I came to escort the victim because I am observant. One night while escaping a cheap hotel room in Chicago, I went in search of a restaurant, and noticed a man walking in a sort of dazed fashion. When he stepped into the streetlight I could see blood dripping down the side of his head, steam rising from the wound.
"Hey man, you okay?"
He looked at me for a second and continued to walk. "I'm going home."
He had a small hole on one side of his forehead at the hairline and a larger one above the ear on the same side of his head. "Look's like you need to go to a hospital. I can call for an ambulance or something if you like."
"No, I gotta see my family." His accent, I noted, was Hispanic, which matched his features.
He kept moving and I followed. I recalled the famous case of Phineas Gage, a nineteenth century railway worker who had an iron rod zip through his skull, taking part of his frontal lobe with it. He survived, according to later testimony, only to alienate his family and friends with his new personality.
"Don't got no phone," the man yelled into the night, as if the statement would get rid of me. I thought it important to obtain some vital information should he happen to collapse into a snowdrift.
"I'm Jacopo. What's your name?"
"Taylor. Taylor Finchum." He stopped and held out his bare hand. Seeing as how I had initiated the exchange I shook it, then checked right away for any transfer of vital fluid. The palm looked clean, but I wiped it on the inside of my coat pocket just the same, and made a mental note to buy some gloves.
We walked side by side now. "So, where's your family?"
"East Falls."
"East Falls," I repeated. Not being from the area, I didn’t know the street but I had my Chicago map with me. "Hold on and I'll look it up."
"Gotta keep going," he said.
The map was small enough to handle while ambulatory, although the inconsistent lighting proved a hindrance. After two blocks, I had been unsuccessful at even locating our current position and put it away. Taylor seemed to know the route anyway.
"Almost there," he said. I think he was reassuring himself.
We hooked a right and after another block came to one of those huge apartment buildings built during the sixties. Ugly brown brick, ill-kept, public housing it had been and maybe still was. I helped him with the doors, like the windows blocked with wood panels. He didn't even bother with the elevator, perhaps from experience, heading straight for the stairwell.
"Is this where you live?"
He planted his steps carefully now and our progress slowed. I stayed directly behind him. On the third floor of what had seemed like ten, he went into the hallway. I stepped gingerly on the remnants of carpet as if expecting something sinister to ooze out of the patchwork.
No one answered his knock.
"I'll try one of the neighbors."
My knock brought an immediate response inside, although it took a minute for the door to peel open. A black woman wearing only an extra-large t-shirt and an infant on her hip stood in the stingy opening.
"Hello. Sorry to bother you. We're looking for the Finchums."
"My mom's name is Lopez," Taylor corrected me.
"Mrs. Lopez? She don't live here no more. She's too old. They send her to the nursing home." Then she saw Taylor's head. "Shit, boy," she mumbled, her eyes wide. A puff of air smacked me in the face when she shut the door again. I didn't blame her. Taylor looked pretty bad.
No longer with a destination, the man could stand no more.
"I wanted to see my family before I died," he said. He sat down on the stairwell and put his head into his hands. "You can call that ambulance now."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. I was already punching 911 on my own.
While they prepared him for transport to Cook County, where they specialize in such trauma cases, Taylor told police that a man approached him and asked to use that same phone. "I said, 'No,' then he pulled out a gun and shot me. I didn't know I was hit until I the blood came down into my face."
I followed the ambulance to the hospital in a taxi to see if he would make it. The wound, they told me, was not as bad as it appeared. The next day I returned after my business was finished. Mrs. Lopez was already there with some of her other children and grandchildren. The police had located her that morning. After fifteen years of apparent indifference, Taylor was happily reunited with his family.
In the visitor's area, Mrs. Lopez thanked me for helping her son. The doctors had told her he would recover, she said, but could suffer seizures as a result of the loss of brain matter. "A half of an inch lower and he would have been dead,'' a man who introduced himself as a brother-in-law chimed in.
I shook my head in sympathy. "Hope they catch the fellow."
Mrs. Lopez looked around the room at the faces of other alternately worried, tired and bored people with suspicion, then took me aside. "This is the best thing that ever happened to him," she confided. "Taylor's never been so kind and thoughtful."
"A near death experience can change people," I suggested in my earnest, pastoral manner. Even as I said it, I wondered if, perhaps, some of us are better off with another hole in the head.