Chapter 1
John often contemplated how much energy was used at the hospital and found himself wanting to shut off lights as he walked down the well-lit hallways. Every area of the hospital was designed to have a sedate brightness that required a huge amount of indirect lighting. Even the rarely used halls in the lower level were kept in the perpetual brightness of a marijuana grower’s basement and John did not want that much effort being put into lighting his way. And yes, he did feel guilt from making the electric motors of the elevators work, especially when he was so thankful when he was able to ride alone. But he couldn’t believe Dr. Callous was serious.
John had been on the elevator when Dr. Callous wandered on with a file in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other. With the pinkie of his coffee cup hand, he had pushed the six button. John grimaced and squeezed his eyes as he always did when someone rode the elevator with him. He lowered his head and massaged his temples with his fingertips, but still the least thing John wanted to happen, happened. Dr. Callous talked to him. “You know,” he had said, “If you rode up to six with me and then walked down to your floor, I could get to where I am needed quicker.”
For a moment, the doctor stared at the luminous five and six buttons as if waiting for John to unselect his choice of the fifth floor. Then he turned to face John who was only five foot six, but had a muscular body he had not put any work into. Callous scrutinized John’s plain, gray T-shirt and blue jeans frayed at the fly, and John’s rugged good looks with a strong nose and brown hair feathered to his shoulders. “Doesn’t that make sense, boy?”
Dr. Callous had bright silver hair that receded gracefully from his wrinkled brow and a slight stoop that made him eye to eye with John. Except John looked away and down and said, “Yes” just to say something.
When the elevator doors opened on four and an elderly housekeeper and her cart of spray bottles, mops and buckets ambled on, Dr. Callous swore under his breath.
“Good morning, Irene,” Dr. Callous sung out, changing his tune once she was within hearing aid range. “How are you today?”
“Pretty good, Doctor.” Irene, a small hunched-back woman who smelled of sweat and unwashed hair, had been cleaning rooms at St. Jude’s for thirty years. The doctors and all the nurses knew Irene, hated her and gave her a cheerful hello whenever they ran into her. “You’re here early today, Doctor Callous,” Irene said with a scratchy, cheery voice. “How are Janis and your two girls?”
When the doors opened on five, John dove head first through their dialogue and emerged out the other side and out the elevator, skinning his knees on the bottom of their conversation. Both ends were shallow.
The doors shut leaving Dr. Callous one more floor to go with Irene. “They’re good. Tiffany and Sasha are both getting straight A’s,” Callous guessed. He hated Irene for asking the question when he didn’t know the answer. He resented her and he resented his high paying job that gave him everything he wanted. He resented himself because he would not give up the job he resented even after he became independently wealthy and could go on to resent retirement. “Good talking to you,” he seethed and brushed by her as the door opened on six.
“Well, thank you very much, Doctor.” Irene pushed the door hold button to push her cart out on six also, but before she got any momentum, two nurses from 6D- The Sleep Disorders Department stepped on the elevator. They gave her a warm “Hello.” God they hated her. But they wanted to prove to themselves that they didn’t consider Irene and the rest of the boorish nobodies in Housekeeping boorish nobodies.
Irene pushed her cart out of the elevator while chatting with the nurses about cleaning rooms and her arthritis. She started to go on about her biggest accomplishment being all her friends at Saint Jude’s when one of the nurses pulled out the door hold button and cut the umbilical cord to the conversation. Irene went on, pushing her cart down the wide, staid hallway. The patient rooms were darkened with only a few slants of early morning sunshine coming through the east windows. Irene watched the breathing mounds of blankets that were the patients of 6A-The Geriatrics Department. She continued on to 6B where the offices of the third floor managers and directors were still unoccupied. Irene stopped her cart on the yellow strip on the carpeted flow that signaled the beginning of 6C-The Center for Negligible Diseases Ward. Then she turned and retraced her steps back to the elevator without her cart. It was break time.
Irene stood in the elevator and watched as John got back on the elevator on five. He pushed the B button and brushed past Doctor Zamboli, two nurses, and a patient with an IV on an IV pole going out for a smoke. John looked like he had a migraine headache so everyone made room for him and quietly went back to what they were doing which was staring at the floor indicator in silence.
With his job, John had many opportunities to meet people and make friends. He couldn’t handle that. It took more muscles to frown than to smile, but it took a lot more energy to be friends than indifferent non-acknowledgers of each other’s presence. He could say hi to the hundreds of co-workers he saw everyday. One hello would lead to another hello and soon he would be exchanging familiarities with someone everyday. But John was sure that it would never progress to “What are you doing on Friday?” and then to “Shall I make you breakfast?” (With men it would never progress to “Do you want to come over for the game on Sunday?)” So why bother with hello? was John’s thought. As a result John was rude. Not out of hostility, but because there was no reason to be otherwise. He never made eye contact walking in the halls. When he needed others to sign the supply sheet, he did not ask them how it was going first. If the elevator was not empty when the doors opened for him, he would probably tell the people on it that he would just catch the next one.
He was consistently non-friendly and as a result, everyone wanted to know him and several nurses had met him in bars and slept with him.
Irene got off the elevator on two to meet a few other housekeepers for break. John studied the blank sheet of paper he held in his hand and pretended not to notice her tentative glance at him as she passed him. Seeing the same person back on the same elevator demanded that John or Irene make a comment and that the other person laugh and say, “We got to stop meeting like this.” John certainly was not going to talk to Irene, especially since she had chosen to ignore him and talk only to Dr. Callous before. If Callous had not been on the elevator, Irene would have talked John’s ear off; but she was not going to waste her breath on John when she could waste all of it on a doctor.
Once Irene was out of the elevator and the doors had shut, one of the nurses bravely said, “God, she smelled awful.”
“Yeah,” the other nurse whose breath reeked of eggs, bacon and generic cigarettes agreed. “They should make those housekeepers shower when they get here. They stink.”
The two nurses laughed as the door opened on one. Doctor Zamboli said in a heavy middle-eastern accent, “A woman in her early sixties can be terrified of slipping in the bathtub. Even with the emergency room here, I don’t think she would shower.” The nurses laughed again. “I don’t think she is to be ridiculed.” The doctor let the patient with the IV pole out and then stepped out. The nurses waited a moment and then sulked out behind him. Later going out for a cigarette, they would commiserate on how the doctor had insulted them.
A security guard got on the elevator and John would have to talk to him, even scanning his important blank paper. He could carry this paper throughout the hospital and instead of eye contact or a hello; he could read the blank paper and look busy on an errand. If that didn’t work, he could nod through a conversation, but he would have to talk to the security guard. The three security guards at Saint Jude’s looked debonair in their uniforms with their shiny badges and embroidered insignias and silly because their uniforms never fit right. This guard, Tim, had neatly pressed flood pants. They were different from the rest of the staff John met in the elevators. Without anything to do, but steal lunches out of the break rooms and have sex with nurse
s on the desk in the security room, they were always so friendly that it forced John to smile and crack a joke and wish them a good day.
To avoid this, John jumped out of the elevator as the doors closed. He stopped short of bumping into a man wearing green shoes and purple pants. “Hey Dykes,” the purple-panted man called out as he reacted with a jump.
“Hey, Bigger,” John returned with a smile and furrowed brow. “Hey, Joe,” John (Dykes) said to one of the other guys with Bigger. Joe was dressed all in white. Even his hat was as white as paper. In fact, it was paper. John didn’t say anything about the other guy with them that he didn’t know. He had on white pants and a white T-shirt, too; so John assumed he was a new guy in the kitchen. The newbie was a younger guy, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two with blonde hair cut short and a bunch of earrings in each ear. “How’s it going in the kitchen?”
“It’s a shithole,” Joe said. With his short hair sticking up and his face darkened with beard stubble, Joe had the look of someone that had just woke up naked with a bottle of vodka next to him.
“Hung over, Joe?” John asked.
“Yeah. I woke up this morning to find myself naked and clutching a bottle