Muslim Nurse

Bob Pajich

She was in an ambulance and she wore a headscarf, not the kind they want to outlaw in France, but one that framed her pretty dark head and let her eyes shine. I guess I needed some maintenance done and she woke me with her work. Bags dripped into tubes and machines hummed and registered my heartbeat. It was my second full night in the hospital and I had yet to puke on the blonde Christian nurse from the morphine so it still dripped into me. The pain was sunk on the bottom of a crystal-blue bay, the outlines of its wings visible from here.

Lucky to be alive and lucky to be there, breathing on the floor for the people with the serious cancers. Presby was out of beds for the people who wouldn’t be soon dying so I was sent upstairs. It was as quiet as a boutique hotel room. The bed was huge and there was only one. The room had comfortable chairs for families to sit and talk quietly and privately. The next morning, they wheeled me into a standard hospital room. A young guy who broke his entire face against a dashboard was there, but two more would replace him before the end of the week, both old and the victims of gravity.

But that night she was checking on me, walking through the night smelling like Purell and latex, the Muslim nurse. “God bless you,” she said, when my eyes popped open, stoned and confused, and she started talking to me, instantly, about her belief in God, how God spared her once in Saudi Arabia, how she sees the work of God each and every day and for once I cared and didn’t cringe. She even asked if I believed and I said no. She nodded and went about her work. I had no body, only that sunken wreck, but my legs were not broken and the tear we later found in the jeans I was wearing mysteriously stopped just below my left testicle.

Immediately, starting with the cop, it pissed me off when people told me how lucky I was, but it soothed me to hear it from her, someone who probably knew a thing or two about it, working night shift in a cancer ward. She had credibility and I wanted to send her flowers for Mother’s Day.

Lying in bed in the middle of the night in a hospital high on morphine, I only wished I wasn’t hurt. The only thing to look forward to the next week was that twice-daily dose of hardcore narcotics that kept the tides high and the wreck submerged. It was borderline enjoyable and I felt like a fiend reaching for the call button whenever the doses were minutes late. I felt ugly and angry in that bed, imagining all the bad things I wanted to do to the man who destroyed my vintage motorcycle. Pissed and childish, the pain I remember but really can’t, I told an 80-some-year-old to shut up only hours after he fell off a roof.

My Muslim nurse told me God saved her just like he saved me. She was in the back of an ambulance with a patient and another care giver. The driver was not taking his job seriously and plowed through intersections willy-nilly, the sirens and lights blazing like faith. She said the two women yelled at him to slow down–pleaded with him–and they saw the truck cut them off. When the ambulance was destroyed she knew God touched her. The man was dead. The nurses and their patient stumbled out of the wreck. God saved her, she said. I wanted her to save me.

All I remember about the accident is the old man sitting in the yellow light of a PAT bus watching me drive by, his hands in his lap, the bus slowing to make the left turn at Fifth and Penn. His head was like a dried potato carved by da Vinci. If I died, that was the last image my brain would record, that and my smile inside my helmet, my one hand hot on my leg. The last photograph and broadcast from my first life, and broadcast to no one at that.

Weeks later, in my cast, dying for a cigarette, I spent an hour looking for the accident in my brain. I know little about meditation, but breathed in time and shut my eyes and focused as well as I could out on my back porch. I relaxed. I dug. In one single moment, I heard the front tire hit the Jetta and it sounded like a snow shovel beating a shiny metal garbage can. There was nothing else; the memory of the noise was as real as anything and made me shutter and cry. I may have made it up. I did not leave my body, there was no bright light, no tunnel, there was nothing until they shook my gurney into the ambulance and that’s when the movie picked up again in fits and starts.

The Muslim nurse, her life spared, believes mine was spared, too. She’s doing the work of God even if God doesn’t exist. She’s seen the paraplegics and those who needed to be taught how to feed themselves after crashing motorcycles. I could walk and talk and be selfish and angry. I planted tomatoes today. I kissed my wife on the mouth. When I tell the poker players I am lucky, I believe it. Right before it rains and my wrist starts burning, sometimes I laugh.

Bob Pajich has a book of poems soon coming out with Low Ghost Press and writes for theterriblefan.com.