Rick Moody - The Diviners

“I think you need to be medicated,” the obese woman says.

“I am medicated.”

The obese woman will not discuss it further. As precipitously as she began talking, she has stopped. Conversation is a brief eruption in the expanse of silence. And in the midst of considering ideas about silence and conversation, Rosa hears someone pounding on the door, announcing that breakfast is going to be over if she doesn’t get up. Rosa treads quietly past the massive bulk of the obese woman, dons her robe and her paper slippers, and shuffles out, squinting, into daylight.

More bodies wobbling ahead of her. Down toward the dining hall. The light is a disinfectant of particulate material that has been sprayed liberally to cover the stench of poisonous darkness. Breakfast is the same dispiriting meal she’s had every morning here, and she can eat none of it. The tray comes and goes. After which, the consulting physician ambles in and asks if he can have a word with her. Rosa nods.

“Right, good. Well, uh, I’ll. . We’re wondering if you happened to notice anything unusual last night, with your, uh, with your roommate.”

“Unusual?” She begins to hear a buzzing in her ears, and her eyes dart across the field of the room, as if stray sounds might be coming from anywhere, and she tries to fix on a possible origin, as if by alighting on a cause, she could relax a little into the singularity of her condition.

Rosa tries to shout, “I didn’t hear anything!”

“Anything at all? Because we have, uh. . Well, the problem is that she has. .”

He doesn’t know how to put it, what will soon become the problem of the entire ward. But she can tell. The obese woman has expired; she has gone over. It’s true. There’s a troika of orderlies, and they have managed to heft the obese woman onto a gurney, and they are wheeling her out of the ward just the way she came in, and a cluster of the detoxifying is there to watch, gathered by the nurse’s station. The large shape goes out with the sheet drawn up over its head. The obese woman never even got to have a name. No one visited her, and no one called for her, and now she is going off for disposal.

“We’re going to have a meeting to discuss it in a few minutes, so that anyone who has any feelings on the subject will have an opportunity to share his or her feelings. It’s important in times like this for the community to gather. There will be grief counseling. If you need it.”

“I’ll tell you what I need,” Rosa Meandro says to the doctor. “To get out of. . I don’t want to go out of here like she did. . I have served my seven days; it’s time for me to go. I am not a danger to anybody.”

“We can discuss that later.”

“I’d like to discuss it now.”

The issue, technically, is that she has to be released to someone, the doctor says grudgingly, and this person will have to meet with the social worker, go through an outtake process, and so forth. But Rosa doesn’t want to be released to her daughter. Vanessa will not agree to the release, and Rosa doesn’t want to be confined in her apartment, telephone conversations or not, because confinement makes her problems worse. She doesn’t have to put up with it anymore, she feels stronger, and if they won’t let her go, she’ll bribe her way out, she’ll go out for a candy bar and then she’ll pay the elevator operator, and then she’ll be on the ground floor before anyone knows what has happened. She’ll be gone. But just as she thinks this, just as she should be explaining to the doctor about how important it is for her to be released, she begins to listen in on a stray telephone conversation. “You don’t understand, the thing is he was on the phone with her at the time that she was hit, he was actually talking to her from his studio, it’s the most beautiful —” Giving way immediately to some strategic planning conversation about gross volumes of doughnuts, interrupted by Vanessa calling from somewhere to check up on the miniseries, bothering some man and then another, also about the miniseries, “We’re going to do it, we’re going to get it done, and we’re going to get it done because no one else is doing anything like this, and I want you to consider this a green light, and I want you to pick whichever version of the story you think is the best one, and I want you to get the budgets together, and I want you to bring them in here where I can see them by first thing tomorrow morning, and that’s the last I want to hear about it,” then the prospects for a long winter with much precipitation, and a conversation about the fastest route from Albany to Providence, “Just shoot on over on I-Eighty-four,” and in the midst of this the doctor asking her something, but she can’t really understand, except that suddenly she is curious. Why don’t any of the conversations mention her? The obese woman should never have brought it up! Even her daughter’s conversations never mention her! The conversations are about market share, or they are about venture capital, or they are about how the campaign needs to protect its investment by sending operatives down to Florida, it needs to get the public relations initiatives on its side; none of these conversations mentions Rosa, as if she’s not even here anymore.

Rosa says, “Call my daughter; you can release me to my daughter. Have the. . someone can call my. . you can release me to my daughter.” But the doctor is retreating to the dayroom. By the time Rosa fathoms what has been said to her, he is underneath the television set, rubbing his hands together nervously, and now Rosa is shuffling toward the dayroom. She is listening to the radiator and wondering if the radiator is actually making the noise that it seems to be making, the sound of someone strangling. The ward is talking excitedly about how wonderful the obese woman was, even though nobody actually interacted with the obese woman because she never came out of the room even once.

In the afternoon, her daughter is meant to come and collect her. Rosa is wearing the clothes she was wearing when she was admitted, and she is frail, and yet she is filled with a grandiose hope. She has come to have a purpose. She has survived this reversal and she is repaired, more or less, and the sunset over the western expanse of Brooklyn, out the hospital windows, is magnificent, and the beauty of the sunset on Thursday is a metaphor for her indomitability, no matter if she’s going to have to return on an outpatient basis so that they can monitor the blood levels of the medication that makes her mouth so dry she can barely peel her lips apart to complain. She is special, in her way, because she has been chosen to hear conversations, and if she is to hear the conversations on the outside, then she will be special there, too, because she knows things that no one else knows, and this makes her worthy and important. The inner workings of politics and culture and conspiracy are revealed to her and her alone.

At 4:30, Rosa asks the nurse, since she’s standing in her street clothes (overnight bag at her feet) by the door marked Exit, if she can just go down the hall to get herself a nice candy bar, a little snack. The nurse has two calls on hold, as well as, in front of her, a snaggle-toothed man in his underwear demanding special treatment in Cantonese, and she can’t be bothered to think twice about Rosa and the candy bar. Maybe if she were thinking, this nurse would think about why Rosa needs to take her overnight bag to go to the candy machine down the hall, but it doesn’t cross her mind, and by the time it does, Rosa is already on the elevator. By the time they check the elevator, Rosa is already on the street. By the time they check out the front of the hospital, she’s past the chain bookstore, heading for the liquor store.