Strangers in the night

George is about 65 or so when I meet him on the sidewalk at 81st and Broadway. His hair is white. He's wearing a turquoise polo shirt and beige seersucker pants that are neither new nor expensive but they are clean.

It's a Friday night in New York. The streets are choked with cabs and limousines. The sidewalk is a river of people. Anyone who suddenly stops walking causes a chain reaction of "excuse me's" with the occasional "dumb ass" thrown in. It's best to keep moving in New York, if only to prevent disrupting the perpetual flow.

Tonight, George is one of those people who suddenly stops. I don't notice him right away. I nearly walk on by, like probably 300 other people, not out of intentional callousness, but because we all see too much here. Someone passed out in the subway or pissing on a street tree or standing in a very public place and screaming nonsense might not be involuntarily mad but engaged in "performance art." Such is the tension in the spring that makes New York tick; those desperately wanting to be noticed by those who pay no attention. The greater the yin of need, the greater the yang of capacity to ignore.

So it is that so many of us are able to walk by George, whose need is penultimate in that moment. If not for the blonde woman skittering around him like a poodle on high heels yelping for someone to help, I wouldn't have noticed him lying on the concrete holding his sides. It takes less than a moment to see that George's need is not only genuine and quite desperate, but not at all a part of his conscious will.

George is having a stroke.

Within the space of that moment, time slows and the rest of New York dissolves. I kneel down and take George's pulse while I direct someone to call 911 the way I've pretended to do in at least a dozen Red Cross classes. Then I look in George's dilated eyes and ask him what's wrong.

"I...don't...feel...good," he says, as if pulling each word from a vat of quicksand. His fingers twitch and curl. His eyes lock onto mine. Moments before, it was just another Friday night for George. Now, his body is in full rebellion and I am the only thing standing between him and pure terror. I cradle his head in one hand and stroke his white hair with the other. "Everything's going to be OK," I say, for lack of anything else to say. "We're going to help you."

Soon a crisp young man in clean new spectacles happens by and asks what is happening. I describe George's symptoms, his slurring speech and spastic movement, his quiet pulse rate. The young man sweeps his finger across George's field of vision and tells the stricken man to follow with his eyes. George does so with the studied intensity of one facing torture upon failure.

"Possibly the anaphasic stage of a stroke," the young man says just as the ambulance arrives. George's new rescuers question him, and he puts every shred of his life force into showing them his comprehension. One of them tells me to move away. I gently lay down George's head and move into the circle of watchers. Snapping on their prophylactic gloves, the EMTs clinically remove George from the sidewalk. The city's cardiovascular flow is soon restored, and I am again part of it, walking home with the feel of an old man's hair pressed into the flesh of my hands.

Monday, August 9, 1999

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.