I had a difficult time sleeping that first night in the ward. The bed was comfortable enough but it was hard to relax just a few feet away from the silhouette of a dead man backlit by sickly fluorescent lights emanating from the nurse's station.Eventually I drifted off. Dreams came in snippets, small glimpses into a possible better tomorrow. Protesters seeing illness, not the ill, as the real enemy, Les sporting a prosthetic jaw of Bruce Campbell prominence with his arm around a mail-order bride, Heidi living simply so that others may simply live, Tyler behaving himself for the first time ever.
I awoke to the sight of Madge straddling Mr. Haynee and taping pennies to his eyes.
"Oh you decided to wake up finally," she said to me. "Good thing. These are the last two coins I can spare for the ferryman."
A woman's voice over the intercom sternly reminded Madge that abuse of a corpse was a violation of Monos Borrachos policy. Madge, without looking back, responded by holding her middle finger up behind her in the direction of the nurse's station.
"She won't do anything to me," Madge said loudly. "She knows I've seen her personnel file and is afraid I'll tell everyone she graduated from an unaccredited nursing school and was put behind the glass in that booth because she has no idea how to take care of sick people. I'm onto your game, Nurse Wretched."
The woman in the nurse's station said nothing. Her scowl deepened well-established frown lines.
"That's not really true," Madge told me in a much quieter voice. "I did use to work here but not for HR. That stuff about her background is just gossip I overheard. There might be some truth to it though. She looks like she's about to cry."
Madge went on to tell me more about her job at Monos Borrachos. Prior to her diagnosis, she had been part of an in-house development team for a new chemotherapy drug called 38P. This new chemo medicine was now being given to every patient who had been transferred to the RCU.
"Have you ever been part of anything so fundamentally wrong you needed to get high just to live with yourself?" she asked.
"No," I said.
"I figured as much. You don't seem like the type who would. Well after your first 38P treatment, you'll know what I'm talking about ."
"What does it do to you?"
"It keeps cancer patients from dying."
"That doesn't sound so bad."
"Of course it doesn't. That's the whole idea."
Two orderlies entered the ward pushing a gurney. I recognized one of them as my escort from the elevator yesterday. The other was younger and better groomed than the first. He was better groomed than most department-store mannequins. Ironed shirt and trousers, shined shoes, not a hair out of place.
"Charon, at least you've come," Madge said to the older of the two.
"And I see you've brought your ferry," she added, pointing at the younger man.
"Be nice," said the older orderly. "Jason here ain't queer for anybody but Jesus. Ain't that right?"
"I suppose that's one way of putting it," Jason said.
They had to move my bed out of the way to wheel in the gurney and take Mr. Haynee away. After Jason helped up, I walked over and sat at the foot of Les' bed.
It wanted to talk with him but looked like it was going to be a one-way conversation. Neither his pen nor Post-it notes were anywhere to be found.
Les lay there staring at the ceiling, his eyes blinking at steady intervals. I asked him if he was doing OK. He shook his head no. I asked if there anything I could do. He shook his head again.
"Poor Richard Terkel," Madge said, coming over and sitting down next to me. "You don't get it, do you? You can't help him. Les is here to be punished just like the rest of us. They know he's a social sort so they took away his only means of communication. They also know he has an eye for the ladies so they put him next to me, a woman with cancer of...well, let's just say my condition conjures up John Wilkes Booth's last words as he looked at his outstretched hands."
"What did he say?"
"Useless, useless," she said, staring down between her legs.
Jason and the other orderly had finished putting Mr. Haynee on the gurney and had taken him away. I went back to my bed and lay down, wrapping the pillow around my head to block out anything else that Madge might have to say.
Under my head sticking out of the corner of the pillowcase was what looked like a small booklet. When I pulled it out and examined it, it turned out to be own of those miniature religious comic books I used to find in laundromats and on bus seats. Real fire-and-brimstone stuff, warning readers they would get drop kicked into the lake of fire if they didn't accept Christ as their lord and savior.
I was pretty sure it wasn't there earlier. Jason might have slipped it under my pillow to try and convert me. I was happy to have something to read and pass the time.
I opened the comic and saw that it was drawn in pretty much the style I remembered, not great art but competent enough to get the message across. The first panel showed a crouching, sweating man surrounded by flames.
Its caption read, "Richard Terkel is in hell."
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