HÔPITAL Y

A short story by Lew Roeg-Roeg, recomposed and enShortened further still for modern sensibilities–

It was a year. 2021, I think. France, Paris, arrondissement XVe. I was sent to Hôpital Y. There I stood. In a long-line, of course. A winding knot of soon-to-be patients all carrying keys for Westfalia Nuggets, Mercedes-Benz Sprinter VS30s, and Volkswagen Crafter panel vans. Me: keyless.

Like those before me, three clerks put me through a reception run-around. Though it took some time for me to translate from Ferchault de Réaumur’s octogesimal division, I am quite certain my temperature was nearly 39.444°C, or thereabouts. This fever and the laboured wait-knot gifted me some degree of difficulty standing. By the time I’d meandered for my protracted inter-view, I was already fending off symptoms of delirium. Badly I wanted a pen and paper with-which to track my-delirium (like a straight, uneducated Oliver Sacks) but was two-times denied.

After the quiz and phone confiscation came the bath. They said it was compulsory, routine for all newcomers. "Not unlike prison or a labour yard or the ayahuasca or peyote retreat", I noted aloud. To no-one. As ever. My clothes were then taken from me. After sitting for some minutes in five inches of lukecold water, I was given a long linen bedshirt and a short beige flannelette dressing-gown. There were no slippers. None in my size, apparently.

I was led out into the open-air. It was night. February. Long before arriving, I'd diagnosed in my own-self a tedious pneumonia or tuberculosis or, naturally, an exotic coronavirus – of some exactitude or other-wise or -whence or what-the-fuck-ever, because who-even-knows. (All the cool kids were doing it, after-all.) As they do, the hospital staff would merely choose which-ever-one they preferred.

The sign directing us to the respiratory ward, to which we were all headed, indicated a distance of approximately one Roman stadia (200 yards or slightly less than one furlong) across the whole of the hospital grounds. One old stone building stood in the distance. It was accompanied by pop-ups numbering maybe a baker's-dozen, plus-or-minus 3.846% (or "half of 1/13th"), of course.

The gravel path was frosty under-toe. The wind whipped the bedshirt around my bare-legs. Halfway to the ward, someone stumbled with their lantern, flashing the yard like a bolt of thunderless lightning. Approaching the ward, a curious familiarity grew inside me. It was a kind of bodily déjà-vu, originating in my skin and growing inward to my core as I shuffled closer. Or was that just the cold?

We entered a narrow and poorly lit room. Coming in from the cold, the space felt warm. It soon revealed itself as draughtily dank and with an unpinnable stank. The walls were lined with iron-framed beds, beds from 1921. (At least, the rung at each foot was stamped with this number.) There were too many beds, too. And also too damned close together. Some beds had partitions between them. Others not. Rough coughs projected from every hopeful convalescent. Feeling a tinge of claustrophobia I laid myself down on a crisp set of empty sheets as everyone else was doing.

Across from me, a tattered man. He looked twice my age. He sat curled in a chair, bedside, half naked. A very young doctor and an elderly student performed some manner of operation on him. At first I thought they had a tangle of tubage but then it seemed more like a bundle of wires. From his old-timey black leather clamshell, the doctor removed a dozen small, fine glass flutes. The student burned a match inside each glass before placing each onto the man’s back. As the student did this, the doctor piled the still-smouldering matches onto a pile of herbs he sheltered in his cupped hand. The doctor blew into the wee cavern between his palms, inflaming the kindling. Then he spoke through the smoke, blowing unheard words at the man.

Never had I been in the public wing of a hospital before. You could sense the eagerness for cleanliness amongst all the filth. Like the doctors and their address, this too seemed impossible. It felt as though the February, both outside and within the room, had lowered my fever some. I watched and listened to the barbarousness, and awaited it now myself with a detached amusement. In the next moment the doctor and student were upon me. Saying nothing, they hoisted me upright and into the chair they had dragged over with them. Without a word, they pulled off my gown and opened the back of my bedshirt. Their cold, impersonal manner was nearly dizzying. The way the pair just started in on me, grabbing, manipulating, without a word. Synchronised, like robotic arms on an assembly line. Their mechanistic approach paired with the pseudo-alternative non-medicine was only more inebriating.

They carefully measured and then snipped from a bundle of silk-like wire. They dabbed my back in six spots, possibly disinfecting the sites of the pending procedure. As that happened, the business end of each wire was twice wiped with a tiny white swab before being plunged and twisted into the flesh on either side of my spine. Then the student held up his hand directly in my face as if to say “stay”, before he and the doctor moved to the next bed.

Porcupined and shivering, I closed my eyes. I tried to listen through the queezings and hockings, passed the hoanings to the mur-mumurings for anything other. All I heard was the chair. It groaned across the floor again and again and eventually back to me. The black bag landed on the bed. Six glasses emerged. Wires were removed and disposed of. Matches were lit and I was cupped. No herbs came out. The bag was snatched and I was tossed face-down on the bed. The pair left in a hurry.

As I was falling asleep the doctor returned, alone. He placed a firm cool hand in the middle of my back and tore the glasses from my back. He then scarified the blisters with what looked like a medieval bloodletting tool, shaped like a wide steel lighter but with thin, hook-shaped blades at one end. He blotted my back with a coarse, bleached hand towel. He tossed the towel beside my head, applied the glasses again, and then stormed away.

The student returned, plucking off the glasses and dabbing at my back once more staining the rag in darkly-coloured fluid. Still on my front, the student fussed with something and grunted. Now, I imagined, I would be left alone for the night. But no. Two women arrived. They had with them something like a steaming curry poultice. They erected my clammy, limp patientness and lashed this concoction around my chest as tight as a straight jacket, but definitely crooked. As they did so, the frowzy nurses simultaneously bandaged my cupped slashings and silently encouraged me onto my back.

Rolling over I couldn’t help but witness the pair of half-sympathetic grins that had coagulated at the end of my bed. Two men dressed the same as myself. It was clear the poultice wrap-job was the only offering approximating amusement on the ward. For the first five minutes the pain was significant. One convinces one’s self they can bear it. The moment one thinks one is in the clear the bearability self-extinguishes. And this was the moment onlookers awaited. One grits one’s teeth. One cannot help but moan. Eventually a strange numbness supervenes, which the guests catch wind of, signalling that the fun is over.

The nurses returned with a steel cart. The poultice was removed and a kind-of-pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath one’s head. One was then left alone.

But one does not sleep.

The night, every night, brings fifty-percent more occupants to the ward. Still, somehow, the ward never becomes over-full. Feverish gawfings and ha-ha-hahackings follow a blast of cold. At five in the morning, every morning, the nurses come ‘round and wake all the patients with the taking of temperatures. No-one is, ever, bathed. If one is well enough they are encouraged to scrub down with fresh snow packed into steel buckets standing behind a screen encircling a drain in the corner nearest the rear door. One must also rely upon their own wellness or otherwise the kindness of unwell strangers to do so much as evacuate bed-bottles and -pans (nicknamed la casserole) as no-one nurse- or doctor-ly would ever do so, it seemed. At precisely eight-by-the-clock, breakfast arrived. La soupe: the thinnest of broths, strained twice, or maybe even thrice, through the most accepting of chinoises and then, for substance, adorned with generous nuggets of the stalest of breads and a sprinkling of rice. Occasionally one is excited by the sight of a speck of blue-green mould. “Tu vois c’est comestible.” Later in the day, every-day, an impossibly tall, solemn, and black-bearded doctor made his rounds. An intern (in goggles and a face-shield) and an orderly squall of vultures (students, doubtless, circling in loosely-fitted black masks and curious red caps) would follow at the man’s boot-heels. There had to be about sixty of us in the ward and it was evident Doc had other wards to attend to as well. He only ever strolled by everyone, never stopped, day after day after day.

After many sleepless nights, one begins sitting up. One studies the other patients. It’s all one can do. Still, it takes weeks to distill much intelligence from the snippets and glimpses of information. At one point, to one’s right was a little purple-haired Spaniard, tattoos abundant, his left leg far shorter than his right. At another point, to one’s left was some squalid travesty of a man who, long before one arrived, enacted some manner of banal horror and now only occasionally groaned and shifted position, but only ever-so-slightly. In the bed across from one was the tattered man of easily twice one age, the one that one noticed upon arrival. One could determine that he was a baker or cook, on account of the old burn scars on his forearms. One knew all about those. One could also overhear the mufflings of a half-conversation in which said man explained that, no, the lack of feeling in his fingertips had nothing to do with whatever his ailment was. Between fits, “...depuis quinze ans, ni température ni douleur!” (However, one’s duelling mental and physical decrepitudes had become such that, admittedly, the receipt and translation may have been precisely wrong. One imagines it to be just as likely that the man proclaimed something on the order of "...dupis quand sans temp. Rapture nous deux!") To his right wallowed and writhed a strapping and vigorous lad. He suffered from the same penetrative, respiratory who-knew-what as everyone else – at least until the night-before-last, if one recalls (which one does not), when his wheezing slowed and then thinned and then was never heard again. Next to him a woman. Maybe eighteen or twenty. Auburn-haired. Gorgeous. Or, perhaps she wasn’t attractive in the least: it could have been that one only ever saw her half naked, sweating, hair a mess, tangled in white sheets. When she wasn’t whrackling-up and expectorating red-streaked green mucus wherever she saw fit, she was announcing the deaths of patients from this and other wards. Or so it seemed. One never figured out how she knew or why she was always the first and only to hear of it. At any moment she would throw her arms to the sky and belt out “Numéro mille sept cent quatre-vingt-dix-neuf!”

Hôpital Y was where one saw every sort of thing one never thought one would. Namely those things one was brought up to believe one, everyone everywhere, was done with. A person, in hospital, under care, dying like a beast? Happened all-day-long. Happened every-day. No-one holding their hand. No excitement. No alarm. No-one ever coming running. One was no different than something small and furry in the forest: unnoticed, left, and then gone. And then only remained remains, shrivelling right where one put them last, waiting to be plucked at and discharged, in a manner how-ever whom-ever deemed fit, or not. Where was the adroitness, one wondered? Where were all the sophisticated life-saving machines? When, one wanted to know, would come the medicine and its man-made Lazarus-effect? All one was going to get, one came to know, was this drowsy magic-placebo to preface one’s too-early extinguishment. One couldn't help but wonder what they did with all the bodies. "What did they do with the bodies?" And, of course, one wondered what would be done with one’s own. "What will you do with me?"