“Are we actually gonna sleep in the same room with it?” he asked, seeing that Yura had woken up.
“Sleep in the hallway then,” he suggested.
But the young guy just shrugged his shoulders, clearly spooked. The young guy’s name was Sania. He wasn’t all that young, as a matter of fact—about twenty or so—he just looked inexperienced, especially compared to those who’d already died here. He was scrawny, yet fit, constantly biting his nails, making his fingers pink and raw. He had long black hair and a fractured shinbone—a soccer injury. When he got to the hospital, the doctors suggested a full examination, as per standard procedure, and an X-ray revealed that something was up with his lungs. Sania said it was all the stress that had worn him down. He’d been receiving treatment full time for about a month now, but he couldn’t get used to the clinic. His mom would come to visit him. His friends on the soccer team would send their regards. This was apparently his first inpatient care experience. He was scared of dead people. Now here he sat in his soccer shorts and red T-shirt, veins standing out in his forehead from the tension, probably imagining what he’d dream about tonight. Yura couldn’t take it anymore, so he threw a shirt on, stepped out into the hallway, and found the doctor. He had hit it off with the doctor right away, partially because the doctor didn’t like any of the other patients here either. Who would like all those goners, constantly trying to spit out their pills and sneak alcohol into the wards? Yura nodded; the doctor rose to his feet laboriously and stepped out of his office. He was proper and rather friendly, yet much too lethargic for a man his age. He mostly kept company with the patients, and he could have easily passed for one of them, if not for his snow-white coat and the thin, gold-framed glasses resting on his pudgy face.
“Well, where am I supposed to put him?” the doctor said, stepping into the ward, sliding his chubby hands into his coat pockets, and nodding at the deceased. “It’s only till tomorrow.”
“Maybe we should carry him out into the hallway?” the young guy suggested timidly.
“Oh, great—then we’ll have people stepping on him all night. All right, lights out.”
“Whatever you say, Doc,” Yura said, bumming a cigarette from one of the goners in the hallway and slipping out the back door. He took a seat on the edge of the fountain and found the lighter he’d stashed there. July nights are so short you can hardly finish your cigarette.
The fountain was in the middle of a large open area between buildings, across from the main entrance of the TB clinic. It was littered with last year’s leaves and cigarette butts. There wasn’t any water in it—never had been. The yellow building poked through the trees; the windows on the first floor were dark. Yellow blots of light ran down from the second floor, where the wards were, treacherously offering asylum to moths, only to snatch them out of the night’s hands. The goners were getting ready for bed. Yura wanted to stay there, out in the night, but he stubbed out his cigarette and headed back inside. The young guy had waited up for him, and he tried to strike up a conversation, but Yura blew him off and plopped down, right on top of the National Geographic. Offended, the young guy hid under his blanket, casting despairing glances at the corpse, and Yura thought that the deceased’s soul might be lying right beside it. There they lie, all cramped, like a married couple that didn’t spring for a double bed.
Yura had been hiding out here for two days already. He immediately made the right connections, used the doctor’s phone to call his friends, took plates and bowls from the nurses and never gave them back, and traded tobacco with the patients. He knew the ropes. It felt like the last week of your hitch in the army. Or your first stint in jail, the one repeat offenders always remember fondly.
It hadn’t been the best of years for him. He’d poured everything he had into fixing up a recording studio, but somebody broke in and cleaned the place out right after it opened. Yura couldn’t think of anything else to do but run himself into debt. He borrowed 20K from Black Devil, who told him not to worry, that he’d make it back. He got his business rolling again. A few months passed. It was time to pay his debt, but he had nothing to pay it with. Black Devil kept finding ways to make his presence felt, joking with Yura over the phone, showing up at the studio a few times, asking about his insurance policies, his fire safety precautions, and his family. Yura didn’t have a family, though—he and his wife had gotten divorced, his daughter was all grown up and living in Canada, and he hadn’t talked to his old man for ten years or so. He’d spent the ten years before that thinking about how to do him in. That’s rock and roll for ya. Hatred and malediction come with the territory—and Yura had been in rock and roll forever. Long story short, when Black Devil started sending him blank texts, he went on a serious bender. When they carted him off to the hospital, he got his “chilling diagnosis,” as they would have said on TV. “Well, is it really all that chilling?” he thought, standing at the entrance to the clinic, holding his fancy white suit jacket in one hand, and an X-ray, hot off the press, in the other. It could be worse. “Sometimes people are born without a voice or with a voice that folks would rather not hear. Sometimes people have extra body parts removed when they’re babies, sometimes the extra parts start growing later. It’s hard to say which is better. At least I can still control my bladder. All right,” he said to himself, “don’t get your panties in a bunch. Everything’s gonna be just fuckin’ fine.” He bummed a cigarette off someone, turned himself in to the TB clinic (wearing his white suit jacket with no shirt underneath), went through a battery of tests, met the staff, and scored a spot in one of the three-bed wards. The young guy was already there. Some sports magazines were lying by his bed and somebody was decaying, slowly but surely, in the next bed over. “It’s nice in here—it even looks pretty clean,” Yura thought, and decided to stick around for a while. He immediately made friends with the doctor and started hitting on the nurse and smoking with the rest of the gang that hung around by the empty fountain. He turned off his cell, used the doctor’s to call some of his buddies and tell them where he was, what to bring, and what not to say. Then his friends would show up and stand outside the window. They were too afraid to come inside.
“Oh yeah, ya call that stress?” Yura said on his first night in the ward, when the twilight made the young guy melancholy and he started griping. “Try being an electric guitar player in a hall where the electricity keeps cutting out—now that’s stress, man. We’re so used to complaining about everything. We’ve gotten real soft. We don’t even know what our internal organs are made of anymore. And when you get down to them, you find so much evil that you don’t even know if you should try to treat them. What’s the use?”
That night, Alla, the nurse, came by his ward, called him out into the hallway, whispered at length in the moonlight, gave him her phone number, and ran on home. Yura went back to the ward and took out his cell, but then he remembered Black Devil and hid it in his pocket again. He just lay there, peering out the window in a dreamy haze. “Everything’s gonna be all right,” he thought. “I’ll camp out here for a month and then take it from there.” He liked hospitals—they were always clean. His apartment was never that clean. Over the past twenty years he’d spent his fair share of time in hospitals—two knife wounds, second-degree burns, kidney trouble, and all sorts of infections, not to mention going in and out of drug rehab. So he wasn’t even close to panicking this time around—“just another brick in the wall,” he thought, “just another corpse in the river.” Time was chipping away at him; he was getting older, the last few morning IVs had made him woozy, and a wave of drowsiness was breaking over him now, mixing the smells of leaves and state-issued sheets. That goner was lying on the next bed over. His breathing had slowed like a river in the lowlands. He had two days left to live—a ton of time and a ton of sorrow.