After Ten Seconds, Caution Starts to Spoil

A hand lingered a little too long at the side of the neck. It had not found a definite pulse, and still wanted to wait for one more echo. Another hand, in a sudden malfunction, first froze, then nearly reached toward a place it should not have touched. Both of those moments would later have to be traced back to where they came from.

Ten seconds in first-aid training is very short. Too short for someone to distinguish fear from possible error. When no definite pulse can be felt, confirmation cannot keep being extended. The extra moment a finger stays there looks merely cautious; but that moment is not blank. It passes inside someone else’s chest. The body gives no answer, and the hand is still asking for one. Slowness has already begun spending someone else’s breath.

This is not a pleasant thing to say. We are used to placing “waiting a little longer” on the more respectable side, like taking one more look to see whether the fire is out, like hearing someone out before answering. But some places have no such margin. The other person can no longer fill in certainty for you. If you keep staying there, your own uncertainty changes location: it is placed inside another body.

When a sudden malfunction arrives, the hand may not be reliable either. It may freeze, or it may touch the wrong thing first. The incident rushes in, and the body has already found a direction for it; by the time judgment catches up, the hand is already ahead. That reach has already gone out. The explanation is still chasing behind it.

If that reach is still worth even a little trust, it has to carry a stretch of corrected past with it: it has reached wrongly before, and been pushed back before. At some point, a wrist was moved aside by someone nearby; it turned out that place was not where it could land. Practice can also be practiced badly; but speed that has never been corrected is more like a hand extended by fright on the body’s behalf.

After ten seconds, the fingers can no longer ask that body for an echo. The heel of the palm comes down. It still does not know whether it will be wrong; it simply cannot keep placing that not-knowing inside someone else’s breath.