A List of Cages(54)

I start talking, saying Julian’s name over and over, trying to sound soothing even though I’m panicking. I reach for him, and this time he lets me lift him out. I try to avoid touching any part of him that looks bruised or cut, but that’s impossible. My hands are under his frail arms when his legs give out, and he crumbles to the floor.

“Open it,” he says. “Please.”

“Julian, you’re out. You’re out now.”

“Open it…for the stars.”

He’s not making any sense. “Julian.”

He slides on his stomach along the floor, tries to open the trunk again, but his arms flop uselessly.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to get back in.”

But he keeps pulling desperately at the lid, saying something about stars. I try to grab him, but he cringes and holds his arms over his head.

“Julian!” I’m terrified Russell will be back any second. “We have to go now.”

He blinks at me. Something seems to register. “Adam?”

“Yes.”

“You can see me?”

“I can see you.”

He nods and closes his eyes.

I lift him easily. I’d like to believe it’s because of my fear-fueled adrenaline, but I suspect he really is this light.

We’re on the street when he goes totally limp, and I’m pretty sure he’s stopped breathing.


I jog through the automatic emergency-room doors, carrying him with the steady accusing thought that I’m doing this all wrong. His head is flopping around like a doll’s—I should slow down, keep his neck stable, but he’s so still, and his skin’s ice-cold and clammy like a reptile’s.

I stop for a minute, scan the empty white expanse of the room. Where are the crowds of crying, bleeding patients? Where are the screaming women clutching their bellies as they’re wheeled off for labor? Where are the fucking doctors?

Through a small glass window on the opposite side of the ER, I spot a woman calmly typing at her computer. I start jogging again and call out, “A little help?” She clearly sees me—we’re making eye contact—but her face has no expression. She stands—slowly—and turns away, exiting through a back door behind her glass partition. “Hey!” I spin around the empty room.

A minute later, a pair of double doors creak open, and the woman and a bearded guy slowly wheel a bed to us. Maybe their almost sedated calm is supposed to calm me, but it’s having the opposite effect.

“He’s really hurt,” I tell them.

They take him from me and lay him down. I follow as they roll the bed through the double doors with the same casual indifference as they did when it was empty. As we walk, I try to answer their questions, but it’s like I’m drunk. All my explanations are nonsensical and thick-tongued.

They push Julian into a tiny room where the lethargic lady wraps a blood pressure cuff around his skinny arm. When it beeps, she murmurs something to the bearded guy, and suddenly no one’s casual anymore. Seeing them morph from bored to frenzied is terrifying.

A dozen hospital workers seem to appear out of nowhere and move in tandem, somehow never bumping into each other, speaking fast in a shorthand I don’t understand. I flatten against the wall, trying to stay out of the way.

One woman plunges a needle into the top of Julian’s hand and tapes it down while someone else attaches an oxygen mask to his face. A tall man in black scrubs rolls a giant square machine into the room, then quickly covers Julian’s chest with round white stickers. Each circle has a silver nipple that he attaches to a wire that runs into his machine. Someone else takes the long dangling cord from the blood pressure cuff still attached to Julian’s arm and connects him to a different machine. Another nurse tapes a white clothespin to his index finger; from the tip runs a long, thin wire.

In under five minutes he’s efficiently tethered to a dozen machines by a hundred wires. He’s a cyborg. A science experiment.

Abruptly, everyone parts for a young man in blue scrubs. He leans into Julian’s face, peels back his eyelid with his thumb, and shines a light into one eye. Julian blinks, opens his mouth like he’s going to speak, then passes out again.

The doctor addresses me while still looking at Julian. “What happened to him?”

My story’s a little more coherent now: A trunk. I found him in a trunk. Then he asks for details I can’t give. I don’t know how long he was inside. I don’t know when he last ate or drank. I don’t know how he got all the cuts and bruises.

The man in black plucks the wires from Julian’s chest, leaves the stickers on, and pronounces the EKG normal.

“What’s that mean?”

“His heart,” the doctor explains, “looks fine. But his blood pressure is too low.”

I follow the cords running from Julian’s arm to a black screen with rows of flashing green numbers.

A small woman rolls in a cartful of test tubes. I get squeamish as she takes vial after vial of blood from Julian’s arm. Then she’s off, adding five full tubes to her collection.

A new woman arrives with a plastic bag of fluid that she swiftly attaches to the silver coatrack by the bed. She runs a narrow plastic tube from the bag to the needle in Julian’s hand.

Julian. Jesus. He’s always been thin, but now he’s emaciated, every rib grotesquely pronounced, his heart almost visible through his skin.