A Thousand Naked Strangers by Kevin Hazzard

it’s never happened to you. Two people cross the road. It’s late, midnight, and very dark. They don’t use the crosswalk. They simply wait for a break in traffic and start going. Halfway across, in the median, they stop and wait for another opening. It never comes. A car preparing for a left turn swings into the median and slams into them both. The driver reacts, but it’s too late. They’re hit, they’re broken, they’re tossed in the air. They—and the various bits of them—land here and there.
    Chris and I are the first to arrive. A loud, fast, screaming response. The rule for scenes with multiple patients is first in, lastout. As first in, the carnage is ours to survey. It’s up to us to call in the appropriate resources, to determine whose injuries require treatment and who can be left to die. Triage is a brutal process of deciding who can’t be saved so resources can be focused elsewhere. Any patient found without a pulse will remain pulseless; we’ll leave him and move on. Sometimes that person we found twitching, eyes wide and not breathing, the one we left for dead, sometimes he starts breathing again. Startled but not surprised, we upgrade him from dead to critical and he gets transported. No hard feelings, my friend. Sometimes life finds a way.
    There’s no such confusion tonight. The first patient we come across, horribly injured and, in all likelihood, doomed, is alive. Chest like a bag of gravel—ribs, sternum, collarbones, all broken. Her lungs are punctured, and huge pockets of air are filling the void. We jab two long, wide needles in, a vain attempt to let some of the trapped air out, but it’s just an afterthought. The legs are also broken, probably from the bumper. They do that, bumpers—snap the bones so they flop and fold like a doll’s legs.
    Help arrives and the first patient is spirited away—alive, but how long that will last, well . . .
    The other patient isn’t. Isn’t alive, isn’t a patient, isn’t someone to be treated. He was launched over the hood, struck his head on the driver’s-side corner of the windshield, and was thrown back down. He’s lying in the glare of the headlights, skull open, face obscured by scalp. There’s nothing to do but look. Which we can do. Because of the headlights. From the car. Which has a driver.
    Shit .
    I walk over to the passenger side and signal for the driver to roll his window down. He’s behind the wheel, unblinking eyesstaring out through the punched-in windshield. He’s frozen, he’s silent. He’s covered in hair. This man—whose only crime was to be behind the wheel when someone else made a poor choice—has killed two people and now sits covered in their hair. How long will he feel the prickly stab of shorn hair on his exposed skin? It’s a horrible situation for everyone involved, and this guy is in need of some sort of attention.
    â€œAre you okay?”
    He looks at the form slumped in the glare of his headlights, at his punched-in windshield, at the hair. He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. I want to tell him it isn’t his fault, that it could’ve happened to anyone, that he’s the unlucky winner of the worst lottery ever. I put my hand on the roof, start to lean in the window, and realize I’m touching not cold steel but, rather, a warm, wobbly bowl of Jell-O—except it isn’t. It’s a brain, and I’ve put my hand right in it.
    I stand up. Peel off my glove. Thank God for gloves. Then I walk over to Chris, a little pale, a little repulsed, a little amused. He crinkles his forehead as if to say, What?
    â€œI just put my hand in brain.”

15
Nailed to the Wall
    I n a job where it’s possible to scoop up a stranger’s brain, it’s important to have levity. But after a while, I lose the ability to judge which stories to tell my friends and which go beyond