The first time I saw the medic, he was kneeling next to a man who had been shot in the Bataclan Theater in Paris. He looked more like a character from a video game than an actual nurse, dressed all in white, with red crosses adorning each of his shoulders. Voluminous robes covered him, and he constantly reached inside to pull outside the tools of his trade. Gauze, bandages, strange-smelling ointments – each was pulled out and applied in turn. The air was filled with the sounds of the wounded and dying, but he seemed to ignore them as he worked. The moment he finished with one man, he immediately picked his way across the floor and began to kneel next to another, even as wounded men and women tried to grab at his baggy robes from the floor, begging for help. I was the fifth person he helped. I’d been shot in the stomach when the terrorists opened fire, and trampled by the crowd as they tried to flee their automatic weapons, as if they could outrun bullets. It felt like I had wet my pants, but I knew that it was not urine that was soaking my pants. I had called out to the medic a couple times after he appeared, striding out from behind the stage, but he hadn’t turned to help me; it was only when my vison had closed in around the edges that I felt something sharp press against my shoulder. “Drink this,” he said as he pressed something against my lips. It was a tiny tube, and when I swallowed, the sweet, chalky liquid left an aftertaste like flat cherry Coke left in a car on a sunny day. He didn’t say anything else before he got to work, pulling out another tube and pressing something cool out against my bare belly. His bloodied hands rose to spread the salve out over my flesh, but I couldn’t watch; just looking at myself made me feel sick. “Why?” I finally asked when the pain in my middle began to subside enough for me to talk again. “Because you matter,” he said, reaching into his robes to pull out a stapler that would be at home roofing my house and began to press it against my flesh; I could feel torn flesh stretching as he pulled it together, fixing it in place with a painful jolt. “That hurts!” I snarled. “You’ll live. That’s the point.” I groaned as a third painful point of steel pressed into my skin. “Why didn’t you help me sooner? I almost died.” “I needed to save the others first. You all survived.” “What?” “You [i]will[/i] survive, I mean,” the man said, his voice trembling slightly for the first time. Into his robes went his hands, which were quickly filled with gauze and bandage. Red pads soaked with blood found their way to the floor before he was finally satisfied, the gauze screeching as it was pulled from the roll and spread over my stomach. I finally looked down; I couldn’t see the blood anymore, or the dark red hole that the bullet had made. “Hold this,” he said, lifting one of my hands with his gloved hand before he rose back to his feet. “I have two more people to save.” By the time the medics got to me, he had disappeared; dozens of unbandaged men and women lay in all directions on what had formerly been the dance floor, but for some reason, they chose me to load first. At the hospital, I asked about the medic, but they sad no one like that worked for them. The police thought I was hallucinating; no one could have entered or left that building without passing them. [hr] The second time I saw the medic, I was trapped beneath a collapsed building in Kyushu.