Pie (needs a new ending)

Pie

“I need pie. Like right now.”

“Pie?”

“Pie. Right now.”

“You’re aware that it’s like three in the morning, right?”

“You think I can’t get pie at three in the morning?”

“Well, I guess you could go to that twenty four hour Macdonald’s—“

“That little pocket of deep fried goo is not pie. Don’t insult pie by lumping that thing in the same category as pie.”

“Fair enough. Problem is, there isn’t a grocery store open right now, and no restaurant close enough to walk to.”

Damn. Rick has me stumped there. But I refuse to give in.

“I don’t care. I have a need, and needs must be met.”

“Are you sure that this isn’t a desire being dressed up as a need, one that could in all reality wait until morning?”

“Did I say I desire pie? Are you accusing me of unnecessary hyperbole?”

“You? Never. Of all the people who ever existed on this or any other planet, you are the last one who would ever use hyperbole without due cause.”

“Damn right. I’d rather jump off a tall building and land on a bag of kittens than use hyperbole without it being completely called for.”

“Yes, indeed, clear and appropriate expression has always been a priority for you.”

“Precisely, and now that that’s established, we can conclude that this is a genuine need, correct?”

“I suppose so.”

“So are you coming?”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, wherever there’s pie.”

Rick doesn’t have anything to do, and I know he’s coming. After all, what kind of friend would he be if he didn’t join me on this, the latest in a long line of our small adventures?

“Come on, get your shoes, and let’s begin our quest.”

“A quest for pie.”

“Of course.”

“Why do we have to call it a quest?”

“Because if it’s a quest, the adventure’s built right in. Every quest ever undertaken by man, woman, child or other has included some sort of adventure or another. If it hadn’t been a quest, they would’ve just been, you know, doing stuff.”

“I see. All right, well, as you said, let’s begin our quest. Lock the door.”

“Done and done.”

And now we’re on the street, walking toward the main road where the shops and a few smaller diners are. Hopefully, there’s a twenty-four hour joint there, though how such a thing may have occurred without us knowing is beyond me. We reach the end of our block and turn the corner, and there’s a ragged looking man walking towards us.

“Hey, you guys got any spare change?”

He’s standing right in front of us now, blocking our path.

“No, sorry,” we say, and move to go around him.

He sidesteps, again blocking our way.

“You sure? I really need the money, man.”

Again we say no, but this time he pulls out a knife.

This is a mistake, because this poor soul is completely unprepared for how quickly Rick and I work together. He has no way of knowing that as Rick grabs his wrist, I’m going to go low and kick his legs out from under him, while with his free hand Rick will put two quick hard jabs into the man’s nose as he falls, blood spurting from his face.

Of course, neither Rick nor myself have the slightest clue how to actually do any of that stuff, so the guy doesn’t really have to worry about it.

Instead, what happens is Rick screams at the top his lungs, which makes the man jump back, startled, and gives us the chance to run away at full speed, which we do. We don’t stop until we’re a few blocks away, and we’re pretty sure we’ve lost him. Breathing hard, I look at Rick, panting just as hard as I am, and we start laughing.

“Screaming like a girl, eh? Interesting choice, but good plan all the same.”

“Yeah, well, it would have been, if I’d thought about it, as opposed to just having my body instinctively know that shitting myself would make it harder to run.”

“I see. Darwinism at it’s finest.”

“Sure. Survival of the least shitty, so to speak.”

Then, with the universal wisdom of every smoker who has just made serious use of his damaged lungs, we both reach into our pockets for cigarettes and lighters. As Rick leans his head back for his first drag, he sees the glowing red sign of an all night pharmacy down the street.

“Hey, let’s walk down there.”

“They don’t sell pie there.”

“No, but they sell drinks, and I’m pretty thirsty, and they might know where we can go to get pie.”

“Fair enough. Let’s go have a look see.”

The store’s still a little way off, so I think up a conversation topic.

“It’s pretty dark out here. Quiet, too.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of peaceful, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

I gesture over to two buildings on our right, locked up, lifeless, pieless, and utterly uninteresting.

“What would you do if, right from in between those two buildings, a big horde of zombies came staggering out after us?”

“Probably the same thing I did with the knife guy, only this time I'd shit myself.”

"Instead of screaming?"

"I'd be too busy, what with the shitting and the running."
“What about Darwinism?”

“Dude, they’re zombies. All rules are off when you’re dealing with zombies.”

“Well, I have to admit I agree with you there. Not exactly the bravest of souls, are we?”

“No, but at least we’re honest about it.”

“And that has to count for something, right?”

“Sure. I mean, if we walked around acting like we were all tough and brave, knowing full well that we’re anything but, we’d be—hey, what the hell is that?”

We’ve reached the middle of the parking lot by now, just in time to see a big white pick up truck screech into a parking space a few feet away from us. Given our recent experience, I think for a second that they’re going to rob the place, but instead a young blonde woman opens the door and stumbles out, smelling like she’d spent all night in a bar, and was planning on bringing some of it home with her.

She puts her head back inside and screams, “You shut up! I have had enough of this drunk bitches!”

Grammatically that is incorrect, but I figure it’s not worth pointing out. Plus, with the slurring in her speech, it kind of makes more sense that way.

The girl sitting in the passenger seat starts to slur something of her own, but we can’t hear it because the driver slams her door. She turns to us and throws me her keys.

“Take my keys away. I’m not driving this drunk bitch around anymore. First, she starts a fight with Theresa, then Jackie, and the nexsht thing I know, I’m sitting at this fuckin’ table, with all these drunk bitches fighting with each other, so take my keys, ‘cause I have had enough, you know?”

No, we don’t know, and I’m not really sure what to say to all this, so I kind of just stare at her before I reply, “Um, I don’t really want your keys. I just want some pie.”

For whatever reason, she actually considers this for a moment.

“Do they sell pie here?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

She makes a weird face at me, and then looks at Rick.

“Will you take my keys?”

“No. I have my own set already.”

She starts to say something, but the passenger side door opens and slams shut. We all look over and see the other girl striding away. The driver girl starts screaming at her.

“Good! Get out of here! I didn’t wanna drive your drunk ass around anyway! I hope you get arrested and they take you to jail and beat you, drunk bitch!”

Then she walks over to me, grabs her keys from my hand, gets in the truck muttering about drunk bitches, and drives off. Rick and I look at each other for a second, and then he shrugs his shoulders and says, “Sure,” and we walk inside.

We say hello to the two guys sitting behind the counter reading magazines, and one of them looks up and asks us what was going on outside.

“Oh, this drunk bitch started a fight with Theresa—“

“And Jackie” Rick interjects.

“Right, and Jackie, and so the other girl doesn’t want to drive her around anymore, but that’s okay, because she got out and walked off, which is good for me, because I didn’t want her keys.”

The guy says “Oh, ok,” and they go back to their magazines. Apparently they’re used to this kind of thing.

Rick and I walk to the coolers and he grabs a bottle of water. I realize I could use a drink myself and grab a bigger bottle of water, because I figure if I’m going to get duped into paying for something I should be able to get for free, I might as well go all in. We go up to the counter and the guy puts his magazine down and comes over to ring me up.

He scans my bottle of water, taps the screen a couple of times and says, “One eighty six.”

I hand him a five, and he gives me my change.

I step aside and let Rick make his purchase, thinking quietly to myself.

When we get outside, I hold the change in my hand for Rick to see.

“Check it out. Three fourteen. That’s three point one four. I got my pie.”

Rick rolls his eyes at me and says, “That’s ‘pi’ with no ‘e’.”

“So what you’re saying is you’d rather keep looking than consider this quest accomplished?”

“Well, when you put it like that, I have to congratulate you on your—”

“Hey!” someone yells from behind us, and we turn to see the knife guy jogging toward us.

And as we run off into the night like the Darwinian cowards that we are, some part of me notices that this time, Rick didn’t scream. He's probably too busy.

"Intensive Care" revision

Intensive Care

John Crawford

             I quit my job because of M*A*S*H.
             I’d taken a job as Patient Care Technician, which is somewhere between an Orderly and a Nurse’s Aid. I was tired of doing the normal retail jobs, and I figured working in the Intensive Care Unit at a hospital was about as far from being a register jockey as I was going to get. A year and a half later, I’d done so many chest compressions on so many people that doctors running the codes didn’t call for compressions anymore. They just looked at me and nodded.

            It always started the same way: I would hear the PA system’s automated female voice, somehow managing to convey the tone of urgency hidden under a forced calm, “Code blue! Code blue!”
            Then it would state the area of the hospital where this was all happening. During the day shift, because of all the visitors, the nurses and techs and other necessary personnel perfect a sort of power walk that they believe is going to keep things on the quiet side. Although I expect seeing a bunch of people in scrubs power walking down a hallway would not go unnoticed. Overnight, on my shift, no such pretense was necessary, and occasional observers would see blurs of scrubs flying through the hallways to get to the dying patient. It really is just as dramatic as it is on television, until you hear the people running with you making jokes.
            Just another day at the office, chatting around the old water cooler.
            By the time I would get to the room, it would always be full of people, until someone, usually my charge nurse Marlena, would kick most of them out.
           “If anyone is here who doesn’t need to be here, get out!”
           Marlena could clear a room faster than anyone I’ve ever met, and I have nothing but pity for anyone who ever tried to challenge her. She was a short, stocky woman with a significant limp that tried unsuccessfully to slow her down. Her parents had been hard working immigrants from Mexico, and she was as tough as a person could be in a pair of flowery scrubs. Whenever there was a code in our unit, she would tell any other tech who showed up to leave, because I was there. More than once I ended up doing compressions for nearly an hour, because she didn’t trust the techs from the other parts of the hospital.
          So the room would clear out, except for the on-call doctor, Marlena, the patient’s nurse, a couple of others who stayed to help, and a respiratory therapist. And me, one knee up on the bed for leverage, doing chest compressions.
         This part is nothing like it is on television. On television, you never see the rib plates folding under that pale, grayish skin. You can’t feel the tiny shock wave that travels up your arm when a rib breaks under the pressure. You don’t hear that muted crack under the skin, and you don’t notice how your hands push in a little more than before. This, they tell you in CPR class, is an acceptable side effect, and will happen more often on thin people. When the code ends on television, either everyone is relieved and works out their own problems, or we get to see how hard the doctor takes his patient’s death. They never get called back into the room, because the patient crashed again. You never see the twenty one year old tech go outside to the dank, isolated employee smoking area, and he never chain smokes for half an hour because he knows he has to go back upstairs after this and take the body to the morgue.
         The credits never roll in real life.
         What happens instead is that people get used to it. It turns out to be like any other job. At first, it’s all new and unnerving, but eventually you get the hang of it and it’s just work, like anything else. Eventually, you get so that after you witness a man forcefully remove his own catheter –which is much worse than when women do it-, or you wrestle a delusional patient with a head wound back into bed and get them restrained, you don’t need to go outside to smoke. Instead, you remember that it’s lunch time, so you go downstairs to the all night snack bar and get some chicken strips. When someone codes half an hour before your shift is over, and everyone grumbles about wanting to go home, you join in.
         This where I was until one night, my first night off in four days, I was sitting in my quiet little one bedroom apartment watching television. When all your friends work days, and even the bars close at two, you spend a lot of time at home, by yourself. So I’d gotten pretty familiar with the late night programming schedule. From midnight to one, The Cosby Show would be on one channel. Then, one episode of Cheers, or maybe something like Night Court, depending on my mood. After that, I had thirty minutes to kill before M*A*S*H came on, and that was when I’d make dinner. That night I went to Whataburger, which took forever, and by the time I got back the theme song was playing already. So I threw the bag of food on the coffee table and ran into the kitchen to get a beer before it was over.
          M*A*S*H is a show about an army hospital unit set in the Korean War. The title is actually an acronym that stands for mobile army surgical hospital. I had taken a renewed interest in it since starting at the hospital.
         It turned out to be the episode where a TV journalist comes to visit and interviews the surgeons and nurses about what it’s like there. This is one of the greatest episodes of M*A*S*H ever, and I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid, so I was in a pretty good mood. I was blissfully alone in a quiet apartment, watching one of televisions’ best shows, having a big, greasy, half pound double burger and what would probably become three or four beers provided by a Mr. George Killian, by way of Coors. What more could I ask? Then, actor William Christopher showed up on screen as Father Mulcahy and said this:
                   
                                           When the doctors cut into a patient,
                                            and it’s cold, you know, the way it is now,
                                            today . . . steam rises from the body.
                                           And the doctor will . . . warm himself
                                           over the open wound. Could anyone
                                           look on that and not feel changed?

                   I sat back against the cool leather of the couch and stared at the screen. I didn’t know why that hit me so hard, exactly. I’d seen episodes before where people died and things were sad and everything and had never been bothered by it. I’d seen Hawkeye, a surgeon on the show, do CPR, and instead of hoping the patient lived, I pointed out that he was doing it wrong, his rhythm was off. But that stayed in my head for the next two days, rattling around as I enjoyed my time off.
                  Then it was time to go back to work. It was a quiet night for a while, until about one in the morning, when Marlena told me to get room number three ready for a new patient. As I got up from my chair, I heard her tell Sandy, a bushy blonde haired nurse who spoke softly and looked at everyone with eyes that always seemed to understand, that she was getting a new patient.
                 “She’s an over dose, they think aspirin and a few other things.”
                 “Family with her?”
                 “Family’s out of town, they can’t get ahold of ‘em. They gave her charcoal, but they don’t know if it’s too late or not.”
                 That was all I heard, because that’s when I started thinking to myself I should make sure a comfortable chair is in that room, because I’ll be in there babysitting in case she wakes up.
                 I went into the room, sliding the door open. The rooms in this unit didn’t have regular doors, but huge sliding glass doors that opened up all the way for easier access. This made it possible for us to bring in the patient on his or her bed, line them with our bed, and lift them up and over. I just finished laying the blue cotton pad on the bed –designed to protect the sheets in case of incontinence- when I heard the general noise of people from the ER getting off the elevator and pushing the stretcher. Marlena directed them to room three and I put some gloves on and twisted my neck a little to pop it, out of habit.
                 They wheeled the stretcher in and I saw for the first time that it was a young teenage girl, maybe fourteen. I heard the snippets of the nurse from ER giving report to Sandy while the rest of us moved the girl onto the unit bed and hooked her up to the monitor.
                “Police found her in her home. . . empty bottles on the floor next to her. . . couldn’t find any numbers. . . fourteen years old. . . aspirin, sleeping pills. . .”
                 After everything was situated, the ER people took their stretcher and went back downstairs, Marlena told me that I would indeed be sitting in here, just in case. I knew that for an aspirin over dose, charcoal is sent into the stomach via a nasogastric tube, because the chemicals in aspirin will bind to that instead of getting in the blood stream. If this is done too late, however, the liver bleeds out. So I was in there either waiting for her to wake up or bleed to death internally.
              Much as I hate to admit it, this normally would not have bothered me very much. I’d done it before, with varying outcomes, so I was familiar with the end process. But this time, Father Mulcahy was delivering his monologue in my head with that high pitched, earnest voice of his. I tried to ignore it, reading a book I’d brought in with me. It didn’t last. I sighed and put the book down in my lap, turning to look at the patient.
             Fourteen years old. This girl was too young to be here. She wasn’t a patient; she was just a kid, a baby. This wasn’t work, this was a living person fading away right next to me, and I was just reading a book like I was waiting for a fucking bus. I looked at her, so small in that hospital bed, tubes coming from her nose and arms going into small IV machines. She wasn’t ending a long and painful battle with cancer; she wasn’t paying the price for a life of heavy smoking and drinking. She was just a girl, all alone and feeling God knows what.
            She was unconscious, intubated, and if anything was left in her mind, she was dealing with it all on her own.
            So I did the only thing I could think to do. I held her hand lightly and turned on the TV, talking to her softly about what was on. We watched the two episodes of M*A*S*H that came on at two, and after that I channel surfed with the bedside remote, talking to her the entire time. Until about five, when she crashed.
           In the span of about ten seconds, I went from holding her hand to pushing down on her chest, making her heart pump while nurses flew around us, setting up the crash cart and yelling for things. The translucent blue mask pushed her eyebrows together, making her look like a child having a nightmare. I felt one of her ribs go, the small crack vibrating through my wrist the way thunder rattles windows. For the first time in over a year I felt scared and desperate about what was happening. I found myself pleading with a God I didn’t even believe in to do something, even though I knew it was too late.
           Fifteen minutes later I was outside, smoking cigarette after cigarette and looking up at the sky. It was still dark; sunrise wouldn’t be for an hour or so, and the stars were shining. I sat on an old wooden bench and stared up at them while all the things I’d seen and done in this building came rushing back to me. All the people I’d seen die as I kneeled over them, all the bodies I’d taken to the morgue or helped the funeral home people move out. All those empty, blank faces staring up at nothing came back, and I knew why Mulcahy’s words had stuck. I wasn’t used to it anymore, and I wouldn’t be again.
          I had looked, and I had been changed.