334 by Thomas M. Disch Read Free Book Online

Emergency. His face had been a regular beef stew; now it was a tidy volleyball of bandages. From the boy’s clothes and the tanned and muscly trimness of his bare arms (on one biceps two blurry blue hands testified to an eternal friendship with “Larry”) Chapel inferred that he would have had a good-looking face as well. But now? No. If he’d been registered with one of the private health plans, perhaps. But at Bellevue there was neither staff nor equipment for full-scale cosmetic work. He’d have eyes, nose, mouth, etc., all the right size and sitting about where they ought to, but the whole lot together would be a plastic approximation.
    So young—Chapel lifted his limp left wrist and checked the age on the Identi-Band—and handicapped for life. Ah, there was a lesson in it.
    “The poor man,” said the substitute, meaning not the boy but the transfer. She handed Chapel the transfer form.
    “Oh?” said Chapel, unlocking the wheels.
    She went round to the head of the cart. “A subtotal,” she explained. “And… ” The cart bumped gently into the door frame. The bottle swayed at the top of the intravenous pole. The old man tried to lift his hands but they were strapped to the sides. His fingers clenched.
    “And?”
    “It’s gone to the liver,” she explained in a strange whisper.
    Chapel nodded somberly. He’d known it must have been something as drastic as that since he was routed up to heaven, the 18th floor. Sometimes it seemed to Chapel that he would have saved Bellevue a lot of needless trouble if he’d just take all of these to Ab Holt’s office straightaway instead of bothering with the 18th floor.
    In the elevator Chapel paged through the man’s file. WANDTKE, JWRZY. The routing slip, the transfer form, the papers in the folder, and the Identi-Band all agreed: JWRZY. He tried sounding it out, letter by letter.
    The doors opened. Wandtke’s eyes opened.
    “How are you?” Chapel asked. “Do you feel okay? Hm?”
    Wandtke began laughing, very softly. His ribs fluttered beneath the green electric sheet.
    “We’re going to your new ward now,” Chapel explained. “It’s going to be a lot nicer there. You’ll see. Everything is going to be all right, uh …” He remembered that it was not possible to pronounce his name. Could it be, despite all the forms, a mistake?
    Anyhow there wasn’t much point trying to communicate with this one. Coming up from surgery they were always loaded so full of whatever it was that there was no sense to anything they said. They just giggled and rolled their eyes around, like this Wandtke. And in two weeks, cinders in a furnace. Wandtke wasn’t singing at least. Lots of them sang.
    Chapel’s shoulder started in, a twinge. The twinge became an ache and the ache thickened and enveloped him in a cloud of pain. Then the cloud scattered into wisps, the wisps vanished. All in the distance of a hundred yards in ‘K’ wing, and without his slowing, without a wink.
    It wasn’t bursitis, that much seemed certain. It came and went, not in flashes, but like music, a swelling up and then a welling away. The doctors didn’t understand it, so they said. Eventually it went away, and so (Chapel told himself) he had nothing to complain about. That things could have been a lot worse was demonstrated to him all the time. The kid tonight, for instance, with the false face that would always ache in cold weather, or this Wandtke, giggling like he’d come from some damned birthday party, and with his liver changing itself all the while into some huge, horrible growth. Those were the people to feel sorry for, and Chapel felt sorry for them with some gusto. By comparison to such wretched, doomed creatures, he, Chapel, was pretty lucky.
    He handled dozens every shift, men and women, old and young, carting them here and there, up and down, and there wasn’t one of them, once the doctors had done their job, who wouldn’t have been happy to change places with the short, thin,