22

For Abe as for most people, the weeks fly by in a haze of undifferentiated activity. He can never believe it as he tears the month past off the calendar: whatever happened to that one? His shifts on the job all blur together, especially since he deliberately tries to forget most of them. He couldn’t tell you a thing about his mad drive from Laguna Canyon Road up to UCI hospital: did they lose the victim that time? Was he working with Xavier? He has no idea, and what was it, one, two months ago? No one can tell; no one is operating on that kind of long-term time scale anymore. Lucky if you can remember what happened day before yesterday.

Somewhere inside him, of course, it is all remembered: every crash, every drive, every expression flitting over X’s face as he sweats it out with the victims in the gutbucket. But the recollection mechanism is firmly turned off. As far as Abe knows in his waking hours, it’s completely gone. Two months ago? Gone! It’s present tense for Abe, the here and now his only reality, the moment and the only moment. This may account for the fact that he very seldom has an ally. He doesn’t think about it. Alliance? With Inez, right? Or was it Debbie. He’ll find out tonight at Sandy’s party.

Tonight he’s working with Xavier again, as usual. As long as one of them doesn’t trade around off days to extend a vacation (which happens fairly frequently) they’re a team. They like that. It gives the job some continuity, makes it a little more like ordinary jobs.

The radio crackles, X picks it up. “We hear you, All-Seeing One.”

They’re tapped out. Code nine, pile-up, five to eight cars, Foothill Freeway just west of the Eastern Freeway, still up on the viaduct. They’re on the Santa Ana Freeway in Tustin, they gun up the Eastern and then up onto the Foothill. The tracks are stacked, Abe drives them on the really narrow viaduct shoulder toward a seemingly airborne forest of flashing reds and blues, three CHPs and another rescue truck already on the scene. Abe and Xavier jump out. The other rescue pair is engaged at the front of the pileup, so they go to work on the rear end. “X, see if you can get another truck or two here fast.”

Third car in has been accordioned to a pancake of metal and glass no more than ten feet thick, and driver and passenger are still in it, both unconscious. Viciously Abe pulls over his primary cutter from the truck, goes to work on the passenger side. The passenger, an older woman, is dots. “A definitive case of the dots,” as X mutters while crawling over her toward the driver. “Real chicken pox.” Driver, an older man, is thrashing around suddenly. Abe leaps over to his side of the car, X is slapping on the drug patches and trying to assess the damage. “Here, Abe, chop a hole for me to get in th’other side.” Screech of metal cut like paper, waldo Superman yanks the roof up and X slithers in, cursing at a sharp edge that catches at his crotch. He flops over the front seat and goes at the driver, Abe continues to widen the door, snip snip snip, Chippie puts a halogen floodlight on them and it’s all overexposed, howl of approaching sirens, it’s loud out here on the freeway but Abe doesn’t hear a thing, it’s only stubborn metal here. He chops away the whole side of the car, looks up to see the hundred cars passing slowly, vampire eyes feasting on the sight.

“Abe! Abe!” X is hanging down underneath the steering wheel. Abe leans in. “Look man, he’s caught here, the driveshaft wall has snapped over and crushed the right ankle.”

Abe can see that.

“Cut that loose, will you?”

Abe goes to work on it.

“Not so close!”

“Well shit, how else can I get that sheet turned back?”

“Work higher around it, man this guy’s gonna bleed to death from his fucking foot! Can’t get the patch all the way around—”

Snip. Crrk. Crrk. Crrk. Snip.

“The driveshaft and the motor are pressing down on that wall, I’ll have to get the crane on it and yank it up—”

“No time for that! Okay—I got a tourniquet on the calf. That foot is almost torn off anyway, and he gonna die if we don’t get him out of here right fast, so listen here Abe, take those snips and cut his foot clear—”

“What?”

“You heard me, amputate right here. I’ll get him to the car. Do what I say, man, I’m the medic here!”

Abe set the edges of the cutter blades against a bloodied black sock, resists an urge to look away. Just like scissors. “That’s it, right there.” He squeezes the master handles together gently. “Quick now.” There’s no resistance at all to the flesh. Only a little resistance, a slight crunch, as the blades cut through the bone. The footless driver sighs. X slaps a fix on the stump, hands flying, breath whooshing in and out of him as he wiggles around, lifts the driver out, they pull him free of the dash and get him on a street gurney. “Cut that foot free and bring it along,” X says as he runs the gurney to the truck.

“Fuck.” Abe attacks the motor from the front, puts the snips to it and presses together hard as he can; it takes all of his and the teleoperator’s strength to cut the driveshaft in half, but that done he can sink the cutter into the motor and pull it forward by main strength. Then he can get a grip on the driveshaft wall, a tricky maneuver, but he does it and bends the wall back, runs around to the driver’s door, reaches in, yep, there, he can reach in and grab the thing, shoe all full of blood, and here he is running back to the truck with a foot and ankle in his hand. Part of him can’t believe it’s happening. He throws it in back on the bed with its owner, X looks up from his man, “Let’s get this guy to an ER fast.” Abe is in the driver’s seat, seat belt on, off he goes, Mission Viejo’s got a little hospital with a good ER to handle all their swimming casualties, no track now, it’s full speed ahead and X’s sweaty face in the window. “I got him stabilized, I think. He’s looking good.”

“Will they be able to graft that foot back on?”

“Yeah, sure. It’s a clean cut. They could graft your head back on these days.” He laughs. “You shoulda seen the look on your face when you tossed it in to me.”

“Shit.”

“Ha, ha! That’s nothing. On Java once I was carrying a whole leg out, hip down, and damned if it didn’t keep kicking me.”

“Shit.”

“You didn’t feel anything twitching or anything? Ha, ha.…”

“Please, X.”

Abe flies down La Paz and up the tortured curving streets that are supposed to make old Mission Viejo somehow different. To the hospital, onto the ER dock, wheel the guy and his foot inside. Whew. They sit on the dock.

X gets up and gets towels and water bottle from the ambulance compartment. They towel off their faces, drink deeply. Abe feels the shakes begin to hit. The kinetic memory of the amputation returns, that crunch when the waldo suddenly overcame the bone’s resistance. “Man,” he says. X laughs softly.

Brrk! Crrk! “Truck five twenty-two, code six, a two car head-on where the Coast Highway meets Five in Capistrano Beach—”

Tapped out again. Reflexively they’re up. Xavier yells in to the ER nurses, Abe gets the truck started. X jumps in. Seat belts on. “Man they’re densepacked tonight.”

“Drive, road pilot, drive this baby.”

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