Burning Down the House (16 page)

So you melt away, walking carefully and purposefully through the Staff Only door to the barren painted hallway where the ambulance patients are brought in. It's a different part of the hospital, this: cream-coloured cinder-block walls with absolutely no decoration, completely utilitarian, non-slip mats on the floor and often, if it's busy, cast-off equipment and packaging littering the base of the walls, thrown aside while the gurney's still moving and the doctor's already up on top of the patient.

It's like the difference between the restaurant and the receiving area. Step through the door at the right time and you can see straight into the back of a waiting ambulance, its lights still on, so that it looks strangely as if it's waiting there for you, open-mouthed. But your job, win or lose, is done, and the only ones who ever come to tell you anything about the outcome for your patients are the paramedics and the other ambulance guys. They're the only ones who seem to know that it might actually matter to you.

Sometimes it's days later before some sort of message trickles back. “They think she might have a tear in her liver,” one will say, shrugging. “She's still on the fourth floor, serious condition.”

“You know that black car off the road near the water? Had a skull fracture after all.”

You wait in the empty hallway, no longer part of anything, and the only thing you can really think of doing is leaving, feeling like the other team is somewhere else, celebrating in their own dressing room. Except you know they're not celebrating, because he's dead. It's as simple and final as that.

But someone has to wait to pick up the backboard, someone has to wash it off and collect the loose tangle of black nylon strapping that held the patient on the board, someone still has to slide it back into the empty, cooling rescue truck and imagine that there's nothing important about it, that the board doesn't always ride with its own ghosts.

No one ever effectively tells you what it will do to you. Sure, they tell you that you can't help but be affected by what you will see. They describe, carefully and professionally and clinically, under the staring fluorescent lights in the training room—a room where nothing ever seems truly difficult—how it may come at you strangely, in your dreams, or even sometimes in daydreams, triggered by something as simple as driving by a particular house again.

Dreams may seem dry and easy to deal with. You know they might come, and you think you'll be ready when they do. They're like the offhand warning on a cigarette package—“Cigarettes may cause cancer”—that you don't want to see anyway, and that your eyes eventually learn to gloss right over, however horrible the pictures. But the trainers don't tell you how the nightmares will actually pick you up by the neck and shake you silly, how they will blast your nights with doubt and blame and leave you cringing in ways you can't even understand, let alone deal with.

And they sure don't tell you about the sex.

They really should tell you about the sex, at least so it doesn't smack into you unexpectedly. They should have told me that I would come home with the death smell still in my nose, with the powder from the gloves still on my hands, with it all still clinging, impermeable, to my clothes. That I would think I should be monastic, that I should be saintly and thoughtful in what everyone considers a solemn moment. They should tell you that in reality all you will want to do is rip the clothes off someone you love. That you will want to roll wild, will want to boil, will want your flesh to shiver, will want to tremble and fall.

That you'd be making love to someone who didn't understand why she should be awakened in the middle of the night by someone both physically and mentally cold, a partner single-minded, desperate, determined and a hundred miles away from anything that looks like the storybook definition of love.

That you'd want to howl at the night that they're dead, they're dead—
but I'm still alive
. The world is dark and you are inexplicably, violently angry.

Since the trainers didn't warn me, afterwards I'd spend the rest of the night ashamed for just that, listening to the even breathing of the person sleeping next to me, sleeping with a damned clear conscience.

And that it would happen again, and again, and again—every time as frightening and necessary and unexplainable as the first. It just didn't seem fair that after all that futile effort and crushing doubt, I actually got to have one more thing to hate myself for.

Sometimes I would go into the fire station in the dark on my way home from a call, late at night after the other firefighters had left, when the only lights in the place were the single set that always stayed on in the back, over the radio table. I'd let the door slam behind me, stand in the half-light and just soak in the place. Smells always take me shooting back, and a moment in the fire hall was all it ever took. The faint hint of diesel exhaust and the smell of rubber from the tires on the trucks, squatting motionless on their smooth concrete pad.

I'd turn on the big power switch on the side of the driver's seat in each truck, check the air pressure, flick the emergency lights all on, shut them all off again. Sometimes I'd open the big front doors and roll the trucks out, letting them build up the air brake pressure to full before backing them into the bays again. I'd put the radio on scan and listen to the chatter. I'd climb up into the big square box of the rescue, checking to see that the trauma kit pockets were packed with new gloves, that all the straps on the breathing gear were extended and ready to put on, that the mask visors were clean and dry.

The training books have instructions for all of that: how to mix exactly the right solution for washing and rinsing the breathing apparatus masks, how to wipe down the straps and check every gauge to make sure the tanks are completely full. There are fixed dates for when the tanks have to be pressure-tested, and an address in California where you send pressurized samples of air from the cascade system that recharges the tanks so the system can be tested for contaminants. There are regular dates for recertifying on first aid and oxygen therapy, and instructions for checking the heat tags on aluminum ladders to see if they've been weakened by exposure to too much heat. If a small circle changes colour and won't change back, the ladder goes out of service. There are even stale dates on the IV bags of saline in the burn kit, and you can check every single one, tag the old ones and take them out of service.

But there are no instructions anywhere on how firefighters can learn to simply and painlessly let go.

Smelling the faintly acidic, sharp odour of the medical gear and the adhesive tape, I'd turn the power on and then climb down to look at the pump panel and verify that all four tank-fill lights were lit on the pumper, so that I'd know the tank was brimming with a thousand gallons of water. But more than anything else I'd be listening, just to see if there was anything left to hear. I always thought there should be voices in all that waiting gear, if it was quiet enough. If you listened hard enough—if your ears were set to the right discrete frequency. I longed to hear if the tools still spoke about cutting cars, if the air masks mentioned all the searches done while crawling on your hands and knees. Most of all, listening to the varnished plywood of the backboard: pressed up against the back of every victim, the backboard should have known if there was anything left to say.

I listened and I waited, but all I heard was the trucks shifting and pinging now and then on their concrete pads, and sometimes the thin crackle of interference breaking in on the station's base radio.

And I imagined what it was like for the woman I'd driven to the hospital, to be sitting alone and waiting there in the emergency room, abandoned by everyone, shed like another set of used rubber gloves by professionals already changing channels, turning their minds and hands to the next case, the next car, the next emergency.

Someone would have to come out and tell her, and I would have long ago vanished as easily as a ghost, just a firefighter who had driven her to the hospital as she was suddenly overtaken by far more serious concerns.

One training night we took one of the firefighters who was being a know-it-all and tied him down in the Stokes basket, neck collar on tight, everything immobilized just as if he were an accident victim, and then we stood the basket on end and leaned him up against the side of the fire station.

Then we all went inside for coffee.

He played along for ten minutes or so, trying to be a good sport.

We eventually went out to get him when he started shouting, but not because we were in any rush to let him go. Fact was, we were afraid the neighbours on either side of the fire station might complain.

FOURTEEN

I can, if I try, if I dwell on it, find at least one mistake for almost every scene I've ever gone to.

There are just too many variables, too many ways to do things wrong. I'd be down in a roadside ditch, up to my knees in water, holding an unconscious accident victim's head up out of the water so he wouldn't drown, while at the same time I'd be shaking with the huge nagging fear that I might have moved him too abruptly. That, in pulling his face up through the three inches of dark water, I might also have moved his neck in a way that had left him permanently paralyzed. There were always things I could have done better, and things that in retrospect perhaps I shouldn't have done at all.

Three years in, and I'd finally learned what my primary mistake had been. A basic one, that, different from the obvious ones I could think about as soon as I was back at the station. By the time I realized it, and how early on I'd made it, I was in far too deep to find a legitimate way out.

I didn't have the benefit of a clear-cut, sharp starting point, a defined place where everything got out of control or even where it began to slide. I had the usual collection of small mistakes, but I'd never let someone die or turned the wrong way in a burning house or failed to find a victim in heavy smoke. I hadn't ignored a serious head injury or sent someone home who was badly injured. Maybe with something like that, something as clearly significant as that, you know that you need professional help, and you get it.

The big mistake I made was not talking, not to anyone. It was choosing not to talk even when the moment offered itself.

I can remember deciding in grade seven that I would never cry in public again, no matter how hard I got knocked down on the playground—and after that I didn't cry anymore. Red Rover was banned at my grade school because Mark Dykstra had lost one of his front teeth, but we went ahead and played it anyway, and I got knocked down repeatedly and hard, trying to break through the other team's linked arms.

I cried a lot, until the day I decided not to.

I have no idea when I decided I couldn't take the risk of having someone say, “If you can't take it, just quit fighting fires.” I don't know when I decided I just couldn't explain how hard it was all hitting me, or when I began to think that there was no one left who was interested enough to listen to it all anyway. Bottling it all up seemed to be the best choice, despite the developing nightmares.

Nightmares there were, and nightmares there are: Accident victims who stand next to me while I yell at them to call for help, but they can't dial the telephone because their thumbs have been ripped off. Dreams where I'm trapped at a fire because a burning cargo net has fallen on me and the ropes are carefully burning stripes into my skin. Dreams where people I'm carrying keep slipping out of my arms and vanishing in front of me in the smoke.

With my Newfoundland department I had hints of what would eventually become regular and terrifying daytime fugues: I'd be sitting in front of my newsroom computer and the words on the screen would vanish. In their place, I'd be watching an accident scene unfold as clearly as if I were actually there. I had the distinct feeling by then that it was too late to start explaining, that any sensible person I talked to would have to decide I was going crazy.

The newsroom scanner would bark out that a fire station somewhere in the city was going to a “Code-4 medical,” and I'd automatically search my pants for my gloves, seeing someone prone on a floor instead of my keyboard, preparing to do CPR.

As reasonable as keeping it all secret seemed to me then, I know now that it wasn't the right decision. In fact, it was clearly my own personal wrong turn. Even three years in, it was ingrained, and getting worse. Daily.

Now I can go through a pamphlet on post-traumatic stress disorder and recognize every single symptom. I have the sleeplessness and the cinematic nightmares. I've got the memories that unroll in my head like movies I can't walk away from, complete with sound and colour and smell, day or night. It's like living with movies that sometimes sneak up on me out of the blue, and that are, at other times, triggered by a familiar sequence of events or even a particular stretch of road. I've got the unfathomable irritability and the sudden, inexplicable flashes of anger, and most of all the constant need to crawl away from conflict. I've walked out of arguments at home and found myself a block and a half away, walking along the sidewalk in my socks, my head spinning with words that just won't come out.

I'd become an unlikely poster boy for a kind of mental illness I knew nothing about when it first fingered its way into my life. And the irony of it is that I thought it was only happening to me. I should have known better. I was a person who spent plenty of time observing that people not only have remarkably similar physical reactions but remarkably similar mental ones as well. I thought my problems were unique, that I was unique.

When I started on the trucks in Wolfville, it all seemed simple enough: you did your job, and then you hung up the stress at the same time you stood in front of your equipment stall and hung up your bunker gear. We were tough guys, all. The injured and dead were supposed to be gone when the ambulance doors slammed closed, or when the doctors took over doing the chest compressions. Wipe off the dirt and the sweat and the pain, and don't think about it anymore.