Patient

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The bus will have to move. I'm under its rear tires on the passenger side, and with the crowd, the driver can't see me in the mirror. "Can you please tell him to move?" I say to someone leaning over me. It is easy to be calm because I cannot really have been run over by a bus.

I look for my friend Simone. She is short and curvaceous, with warm brown Caribbean skin and long black hair. We have been out together, dancing in a sweaty blue-neon nightclub with pulsing music and dancers with seductive silhouettes gyrating on pillars. Earlier, she had helped me pick out the pink-and-red shoes that are now squished under the tires. She would make the driver move the bus, but I can't see her. [End Page 152] [Begin Page 154]

In an emergency, you cannot just say, "Somebody call 911," because everyone will assume that someone else will do it, and no one will call. This is called "the Problem of Collective Action." I pull my cell phone and driver's license out of my jacket pocket and hand them to a stranger and tell the stranger to call an ambulance.

It's about two in the morning, a weekend in late November; there can't be a bus on my leg. I am a junior in college, and tomorrow I am going to a big tailgate where I will drink beer and hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps, laugh with my friends in the cold. A few minutes ago I was standing on a corner in downtown Boston, in a crowd of about two hundred students waiting to be taken back to campus. The tall charter bus, with gleaming white sides and purple lettering, its tinted windows well above eye level if you are beside it, came around the corner. We were standing on the street, and it pulled up fast, right by the crowd. And then those of us standing furthest out in the street were up against it—the hot, smooth flank of the bus on one side, the pressing crowd on the other. Someone beside me fell, and then I fell. While I was still lying on the cold asphalt, the bus moved forward a little, and its tires rolled onto my leg. It stopped there, breathing its exhaust and the smell of hot rubber on me. Do all buses have four tires in one cluster like this, two across and two deep? Two of the tires are sitting on my left leg, and my right leg is wedged into the little crevice between the pairs.

But this isn't a real event; it is a saying: "I feel like I got hit by a bus." You say this when you have gone for a long run without stretching and wake up the next morning with soreness in long-forgotten muscles. It does not happen in real life, certainly not to me.

The bus moves forward, off my left leg, over my right leg, and then off me altogether. The weight must have been deadening my nerves; the sensation that was uncomfortable a moment ago has exploded, the pain in my leg taking up all the room in my brain. Someone picks me up and moves me to the sidewalk. I feel small. The cold cement feels good. There's an ambulance, and now Simone is here. She will go to the hospital with me, but she has to ride in the front. I lie in the cargo hold and beg the EMTs for drugs. They cannot give me any and ask what hospital. I shouldn't have to make this decision; I don't even know the names of any Boston hospitals, and what good are EMTs who are powerless to choose a hospital or relieve pain?

At the hospital, everything is moving; my stretcher is being thrust into wide, swinging doors. White coats and bright-colored scrubs flash against the bright white walls. There is forceful talking and the beeping of machinery. People surround me. They put an IV in my arm, and a beady...