January 9, 2013

Columns

Fiction

CPR

by Sherman Alexie

When a rescue helicopter flies over my apartment building—I live three blocks from Harborview Medical Center—I think of the wrecked and ruined patient strapped to a gurney and I wonder how many people will attend his or her funeral.

I wonder if that Life Flight chopper will itself crash and kill everybody on board.

It happens more often than you think. Over the decades, hundreds of people have died in those crashes. There have been patients, rescued from aviation wrecks, who were subsequently killed when their emergency flights crashed on the way to the hospital.

If somebody you loved died that way, then you'd have to tell God to fuck off, enit?

I live alone in this apartment because my boyfriend left me a few days after gay marriage became legal in Washington State. He said he could never buy into the archaic notion of marriage, gay or straight.

"You're a romantic," he said to me. "You need to find another romantic."

I silently watched him go. I wanted to call him a coward. I wanted to tell him that he was an evil genius who'd turned an epic civil-rights triumph into an excuse for him to live out his child-of-divorce bullshit. But I didn't say anything. I never say anything that matters.

But I have been purchasing toy helicopters. When I have 365 of them, I'm going to put them into a big box and mail them to my ex-boyfriend.

Dear Pissant, I'll write. In this life, I will survive one more wreck than you do.