“Barney,” I yelled and I banged on the glass with my fist. “Get up. It’s not going to work. I’m not coming in there.”
But nothing came back from him. The shouting and the banging on the window didn’t even send a ripple through him. I walked over to the door and I opened it again and stared in at him. The greasy smell of the house came outside, but there was no sound and no movement. His body was just a thing, like a pile of laundry in the middle of the room, as still as the furniture. I think it was that stillness that got me. I was sure you couldn’t fake it. A person just couldn’t hold themselves forever like that. You couldn’t do it on purpose.
I said his name again. I said “Barney” and I crossed over. It was like stepping out of an airplane.
Everything happened quickly after that. I walked over to the end table and pushed the red flashing Medic Alert button a couple times. Then it was only the two of us. I went over to Barney and rolled him over onto his back. His eyes were closed and everything had gone limp. Even the shape of his face was different and you wouldn’t have recognized him. There was nothing left to hold him up from the inside and I didn’t know what I should do. His body lumped in front of me like the low, half-built wall of a kid’s snow fort, big enough so you could duck down and hide behind it. He was way larger than I realized and much softer and his skin was cooler than I thought it would be. There was a thin, white paste coming from his mouth and the head of his penis had flopped out of his twisted shorts. I put my ear down on his chest and felt his hair pushing against my cheek. I listened for a rattle or some kind of breath coming from way down inside of him and I ran my fingers around his neck trying to feel for the thudding or just a little surge of anything that might still be flowing through him.
I didn’t have any training, but I set myself up for the kind of CPR I had seen on television. I tilted Barney’s head back so his chin was pointed straight at the ceiling and I tried to flatten everything else out, his arms and his legs. I wanted to make sure all those hoses and pipes that I imagined running inside of him would be in line. Then I just did it and I put myself through a set of actions that would have been impossible to imagine five minutes earlier and were now just as impossible to avoid. I pinched Barney’s nostrils together and brought my mouth down until my lips came right up against his. I held back for maybe half a second and then pushed down even harder until I had a tight seal over his mouth. It was simple after that. I blew my air into his lungs, sucking the oxygen out of myself and forcing it down into him. The taste of the ravioli and the beer and the white paste were still there in his mouth and I thought I might throw up when I lifted my head to pull in another clean breath. But then I went back down and I gave him two more breaths, as full as I could make them. Then I moved over to the middle of his chest and put my fingers together so my hands came down almost like one plunger pushing down on his round chest, squeezing at his heart ten or twelve or maybe fifteen times before I had to go back to the head and blow into him again. As I shuffled back and forth on my knees, moving just a couple inches from the top of Barney to the middle of him, it hit me that this was all it took. A person just needed the air to go in and go out and the essential liquids to go around and around. This was how they did it. This was how they kept your life going at the worst of times, by blowing it in and pushing it around and forcing it all the way through your body even if you didn’t want or deserve it.
Everything worked exactly like it’s supposed to. I kept it up with Barney for maybe five minutes, taking turns blowing and pushing, and then I heard the sirens. The ambulance stopped in front of the house and the flashing purple and red lights came in through the window. I looked over at the necklace again. It was still there, resting on the end table, still blinking on and off. I couldn’t believe it had actually done what it was supposed to do. It was just a brown plastic circle in the middle of a beige plastic square with a piece of string attached to it and it didn’t look like it had been cared for well enough to work. Then they were inside, an older guy and a younger woman wearing dark blue baseball caps, and they took over.
“Family?” the woman said to me as she unzipped her gym bag and started pulling out her gear.
“No,” I said.
“How long have you been at it, approximately?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Five minutes, no more than that.” She snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and took out a syringe and stuck it in a little vial and filled it halfway up with a clear liquid. Then, without any hesitation, without even changing the expression on her face, she found her spot and drove that needle right into Barney’s arm and pushed down on the plunger with her thumb.
The man kept muttering to himself as he fiddled around with the wires and tried to untangle the paddles on his portable defibrillator.
“They never pack this right,” he mumbled to his partner. There was a flat, bored sound in the way he talked and she just nodded her head and said the guys on the night shift were always like that.
It took him maybe fifteen seconds to get everything straight. And then it was just like you’d expect. The man pressed the paddles onto Barney’s bare chest and the woman put her straight arm against my body to make sure I was standing far enough away. The man said “clear,” very quietly as if there was really no one to warn, and then he sent a shock wave into Barney. It wasn’t as loud as I expected. Just a sizzling sound and it made a kind of burning smell, but nothing happened. Then he said “clear” again and gave him another blast and that was the one that did it. Just like jumping a car after the lights have been left on all night. This big shiver went all the way through Barney’s body and his face suddenly came back to its normal shape and he took in this enormous breath like he was coming back to the top of the lake after being under too long. He started coughing hard and spitting up. The woman rubbed her hand on his chest and she looked straight into his eyes. Then she looped an elastic band around the back of his head to hold the oxygen mask in place and she turned the dial on a little tank to set the gas flowing. She shined a little pen flashlight into his eyes and started talking to him in this very slow, calm voice. She told him there’d been an accident, a cardiac event. But now everything was going to be okay. His signs were looking good, she said, and they were going to take him to the hospital.
“You are going to feel yourself being lifted,” she said. “We’re going to lift you and put you on a stretcher and take you in the ambulance. Do you understand what I’m telling you?” Her voice came out at that perfect pace.
“Just nod your head if you understand.”
Barney nodded his head, but his eyes were panicked and they skittered around the room, clunking off the walls and the couch and the TV. Then he settled on me, the only person he recognized, standing about a foot away. All the confusion went out of his face and his expression changed back, back in one second, to the same angry and disgusted stare we saved only for each other. That’s when he finally made his move on me. His arm shot up from the floor, faster than you’d think and he grabbed hold of my arm. He gripped it so tight, with so much pressure, it felt like he was going right through me and holding onto those two skinny little bones in the middle of my forearm. There was so much power in him, even then, so much strength in just one of his hands that I knew right away I would have never been able to fight him off. That was the only time we ever touched.
“It’s okay,” the woman told Barney in her soothing voice. “He’s right here. Don’t worry. He’s not leaving.”