roves the halls with carts of laundry, taking soiled blankets and diapers down to
the cellar, bringing clean blankets and diapers up. He brings up meals, brings
down trays.
Doctors walk the rows of beds injecting expecting mothers with morphine and
something called scopolamine that makes them forget. Sometimes there are
screams. Sometimes Tom’s heart pounds for no reason he can identify. In the
delivery rooms there’s always new blood on the tiles to replace the old blood
Tom has just mopped away.
Their bodies are scarlet; they have tiny red fingers, no eyebrows, no expression
except a bewildered wince
The halls are bright at every hour, but out the windows the darkness presses
very close, and in the leanest hours of those nights Tom gets a sensation like
the hospital is deep underwater, the floor rocking gently, the lights of
neighbouring buildings like glimmering schools of fish, the pressure of the sea
all around.
***
He turns eighteen. Then nineteen. All the listless figures he sees: children
humped around the hospital entrance, their eyes vacant with hunger; farmers
pouring into the parks; families sleeping without cover—people for whom
nothing left on earth could be surprising.
There are so many of them, as if somewhere out in the countryside great farms
pump out thousands of ruined men every minute, as if the ones shuffling down
the sidewalks are but fractions of the multitudes behind them.
And yet is there not goodness, too? Are people not helping one another in these
ruined places? Tom splits his wages with Mr. Weems. He brings home
discarded newspapers and wrestles his way through the words on the funny
pages. He turns twenty, and Mr. Weems bakes a mushy pound cake full of
eggshells and sets twenty matchsticks in it, and Tom blows them all out.
He faints at work: once in the elevator, twice in the big, pulsing laundry room in
the basement. Mostly he’s able to hide it. But one night he faints in the hall
outside the waiting room. A nurse named Fran hauls him into a closet. Can’t let
them see you like that, she says, and wipes his face and he washes back into
himself.
The closet is more than a closet. The air is warm, steamy; it smells like soap.
On one wall is a two-basin sink; heat lamps are bolted to the undersides of the
cabinets. Set in the opposite wall are two little doors.
Tom returns to the same chair in the corner of Fran’s room whenever he starts
to feel dizzy. Three, four, occasionally ten times a night, he watches a nurse
carry an utterly new born baby through the little door on the left and deposit it
on the counter in front of Fran.
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