Lexicon

shoulders. Everyone knew that. Anyone in emergency services had practiced in drills a hundred times. He looked around the van. This vehicle wasn’t just familiar. It was his.
    He crawled past the trolley and into the cabin, dropping into the driver’s seat. He put his hands on the wheel. Eliot was bleeding to death back there. But it was calling to him. He had the feeling he was a paramedic.
    He popped open the compartment between the seats and rummaged through the junk inside. Among the loose change and plastic wrappers was a yellowed newsletter. He glanced at it and almost tossed it aside before realizing the picture on the front was of him. He looked different. He was standing with a bunch of other people in front of the emergency room. Everything was clean and bright. His hair was long. He had a tan. His shoulders were broader. He was relaxed in a way that Wil couldn’t ever remember feeling. He read the caption and counted the figures from left to right, to be sure. HARRY WILSON. That was him. His name had been Harry.
    Behind him, Eliot coughed. Wil thought,
That guy has lost a lot of blood
. He blinked. For some reason, he hadn’t attended to Eliot’s gunshot wound. He was letting him bleed out, apparently. He felt bewildered. Why had he let Eliot go so long?
    He climbed back through the van and manhandled Eliot into the bed. Eliot groaned. That was a positive sign. Well. It was a sign. He ransacked the shelves for a scalpel, surgical gloves, dressing, and saline, all of which were in their assigned places, rolled Eliot on his side, stuck the scalpel between his teeth, and forced Eliot’s knee up and his arm over. He cut away the shirt and there it was, an exit wound, big as his hand, pink and torn and oozing blood. He was appalled at himself. Timely first aid would have saved this guy’s life. All he could do now was compress and close anything that looked like it was fountaining blood.
    He inserted a finger into Eliot’s lower intestine and gently lifted. There was a sucking noise, a
glunk
, and a small sea of Eliot flowed onto the back of his hand, which was bad, about the worst thing he could see, because that meant Eliot had holes. To locate the source he had to force four fingers in there, and Eliot made a terrible sound. Wil did what he could. It was not much but maybe enough. He began to dress the wound.
    As he did, memories burst in his head like popping corn. Tiny, irrelevant things. The look on a girl’s face. The smell of earth in the morning. But they were coming. Squeezing past whatever barrier had been erected in his head. Something important came to him, and he paused.
    Eliot breathed. He was unconscious. His face was gray. The problem was too much of Eliot was spread across two different vehicles. Eliot was on his shirt and his coat and on the floor of two different vehicles. He was about a hair’s breadth away from hypovolemic shock and there was nothing Wil could do about that. He looked out the back of the van at the emergency room. Twenty feet from a hospital that was full of blood product, and every pack would be black and hard as stone.
    He leaned forward. “Eliot.” He twisted Eliot’s ear. This was extremely painful, if you did it properly. “Eliot, you motherfucker.”
    Eliot groaned.
    “Eliot.” He put his lips to Eliot’s ear. “Eliot.”
    “Uh,” Eliot said.
    “What’s your blood type?”
    • • •
    Eliot opened his eyes. There was a ceiling. Tiled. A false ceiling: the kind that had pipes and wiring snaking through it. He didn’t know where he was, or when.
    He heard a
crack
. He tensed. His abdomen hurt. There was a lot of pain in his body. He tried to raise his head and his vision swam. He saw pale blue walls and a cracked ceiling. A corded phone implanted into one wall. Chairs, a bedside table. A bed, for that matter, in which he was lying. The air smelled of dust.
    Oh, Christ
, he thought.
I’m in Broken Hill.
    He explored his surroundings with his hands. Something tugged on his arm, which turned out to be a tube. He was attached to something. He levered himself up his pillow, inch by inch, and saw a hat stand, draped with tubing and three bags. One of the bags bulged with clear fluid, one had dark fluid, and one appeared to have contained dark fluid until recently but was now mostly empty. He felt bewildered, because he didn’t remember any of this.
    A second
crack
. This time he identified it as a gunshot. A rifle. His thoughts began to order