He got on the Ravenswood el at Armitage–an elderly, birdlike man, smartly dressed, with an impeccable white goatee. He took the seat next to mine and fussed for a few moments with his worn leather briefcase. I didn’t pay him much attention. He seemed normal enough. He looked like a music teacher, or a curator at a museum: someone who’d been riding the el into the Loop every afternoon for decades. But I did get the feeling he wasn’t well. He acted tired, as though he’d had to run for the train and it had taken more out of him than he’d expected.
“You got a passenger who’s collapsed,” I said.
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Everybody was still sitting where they were, not talking, as though embarrassed. The man still lay where he had fallen. A woman who’d been sitting behind us finally got up and leaned over him. She asked loudly, “Are you all right?” He didn’t move. “Are you all right?” she shouted into his ear. He still didn’t move.
“I don’t think so,” the motorman said to me. “That isn’t a good color, is it?”
The woman bent forward to breathe into the gaping mouth; then the man in the turtleneck pushed open the fallen man’s overcoat and began to knead at his elegant striped shirt. After a minute the woman said to me, “My hands are shaking so much I can’t tell if there’s a pulse. Could you try?”
Somebody else came up and said, “What’s taking the ambulance so long? You know, there’s a hospital a block from here. Let’s call them and get an ambulance.”
“Look,” the motorman said tensely. “I call the dispatcher. He calls 911. They have a list of locations near here that are even willing to send an ambulance. He calls the first one. If the ambulance isn’t out on a call, it comes. If it is out on a call, he calls the next one on the list. And so on. That’s the only way the ambulance ever gets here. Ever. So don’t call. They won’t help you. You’re only going to confuse things. Don’t do anything at all.”
