Thomas Disch - 334

He hurried to the duty room before anything else could happen. Once he was clocked in he felt protected. He even swung his left arm round in its socket as a kind of invocation to the demon of his usual pain.

Steinberg looked up from her crossword puzzle. “You all right?”

Chapel froze. Beyond the daily rudenesses that a position of authority demands, Steinberg never talked to those under her. Her shyness, she called it. “You don’t look well.”

Chapel studied the wordless crossword of the tiled floor, repeated, though not aloud, his explanation: that he had not slept. Inside him a tiny gnat of anger hatched and buzzed against this woman staring at him, though she had no right to, she was not actually his boss. Was she still staring? He would not look up.

His feet sat side by side on the tiles, cramped and prisoned in six-dollar shoes, deformed, inert. He’d gone to the beach with a woman once and walked shoeless in the heated, glittering dust. Her feet had been as ugly as his, but…

He clamped his knees together and covered them with his hands, trying to blot out the memory of…

But it seeped back from places inside in tiny premonitory droplets of pain. Steinberg gave him a slip. Someone from ‘M’ was routed to a Surgery on 5. “And move,” she called out after him.

Behind his cart he had no sense of his speed, whether fast or slow. It distressed him how this muscle, then that muscle, jerked and yanked, the way the right thigh heaved up and then the left thigh, the way the feet, in their heavy shoes, came down against the hard floors with no more flexion than the blades of skates.

He’d wanted to chop her head off. He’d often seen this done, on programs. he would lie beside her night after night, both of them insomniac but never talking, and think of the giant steel blade swooping down from its superb height and separating head and body, until the sound of this incessantly imagined flight blended into the repeated zoom zim zoom of the cars passing on the expressway below, and he slept.

The boy in “M” ward didn’t need help sliding over onto the cart. He was the dunnest shade of black, all muscles and bounce and nervous, talky terror.

Chapel had standard routines worked out for his type.

“You’re a tall one,” it began.

“No, you got it backwards—it’s your wagon that’s too short.”

“How tall are you anyhow? Six two?”

“Six four.”

Reaching his punch line, Chapel made a laugh. “Ha, ha, I could use those four inches for myself!” (Chapel stood 5′ 7″ in his shoes.)

Usually they laughed with him, but this one had a comeback. “Well, you tell them that upstairs and maybe they’ll accommodate you.”

“What?”

“The surgeons—they’re the boys that can do it.” The boy laughed at what was now his joke, while Chapel sank back into a wounded silence.

“Arnold Chapel,” a voice over the PA said. “Please return along ‘K’ corridor to ‘K’ elevator bank. Arnold Chapel, please return along ‘K’ corridor to ‘K ‘ elevator bank.”

Obediently he reversed the cart and returned to “K” elevator bank. His identification badge had cued the traffic control system. It had been years since the computer had had to correct him out loud.

He rolled the cart into the elevator. Inside, the boy repeated his joke about the four inches to a student nurse.

The elevator said, “Five.”

Chapel rolled the cart out. Now, right or left? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t breathe.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” the boy said.

“I need …” He lifted his left hand towards his lips. Everything he looked at seemed to be at right angles to everything else, like the inside of a gigantic machine. He backed away from the cart.

“Are you all right?” He was swinging his legs down over the side.

Chapel ran down the corridor. Since he was going in the direction of the Surgery to which the cart had been routed the traffic control system did not correct him. Each time he inhaled he felt hundreds of tiny hypodermic darts penetrate his chest and puncture his lungs.

“Hey!” a doctor yelled. “Hey!”

Into another corridor, and there, as providentially as if he’d been programmed right to its door, was a staff toilet. The room was flooded with a calm blue light.

He entered one of the stalls and pulled the door, an old door made of dark wood, shut behind him. He knelt down beside the white basin, in which a skin of water quivered with eager, electric designs. He dipped his cupped fingers into the bowl and dabbled his forehead with cool water. Everything fell away—anger, pain, pity, every possible feeling he’d ever heard of or seen enacted. He’d always expected, and then braced against, some eventual retribution, a shotgun blast at the end of the long, white corridor of being alive. It was such a relief to know he had been wrong.

The doctor, or was it the boy routed to surgery, had come into the toilet and was knocking on the wooden door. Neatly and as though on cue, he vomited. Long strings of blood came out with the pulped food.

He stood up, zipped, and pushed open the door. It was the boy, not the doctor.

“I’m better now,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m feeling fine.”

The boy climbed back onto the cart, which he’d wheeled himself all this way, and Chapel pushed him around the corner and down the hall to Surgery.

Ab had felt it in his arms and his hands, a power of luck, as though when he leaned forward to flip over each card his fingers could read through the plastic to know whether it was, whether it wasn’t the diamond he needed to make his flush.

It wasn’t.

It wasn’t.

It wasn’t.

As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered. Martinez got the pot with a full house.

He had lost as much blood as he comfortably could, so he sat out the next hands munching Nibblies and gassing with the bar decoration, who was also the croupier. It was said she had a third interest in the club, but so dumb, could she? She was a yesser and yessed everything Ab cared to say. Nice breasts though, always damp and sticking to her blouses.

Martinez folded after only his third card and joined Ab at the bar. “How’d you do it, Lucky?” he jeered.

“Fuck off. I started out lucky enough.”

“A familiar story.”

“What are you worried—I won’t pay you back?”

“I’m not worried, I’m not worried.” He dropped a five on the bar and ordered sangria, one for the big winner, one for the big loser, and one for the most beautiful, the most successful businesswoman on West Houston, and so out into the heat and the stink.

“Some ass?” Martinez asked.

What with, Ab wanted to know.

“Be my guest. If I’d lost what you lost, you’d do as much for me.”

This was doubly irking, one, because Martinez, who played a dull careful game with sudden flashes of insane bluffing, never did worse than break even, and two, because it wasn’t true—Ab would not have done as much for him or anyone. On the other hand, he was hungry for something more than what he’d find at home in the icebox.

“Sure. Okay.”

“Shall we walk there?”

Seven o’clock, the last Wednesday in May. It was Martinez’s day off, while Ab was just sandwiching his excitement in between clock-out and clock-in with the assistance of some kind green pills.

Each time they passed one of the crosstown streets (which were named down here instead of numbered) the round red eye of the sun had sunk a fraction nearer the blur of Jersey. In the subway gallery below Canal they stopped for a beer.

The sting of the day’s losses faded, and the moon of next-time rose in the sky. When they came up again it was the violet before night, and the real moon was there waving at them. A population of how many now? Seventy-five?