In EMT class, we listen to the tidal rhythms of each other's blood pressures and slide airways between the rubberized lips of intubation mannequins. This isn't the full-size CPR dummy, just a limbless torso that looks like something that washed up on a beach several days after a shark attack. It has organic-shaped rubber lungs and a small airbag stomach hanging out of its severed chest. You can watch these as you ventilate your pretend patient and determine if you're squeezing all your life-giving oxygen into the belly instead of the lungs. This is a very real danger in real life, and in addition to doing your patient no good, it is a fast way to get coated with puke. Imagine if you're the last person to see someone alive and your only memory of them is as a burbling fountain of vomit.

My favorite thing about the dummy is the tongue, because the mannequin makers went through great pains to make the mouth section as realistic as possible. It's made of softer rubber, texturized and rough, more like a cat tongue than a human one. It wiggles around in there if you stick your finger in the dummy's slightly-parted mouth. It's disturbingly real without actually being fully biofidelic (there's no spit, for example).

It makes me think, more disturbingly, of the whole industry that is devoted to creating dolls for people to screw.

You might think you'd want your artificial lovers to seem as much like the real thing as possible. It makes the average man, at home on Saturday evening humping his loverdoll, fell less like someone who is desperately unprepared to deal with the human minds that animate real women's bodies. He wants to feel he is touching something with intimacy, reaching out of himself to something like life, and not tunneling into caverns where all life is blind and albino.

But to make the loverdolls like human beings is to ignore that there are frontiers of pleasure far beyond those that our fallible human bodies can provide for each other. For women who experience difficulty obtaining orgasm in the grunt-roll of hetero sex, the vibrator lays open a pure world brighter and more abundant that that which can be reached on board a mere penis. Would that we were equipped with an ability to upgrade our bodies to the latest stimulation-provision that technology can offer us! Soon, losing yourself in the messy scramble of sex will mean getting only half the ecstasy that you can get from the tools of shimmering, quivering modernity.

In class, I fit the twin male prongs of the regulator into the female holes on the oxygen bottle and tighten the screw that mates them together. One half-turn of the valve on top of the canister sends a faint hiss through the system and flips the pressure gauge into the charged range. I have done this plenty of times before while doing equipment checks on the ambulances, and a few times while being pitched around the back of the unit with the siren roaring over my head on the way out to a call, having just discovered that the oxygen tank was nearly empty as we headed for a scene where we would desperately need it. My classmates, never having done this before, are nervous about the hiss of the gauges and the prospect that if you drop the canister, it can turn into a lethal missile. But I feel no delicious thrill of trepidation. This is one of those parts of the class where I'm just biding my time until I can get the certificate that says I can do what I've known how to do for years.

Susan and I are lying around in bed playing Mille Bournes, a card game we first learned in childhood. We found it on a shelf in the cool toy store on Wisconsin Avenue and relearned it in the dim light of a table at Pharmacy Bar, trying to keep our cards out of the beer-rings. We finish our game and decide we've had enough French cardplay for one evening. There is a brief pause while we consider our entertainment options.

"I could practice my rapid trauma assessments on you," I volunteer lamely.

Sometimes I feel that against the incredible texture of emergency medicine, I am treating everything else as a practice dummy.