It's three o'clock in the morning in New York, and the fluorescent lights in the emergency department of St. Joseph's Hospital are blindingly white. A young man with a punctured right shoulder sat on a plastic chair in the waiting area and told the emergency department nurse in a clumsy lie that he "probably sprained his shoulder."
The nurse's name is Lena Abdul. She didn't expose him. She just brought him into Treatment Room No. 3, Closed the door, put on surgical gloves, and said, "I won't ask." Then, after he lay on the examination bed, she used steady and almost cold hands to sew up the wound that she knew in her heart was not a sprain.
He thought it was just an emergency. She also thought he was just another unknown patient who came in at three in the morning and left after getting stitches, never to show up again.
From the smashed-up apartments in the East Village to the underground safe houses in Brooklyn, from the eighteenth-story ventilation shafts to the four-story underground laboratory of the Nova Building in the Bronx.
This is a story about three a. M. Emergency rooms, expired children's Band-Aids, fried omelettes, and donuts delivered to the wrong person. It's about how two people who are used to shouldering everything on their own turned each other into the only necessity in each other's lives in an accident that shouldn't have happened.
She was his emergency room. He was her outlier.
While the rain in New York continues to fall, the neon lights of the bakery never go out.
Intention: You and I are strong enough, but we need each other