subjects he’s worked on, excuse me for putting it like that. He should be done tomorrow afternoon, since he’s probably picking her up right now.” “Maybe I should go to him, help him put her in his truck or van if he didn’t come with anyone and you’re short-staffed, and go with him to provide information he might want. And to stay with her, but in another room while he’s working on her, till she has to go to a home, and maybe even there’s where my wife can meet me — the coroner’s — but I have to make that call to her first and what would Margo do all that time?” and he said “It’s also not necessary; he has all the data he needs from us and the police.” “But there are little specific health details he might want to know about her that only her pediatrician and parents know, and my wife ten times better than I, and he doesn’t have her records, does he? Did you call her pediatrician for them? I don’t remember giving anyone her name and phone number. That one I could never remember — it didn’t have to take something like today — and would always ask my wife for, who’d produce it on the spot. Among other things she has a head of a thousand phone numbers and all our Social Security numbers, but I can give you the doctor’s name or the group practice’s,” and he said “He won’t need any of that for what he’ll be doing,” and you said “So, that means I’m done here. I can go whenever I want with Margo after I make my call. It’s hard to believe. There must be something I haven’t done, attended to, that sort of thing — answered,” and he said “Outside of the call to your wife, if you’re still up to it, and what you want the police to do with your car after, I can’t think of anything. You will want to contact them before you go if they’re through with the car and you’re planning to leave it behind, as I don’t know how long they’ll want to take care of it before they park it in a private lot. Perhaps you’d like me to deal with them, you shouldn’t be bothered,” and you said “I can call them from where I end up or in a few days, send them the title and registration and tell them to sell it or give it away if they want. Maybe for the hospital; you’ve all been very kind. But it’s almost an old car, lots of miles and stains and banging up and now even worse. It might get a couple of thousand if the buyer isn’t repelled by what happened or think there’s a curse attached. Though even if it were new and worth umpteen thousands it wouldn’t stop me from never wanting to have anything to do with it again or anything we left inside it or even file an insurance claim, other than for going what I probably have to go through, like signing the ownership papers with my wife’s and my name, to get rid of it,” and he said “It’s a generous offer, one you or your wife might have a change of mind about later, but I’d think it’d be too complicated for the hospital to get involved in something like an auction or sale, though thank you.” It’s a little room, a cubicle as the doctor said. As they were walking to it he said “It’s something, isn’t it, those floods down South. With only a slightly stronger wind or high pressure — something blown in from the ocean or up from the Gulf — and then a similar weather pattern that stopped the clouds over the South for so long, we would have got a huge dose of it ourselves,” and you said “What, because of the rains? I wish we had. I wouldn’t have driven back today, or yesterday if I had heard it was on the way, or tomorrow if it happened today, if we started to get what they did or anything near. That is what you mean, right?” and he said “There’s never been anything like it in the weather annals there. We’ve had periodic heavy wettings recently, nothing for several days. But they’ve had, Virginia on down, twenty-six straight days of rain and five to seven inches of rain in some places for six consecutive days. You can understand why the rivers wouldn’t hold — the levees. A few billion acres of land covered over, I read. Entire towns and one capital city under water, or to the first or second story, and one of our oldest universities totally flooded. What a catastrophe. Six states have already been declared federal emergency disaster areas and a seventh is on the way. Municipal water systems knocked out for weeks, the pestilence that can occur if people so much as brush their teeth with tap water in thousands of homes. Billions in property damage, not acreage loss. Maybe a few million acres covered or totally saturated. And to top it off, it’s continuing to rain in biblical proportions with no end in sight. What was it, eighty days, forty days, forty-eight? You can almost begin believing that it happened because of something horrific the region’s done, for why was every other region spared? Just think what’s going to happen to fruit and citrus prices the next year and traveling this summer if some of those major bridges go and highways are ruined,” and you said “I’ve been listening to it on the radio now and then and seeing it in the papers the last few days but for some reason I haven’t paid much attention. Could be it’s just too big a calamity to imagine or care about as a whole or there hasn’t been enough reporting of individual tragedies about it except for things like ‘My family farm’s gone,’ ‘The homestead where my ancestors grew up is finished,’ I can’t get to work and I need the money, now even more so to pay off this damage,’ ‘My car and camper both destroyed along with the carport they were in,’ ‘Our only family tree’s on my mother’s computer that floated away,’” and he said “Picture I get is different, sir. Seventy-one deaths so far overall and thousands of livestock, if you care about animals the way I do. An entire Boy Scout troop lost while spelunking, quarter-million people living in shelters now, but all that neigh-bor-aiding-neighbor attitude down there, with some people driving hundreds of miles to help and even coming from other states when the call went out for sandbaggers to work twenty hours straight. One man who sandbagged for a storeowner he hated like hell, he said, but in times of crisis like this, he added, what else can you do but pitch in?” and you said “Then I must be wrong, didn’t read enough or not the right newspapers and wasn’t listening to the radio at the right times. I didn’t mean to sound heartless about it.” Little room, little cubicle, normal-size cubicle, how big do you suppose? Big as three old telephone booths, some height. Big as your second-floor shower-bath at home plus connecting linen closet, same height. Big as two cars of your model and make, one on the other. Your car. What things of hers you leave behind in it? Dollies, clothes, games, toothbrush, you’ve said all this, her own special toothpaste gel with an unusually large flat cap so the tube can stand on it, books from your local library, let it all go. To the library you’ll say, well, you’ll say nothing. You’ll just pay by check sometime after the bill comes for all your overdue books and never if you can help it go near that library again. No windows, so, windowless, diplomas on the walls, bookcase full of medical books, papers neatly stacked on the narrow desk underneath, pencils, long yellow writing tablets, couple of coat hooks on the door with medical jackets on them, hanger with street clothes on a wall hook, tie on another, running outfit and athletic shorts on a third, running shoes and hightop sneakers so maybe he also plays basketball, towel on another wall hook, under it a long black rubber tubing he probably exercises with. You pull out the drawers looking for what? Phone book because you forget your area code and don’t want to dial Information and speak to anyone for it. It’s a new one, changed the past year when the state divided into two codes, and all you can think of is the old. Shaving gear, bottle of aspirins, pint bottle of rye or whatever the smallest size is that isn’t the souvenir kind, half pint. A glass. You shouldn’t, it’s not yours, there’s barely a quarter-bottle left, which means around two shots. He may be saving it for a bracer, after this difficult shift with your dead daughter, for instance, or right after you go. But he wouldn’t mind, he’d understand, not mind that much, you might even tell him if you see him again and a few months from now send him a fifth or liter of one of the best Irish whiskeys, if you remember his name, and pour a finger of it, two fingers, practically emptying it, and shoot it down and put the bottle back in the drawer. Glass was clean when you picked it up, no sink in here so unless you wash it he’ll know you drank from it. But again, you’re almost sure he won’t mind. He’s a nice guy, you can tell by what he said and the way he smiled and all the time he gave you. What doctor do you know would do that? Maybe all of them, in this situation, if they weren’t called to another emergency, and anyway by the time he finds the glass, which could be today if he takes that bracer, you’ll be gone from here though you don’t know where yet, and you look for your hanky, no hanky, you must have used it on her in the car and left it there or thrown it away, and dry the glass with your bloody, dirty shirt — even worse than stealing his liquor, as the hanky would have been, but here he won’t know and he’ll probably, since he’ll also probably smell the whiskey on it and notice the bottle almost empty, wash the glass before using it. Framed photo on the desk of him and his wife and two sons, or you assume they are, and who else could they be? Framed photo on a bookshelf of him and this same woman and now three children, so you know they’re his. But he said two were around the same age as yours and one a bit older, which isn’t so here. Was he saying that to show something, do something? What’s the difference what it means if he was only trying to help? All facing the camera, posed in a way you never would with your family, and by a professional it seems — cloudy blue backdrop that doesn’t exist in real life except as a photographer’s prop or maybe it’s just worked into the print, but to you it looks like life after death, to them maybe it’s heaven on earth. Anyway, something else you’d never do, pay a pro to photograph you, doctor and his wife sitting on a red Victorian loveseat, three- or four-year-old girl squeezed between them with a hand on each of their closest knees, same two boys behind them and looking about three years apart but several years older than in the desk photo, so that one probably taken before the girl was born, doctor serious, wife looking giddy to almost delirious, both seemingly unaged since the earlier photo and doctor looking even younger in this one, must be the more youthful haircut and the jogging and exercise or the photographer touched them up. Do you have family photos where you’re all in them? Maybe only one, or two or three, but one you remember and is inside a plastic sheath tucked away in your billfold and which used to be pinned above your desk at home but you haven’t looked at since you stuck it in there: first time Julie was taken outside, when she was a couple of weeks old. Your mother-in-law had come down to help out and took it. On the grass in front of your apartment building then, Margo seated between your wife’s spread legs and waving a lolly, you kneeling beside them holding Julie who’s crying hysterically while everyone else is smiling. Diaper pin or rash, soiled diaper, stomach bubble or hunger, any one of those could be it, your wife used to say, but here it might only have been her first airing. So: outside air on her face and street sounds — cars, trucks, maybe birds, a dog barking, passerby shouting, motorcycle passing — and all your excited chatter at having her out. Even a plane overhead. They often flew by and sometimes it seemed pretty low. Think what the first one of those must have sounded like. Impossible. The phone, and you sit at the desk. Got to get it over with. No, that’s not the attitude. The attitude should be what? You don’t know. The attitude, my friend, the attitude! Sorry. How do you call out from here? Same as from your office: dial nine, then one, area code and phone number? The area code, you were looking for a phone book, and you go through the drawers again and look on the bookshelves but don’t find one. Some people in tight quarters keep them in corners on the floor and you look at all four of them, none’s there. Someone’s playing loud music with this thumping beat, probably in a nearby cubicle. Area code you suddenly remember and write it down along with your phone number. But you’re not dialing home, you’re calling your wife at your in-laws’, and you jot down the New York City area code. Their phone number, even after years of calling them now and then, you were never able to remember. You don’t know why. You like them and they’re easy to speak to so it isn’t that you wanted to forget the number and by forgetting it you forgot them or your difficulty in talking to them, et cetera. You even tried to find some memory device to remember it but it was such an odd assortment of numbers, the lower ones all mixed up with the higher ones and none seeming to join another, that you couldn’t come up with one. It’ll be hard calling your wife — speaking to her with what you have to say — with that music — and then dealing with everything else after it — going on. “Stop, please stop that racket,” you say, “if there’s a God in heaven, stop it now.” But you don’t want to try and find the room it’s coming from and ask that person to turn it down or off, if anyone’s there. You might lock yourself out of this room and you also don’t want to confront anyone. You want to get it over with, that’s all, done, done, and don’t want any more interferences and distractions, and then get on to the next thing and the next thing and so on till ten years from now it’s somewhat out of your mind or not in it all the time. Something like that. Just speak, when you do speak, with a finger in your free ear. Which kid did that recently? Not one but with two: Julie, in the car; no, Margo, here. Both — all kids likely — did it with both ears plugged: don’t want to hear what you’re saying when you’re remonstrating, that sort of stuff. You get up and put your ear to the walls till you find the one it’s coming from and yell “Stop it, will ya, shut the fucking music up,” banging the wall. You listen for about half a minute and no one says anything, music stays; they had to have heard you so probably nobody’s there. There’s no other way, you’ll have to get New York City Information, and it isn’t as if you’re talking to your wife yet, and you dial nine, one and the Information number there. Man says “Mr. Lewis, what city please?” and you say “Yes, thank you. Listen, this is very tough for me, Mr. Lewis, speaking. I do want a number but there’s been — please stick with me through this quick spiel — a death in my family—” and he says “I’m sorry, sir, what can I do for you, what city?” and you say “Manhattan. It was just before, a few hours, and I’m still a little crazy — a car accident — all upset about it and I have to call my wife and need her parents’ number there,” and he says “The name and address?” and you say “That I have,” and give them and he says “Hold on for your number please,” and a recorded voice gives it. The music, another piece, almost the same screeching and beat but faster, is that supposed to be relaxation, diversion, rest, something to think with or listen to on your dinner break, maybe just good for sex, but not here, though could be, on the floor, put a jacket underneath, or both on a chair, perfect place with only one key, but if not what is it then, what’s it serve? It’s so goddamn ignorant, why do people who like serious music keep it low and those who like this kind turn it up so? That true? You don’t care what the answers are, but in a hospital, in this part, where people are dying or recently dead, or maybe that’s not in this part, you walked a long way, but still, and instead of a bracer, this? What am I missing? Oh that’s a lark. Oh shit, forget it, don’t let it get to you, it’s not going to go away by your praying and raving against it, so are you ready? As I’ll ever be. What are you going to say? I’ll just see what I’ll say. Not good enough, this is the