Sharks In The Time Of Saviors

Dean leaves college and abandons his dream to be an NBA star. He is now working for a delivery company, loading and unloading boxes. He describes the humiliation of having to make a delivery at the college where he used to be a basketball star.

He honestly explains why he burned out, making it clear that drugs and alcohol were major factors in his descent: “Howbout the party in me started small and got bigger, just a little here and there and then epic, all the time epic, blackout epic” (136).

Nainoa describes some of the patients he has saved with his mystical powers. His paramedic partner Erin suggests he should do more with his gifts: “You shouldn’t be in this station […] You should be in, I don’t know, a war hospital or a—a—Calcutta. Where there are thousands. Millions” (142). Nainoa responds, “I’m not Jesus” (142).

Nainoa revives a dead Labrador whose body he finds in an alley. The incident appears to be the peak of his powers. He comments, “Never before had I saved something so far gone, human or animal” (145). Soon after, his powers seem to desert him during a paramedic call for a pregnant woman who has been severely injured in a car accident.