“He’s trying to put his fingers in,” the woman said.

“Back! Back!” Gwen called as the crowd kept pressing.

“Get off me!” Zeke yelled.

Vince took over applying pressure, blood pulsing between his fingers, and Gwen struggled to give Zeke oxygen as he violently wrenched his head side to side. Then one of the workers said, “Fuck this,” and wrapped his biceps around Zeke’s throat. This meant relinquishing one of Zeke’s arms, and now I found myself on the ground, gripping the tensed, bony muscle in its cracked leather sleeve.

Blood seeped through the seat of my pants. I could feel him relaxing, or dying.

“Gel,” said Vince, who’d peeked beneath his hands. I saw him grimace at the bowel. “Dressing.”

Gwen applied hemostatic gel to one of the puncture wounds and used a moist dressing for where he’d been eviscerated. I only learned these terms later, when I interviewed Gwen and Vince about what happened. All of this took only minutes, a brilliant, frenetic competence, and they had him on the stretcher and into the truck.

The Glades receded through the back windows of the ambulance as I rode with Zeke and Gwen. At this point, she explained later, the hypovolemia had resulted in hypotension, low blood volume causing low blood pressure. She got a large-bore IV in an antecubital, and at last I got to see the solution in action. The bag of white blood was hooked up and I watched it flow into his veins, a clean contrast to the red mess on my clothes. In the fury of the moment, I didn’t give a thought to anything like consent.

It was a long way to Ocean General. Over the course of the ride, I saw the solution work. His skin plumped, his lungs ballooned, and I could almost hear his heart pound louder. The white blood filled him up and his eyes met mine, sparkling. He was alive.

3.

A nurse allowed me to shower off the bike thief’s blood and gave me scrubs to wear. He was in surgery for a couple hours. I sat with Dr. Kriss in the waiting room, staring at CNN on a little TV in the upper corner. It said scientists in Texas had cloned a calico cat.

Sitting with Dr. Kriss for these hours gave me more insight into the story she’d told about her father, and why she felt he’d died because her expertise hadn’t been enough. She kept turning every possible outcome over in her mind and worrying it aloud.

“What about sepsis?” she asked a nurse.

“What about it?” he said.

“Zeke, blood poisoning. It could already be happening.”

He said that wasn’t his patient, but he could check if she liked. Dr. Kriss waved him away impatiently.

“There’s always a risk with colorectal surgery,” she told me, slumping back in the chair. “Anastomotic leak.”