Ambulance Number One

The stretcher is on wheels. They turn me and now I’m going straight.

I want this ambulance. I want what will happen when they shut the doors. Warmth. The doors shut. I’m inside.

It isn’t warm at all. It’s exactly as cold as outside.

“What’s your name?” the paramedic asks.

I don’t answer. I don’t have to.

“Do you remember your first name?”

I say nothing.

“Do you know who you are?”

Yes. I know. I know perfectly well who I am, what my first name is and what my surname is. But the prophecy has to be fulfilled to the end. Silence is part of it. I’m not hiding behind it. I’m performing it.

“Well, we’ll be lying here a while longer. See, we can’t leave. Battery’s dead.”

After a moment of silence he adds:

“Maybe you’ll tell me why you don’t have shoes?”

I say nothing.

I’m in suspension. As if none of it mattered to me. But not entirely, because it’s cold. That is the limit of indifference. Not fear, not shame, not questions. Temperature.

It goes on forever. Maybe half an hour. Maybe fifteen minutes. We’re waiting for something. For the volunteer fire brigade, apparently, who are supposed to jump-start the engine. I don’t know exactly. The minutes drag. My foot may already be beyond saving.

The ambulance came and isn’t rescuing. It’s standing with a dead battery and I’m lying strapped inside it, in a suit, with no shoes, freezing like on the pavement. The only difference is that the doors are closed.

“I’m cold,” I say at last.

“You’re covered,” the paramedic replies.

“But my foot... Can you turn the heating on?”

“Unfortunately the battery’s dead. We’re waiting for the fire brigade. We’re badly underfunded.”

Said over a strapped-down man who’s afraid for his foot.

The prophecy says to keep silent. I keep silent about my name. About shoes. About who I am. I speak because it’s cold. The prophecy doesn’t say whether they’ll amputate my foot.

“So what’s your first name?”

“White Whisper...” I finally let out.

“Surname?”

“White Whisper.”

“Do you remember your ID number? Do you remember who you are at all?”

“I am White Whisper...”

“Nice. I’ll write that down. What film is that from?”

After that I say nothing. Not out of resentment.

White Whisper goes into the paperwork as a quotation. There’s nothing left to add.

At last the volunteer fire brigade arrives. Somehow they get the ambulance started. I hear the engine.

Police, ambulance, fire brigade. The full set. We move.

The paramedic above me puts a film on. He’s watching it. I hear the sound. It reminds me of Stranger Things. I don’t see the screen. I lie and wait. The foot is freezing and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t feel it anymore. Maybe it’ll just be frostbite. I’ve had frostbite before. I know what it looks like afterwards.

We arrive. I’m calmer. I ask the paramedic his name.

“I’m the paramedic from the ambulance.”

“Which one?”

“Number one.”

“I’ll run a fundraiser and buy you that battery. For ambulance number one.”

Strapped down, with a foot I can’t feel, I’m planning to help the ambulance that didn’t warm me. This isn’t irony.

I already have a plan: a fundraiser for the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity. The thirty-third finale. I don’t know yet that first I’ll have to plan an escape from the hospital. We’ll go from town to town in the silver arrow with the platinum pistons, with the light of anarchy on the roof — a laser from a Dobsonian telescope, aimed straight up into the sky. Television will be there to welcome us. That’s how I’ll get everything back — my wife, my children, my money and my authority. It’s foretold.

The battery is on the list.