If you’re at the county hospital parked in the three-minute pull-out by that new clinic building, and the employee you’re picking up doesn’t come out, you see an opera. Verismo. You’re backstage, you see the backdrop, tall buildings with hundreds of windows painted on, and down below them on the sidewalk a Chagall village of the poor. Bearded, hooded, limping, bandaged, milling around, pregnant, some in two winter coats although it’s summer. There’s a bus shelter where a man is living in a blanket. The buses pull up, two or three so close in line you think they’ll bump each other but they don’t. They can be closing in on each other and somebody in OR scrubs will dash right between them to get across to the main hospital. I’ve seen the intern I’m picking up do that, waving to me that he’ll be back. The bus in the front sinks down like a camel in the sand. Our city has kneeler buses for people who don’t climb steps. They’re pulling carts loaded with their bagged possessions or they have canes or crutches or a few go on in motorized chairs. The sidewalk is full at five in the morning and it’s full all day, maybe all night. You can’t tell a doctor from a transporter because they’re all in the blue scrubs. Everybody has a badge. Not everybody: some have bracelets, and those are patients getting exercise. Their blues are paler, their legs bare. Before they can be discharged they have to be able to perform ADL, activities of daily living. Or they just have to have a cigarette or go crazy. Sometimes someone goes with them to push the IV pole and sometimes not. Assisted or unassisted. One pushing his own pole was young and thin, wearing one of those cotton hospital robes. It blew out behind him, a balloon of thin cloth with the sun in it. He kept coming back around the block in curls of cigarette smoke. He was pushing his own pole as he smoked but he had his brother, maybe his twin—they had the same black hair and beard—with him. He looked happy to be smoking in the sun, but the twin was morose. He was fifty pounds heavier than his brother but they looked alike; they looked like one of those before and after shots. After two or three rounds the sick one came around without the brother. He stopped and lit a new cigarette. Suddenly the brother ran out of the alley behind him and hit his elbow from behind, knocking the cigarette out of his fingers. They both bent from the waist as if they were bowing, like Sumo wrestlers, but they were circling and yelling in each other’s faces. Inside the car the yells were faint, but they pushed each other in the chest and then grabbed each other and the brother wrestled the sick one down onto the sidewalk. The sick one came loose from whatever the pole had attached him to, but he didn’t languish on the sidewalk, he got on his hands and one knee and started to stand up. You could see the twin brother panting and jumping from foot to foot and I thought he was going to kick the sick one but he bent over and helped him up. The sick one tried to hit him in the face but his fist went right by the head with so much momentum that he went into another fall. The brother caught him, the pole fell into the street where an ambulance cutting the corner just missed it, and the security guy came running out. It looked like one of those movies where the cop is going to bang the culprits’ heads together, but instead the three of them huddled there for some time. Now the twin of the sick one was sobbing. They must have been from a country where crying aloud was permitted. Finally the security guy picked up the pole, gathered the tubing over his arm, took one arm of the sick one and the brother took the other. Before they could take a step the sick one sagged in their hold and would have dropped on his knees if they had not held him up. Then it seemed he had fainted, so the security guy dropped the pole, picked him up and carried him. The twin, still crying, seized the pole and rushed ahead to open the doors, which half the time fail to open automatically, and they disappeared into the building. After a while the intern I was there to pick up came out. He said, “Good Lord, a kid almost died ambulating. They’ve got the Cart in the lobby.” The Cart comes to resuscitate you.

“Ambulating, what a word,” I said.

“‘Ambulating without assistance.’ Sorry. He’s done for, with or without.”

“But he’s a kid. How old is he? What happened to him? What’s his brother going to do?” My voice went higher as he turned on the radio and loosened the waist tie of the scrubs, giving me a look of pity.

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Valerie Trueblood‘s most recent book is Terrarium: New and Selected Stories. She’s also the author of the novel Seven Loves, and the short story collections Marry or Burn, Search Party, and Criminals. She’s been a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award, a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and a recipient of the B&N Discover Award. She lives in Seattle.

Photo credit: Seattle street scene (modified from the original) by Dennis Hamilton via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0.