We all sleep in the same room when we sleep. Rows and rows of bunkbeds hold the rumpled forms of my crewmates, with pairs of black boots arranged underneath. It is inky dark. When I first walk in the bunkroom sometime after midnight, I wait nearly a minute for my eyes to adjust. Then I pick my way between the metal frames of the beds, one hand out to ward off any unseen obstructions. I always take the bed nearest the pole. When I first joined the rescue squad, I picked this spot because I was afraid I would sleep through a call. I figured I was unlikely to miss anything important when my crewmates would be sliding down a firepole mere feet from my head. Now it is habit; caught somewhere between the randomness of beginnings and the stasis of tradition.

Not everyone will go out of every call; the squad typically staffs two ambulances, at least one paramedic unit, and a heavy-rescue vehicle. We're assigned to one unit's crew from 7-11 PM, then another's from 11 PM until 7 the next morning. With every call after 11, the drill's the same: the lights come on automatically in the bunkroom, an enormous buzzer blasts us out of bed, and then everyone listens to the call broadcast through the room's loudspeakers. If it's not for your unit, you lie back and wait for the lights to shut off again and for sleep to find you again. If you're on the call, there's a groggy slide down the pole, and you clamber into your ambulance, trying to clear your mind as you race out to the place where help is needed.

I am particularly fond of being on the medic crew. Mike the Lieutenant knows this, and places me there as a reward when he thinks I've scrubbed a enough bathroom floors or otherwise earned it. Mike knows that I've been dallying with the possibility of taking a firefighting class, and given the need for more firefighting personnel, he'd like to encourage me by placing me on the heavy rescue vehicle. But the medic unit is clearly more to my liking, so I've ended up there a lot recently.

At six in the morning the lights slam on and the buzzer punches through my dreams. I hear the tones for the medic unit and rouse myself before the loudspeaker finishes its announcement. This time I am particularly fogged with lack of sleep, having only gone to bed two or three hours earlier, and I pull on my black boots in a kind of stupor. I take the stairs, not trusting myself with a plunge down the pole. Only as we pull out of the station do I begin to feel completely awake. Heather, who's studying for her paramedic certification, is in the back on the unit with me. We joke about something which my mind immediately forgets. We frequently trade barbs about a recent call in which I got puked on. I am momentarily a sort of magnet for vomit. Perhaps that's what we chat about.

We are flying down Wisconsin Avenue in the thin early-morning traffic, the red lights rioting on shop windows and other cars' windshields. Heather and I both comment on the unusual speed with which we are responding to the call. I don't think either of us wants to admit how rattling it can be to be in the back of a fast-moving ambulance. Scenery blurs by, featureless and meaningless. It's almost like I am still encased in a dream, senseless up in the bunkroom.

We are moving at a rate that is stupendous, alarming, enthralling. It is everything that people imagine an ambulance to be like. Drivers fall to the sides of the road ahead of us, a parting hedge of red brake lights. The siren is like a new and dangerous form of propulsion. We rocket towards the sourse of hurt.

"Captain!" we yell out, "The Dilithium crytals canna take much more of this!"

"What?" we hear the muffled voice of the driver, busily sending the siren into squeals and yelps.

"Nothing!" we chorus. Then, in a pathetic Scottish brogue, "Sir, we're breaking up! We can't keep up this speed much longer or we're done for!" We laugh as we fly.

And so, shielded behind an insulating barrier of mirth, we fall through the dense atmosphere of human frailty toward this moment's reason for our being.