by Jeffrey Paul Dore
The woman bent at the knees, crouched, fanned her hand on the cracked concrete for support, lied on her side on the sidewalk, rested her head in the crook of her elbow. The light yellow dress spread across the ground, the pink top already dirtying from the slimy grime trail left by the garbage bin she was dragging to the curb edge. The yellow and pink striking an unnatural colour balance against the surrounding crumbling eroding city.
We saw her from the windows. We saw her from the skyscrapers. Passengers from a passing bus. Neighbours. We recognized this was a newsworthy event.
The machine of the city continued. Stoplights still changed, the upturned flat palmed DON'T WALK LEDs flashed us yet another warning we either chose not to heed or was so apart of the white noise we just didn’t see it anymore. The subway rumbled below, threatening the cracks in the roads to finally open and swallow us whole. We silently wondered what it would take for the machine to halt. We stopped being afraid of every plane that flew overhead. Earthquakes and tsunami’s only happened in other cities. We were invincible.
A crowd formed around the yellow dress and pink top. At eight years old, my curiosity drove me more than instinct. By being the first on the scene, the first to her side, I co-opted the breaking news, took responsibility as the storyteller, distinguished myself from the other late-comers as the one with the power, the one with the information.
The woman stared straight ahead. The crowd started asking questions. Are you okay? Are you hurt? Can you get up? Her eyes bounced around to the questioners but she didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. One man bent down, twisted his head to face her. He had a take-out coffee cup in his hand with these words written across the side: Hazelnut-vanilla-soy milk-double shot-espresso.
Her eyes sprung over his shoulder and rested on me. Her eyes asked me closer. I put my hand on the coffee-man’s shoulder, a polite gesture, a movement mature beyond my years that said, We’re all in this together. I crouched down and she grabbed my hand, grasped so tight it hurt, the tips of my fingers turning a bright red.
“I just want to be left alone,” she said in a weak voice that did not match her strong grip.
An old woman pulling a cart full of newspapers yelled, News of the World for sale! She hadn’t realized she was selling yesterdays news, she didn’t know the woman lying on the sidewalk was today’s news, that it would be the start of the story that brings us to the brink. A businesswoman seemed to be talking to no one until her Bluetooth becomes visible. The coffee-cup man aimed his smart phone, recording video while simultaneously sending it into the stratosphere. A teenaged girl smacking gum, her short shirt showing a pierced navel, was responsible for naming the soon-to-be epidemic. @gumgirl Woman lying on sidewalk – can’t take the heat :-p #collapse. It would be trending on Twitter within ten minutes.
Even with my young mind, I knew collapse was the wrong word. The tight grip of the woman’s hand told me so. We needed to name things. Abstract concepts were no longer allowed or tolerated. We needed well-established, easily identifiable and categorically straight and narrowed tags that can be understood immediately, placed in the order that represented our lives. No deviations, no colouring outside the lines.
Anything that did not register with our preconceived perspectives was simply discarded. But you can’t discard a woman lying on the sidewalk.
The crowd increased, their collective anger palpable. Aggression that permeated just under the surface boiled over. People yelled at her to get up, ordered her to explain herself. Little did we know, the same situation was being played out all over the city.
Collapse occurred when a person overloaded. Too many 1’s and 0’s flying through the air, entering our heads, cluttering up the pipes, overheating the engine, resulting in a total crash of the system. It wasn’t the machine of the city that would stop, it was the beating hearts that would give-in first. Collapse wasn’t death, wasn’t suicide, biological, physiological, medical, psychological, accidental, on purpose, premeditated, last minute, the person who collapsed wasn’t making a political statement nor was it some type of religious speaking-in-tongues type of revelation. We used the potential of technological advances to advertise our lives. It made sense to us during this early stage of the collapses that we could not end our lives in a whimper, but be alive, albeit in a neutral state, to make our lives mean something, the way celebrity deaths mean something to so many. It made sense our collapse should be recorded.
The crowd parted, two paramedics with tackle-boxes crouched next to the woman. I didn’t hear the sirens, the sounds must have evaporated between the shouts and murmurs of the surrounding mechanical parts. The paramedics were the calm in the chaos. The woman kept looking at me, she said, “Please, nothing is wrong, I just want to be left alone.” The paramedics took her vitals, kept asking questions. The crowd collectively looked over their shoulders, and by extension, my shoulders.
A gurney appeared, when they tried to roll the woman over, her grip intensified severely. “I will only go if the boy comes,” she said. The paramedics looked at me and my power extended beyond mere information, it was connected physically to the eye of the storm. The moment lingered on, I let the biometric pressure intensify, until I finally nodded. We moved her on to the gurney, through the crowd to the ambulance, creating a poorly constructed ballet stepping up into the back of the flashing machine. The doors slammed shut.
Silence.
My eyes took in the equipment hanging from handles, instruments tucked inside compartments. I knew from that moment, I would become a paramedic. It made sense and I clung to this decision, believing in it, trying to have faith in it. A belief and faith that wavered as I progressed from paramedic to head of the special task force collecting the collapsing people. It made sense because I was there from the beginning.
That understanding started eroding the same day as this decision regarding my future. A little at a time, almost imperceptible, almost unnoticeable. But I can tell you it started a few blocks from where the woman with the pink top and yellow dress collapsed. The ambulance stopped, the back doors opened, a crowd of men climbed in, flanked us, surrounded us. A different crowd. They pried my hand from hers, she didn’t fight and neither did I. Please don’t blame me, I didn’t know how to fight at the time. Two men pulled me from the back of the ambulance, put me in the back of a black car. We parted ways, the ambulance and the car.
I was returned to my street, there was no crowd, no evidence that anything happened. Only the garbage bag waited patiently to be taken. The next day, a woman in a light blue top and white dress exited the apartment building. She was the same age, had the same hair colour. The only difference being she stayed on her feet.
