— That was me.
— I knew it.
— I was reading a computer screen. I didn’t order the cremation.
— But now are you putting this all together?
— Yes I am.
— Do you know the kinds of crimes you were part of now? First a man is shot for holding a steak knife in his backyard. Then we find out he’s shot seventeen times. Then the cops won’t let his mom see him. Then they burn his body without her permission.
— But she must have signed some form.
— She can’t write in English! They signed it for her. They claimed that she asked for cremation verbally, and then she signed the form. And they thought they were so fucking clever, because they had a Vietnamese woman with limited English, so they could always claim it was some misunderstanding. And you know what else? Your fucking paramedic friends stole his watch.
— That’s not a surprise.
— I bet it isn’t. They steal all the time, don’t they? They stole the dead guy’s watch, probably for the same reason that the fuckers forged her signature on the cremation forms. They figured she couldn’t advocate for herself. She’s some helpless Vietnamese woman. And he’s some kid with bullets in his body. If the paramedics take his watch, they can blame it on the cops, or vice versa. I mean, you guys have a top-to-bottom system of wrecking all hopes of humanity. You strip bare every vestige of dignity.
— I think you know that isn’t true. The case with your friend was incredibly rare. And everyone was very scared.
— You threw a body in an oven to hide the evidence.
— I didn’t do that. I had nothing to do with that.
— You were complicit.
— You think your friend is the only terrible thing that’s ever happened in a hospital? I’ve worked in some good ones, but this hospital we’re talking about is a mess of a place. There are disgusting things every day, and dignity is not an option. It’s a river of human decay and mistakes made in haste. People die every day for reasons no one could ever justify. Too much of this drug, not enough of that. People come in with a cold and leave dead. And above it all we have a code of silence driven by fear.
— Oh God.
— We do more good than harm, for sure, but …
— You know, when your friend is transported from his backyard, full of bullets, to a hospital, you think he’s going to a more honorable place. There are these places where we expect honor, and cleanliness, and a code of conduct. But every day there’s another one of these places that slips from the list. It’s a damned short list now, you know that?
— I do know that.
— I have an astronaut here who did everything he was told to do and it got him nowhere. He’s one example. He reaches the pinnacle of his field and they give him a punch in the gut. On the other end of the scale there’s Don, who wanted to be left alone, who was confused, and the price of being confused in this world is seventeen bullets in your own backyard.
BUILDING 53
— Congressman, did you do anything over there that surprised yourself?
— Sure. Wait. What time is it?
— Sorry to wake you up. There’s just not much time left, and I have to get down to the beach soon, to see if this girl is there again.
— What’s that? What girl?
— This woman who I like a great deal, sir. She’s been walking on the beach with her dog, and yesterday we talked, and I know there’s a reason she was there when I was there. But that’s not why I wanted to talk to you. I was just spending some time with this lady, this other lady from the hospital I poured gasoline on, and at a certain point I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere with her.
— Wait. You poured gasoline on—
— Not on the lady. On the hospital. It was minor. It was symbolic. And she didn’t know why I did what I did, because she’s always been a perpetrator of the system, as opposed to a victim of it. I trust you know what I mean.
— Well, son, I understand you have a unique perspective on it. You say you took another person? This one a woman?
— She works at the hospital where my buddy was taken. They burned his body to hide the evidence. They shot him seventeen times and said it was three, so a few weeks later I poured some gasoline around the administrative part of the building, and I lit it.
— Anyone hurt?
— No sir.
— You intend to hurt anyone, son?
— No sir. But I had no other recourse. Or I didn’t think I did. I wasn’t about to sue them or some other useless thing. I wanted to make a point, and make it quickly. I needed to shove the dog’s nose in the shit so they would make the connection.
— And you’re saying you weren’t caught?
— No. Some people thought it was me, but everything was all fucked up because of Don, and the cops didn’t want to make it any worse, so they didn’t pursue it.
— Did it solve anything for you, lighting that match?
— It felt pretty good in the moment. And when I saw the newspaper reports, and read about the administrative people all shaken up and scared, that felt good, too. The best thing was that some of their records were burned, and that felt like justice.
— It’s not good that you went about it that way.
— They shot my friend.
— The hospital people didn’t shoot your friend, son.
— Well, they helped kill him.
— I have a feeling he wasn’t going to make it, what with seventeen bullets in him.
— You must have had moments like that, sir, where there’s some human being that’s acting like, well, shit. For some reason the hospital woman makes me madder than the cops who shot him. I mean, why is that? Two years later I still don’t understand it.
— Killing feels more natural in some way. Killing is some kind of connection. It’s a convoluted connection, but it is one. You know how when you’re a kid, and you’re wrestling around with some friend, there’s always that moment when you think you could snap his arm or bite through his nose?
— Yes, yes! I know that.
— But what happened at the hospital is something else. It’s not human. It’s not primal. So we don’t understand it. It’s a more recent mutation. The things we all have, love and hate and passion, and the need to eat and yell and screw, these are things every human has. But there’s this new mutation, this ability to stand between a human being and some small measure of justice and blame it on some regulation. To say that the form was filled out incorrectly.
— Yeah, yeah, what is that? That’s the doom of us all.
— This is a new thing, son, and it’s a frightening thing. It’s something I saw every day in the VA. And if you think it’s bad in some hospital, Christ, you wouldn’t last a minute in Washington. Wait. You hear that?
— I do.
— I really think this is the end, son. That’s at least three choppers, and they’re getting closer. That’s not good for you.
— They’re going too fast. They’ll pass.
— I think the clock’s running out, kid. Now listen. There’s no reason anyone has to be hurt. I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I have a plan for you.
— That’s not necessary.
— I know it isn’t. But listen. You’ve probably heard some pretty frequent helicopter activity out there, right?