Sometime you see Them

The moonlight outside the window filtered through empty tree branches into his yard, and Joe watched carefully as if the occasional snowflakes that were falling were of cosmic importance. Maybe they were… after this evening’s events, for all he knew, they may be. He held the bottle of Woodford Reserve, the best whiskey he had ever heard tried, like it also offered answers to the crumbling paradigm of his worldview. Not prone to drinking, the few sips he had taken had just melted the lines enough to make it possible to contemplate the strange events of the evening. But just to be sure, he took another long swig and stared harder out the window, perhaps on guard for something that might have followed him home.

Joe had worked at St. Luke’s medical center as a registered nurse for seventeen years this coming July, assuming that by three pm tomorrow he had steeled himself up enough to actually go back (which, a quarter of the way into the fifth of liquor, was still not looking likely). He had been on bad shifts, lost patients, considered quitting a dozen times and even had the number for a local college that offered quick and on-demand CDL classes for days when driving a big rig sounded a lot better than what he did. It was just a solace; he would never really walk away from nursing. He loved it.

He had loved it. It was entirely possible that he still did. But how could he ever walk into the hospital again after seeing what he saw? The idea of even going back as a patient seemed less appealing than dying of a heart attack right there in his own living room if it came down to it. What was he going to do? He ran a hand through his short reddish-brown hair and took off his glasses. The alcohol was starting to blur his real vision, but he could still see her face plain as day. Not the blue, still face interrupted by the endotracheal tube for breaths during the pointless rounds of CPR; her other face.

It was never going to be a good day when he got pulled from his safe, normal post on Med-Surg into the frantic chaos of the ER. Joe hated the ER. His post was orderly and scheduled; you gave meds at a set time, you did treatments at a set time. There was rarely a reason to run, to yell, to get your own blood pressure up. Your lunch rarely got interrupted if you scheduled it properly, and very few split-second decisions were irrevocable. The ER was different. It was a haven for the trauma junkies and the ambulance cowboys, always a mess, bloody, manic, full-speed ahead chaos. You never knew what was going to come in at any given moment. So when he was sent down into the adrenaline-soaked hell an hour into his shift, he tried to talk his way out of it. But the ER was short staffed tonight and it was one of the exceedingly rare shifts when he was on the bottom of the seniority ladder. Erin had been there for nearly twenty years, and Doris had once delivered a baby named Moses, so it was on him. The things he called them in his head on the way down the back stairs were less than flattering.

It was like opening a door into a psych ward when he scanned his badge through the door to open it, except all the patients wore scrubs and people wandered in off the street to bleed or puke. There was plenty of both going on, and he followed the first cry for help that he heard (actually the cry was “five milligrams of Ativan, quick!”, but close enough). He hurried into the room to see one of the three doctors struggling to get the rails up around a hysterical mother and a teenage boy having a grand mal seizure. Things did not improve from there.

A stomach virus was tearing through one of the local nursing homes. Nineteen octogenarian and older patients came in over six hours with excrement coming out both ends, and of course, this shift housekeeping was also understaffed. It was an utter disaster. And true for the time of year, the pollen count had come up, prompting at least twenty-five people to insist they had the flu and needed antibiotics (three of which became irate when he tried to explain that even if they weren’t just experiencing allergies, antibiotics have no effect on the flu). While he cared about people, Joe was self-aware enough to know that he was no good at being in the first round of care, where people don’t know what’s wrong with them, are panicked and scared, and often irrational. He just had no patience for that aspect of care, and he knew it. 

The breakneck speed at least make the shift pass quickly, but by ten and a half hours into the twelve hour shift, he had personally attended to dozens of patients and had no doubt that at least two hundred had passed through the rest of the staff. Exhausted didn’t touch how he felt, and the clock moved like it had stones tied to the hands. But he knew that while he was physically wiped out, his mind was as sharp as ever because he was killing the puzzles in his extra-hard Sudoku book on his break when he heard the commotion outside the break room. He ran out to see several people running toward the ambulance bay with a stretcher, so he rolled his eyes at the theatrics and joined them.

In the otherwise empty ambulance bay, several security guards huddled around a young woman sprawled on the concrete. Joe had no clue what had been done to her, but there was blood everywhere. He helped position her on a spine board and put it on the gurney. Security was talking with the police, trying to get the information on the car that dumped her and drove off, and the medical staff went about their job of trying to save her.

The girl could have been fifteen or she could have been thirty. Her face was swollen and bruised and bloody, and the four bullet wounds in her abdomen were bleeding profusely, so there was little time to contemplate such mundane things as her age. Two large-bore IVs were set up for fluid replacement and attempts were made to slow the bleeding. Joe knew it was futile, that she would never be stabilized enough for surgery and that they were just going through the motions, so when a small, bloody hand latched onto his wrist, he barely stopped himself before he shrieked like a little girl. His wide eyes turned to look into hers, one nearly swollen shut, the other almost solid red from the intraocular hemorrhage. He had always laughed at the idea of eye contact resulting in a Moment with a capital “M”, but he felt it. Despite all he knew about the brain and her scrambled visual input, the girl saw him. And in that moment, he saw her. More than just a patient to be fixed or part of his job, he saw her. Someone’s daughter, sister, friend… and the steady beep in the background coalesced into a steady while. 

“Asystole!” someone shouted, and the flurry of CPR began. The doctor put a tube in her throat to get oxygen directly into her lungs, several nurses, including Joe, took their turn snapping her ribs in a pointless attempt to bring her back. Code drugs were fed into IV lines that had diluted the blood coming from the wounds until it looked like nothing more than cherry Kool-Ade. It was not going to happen, but for once, even Joe felt compelled to try.

His two-minute cycle had just finished and he was struggling to catch his breath when it happened. Amidst the flurry of a full code situation, he thought for a moment that he had to be seeing things. The hazy shape formed above her head slowly solidified into a grey replica of the girl’s form, though it took Joe a moment to wonder why it looked so different. It was her form as it had been, her shocked eyes wide and clear as it slowly sat up from the body it had been attached to. It slowly raised grey, translucent hands and flexed the fingers they tapered into. The hands raised to touch the new face and melded into it like a shadow. The mouth opened in what had to be a silent scream of horror. The stethoscope Joe was putting back around his neck clattered to the floor as his hands fell slack to his sides. The terrified grey eyes met his for a moment, appeared to scream again, and put out its hands to him as if asking for help before rising from the body and evaporating into thin air.

Paying no attention to the borrowed nurse whose name he didn’t know, the doctor called for a pause in CPR. “Still asystole. Time of death, 19:07. Good work, team. She was gone before we even got her in here.” He took off his gloves and left to change out of his bloody scrubs. The rest of the team went about cleaning up and preparing the body for the morgue. 

Joe was still frozen in place. Part of him insisted he had to have been imagining it, that it was just the mental trauma of the bloody, messy emergency and exhaustion speaking, but the rest of his mind was shouting that he had just seen something that couldn’t be. He was going crazy. That was the only possible answer. There was no such thing as a soul or any of the metaphysical nonsense! People were physical beings; all that made them as a person was electrical impulses in the brain, and his seemed to be misfiring. He should get help. He should see a doctor who could run tests and find out what was wrong in his brain that he thought he was seeing-“ 

“You saw it, didn’t you?” a voice said beside him. “Your first?”

The nurse was small, blonde, and looked way too much like their patient for Joe’s comfort. But still, if it was all in his head, how could she know? “I… you saw it, too?” 

She nodded. “Yeah. Not my first though. Work in the ER, it happens.”

Joe realized he was shaking like a leaf, but other than the young blond nurse, no one paid him any attention. “Are they… I mean, do you always…” He couldn’t form the question he wanted to ask. Was it always like that here? He had seen people die, of course, but that was a definite new one for him.

She shook her head. “Not every time. Or even all that often. But sometimes. Sometimes you see them.” She turned to walk away, but stopped. “Are you okay?”

“No,” Joe replied. “No, I’m not okay. Not at all.”

The first rays of the sun were starting to show through the trees, and the bottle was empty. Neither the whole night of contemplation, nor what he knew to be a fairly serious case of alcohol poisoning had given him any clarity on what he had witnessed. He didn’t know how he could go back in to the hospital in a few hours and pretend he didn’t see that… thing… (soul, Joe, it’s called a soul!) come out of the dead girl. Couldn’t go back and pretend he wouldn’t look for some inner ghost (soul!) in every person he saw. There was just no way. Only one choice of action made sense.

He stood on surprisingly steady legs and placed the bottle in the trash. Draining a full bottle of water, he called his supervisor and told them he was puking his guts out. It was no lie, he would be soon from all the whiskey. Then he dug out the number for the CDL class and put it by his phone before going to bed. He would call them first thing when he awoke.