Do Not Resuscitate

In all my life I've never saved anyone, which is the purpose of my job and training. Not once. Though there was the kid in the park choking on an apple a few years back, there was a good chance he would have coughed it up on his own, so I can hardly count giving him the heimlich maneuver as saving his life. I look at people all the time in restaurants and in the grocery store or wherever, wondering when will I get my chance. If they're going to stroke out. Or have a heart attack. Or accidentally cut themselves badly enough that I can swoop in with my gauze. With my breathing apparatus. Will I be lucky enough ever to apply a real life tourniquet? Or shock someone with my defibrillator? Or treat anyone for hypothermia or heat stroke? One can only hope. 

I looked up that kid from the park years later because he had a funny name that was easy to remember. Billy Fry. I thought it would be wonderful to read that he became a doctor or he had done something good with his life. Made the most of it. Even if he had become a dad and was a reasonably good dad, it would have pleased me in some way. But I found out that he molested some kids at a church camp and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. I stared at his miserable mug shot from the newspaper. He had a grizzled jaw and a hard and ugly face.  He scowled at the photographer and all of society through that lens. I should have let him choke on that apple core. It's nature, after all. And who am I to interfere with nature? Maybe it was God's will and I thwarted God's plan of saving those kids from abuse. 

I am wildly turned on by some of the pictures in the CPR instruction manual. They are pornography to me. I am not sure what condition that indicates I suffer, but I suffer it well. I've trained five thousand four hundred and seventy two people in First Aid/CPR since I became a trainer for a private company that is an agent of the American Red Cross. I've done more than a half a million chest compressions in my time, which makes me sound impressively old and experienced, but I am 44, so I am not as old as I may seem, or as I may feel at times. I wonder how many breaths I've breathed into the plastic lung sacs of mannequins. I wonder if any people I taught ever saved a life, became fruits of my tree, so to speak. You wonder random things when you're alone and there is no one speaking to you about dinner plans, or blaring a television in the living room, or needling you about mowing the lawn. You wonder many things while jerking off to pictures in the CPR instruction manual so you can get some sleep. 

I've never been successfully in love so I suppose my career supplanted my deficiency in that respect. For one reason or another, things just never worked out with me and another woman. I am moderately attractive and in good shape and have some interesting qualities, I like to think, but I've never quite matched with another human-being where it hasn't felt forced in such a way. Where I haven't dreaded, at one point or another, the inevitabilities that come with every relationship. People seem to expire to me the way milk or bread expires. There is only so many times I can sleep with the same woman. Eat with the same woman. And eventually, when they have nothing interesting left to share or say about themselves or about their unique perspective of matters, I find a way to rid myself of them rather than scraping the mold off or drinking yet another sour cup of their life that inevitably makes me  ill. Usually this is done within one presidential term. 

I am fully cognizant that I too must be that way to other people. I do not pretend myself to be some bottomless well of amusement. My jokes, my stories, my charm, they must get old. My bad habits, annoying. So sometimes, preventing the inevitable, I have resigned myself from other people's lives before I was cancelled of theirs. When I could see it in their eyes, the same faint flicker of slight disinterest or curdled amusement that I had so many times in mine for someone else. And I might say or feel words of remorse and regret, for she could have been the one, though well I know that we all are marked for expiry regardless of how pretty or how interesting and kind we seem to be for a while. That love is merely a matter of giving up, of going no further and choosing not to pursue other interests rather than finding some holy grail that fills the soul with eternal ecstacy and ever-arousing contentment. 

How many older men have I seen with that pitiful look of curiosity upon their face when another pretty woman is around who speaks to them cordially or not even at all? Reduced to nothing but a ball of shapeless putty. And they look upon her as though her pants are filled with a pot of gold, denying the obvious that it is nothing they haven't seen before. Or how many older women in the shadow of attractive men swoon, indulging even temperately in the hot-flash fantasies of the younger woman they no longer are? I wish not to be vexed by either condition, done onto me or done onto another. I wish only to be immune to the flippancy of myself and of others. The dark comedy. The Shakespearean tragedy. I often wish to be a mannequin myself. Tucked in a bag until I am of some good and practical use. Not left to wander in the down hours when it is pointless for me to wander. Life is filled with a great many frivolities in which I wish not to partake, but which is all so erroneously categorized and insipidly accepted as "being human." Much gets excused under this ruse. 

I suppose it odd for some to understand my love for Rescue Annie, unless the prior passage made clear sense. I've worked with her for 12 years since I became a First Aid/CPR trainer and she has been with me through every failed relationship, for they are all failed if they do not last it can be very reasonably concluded. Despite whatever Eat Pray Love bullshit one feeds oneself to remedy the tragic realization that one is simply a garden-variety whore. She has been with me through all my ups and downs. A reliable coworker and friend who I talk to often when the class ends and I am packing things up. Or prior to when I am preparing for the class to come. And one day as I was instructing a class full of bawdy construction workers, I felt a ripple of jealousy move over me when one of them playfully fondled Annie's imaginary breasts to a chorus of indignant laughter. I had other mannequins, but they were all males. Chris Cleans. I used Annie to demonstrate, but when I had a larger class I'd let one of the students use her. But not after that. I told him to share with another student and I pulled her to my instructor's table and hovered over her as protectively as a husband might hover over a wife. I realized that in all the time I thought I was alone, I never truly was and that she was much more than a full-body mannequin to me. All those breaths I had breathed into her, all those chest compressions and shocks of the AED, had given her life.

It may sound impossible, but it is true. We had dinner that night and many nights after. We watched TV and she favored old movies. We cuddled in bed. The smell of rubber always turned me on, even as a boy, I recalled. I used to chew on various rubber things. Balls, erasers, whoopee cushions. Anything. I told her about my life. And she told me about hers. Only she wasn't as simple as I thought. She was a highly-educated intellectual woman who never compromised on her morals. She told me that everytime I demonstrated life-saving techniques, she lied there looking up at me and imagined she was dying. That I found her drowning in the ocean and I pulled her onto shore, just in time. That she was electrocuted by a downed power-line and I revived her. And every time, no matter the particular fantasy, I saved her life. I told her that was the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. I didn't question how or why she came to life. I just enjoyed it while she was because still, I knew, despite the sublimity of new love, we all expire and such is an inexorable fate. 

No one can imagine the love affair we had. It doesn't help to try to explain or to put it into careful words and dance around the titillating subject with salacious metaphors for our beastly acts. I painted her face. Gave her lips color. Painted her eyes white with brown marble-like irises and she came to life more and more each day. The slow encumbered movements of her metal joints became more fluid and natural and tendons grew and skin over the tendons. She was less obsequious and more independent. And her voice became less like an operator and more human. 

She could only stay with me on nights of the week when I had a training class the next day and didn't have to go to the office to pick up equipment. She belonged to my company. I could keep her overnight when it was reasonable to do so to avoid excessive travel so the company didn't have to reimburse me for unnecessary miles. And on those nights we laughed and we danced and I found a love in her like I had in no other. When she couldn't stay, I would sneak into the equipment closet for an office quickie. Or to share a tuna salad sandwich. I was almost caught once or twice. Stumbling out. Out of breath. Tucking in the tail of my shirt. But no one ever saw her as I saw her, I don't suppose. Maybe they checked the supply closet after me, but when they saw no one else obvious to them, their suspicions were allayed. Perhaps, they thought I was only sleeping, which is far, far less an impious prospect than sodomizing or being sodomized on the clock. 

Eventually, I didn't return her. She moved in. One of those inevitabilities I once feared. I claimed I lost her but I was apologetic and blamed myself sufficiently and offered to pay for her. The company was sure she would turn up, because, as they said, who would want a CPR mannequin? But of course, no one turned her in. I paid them $500 towards another mannequin, which was not nearly enough to cover the cost, but it was a good gesture and they felt bad for me, and since I had never lost anything of theirs before, they let me off the hook. Annie and I were happy as any couple. I will even say as all people so unabashedly do, or at one time think, we were happier than the rest of the world. We were the very epitome of true love. We decorated the house as she liked it. Painted walls. Changed light fixtures. She liked to sit on the front porch swing more than anything and I sat with her. There was a nightingale she loved. She liked to listen to the birds in the trees and watch the children ride their bikes past the house. And seeing those children and living with me in what suddenly became our home, more inevitabilities were realized and led to others yet to be had. She dreamed of having children, she said. I suppose that was when our bubble busted. As fantastic as she was and as remarkable as her existence had proven to be, she was certainly not capable of having a child. It was all a very dramatical production of melancholy and female histionics from there, like some bad soap opera desperate not to be canceled. 

The company replaced her with Mouth-to-Mouth Monica. She was slim, young and attractive and she smelled heavenly of new rubber. It was all downhill from there. Annie was jealous and depressed she couldn't have a baby and when I tried to console her, I only seemed to make things worse. When I tried to explain why she couldn't have a baby, she would accuse me of not seeing her as "a real woman." Though she wasn't a real woman, I could never say that or even allude to the fact she wasn't or it would set her off. It didn't help that I couldn't take her to trainings with me anymore for the obvious fact that the company would discover I had stolen her and not lost her as I claimed. And then they would fire me and convict me of theft or of being some pervert. I would be that person that everyone talks about years after he is fired. Do you remember that guy? That guy who fucked the CPR dummy? And what would they do to her after something like that? Would they wash and sanitize her for reuse? No. They couldn't. They would have to burn her or toss her in the dumpster. No one would go mouth-to-mouth with her after what I had done to her. After all the sodomy. The painted faces. Not even with a face shield or a breathing barrier. It would be certain death for Rescue Annie. 

She would accuse me of smelling like "that French rubber slut" when I came home for she was convinced that anyone with the name Monica was French. When I was tired and too worn out to make love, she would snap and accuse me of having a fling with Monica and she would cry and tell me to "Have her!" and then moments later cry some more and bawl, "How could you?" while telling me to get away from her when I tried to comfort her and then accuse me of being insensitive and cold for not trying to comfort her. 

It was then that I knew we were no different than any other couple, as much as I had naively thought we would be. We were no better and no worse. And I knew, and she knew, we had come to a point in time when it was better to say goodbye. But saying goodbye is the difficult part for there are so many ways to do something that is never as simple as saying the words. I couldn't get through to her and I went to work as normal, hoping she would be the one who said the words that I couldn't say, or who would say goodbye simply by being gone. 

But her goodbye didn't come in her absence or in words she spoke. It came in three simple words she wrote on a piece of notepad paper. I came home to find her naked in bed with an empty bottle of sleeping pills next to her. Her mouth open as it always was, jawline straight, chin tilted up, looking as though she was waiting for another rescue breath that didn't come. Those three words on the paper were disappointing to me. They didn't read "I love you" or even "I hate you." They read, "Do not resuscitate."

I wadded that paper up into a ball as I watched her lifelessly lie there. Her cold and final goodbye was an act worthy of Shakespeare. And transfixed in an uncertain and contradictory state of shock and acceptance, rather than doing what she told me not to do, I did nothing at all, which I suppose, in this instance, was how I said goodbye to her. 

I stewed for years. Tortured myself. Drown her memory with alcohol and a string of loose women. I gave up on being a First Aid/CPR trainer and became a police officer. It seemed like a natural progression. I had to be certified yearly and some other instructor lugged in suitcases full of Annie's and Monica's and Chris Cleans, but none with any personality. They brought in instruction manuals with photographs that hardly aroused me at all. Taking CPR always made me feel bad, especially when they pulled out the Baby Betty's. Saving an infant is the greatest thing a police officer could do for society and the department, the brass said. One saved baby is good PR for at least a year, and anymore, it is all about good PR. But I looked at that Baby Betty I held in the crux of my arm and I wondered what could have been. Maybe we could have adopted. I think Annie would have been a good mom, rubber or flesh, pulse or no pulse. 

But life more often than not plays itself out the way it should, like they say. Like that apple core that found its way in Billy Fry's throat before I mistakenly thrust it out. Seven months after I became a cop, I responded to a call where a lady was unresponsive in a pond. I arrived and immediately dove in and pulled her out. After a few minutes of working on her, her big brown eyes fluttered opened and she spit out a fountain of pond water that shot straight up and slapped back down on her chin and nose. Then she gurgled and smiled looking up at me and I knew then that I was wrong about everything. Sometimes there is no expiry. And sometimes all we need is the hand of fate to nudge us a little in the right direction. When she asked me about my last girlfriend, which is one of those many inevitabilities I've since learned to embrace, I didn't go into detail other than saying that Annie was a co-worker who took her own life, leaving it at that. She didn't press. Nor did I press as to why she was drowning in the pond that day. You needn't know everything about someone when you are in love. Things unspoken are sometimes best left at that. It is not an invasion or an intrusion, after all. It is love. It is acceptance.