This was no one else’s wreck, it was ours.

Finally naked, I ran down the dorm corridor, found the communal bathroom and a shower stall, pulled back a plastic shower curtain and turned on the water.  The world shrank down to the sight of my own hands, the sound of my breath.  I was alone in the big echoing room.

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The EMT had a mustache.  That was all I could look at.  I watched it move over his mouth and tried to climb the huge wall of the pain to be closer to what he was saying.  He said, “I’m going to give you morphine.  Is that OK?”

I nodded.  I thought I understood.  Something he was going to do now was going to help.  Reaching in through the shower he found the arm with no damage and located a vein.   The drug was warm going in.  He looked at the syringe while he worked.

After he took out the needle, he turned to find Bob standing in the doorway.  He walked back to his medical case, put away his gear then stood and went to Bob.  Putting a hand on his shoulder, he took the towel Bob was holding and walked back to me. He held the towel up as a screen, not touching me but still getting wet from the shower, and kept talking.

I couldn’t follow a word he said.  I could feel the cold water on my skin still, the slap of pain that came with it.  I wanted to touch things, the tile of the shower stall and the wet terry cloth that the EMT held between us.

Past the EMT’s arm, I could see another man with the same uniform out in the hallway.  I remember wondering why he was there.  We only needed the three of us, I thought.  Any more people and I’d have too much noise around me.  I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on climbing the wall.

The other EMT moved past Bob and pushed a wheelchair into the room.  How’d they get that up the stairs, I thought.  The men nodded to each other, passing between them a look of such competence and tenderness that I almost couldn’t watch.  They’re feeling bad about me, I thought.

“OK, we’re going to move you now,” said the EMT with the mustache.

They walked me out of the stall, patted my skin dry with a cloth and wrapped me in a light white sheet.  They helped me sit, they dried my hair.  While they worked I looked at my lap and hummed a little pain song under my breath.

And then, in an instant, it cleared.  The warmth of the morphine circled around under my skin, leeching its way up to the throbbing flesh and stretching it out until it was simply gone, like the dot that used to disappear from old school TV screens after you shut them off.

Now things began to fill up the space where the pain had been.  Aluminum seeped in from the corners of my sight until everything was aluminum.  The room was made of aluminum. So was the EMT, so was my skin and the shower curtain.  And, miraculously the aluminum was the same color as whatever it took over, so that everything looked the same.  But I knew it wasn’t.  I could taste it.

I looked up from my lap and met the eyes of the EMT with the mustache. “Better?” he asked.

I nodded. 

“OK,” he said, “let’s get you down those stairs.”

□

Nurses tended to the wounds, cutting away blistered flesh and gave me more morphine which, this time, made me throw up.

They treated most of the burn with thin panels of frozen pig skin.  The skin would adhere to the raw wound like plaster or a bandage; it would set to the wound.  The pig skin would then behave just like a natural scab, something burns don’t make.  As it healed, the pig skin would peel back to show the healed flesh and you could cut it away, around and around the edges. 

In the packages the prepared skin still had brown freckles dotting it, showing the markings of the animal that gave it up.  Any skin that was flat could take it.  But where the skin curved they iced me with Silvadene cream and wrapped me in gauze. 

My breast was bound to my chest, the fingers in my burned right hand a mitt that I couldn’t move.  I didn’t know it yet, but one week later, brain fuzzy with Vicodin, I would pull off the ruined skin of my breast until the scab of my nipple came loose to reveal a pale half-moon underneath.  I would make sure to keep that moment from Bob.

But just then, I let the nurses be in charge of my skin, and when they were done, it was late at night and they took me up to a room.  Bob left me in the dark, the curtain drawn between my bed and the next, the window beyond that.

The woman in the other bed screamed all night.  In the morning, I woke to find her watching Erkel on the television we shared.

She talked to me through the noise of the TV.  She’d been at a gas station, filling her tank.  She’d spilled a little gas on her pants.  As she got in to the car, her passenger’s lit cigarette had fallen from his hands.  Her clothes had ignited instantly and she’d run from the car, across the blacktop in panic before someone tackled her with a blanket and tried to get her to roll.  All she could think was that the pumps would explode.

□

That morning, I told the doctors that I wanted to leave.  As I had my dressings changed, I memorized how it was done, failing to rest, rushing the whole thing.

I called my parents and lied to them.   They were in Massachusetts, I was in Seattle.  We were broke enough from school.  We didn’t need the expense of a flight.  “I’m fine,” I said, “Bob’s here, the burns aren’t that bad.  I’m going home today.  Please don’t fly out.”

But it was more than the money.  I’d been in hospitals with my family for much of my life, and my accident didn’t seem to rate as an emergency.  Also, it wasn’t safe to be needy around them, so I simply wasn’t.  From the strange territory of the hospital bed, I lied to them, and I looked at Bob while I did it. 

It was just going to be us.