Marcus

“You see this?” I pointed to Rashid. “My best friend in the whole world.”

Mirza dropped her head and smiled. We worked well with campus security. Everyone on the night shift knew me and Rashid were tight and liked when we were on shift. It’s because we laughed a lot. It made everyone else feel at ease.

When it came to medical emergencies, campus security was like the flagship that alerted us to calls. What they needed in return were competent responders to assess and treat the patient. Rashid and I hit the mark in every way. Security trusted us and may have had a certain piece of mind when we were on duty, like they knew we had their backs. As a result, we had a sense of comradery, like we were all on the same team.

The exception was Calvin, a large, button-nosed, and manipulative man. He was good friends with the director of security and had his own personal office in the security courters. His official title was Operations Manager, though his primary occupation is watching shows in his office.

I ignored him when I could and focused on the job. My friends on other campus emergency response teams had ambulances and were integrated into their municipal response centers. In our quiet urban town, where the campus was three blocks from the ambulance station, the estimated dispatch-to-arrival time for on-campus, life-threatening emergencies was only 6 minutes. Our job was to stabilize patients until ambulances arrived or to treat low-stakes emergencies on the spot.

We carried three medical packs with us. In the largest, there was five colour-coded kits which were organized for different categories of emergency. For example, the red case was the airway kit, which included a bag-valve-mask and oral and nasal pharyngeal airways. The green kit stored supplies for treating bleeding and trauma. It had two tourniquets, hemostatic gauze, big stacks of non-stick pads, abdominal pads, and four-inch compress bandages. The heaviest and most dangerous piece of equipment was the 15 cubic foot portable oxygen tank. It had its own dedicated backpack which Rashid was carrying. If he dropped it down the stairs by mistake, it could explode and blast the high-pressure metal cylinder through the wall of the building. The last pack was a black polyester rucksack where we carried the Automatic Electronic Defibrillator (AED). Rashid wore it too. It blinked a green indicator light every three seconds from behind a plastic casing and was our most important piece of equipment for treating cardiac arrest.

Calvin got up from the security reception desk and started to the break room.

I turned to Mirza. “What’s the time?”

“Ten to six. You want to clock in?”

“Yes, please. Here’s my card. I confirm the inventory’s been checked.”

“No thanks to you,” Rashid said.

“How about Mirza adds that? Inventory checked: thank you, Rashid. No thanks to Marcus.”

“No, man, no. I was just teasing you. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“You need to be less nice. It makes me feel bad when you’re this nice.”

“Can’t help it, man. Just my nature.”

“Alright. Let’s see here.” I dug my hand into the side pocket of my cargo pants. “Got my note pad, pen, gloves…where’s the flashlight? It’s not in this pocket, either. You have a spare one?”

“I swear there’s one back in the storage room,” Rashid said.

“Pardon me, gentleman. I could really use your help with something.” It was Calvin. He was peeking from behind the door of his office.

Rashid and I looked at each other. “What do you need help with?” Rashid asked at last.

“Oh, just to hang a little something up.”

I could sense Rashid moving to say yes, so I grabbed his arm gently. “Actually, we should probably get back to the storage room and restock our kits,” I said.

“Really? I was under the impression you had already checked the inventory before coming here.”

“We forgot something.”

“It’s only going to take two minutes. I swear on my own life. See?” Calvin raised his right arm as if making a pledge and then made a pouty face.

“What exactly do you need to hang?” Rashid asked.

“An old family portrait. It used to belong to my mother who just passed away.”

“Jeez. Wow. I mean—yeah. I mean—I guess we can help with that. Sorry to hear about your mom.”

“Thank you, Rashid. You’re very kind. If you could just follow me here. Yes, you come too, Marcus.”

Rashid and I walked around the security reception desk. Calvin waved us in. “Come on, just come right around the desk and come over to my office. Thank you very much. Thank you to the both of you.” We walked from the desk to the office. Beside the office door was an electrical breaker. We passed it as we went in.

“Now let me just get this chair out of your way. Yes, please follow me into the office. Just like that. Perfect, and now you can come around the desk like this. And take a look here. Voila! Here it is.”

I scratched my head even though it didn’t itch. The painting was beautiful. It was an immaculate seascape where enormous, monstrous waves collided with one another, like in an Aivazovsky. From one end of the painting, golden light enshrined a gigantic tidal wave. It fiercely descended on a small and sharp freak wave that had risen like a slime from the shadows.

“Wow,” Rashid said.

“Yes. It’s marvellous. Now if you don’t mind—”

“Oh, sure.” Rashid bent down and picked up the painting. He moved it to the far end of the wall where Calvin pointed and then grabbed the drill on the corner table.

“Wait,” I said. At the bottom of the wall, directly in line with where Rashid was about to drill in the screw, there was an outlet. “Does that that thing have a live wire leading up the wall?”

Calvin shook his head. “Every wire is horizontally connected to the outlet. It’s safe to drill over it.” My entire body tightened.

Rashid lined up the screw and drill bit when Calvin stopped him. I was about to let out a sigh of relief when Calvin retrieved a wall mount from behind a sofa. “Actually, I don’t think that’s the right spot for the painting. Would you install this instead?”

“You’re not serious,” I said.

“It’s okay Marc. It’ll take a minute or two.”

“That’s the spirit. Here you go, Rashid. Don’t drop it,” Calvin said.

I imagined slapping sense to Calvin and consoled myself by cracking every one of my knuckles.

Rashid aligned the drill bit with the screw and pressed the trigger. The screw began to revolve. Twirls of paint and wood came off. Rashid pressed the trigger harder. The screw went deeper into the wall.

“There,” he said at last. He picked up the next screw, and I felt myself tighten up again. He aligned it adjacent to the first and began to drill.

This time, a loud bang rang in the air. I thought it was a gunshot and ducked instinctively. Mirza grabbed my shoulder. I turned to see what she was looking at. Rashid shook in place. The drill kept going. Smoke rose from behind the screw.

“Oh, hell.” Calvin sprang to his feet and ran out the door. “Gonna kill the power,” he said. I thought he was going to be a few minutes, but he didn’t reach the end of the office before the lights went out and a dull thump sound followed by the end of the drilling.

I snapped the hip belt on the pack in place and bolted to Rashid.

“Rashid, hello? Can you hear me, Rashid?” I tapped his chest and shoulder firmly. “Rashid? Hello, Rashid. Can you hear me?” When he didn’t move, I pinched his fingernail, then the trapezius muscle on his back. I ran my index and middle finger along the front of his neck and pushed in to find his carotid pulse. I brought my cheek to his lips and nose and felt for a breath. I waited for ten seconds.

“Mirza!” I yelled. “Damn it. Calvin, call an ambulance. He’s in cardiac arrest. Where’s Mirza?”

I placed one hand over the other and then located them above the center of his chest. I sang the main chorus of “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees in my head and started compressions. As I pushed down on his chest, I felt the soft friction of his sweater against my palms and flutter of panic rippled from by stomach to the top of my head. Should I have cut his shirt off? No. That came later. I needed the AED.”

Calvin came to my side. He was talking but I couldn’t register what he was saying.

“Where’s Mirza?” I asked.

“The 911 operator wants to talk to you.”

“I need the AED.”

“Is he breathing?”

“He doesn’t have a pulse.” I told Calvin to put the phone on speaker mode and leave it beside me. “Get Mirza,” I said.

I was doing compression-only CPR at the same time, which meant I was doing compressions without giving mouth-to-mouth. I hadn’t counted the compressions and was waiting for Mirza to bring the defibrillator and start the proper CPR cycle. I just kept pumping out the compressions. The longer we waited before administering the shock, the less of a chance Rashid’s heart would restart after the shock was administered.

It was like my heartbeat was pounding against my entire body. I didn’t know if the thoughts in my head were racing or going slow. I used to think my job was useless, albeit it was an important job to have on campus because it made area safer. The severity of calls I had responded to were less severe than the severity of calls I was trained for. In a roundabout way, this was the first time I was really “trying to save a life.” But who’s life? The lights flickered on. Rashid’s eyes looked blank and taxidermized. I turned away. Where was Mirza? For a split second I saw Calvin standing there, frozen and with fear in her eyes. Mirza was beside him, rubbing her hands together and looking from me, to him, to Rashid.

The lights went off, and I was back to compressions in the dark. I called for Mirza to come. I had to work fast and couldn’t think well enough to explain it all. I had her turn on the light on her phone and point it at me. As calmly and gently as possible, I said, “In ten seconds. Your turn.”

I pumped out thirteen or fourteen compressions, then motioned with my chin for her to switch over. I put my left hand on the floor and stuck my right hand out three inches above it, then scrambled in the dark for the rucksack. First, I hit what felt like a table, then a chair, and then the office door where, adjacent to it, I felt the stiff plastic coating of the bag where Rashid had placed it when he got to the office. I grabbed hold of it and ran it back to Rashid. I squatted on the floor and opened it to retrieve the defibrillator.

When I had the AED kit in my hand, I unzipped the small hard case and took out what I needed: scissors, razor, AED. The button on the AED was small. I turned my torso so the indirect phone light would help me locate it.

“There you are,” I said when I found it. The AED began narrating instructions for CPR which I ignored. I grabbed the scissors and dove to cut the shirt in half from the neck of the collar down to the hem. The next step would be to stick on the AED pads and deliver the shock. I lined up the shirt with the scissors and got to work. I cut the first section from the neck down to the start of the chest but had to line it all up again because the scissors slipped. Outside the distant siren of an ambulance closed in on the first-year residences. I kept cutting and lining it up and cutting and sensing what was probably the pain in a decade of friendship threatened by a single, present moment.