We catch the call off the radio, leave the ER at a sprint. Like TV. Just as we arrive we can hear the Engine crew, first on the scene, asking dispatch for our ETA. That's when we know it's bad.

Boom boom boom.

We do everything we can. This time we hang around the ER for a while to put the unit back together, restock, find out if he'll make it.

Tonight I'm on an ambulance that's based out of another fire station in the area, rather than at the Squad headquarters. We swing by the Squad building to replace our main Oxygen tank, refuel, and grab another backboard. I can tell that M is a bit unsettled by that last call. It's her first bad one since she made aidperson and took charge of a unit.

I feel almost nothing. I run into Steve the Lieutenant, who left my crew to head another night because of a scheduling conflict. Steve is the Paramedic and Firefighter who first put me in full turnout gear and sent me into a training room full of artificial smoke, tapping into some latent desire I apparently had to search for people in a fire. He must at some level recognize that I see him as kind of a role model. Now we hang out in the kitchen for a few minutes and talk casually of web design, our alternate gigs. With us it's always either the web or firefighting.

M will need some time, but she'll be fine. I've been present at the deaths of a fair number of people, and after a while I think I got the hang of it. She's certainly been in scrapes like this one before, but never, I believe, in a command role. That, too, must take some getting used to.

While I feel sympathy for her, I'm a little disturbed that I myself don't feel anything in particular about the call. The rest of the night is totally quiet. I sleep badly, but only because the bunk bed creaks every time I turn over.

On Saturday morning I drive home to find my street completely blocked off by police. I park some distance away and walk home. The cops stop me a block from my house and initially refuse to let me pass. The police have just raided the protesters' convergence center several blocks away, and now they've sealed off the area around the local police station in fear of reprisals. My Rescue Squad uniform doesn't dissuade the cops from hassling me. "I live right there," I say, pointing over their shoulders, "in that house right over there." They don't look, perhaps concerned that I'm trying to fake them out and then deliver a gut-punch. Finally they relent and let me go. "What's going on, anyway?" I ask in irritation.

"Routine," the cop says gruffly. Really. Generally I am not, in this nation, prevented from reaching my place of residence for no articulated reason. Later that day, Susan and I walk around the hood to check out the state of protest. By the time we get back, the police are checking IDs of everyone who wants to get into our cordoned-off neighborhood. We wonder if this is particularly constitutional, but apparently have no choice but to submit to the ID check if we want to get home. Later we learn that our neighbor John printed out a copy of the Bill of Rights and personally delivered it to the desk sergeant. As ineffectual as this gesture doubtless was, I feel a great affection for John when he tells me this.

That night we go to see some Irish dancing. There is one song, a gathering of voice and drumbeats, that makes me think of walking towards fire.

Once I am asleep and defenseless, the nightmare ruptures open. The patient's face has been shot off, with little left but the bare wet bone. I can see the articulations in the jaw as he tries to talk.

"Don't let me die," he begs me. He's trying to get up off the cot in my ambulance, flailing blindly, a desperate, shredded skeleton. He claws at me, pulls his way up my arm. "Please."

It will take some time. But at least I still feel something.