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and autopsy room. They are a gallery of freakish events. A man who fell on an iron fence railing that pierced his chest, a woman having an allergic reaction whose tongue has swollen to the size of a shoe. A man who was hit in the face straight on with a shotgun and whose nicely cut hairdo now frames what looks like a dish of eggplant parmesan. I am fascinated by what is left intact on these unfortunate people. We are supposed to be looking at a bloody stump of a wrist and I am seeing the grace of the hand that is left behind, the attractive nails and elegant ring on the good hand, the silky skin or the curve of a hip, the svelte fleece of pubic hair that glistens despite being a neighbor to disaster a few inches away.
    I think I am weird to notice this, but I am looking for comfort in the midst of chaos. Maybe I am trying to remember these are people and not body parts. By the fourth class things have gotten so intense that I have taken to writing the name of my shrink in the well of my notebook over and over, in an attempt to keep from running out of the room.
    I plead my case to the gods of medicine. “Let me get through this,” I say. I think it can’t be worse than sitting in the plane. I am listening to Prozac, but it hasn’t told me everything will be all right.
    The class is like a living and changing entity. Cliques form. There are now popular people and pariahs. During the breaks the same people talk with each other. The cops still give us dirty looks and yell at us about parking in their spots. The paramedics hang together, daring us to come near them, and I have made an uneasy alliance with a girl named Dot. At least a decade my junior, Dot wears her hair cut short, dyed purply red and spiked with gel.
    Each of us takes our same seat each class. I hold on to the one near the window ledge with the force of a pioneer homesteader. I love this seat because the cracks of the window caulking leak just enough air to make me feel I will not pass out when the lecture gets too visceral. Dot has taken up residence in the seat next to mine. We are both front-row types—intense, educated, verbal. The difference between us is that she fails to understand that this is boot camp and the best way to survive is to be invisible. You don’t want to piss off the paramedics. They clearly hate us just for being new and dumb and are looking for any excuse to make our class time more hellish. Somehow Dot doesn’t get this, or if she does, she doesn’t care, as she raises her hand every five minutes. She questions them, she argues with them, she corrects their grammar. I am wishing she was far away from me; I worry they will think I am in cahoots with her. “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” I whisper under my breath. But she doesn’t.
    We are starting to get up from our desks and do what are called practicals. This involves Frank dividing the class into groups of six and practicing things like CPR or trauma assessments with each other instead of just sitting at our desks learning things theoretically. Dot is in a different group than I am. Frank has broken up the groups by last names rather than seat assignments.
    I am having a wonderful time because I like the hands-on part. I now get to touch living people, my fellow students. Maybe it is my age or my training as an artist, but I am not at all shy about placing my hands on a stranger’s body.
    With the help of the paramedics we learn how to apply traction splints and cervical neck collars and how to cut off someone’s clothing fast and look them over for bullet wounds that have entered and exited. We use each other and we use rubber mannequins to practice on. I am given a rubber baby doll and told to save it from choking. I do the pediatric Heimlich maneuver so hard the baby’s head flies off and lands ten feet away in the corner of the room. This is not good.
    I move on to the big adult-sized rubber mannequins. The female mannequin has blond plastic hair that looks like a 1950s