He was a very discreet person, Cicero. After our brief exchange on the phone, he hadn’t asked me anything more about why I wouldn’t sleep with him again. Which was good, because I wasn’t sure I could explain it. I’d crossed a line, both in personal morals and professional ethics, and that couldn’t just be erased. But I think my desire to go back over to the right side of that line was rooted in my unease with how easily I’d crossed it in the first place. Sometimes I wondered if there were a hidden moral flaw inside me, one that had driven me into the line of work I did, where right and wrong were so clearly delineated.
But when I’d arrived, Cicero had merely looked over the Australian wine I’d brought and asked me how I was. I’d said I was fine, and he’d said he was fine, and then a small discomfort had descended on the conversation. Cicero broke the silence by asking me if I wanted to go up on the roof.
I’d thought it was a joke, but he’d explained how it was possible. We’d parked his wheelchair and set the brake at the foot of the emergency stairwell that led to the roof. When Cicero was seated on the lowest stair, I’d taken his lower legs just under the knee, and Cicero had raised his upper body off the stairs, weight on the heels of his hands. His method wasn’t, I saw, unlike the triceps exercise I sometimes did at the gym, lowering myself from a weight bench. But Cicero was ascending, going up the stairs literally on his arms. Supporting his legs and following, I was still assuming less than a third of his body weight. It couldn’t have been easy, and I understood then the importance of the hand weights I’d seen under his bed.
“That wasn’t pretty, and it was slow,” Cicero had said when we were up, “but it got the job done.”
I’d poured wine into the mismatched glasses I’d carried up in advance, along with the blanket.
“You know what the most difficult part was?” he asked.
“What?” I said.
“Letting a woman help me with it,” he said. “With the guys down the hall, it’s different.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Several times,” he said, accepting the wine. “I need fresh air every once in a while.”
Now, standing at the rooftop’s edge, cupping my wine in my hands, I thought about that. Wouldn’t it simply be easier for Cicero to get in the elevator and go downstairs and outside for air? “ Cicero,” I began, “I know what you said the other night, but are you agoraphobic? It’s no big deal to me if you are.”
He laughed. “No, I’m really not agoraphobic.”
“Then why don’t you ever go out?” As soon as I’d said them, I regretted the words. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me-”
“No, it’s okay. I have no secrets.” Cicero unfolded one arm to indicate the unoccupied part of the blanket. “Come sit down. It’s a story that’s going to take me a little time to tell.”
I walked over and sat cross-legged on the edge of the blanket.
“It has to do with how I became paralyzed,” Cicero said. “I was injured in a mine collapse.”
“You went down as part of a rescue crew?” I asked. It seemed odd to me that medical personnel- not EMTs or paramedics but actual doctors- would be sent into harm’s way.
But Cicero shook his head. “I was working down there,” he said.
“As a miner?” I said.
Cicero nodded. “It was after I lost my license to practice medicine.”
Every time I thought I had a handle on this man’s situation, I learned something new. The idea of Cicero being in a mine disaster was so unexpected that I set aside my curiosity about how he’d lost his medical license, which so far he’d only alluded to. That could wait. “Tell me,” I said.
“This is going to take me a minute to explain,” he said, and lifted himself up onto his elbows, to drink a little wine. “I grew up in Colorado, in a mining area. My father had worked in the mines, this five-foot-seven-inch guy, covered in coal dust, reading a paperback copy of the Iliad on his lunch break. I was getting back to my roots, you could call it.”
“You worked with your old man?” I interrupted.
Cicero shook his head. “My parents were both gone by then. When I came back, I got hired at a small, family-owned, nonunion operation, working the very last of a played-out coal seam. I wasn’t real popular for my first couple of months.” Cicero seemed amused by the memory. “On my first day, the crew foreman, Silas, asked me what I’d been doing before getting hired there. I told him the truth, that I was a doctor. Looking back, I don’t think he believed me. I’m pretty sure he thought I was giving him a hard time. He just said, ‘Well, it’s my job to keep you from killing yourself or anyone else until you get tired of banging your head on the ceiling and go looking for some other work.’ ”
“Nice guy,” I said.
“He was a good guy,” Cicero corrected me. “Silas was younger than a lot of his crew, but he’d been down in the mines since he was 18, and he knew his shit. I paid attention to him, and after a couple of months, I pretty much knew what I was doing. Silas started talking to me other than to say things like ‘Don’t stand there.’ We’d eat lunch together and talk.” Cicero paused, drank some wine. “We were both kind of nervous about the safety situation. To put it mildly, small nonunion mines tend not to be the safety leaders in the field. But when it actually happened, it surprised me, how quietly it started.”
“What started?” I asked.
“What the industry calls an ignition accident,” Cicero said. “Down in a mine, you hear roof falls a lot, and blasts, so the noise I heard that day didn’t bother me. It sounded like business as usual to me. The first I knew anything was wrong was when I felt the air reverse direction.”
I tilted my head, signaling incomprehension.
“Mines need to breathe, just like people,” he explained. “Ventilation systems ensure that excess blackdamp- that’s methane- is carried away from where miners are working and fresh air is carried in. In some mines, like ours, the fans create a wind of seven or eight miles an hour. That’s significant enough that you can feel it, but you’re used to it. You don’t notice it until it stops. It feels like the air has actually reversed direction. If you know what it means, it’s not a good feeling. Silas felt it the same time I did, and we looked at each other.
“That’s when we heard men yelling, and we stopped working and traveled to the scene. At the site, I saw that there were two men down, injured. There’d been a roof fall, which had caused a spark, which caused a small explosion. A fire was burning, but no one was dead. The foreman in that section saw Silas and me come out from behind a crosscut. He wanted Silas there, but when he saw me, I was still a new guy to him. ‘Not you,’ he said to me. ‘Get out of here.’ But Silas said, ‘You want him here. He’s a doctor.’ ”
Far below, a siren wailed; involuntarily I looked to the roof’s edge. It was the sound of my work; I was Pavlovian that way.
“To understand what happened next,” Cicero said, not noticing my moment of inattention, “you’ve got to understand a little about mine accidents. Often, the first ignition doesn’t kill anyone. But it does start a fire, and it also compromises the ventilation system. When the ventilation system stops working, methane builds up. It’s the subsequent explosions that kill people.
“There’s time to evacuate, but the problem is, not everyone does. Some miners travel toward the blast, instead of away, to render aid. That’s the ethic down there, to help each other. I don’t know if I stayed at the scene because I thought I had really become a miner, or because I was still a doctor, but for whichever reason, I was still at the face when the second explosion happened.” He stopped to reach over to the wine bottle again, poured a little more, drank.