On Indian School Road, I saw a man standing in front of a tall building, shaking his fist at it in reproach. Outside a night-club, people had circled their cars in the parking lot and were dancing in the ring of headlights, their radios turned to the same booming station.
In another parking lot, a crowd had gathered round a bonfire in a garbage can, warming their hands over it as if the night were cold, which it was not.
“We’re almost there,” Wylie said.
I saw a few flashlights and candles, and with my window rolled down I could hear distant yelling and what sounded like breaking glass; if looting had broken out, it wouldn’t have surprised me. I realized that Irina had been quiet for a long time, and when I looked back her head was laying against the seat at an awkward angle and I couldn’t tell if she was asleep or unconscious. The baby, too, was silent in her sling.
“Wylie,” I whispered. “We’ve got to hurry.”
“I know,” he said.
But around the next corner we came upon a scene of malevolent chaos. In front of a gas station several cars were parked in the middle of the street, doors open and lights on. One had a dent in the passenger side and steam issuing from its hood. Along the curb other cars had stopped, some drivers honking their horns, and a crowd had gathered, though for what purpose, exactly, was unclear. Some people were banging on the dark windows of the gas station, others were yelling, and there were several fistfights. The road was completely blocked, and Wylie slowed down, trying to decide what to do. I heard a window shatter, and Irina leaned into the front seat.
“What is happening? Are we at the hospital?”
“Almost,” Wylie said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
“Who are all these people?” Irina said wonderingly. I was asking myself the same question. They looked monstrous and intent, their faces contorted with anger, but I couldn’t figure out what they wanted or where they’d all come from.
Wylie pulled into the gas station and drove around the back of the building, but then a police car pulled in on the far side, cutting us off, and a voice on a megaphone told us to turn off the engine and step out of the vehicle.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Wylie said.
“What is this?” Irina said. “Wylie, we can’t stop. We have to go to the hospital.”
“Hold on,” Wylie said. “We have to deal with this first.”
We stepped out of the car and faced two blue-uniformed officers, who in the red swirl of the cruiser’s light seemed just as monstrous as the rioters out front. I saw two other patrol cars pull into the lot, the cops looking anxious as they commanded the crowd to disperse.
“We need to get to the hospital,” Wylie was explaining. “We have a sick baby over here.”
One of the officers glanced at Irina and Psyche and nodded. The other, though, came around to my side of the car and played his flashlight over the interior.
“Please, there is no time for this!” Irina shouted, her voice breaking with panic. “We have to go now!” She was bouncing in place and sobbing, clutching Psyche to her chest.
“What are you people doing back here? And what is that ?” the officer said.
His beam, I saw, was fixed on the pistol on the front seat.
“What are you doing with that weapon?”
“It’s a BB gun,” I said.
The cop looked at me as if this was everybody’s excuse. “That doesn’t answer my question,” he said.
“What are you waiting for?” Irina yelled, and people all around us stopped whatever they were doing to stare. It was possibly the loudest shout I’d ever heard. “My baby needs a doctor!”
“Planning on doing a little shopping tonight while the lights are out?” the cop said.
“With a BB gun?”
“You want to scare people, all you need is the appearance of a weapon,” he said. A universal wisdom, apparently, since Angus had said the same thing. I just shrugged. He went around to the back of the sedan and told me to open the trunk, which I did.
“What’s all this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not my car,” I said.
“Where’d you get it from, then?”
“A friend of ours.”
By this time Irina was completely hysterical, and Wylie wasn’t in much better shape. I had a dreary, dazed feeling that things were going from bad to worse, which was confirmed by the officer’s reaction when he looked in the trunk.
“Jesus,” he said. “We’ll take that baby to a doctor, and then you people are going to answer some questions.”
We wound up with a police escort to the hospital. The building had power, and coming into its stark fluorescence made us all blink like moles. An orderly or a nurse — someone wearing pink scrubs and carrying a chart — took one look at Irina and Psyche and said, “Come with me.” Wylie and I filled out the paperwork, and he kept trying to persuade the desk clerk that he should be allowed to go back and check on his friend and her baby.
The cops wanted to question us but were constantly interrupted by urgent calls on their radios. From the unending crackle of the dispatcher and the frantic repetition of police codes, I could tell that the city was verging on chaos.
“We’re not going anywhere,” I told the nicer officer. “We’ll be here for a while if you want to come back.” His partner shot me a dirty look. “We haven’t done anything,” I said, but he looked completely unconvinced.
The officers argued briefly, over the radio and with each other, then wrote Wylie a ticket for reckless driving. He started to protest, but then thought better of it, and the police left, promising they’d be back.
Outside the electric doors of the hospital the city stayed dark. A man came in leaning on another man’s shoulder, moaning that his leg was broken. In the waiting area a woman in a flowered dress held her son’s head in her lap and her daughter sat next to them, squinting intently at a hand-held video game that beeped and sang as she played it. A short man in his forties, who I guessed was her husband, stood at the counter explaining their situation to a young receptionist.
“We can’t afford to buy my mom’s insulin from the pharmacy,” he was saying, his hands palms-up on the counter. “We got no health insurance and the guy in the South Valley only charges five dollars.”
“You buy illegal medication, you take your life in your hands,” the receptionist said. She didn’t look much older than seventeen, and on her bare shoulder was a small, elegant tattoo of a woman’s face.
“Five dollars,” the man said. “Instead of like fifty.”
“Some guy tells you it’s insulin, and you believe him?” she said. “You can’t trust these people.” She shook her long, shiny hair, dismissing him, and picked up the phone. The man watched her for a moment, then walked slowly back to his family.
In the corner a man in a red suit was shaking, as if being constantly electrocuted; his suit buttons rattled against the plastic chair, and every once in a while he shouted out random obscenities. A couple of homeless people sat wrapped in layers of clothes and blankets, and there were several families with young children and a man with a cut on his forehead who apparently spoke neither English nor Spanish and couldn’t understand the receptionist. It was the county hospital, and everyone in the room seemed used to waiting a long time for any kind of service at all.
Wylie came back shaking his head. “They wouldn’t let me in,” he said. He looked like hell. Dust ringed his eyes and striped his cheeks; his face was all dark circles and hollows, his nose and cheekbones jutting out.
“We’ll just have to wait,” I said, and tried to smile.
“I didn’t know you could shoot a gun.”
“I’m glad I didn’t have to.”
“What was it, a BB gun?”