The Sensing Layer

POST :: 98 :: A skater-kid awakens as a node of infrastructural consciousness.

“Grey, not 911! They’ll for sure send cops! You’ll get the dude shot!”

Grey hesitated, then said, “he ain’t even moving, why would the cops shoot a dude who ain’t moving? We gotta call somebody Zane.”

The ‘dude’ lay splayed between Zane and Grey, both his arms and one leg out akimbo. The left leg was bent at the knee, dark flesh cloudy with dead skin peeked out of a hole in his pale denim pants. Grey already wished they hadn’t stopped. He wouldn't've, but Zane insisted. Fucking Zane, this was all just a good story for Zane.

“Doesn’t your older sis carry that overdose shit, what's it… Narcan?” Zane asked. “They got that sticker on their water bottle that says like, like…”

“I carry Narcan?”

“Yeah!”

Grey looked down at the dude. His eyes were closed. His mouth was open, gaping in a relaxed expression that looked, to Grey, frozen in pleasure. He wasn’t breathing, at least not in any way two 9th grade skaters could discern. A water bottle sticker seemed like the wrong thing to wager this life on.

“This is dumb, we’re being dumb. I’m calling 911.”

Zane was about to keep up his protest, but caved. Grey dialed and heard a voice almost instantly.

“Can you describe your emergency?”

“Say he fell off his bike.” Zane said in a half-whisper. The dude lay 6 feet south of a bicycle they’d both assumed was his. “Maybe they won’t send cops if they think he fell off his bike?” The lazy bliss on the dude's face suggested otherwise, but what did it matter? They'd send an ambulance either way, wouldn’t they?

“Are you there?”

“Ah yo! Yeah, my friend and I are next to this dude, he’s passed out by his bike. I think he fell or crashed or something?”

“Transferring you to medical response, please stay on the line.”

Zane began shoving the man’s shoulders. His torso bobbed like debris in water, his head nodding yes, yes, yes.

“You good dude, c’mon man, don’t be dead, don’t be dead.” Zane stopped pushing and laughed a little. A coping laugh Grey recognized.

The dude was black, hence Zane’s cop concerns. This was the Bay Area after all, and they’d grown up among the stories, all bad ones, almost all involving black men. These stories became hard programming. Cops were not who you called for help, any more than you’d call a pyro to put out a fire. Zane and Grey had marched (with their parents) at the protests, wearing purple N95’s and holding signs made from Amazon boxes, saying one slogan or another, ‘Silence Equals VIOLENCE’ maybe, or ‘I CAN’T BREATHE’. Zane’s Mom wouldn’t permit ‘FUCK 12’. They’d gone home before any teargas flew, whisked away the moment the black blockers broke out their handmade shields. Zane resisted that retreat order. He wanted to stay. He’d been cooped up since shelter in place. He wanted action — to flex with the collective muscle swelling around him. Grey had been grateful to leave though. It was too soon for him, and maybe too late for everyone else.

Since that short movement, hating cops had become an imperative accessory to any adolescent subculture worth its subversive salt. Goths, turfs, traps, hypes, punks, skaters (like Z and G), they all hated cops, in the abstract at least. Direct dealings were rare for Berkeley kids.

“I don’t think he’s even breathing dude,” Zane said. He hovered his phone over the man’s open mouth, screen down. “My glass ain't even frostin’.” Had Zane seen that in a Tik-Tok post? ‘10 life saving life hacks’?

“Please tell me your nearest cross streets, we are dispatching help,” said a new, more authoritative voice on Grey’s phone.

“Um College and, uh.”

Zane looked up at him. “What they saying?”

Grey ignored him. He was combing the visual field for a street sign. He’d never noticed how many words there were, how they coat every surface — ads, traffic signs, business nomen, bus benches, sandwich boards scrawled with deals — it felt ridiculous, suffocating even. Grey needed one word floating in this chaos, a life depended on it. That felt ridiculous, that a life depended on it, on him.

“Miles,” Grey finally said. “College and Miles.”

“Got it, an emergency response has been dispatched. Could you tell me about how old the victim is?”

“Maybe, like 40ish?”

“And is he breathing?”

“I don’t think so,” Grey said, then added, “I think he fell off his bike,” remembering their cop-juke ruse.

“Okay and what is your name?”

“Uh, Grey.”

“Okay Grey, I’m going to need you to kneel next to the victim's head.”

Grey knelt across from Zane. His own phone was in his hand, to what end Grey did not know, perhaps only as a comfort. Zane should be on this call, he’d be more… invested? O well, too late now.

“Okay, I’m next to him.” Grey said.

“Is there anything under his head?”

“No, it's just like, on the ground.”

“Can you please place one hand on the back of his skull and another on his forehead, then position his head so that it is straight. We want his head straight so we can be sure he’s got a clear airway.”

“How long he been down there like that?”

Zane and Grey jumped. An old man with an aluminum cane and an enormous SF Giants cap had snuck behind them. Grey looked up at him, his eyes were hidden behind a pair of large sunglasses of continuous molded plastic, the combined headgear made him cartoonish.

“I dunno, we came up on him like 5 minutes ago.” Grey said to the newcomer.

“Is he awake?” The voice on the phone asked.

“No, I was talking to some rando… uh, stranger, Zane can you deal with this fuckin guy?” Zane nodded and jumped up, grateful for a task.

“Sorry, I’m back.”

Grey pinched the phone to his shoulder with his cheek and placed one hand at the base of the dude’s skull. The other he lay across his forehead like a mother taking a temperature. He tugged the head out of its kink, squaring it with the shoulders. The prickles of his shaved scalp gave Grey goose bumps. An aversion toyed with Grey, shaming him for his feeling of disgust, while simultaneously coaxing up death taboos from a place that felt deep — deeper than shame.

“Okay, his head’s straight.”

“Is there any vomit blocking his airway?”

“Huh?”

“His mouth. Is there any vomit in his mouth?”

Grey peered down his throat. He did not know what vomit looked like still inside a mouth, but saw nothing out of his understanding of ordinary

“No.”

“Okay. That’s good. If he begins vomiting tell me. We will need to physically clear it.”

‘God, no’, thought Grey. He’d pass that horror to Zane. He didn’t think he could do it to save a life.

“I dunno man but I gotta keep helpin’ my friend." Grey heard Zane say behind him. He abandoned the old man and returned to Grey’s side

The distant whine of a siren could be heard. The beginning of the end, Grey hoped. He resented Zane again. Zane would tell this story. He’d tell it as many times as he could to as many people who would listen. He would drag Grey through the tellings like a dog with a log. Grey didn’t want a corpse story.

“Next thing we are going to do is count his breaths. I want you to say ‘breath’ each time you see his chest rise. Can you do that Grey?”

“It’s sorta tough to tell, he got like, three layers on.”

“Yo! Do you want to take our trivia challenge?”

Two boys, a bit younger than Grey, floated toward them in baggy JNCOs, wearing expressions of blank charisma. One held a phone, raised and ready to record if it wasn’t already. The other held a fan of less than crisp $20s.

“You can win up to one hundred dollars and it won’t cost you any… o shit! Is that dude okay?”

“Zane,” Grey said. He caught the hint, jumping back into his deal-with-randos stance.

“We dunno, we’re on the phone with 911 about...”

“Okay ready to begin?” The voice said.

Grey searched the man's abdomen for any hint of rise or fall, it felt like the most he’d ever focused. After half a minute he began to discern millimeters of degree shift in the chests y-axis.

“Ok, ready.” Grey said. “Breath.”

One of the TikTok trivia kids was orbiting the scene, recording more on reflex than for any reason.

“Breath.”

“Great, we need to get to five before we can stop.”

Grey began to doubt again if these were breaths. The could be a trick of the eye, or breeze work on the dude’s jacket. Then the world spiraled tight, like liquid down a funnel. Grey became only a single focused sense. Then he felt like he’d always only been sense, just diffused and staccatoed across so much stimuli.

“Breath.”

His senses now more like the hawk circling unnoticed above, scanning wide-eyed for the almost imperceptible skitter of life in the brambles of the road embankment, ignoring the torrent of urban motion in search of the meat that would become its body.

“Breath.”

“One more,” the voice said.

Would there even be one more, anyone of them could be the dude’s last. Until that point Grey had seen this all through a binary. Either the dude was alive and would remain alive, or was dead and had always been dead. Grey was not ready to witness a transition. Would it tie his soul to this dude? Build some unshatterable karmic entanglement? He just wanted to skate.

The siren grew louder, melting into the icy wave of gnosis that washed over Grey. He was feeling, for the first time, the sensing layer of society, a plane that had eluded him up until now. He was a part of this sensing layer, of lives interlinked, a seamless membrane stretched over something — the earth maybe, or a greater body none of us can fully see. Some porous skin absorbing and repelling like the innumerable villi of his own intestinal lining swaying in him like a kelp forest. He, the voice on the phone, the near-dead dude and his failing breath were a part of the same swaying multitude. Grey was certain that he repelled too much — refusing to dilate and let the in world. As a villi in this forest, he’d been an agent of starvation.

Grey had lived sealed in himself, but Zane stayed open, and grey stayed beside Zane, perhaps for that purpose. His friendship, a crack in a wall. Now death had found the crack and was prying him open.

“Breath.”

“Great job Grey, the response is nearly on the scene, they’ve confirmed a visual. I’m going to get off the line now.”

“What’s your name,” Grey said. But the voice was already gone.

The siren was all encompassing, then terminated instantly as the fire truck swooped curbside. Four men poured out of the doors, a torrent of navy cotton, yellow neoprene, and tanned flesh.

They swarmed the body like a pit crew. One began rubbing his chest with a tight fist saying, “How we doing bud, can you wake up for me,” in varied repetition. Another searched for a pulse, while a third thrust the nozzle of a white plastic up the dude's nose, depressing something that gave a long hiss. No police appeared, Zane’s gambit had worked.

The dude’s eyes opened like reverse footage snap-traps — dark brown iris with pale blue coronas floating in yellowish whites. He sucked in a huge gasping breath and looked up at the faces surrounding him. His face reminded Grey of something. The expression was both empty and full, a hungry blankness, ordering the world’s sound-and-color chaos back into symbols and meaning. There was something sublime in it.

Grey knew what it reminded him of. It was the expression he saw on his youngest sister the day she was born. Grey was 11 years old then. The doula had let him hold her, tacky with drying amniotic fluid. She looked up at him with eyes wide enough to see the entire world in him. It made him cry, how big that gaze made Grey feel.

The Paramedics began asking the dude questions. He said nothing but began turning his head from face to face. The TikTok trivia kids high fived, the old man began to saunter off, and Zane looked at Grey with a we-did-it expression. Grey turned away from it all. He stepped off the curb, tossed his skateboard to the street, and launched into a forceful kick-push down College Ave. Zane called after him but he could make out the words.

He passed nannies pushing bassinet strollers and women walking labradoodles and huskies, canvas treat-holsters bouncing off their hips. He passed sidewalk cafes, hearing the chatter of connection and commerce fly by on doppler curves. A car honked at him as he blew through a stop sign. He didn’t care. Grey rode across the surface of a sensing layer, over the contours of a body too huge to see, the faster he went, the less escape seemed possible. His eyes watered in the headwind. He made that the explanation for his tears.

---

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Till next time, be well.

— Sean Jewell