Stacey Levine - Dra-

If she went in search of a late train right now, she might be able to find the Nurse tonight, doing paperwork under a flickering lamp; and merely by laying eyes upon her, Dra— might be struck enough so as to be cured of all ills; but by that time it would be murderously late at night and the Nurse would likely be angry.

Alternatively, she thought, leaning, her back to the wall, she could take the later train and reach the Nurse’s quarters after midnight, then settle down quietly to sleep on the Nurse’s steps. In either case, once she had stayed the first night, she would surely be able to stay on for second and third nights, not only becoming more calm in general by doing so, but also growing more deeply, ineffably acquainted with the Nurse through protracted, mutually difficult discussions.

Dra— imagined herself sleeping on the steps for several nights in a row, because she would enjoy the tension of being at such a short distance from the Nurse, who, in that scenario, might after all rise from deep sleep at any moment of the night and call out sharply from her bunk that sleeping on the steps was unhealthful, and that Dra— must come inside.

Smiling, scratching the inside of her wrist voluptuously, she wandered toward a lone hallway bathroom, standing dreamily in its damp, unpleasant vestibule for some time, then decided to wait: it was always much better to resist using a bathroom. But due to curiosity, she wound up poking her head through the door anyway, just, she told herself, to have a look inside.

With trepidation, she picked around the bathroom with its broken sinks and toilet bowls filmed inside with dust and grit, and she retrieved, from the clammy base of one, an old, torn pamphlet that listed various employees, long dead, and the worksites where each had worked diligently for years. The page also listed several personality traits for each, and a second column opined as to the pastimes and passions each might have pursued had they been able.

On the long list of names, she saw her own, though prefaced by an unfamiliar single initial; in another portion of the pamphlet, she caught the line of dreamlike letters that formed the name of her new Administrator, a name she had known possibly always, but never heard spoken aloud. Years ago she had come across the name, too — when lying, the whole of one day, upon a stiff, scratchy sofa in the dean’s office at school, recovering from anesthesia, so wildly thirsty and out of sorts that she had been unable to think for hours. But gaining her bearings, she had risen on an elbow and pulled from beneath the sofa a dun-colored notebook that listed on its first page the names and phone numbers of a certain colorful tier of Administrators, her own included. Not only this, but next to the name was a photograph of the woman, her mouth open wide in song; and beneath this photo and photos of others, a caption noted wryly that nothing in life could really be proven, not the existence of any person, either, nor the shape of their face nor any detail of their body. Below that, another caption mocked that notion, saying that if people were generally loved and comfortable in life, such ideas would never arise in the first place.

And now, she ran from the bathroom to hide beneath a chamberlike stone stairwell, heart racing with giddiness and frustration over her various fierce, random thoughts about the Administrator and the Nurse both; and she managed to see that if she, Dra—, were extremely lucky, she might somehow develop slow, strong bonds with each of them, so that eventually, they all might grow inseparable; and then she kneeled, due to flashes of nausea.

Still holding the pamphlet in her hand, making an effort to read on, she turned to its back side and saw that its last paragraphs informed as to steps for cleaning limb wounds. Staring at the wall for a few minutes, she concluded that, no matter what else happened, she must see the Nurse, her resolution over this pounding in her head like a gong. Yet peering out from beneath the stairs, seeing the facade of the Employment Office at a distance down the hall, she moved begrudgingly toward it, reassuring herself that afterwards, in no time at all, she would head for the Nurse, and so be able to relax.

She would simply have to find the Nurse later, she told herself, after she had secured a job. Then she would need the Nurse, whose skills were vast, to check her deeply and clean away all unpleasant distresses; but in fact, if she delayed employment now and instead asked the Nurse to open her chest, back, and abdomen in surgery this very night, the Nurse would find something terrible inside her, Dra— knew, quite possibly a sly disease that worked slowly over time to clot and stifle its victims’ organs with a kind of gristle. Dra— was fairly sure she harbored this gristle, because years before, Dr. Billy had told her, during a rushed examination performed in a locker without the benefit of electricity, that she had a fair chance of developing it because she was predisposed to it, and because she often ate the wrong things.

She rose and dashed across the main hallway, moving along its far edge, hurrying, resolving not to stop until she reached the door of the Employment Office, though even as she ran, her thoughts returned to the Nurse. The Nurse was often cross and harsh, she reminded herself excitedly, and the Nurse had roomfuls of equipment for treatments, some of which required more nudity than others; and running faster now, Dra— realized just how badly she needed to see the Nurse, that she was practically dying for the lack of it, yet the facade of the Employment Office, with its imposing glass door, now stood before her, and she needed to go in. Afterward, she told herself, she would be able to resume the luxury of thinking about the Nurse’s treatments.

Moving toward the ramp that inclined toward the door, Dra— stopped suddenly, stunned, for she saw The Man with No Hair moving across the far end of the ramp, carrying a basket of rubber bulbs. He wore a brown outfit with brown shoe-boots, extraordinarily small, she noticed, as were his hands.

The man stared ahead, no real expression on his face, though it was long-familiar by now, with its snaking nose and bottomless weariness in the eyes; and the familiarity was comforting. In a moment he had entered the office and was out of sight, not before she noticed his hair, which was slightly fuller than she remembered — perhaps it was growing back due to an abatement of illness, she thought; and observing the downy, weak-looking hair growing along the back of his bony skull and past the boundary of his collar, her chest lurched absurdly.

She recalled passing through some uninhabited department long ago — though it could not have been as long ago as childhood — and seeing the man, completely bald, in the same brief, passing manner; he had been sitting beneath a lamp at his bare work table, absolutely motionless, as if unable to stir.

And now the man had gone inside the Employment Office, and she, who needed a job so desperately and had deferred finding one for so long, could not enter, because she could not bear to see him — less from shyness than from embarrassment across a spectrum that included almost everything.

Instead, she ran across the hall to a bank of telephones that faced the office, lifted up the broad, overheavy receiver, and dialed the operator.

It would be simple, she told herself, to ask the operator to connect her with the Employment Office; and she would arrange her new job in this way, over the phone — it was the best she could do. It would work out for the best, anyway: for she now recognized inside herself an enormous longing to speak at length to an operator about great numbers of serious things — which would be a great relief, too, because she had not really spoken lately.