I may have said more than that. At some point in my little monologue, the EMTs reached us and then there were hands to replace my hands, to keep Charles's neck straight while they extracted him from the car. They didn't need me any more. Suddenly, my empty hands felt really cold. One of the EMTs started drilling me—nature of the accident? how long since I put in the call? what first aid had I administered?
"And he was conscious?" the EMT looked at his clipboard
"Yeah, up until, I don't know, maybe five minutes ago? He just stopped talking all of a sudden."
"But coherent before that?"
"Yes. Yes, very coherent. Will he be ok?"
"Well, barring severe infection, he'll live. Broken bones, probably stitches on his head, busted his arm pretty good. I don't know about brain function. You said he just stopped responding? Do you think he could hear you?"
"I don't know. I don't know…I was talking, but I just didn't get anything back. Is that bad?"
The look on the technician's face told me it sure as hell wasn't good. He suddenly seemed to realize that I wasn't looking so good myself.
"Is this your first one?" he asked, not unsympathetically.
It wasn't my first accident, it wasn't my first accident with injuries, it wasn't even my first accident with fatalities. "Yes," I said. There was something about this one that was new to me.
He was about to recite some platitude when a blonde EMT rushed by, appearing out of nowhere. "He's up," she said, and evaporated again.
The first technician smiled at me; "See, there you go. Your guy's back on-line. We're gonna take him in, so if you need any information for your accident report, now's the time. Remember, though, brain function could be a mess, especially if he was out for as longer than we think."
Charles was in the back of the ambulance, strapped to a backboard and on a gurney with two EMTs fussing over him, one taping an IV and the other scanning the information Mario had sent them. Information that I had sent Mario roughly a million years ago.
"Any medical allergies, Charles?" It was the woman I'd just seen, the blonde. She must have telemorphed over here. "Do you like Charles or Charlie? Or Chuck? Or…" she asked idly, her eyes already skimming through the rest of the printout.
"Allergic to iodine, but that's it. And, uh, Charlie is fine," said Charles.
"OK, Iodine it isn't." The technician made a check mark on her sheet, then grabbed a clipboard and gave me a quick smile. "He's all yours, for about the next ninety seconds." She vanished again. The other EMT, the one with the drip, had already disappeared somewhere. Damn. People come and go so quickly here.
So there was a minute where it was just the two of us again, in the middle of the Meadowlands in the dark, before the ambulance got underway. Time for some bonding. Time for some immortal wisdom. Time for some deathless prose.
Nothing came to mind.
"You should have told me that you liked being called Charlie," I said stupidly.
He looked confused for just a second and then he smiled that impossibly sweet smile, young and old and innocent and knowing all at the same time. "It doesn't matter. My best friend calls me Charles all the time. You can like more than one thing, you know."
"You heard that!" Now, I'm no doctor, but if he'd heard what I was saying, he couldn't have been too far gone, right? Maybe there hadn't been any major damage to that amazing brain. Maybe he would be all right, after all.
"I heard it all."
I thought about getting into the ambulance with him, but there honestly wasn't that much more for me to do. I would only be in the way. Anyway, I had a kid of my own to get home to. And a few things I wanted to say to that kid of mine.