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The new surgeon sucked at his cold pipe. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” he said.

She went into the empty chapel and knelt to pray. Saint Dymphna looked on from a deep sconce. The martyrdom of Saint Ignatius glowed red and blue in the cusped arch window. She asked mercy for those lingering victims of the bus depot fire. She asked for clarity in her heart.

She went down in the elevator, past X-ray rooms, the pathology lab, under a geometry of asbestos-covered pipe, through the cool connecting tunnel, up gray linoleum steps to her room in the back of the dorm. Next to a buzzing fan, Mona was soaking her feet in a basin of ice water. Mona worked night shift; she was still in her pajamas.

“Hi, sleepyhead. Doing all right?”

“I’m trying to think, like an Eskimo.”

Mona was tiny and dark, with brown eyes under black bangs. Her people farmed a hundred fifty acres of barley and russet potatoes in Bluefield, Minnesota.

“You could fry an egg on the sidewalk out there.”

“And I’m in ER. It’s going to be stab wounds and psychos all night long.”

She looked down into rippling water. “Why don’t you let me freshen your polish?”

Mona said, “That would be fine.”

She knelt and separated Mona’s toes, wedging them open with cotton balls. She went at it slowly, precisely, sweat burning in her eyes. The polish, called Summer Cerise, beaded thickly at the end of the brush.

MRS. RADCLIFFE was dictating again, a shopping list this time.

“Tenderloin only. I want a well-marbled cut.”

These incoherent moods: The old woman had snuffled and cooed while having her hair put in braids, and now she was cold and peremptory. Caprice. It could be the name of a houseboat.

“And make it white turnips, not yellow.”

The old woman’s tics went in their wonted series. Her hands trembled over satin robe lapels.

“They keep specially in stock for me a certain tea blend. Griffin’s Limeflower.”

She came out of the bright dizzy bedroom and into the hall, where it was dusk. The runner was spongy underfoot, its figures sinking away in brown wear. She went still in the front room before the wall of shelved books, their spines a vague medley. Only the ticking of the mantel clock was distinct. She turned on the lights and wrote in the chart:

“6PM — Medications administered; patient resting comfortably.”

DISMISSED from the hospital, she went on to Ransome Hall, a brick keep under iron-ore mountains at the far side of town. Wealthy neurasthenics went to Harbor Springs or to Bois Blanc Island, while the rest came here: firebugs, cataleptics, pederasts. She worked long hours on the lockdown ward, and wasn’t afraid to be by herself. Behind barred windows, she was free from niceties and rules (“No jewelry is to be worn while on duty”). There was only the rule of law, of the hammerlock and the leather restraint. She was glad to show strength instead of endurance. And when strength ran out, there was time to dream.

It was easy — they trusted her with all the keys. Light was low in the storeroom. She snapped the glass neck of the ampoule, drew its full contents up into the syringe, lifted her skirt, punctured a thigh. Brighter light fell on drifts of white flannel blanket. Poultice pans had sheen. Rubber ice caps and rubber sheets seemed slowly to breathe. Her skin was cream with a waft of vanilla.

ON her day off she went to the movies. There was a very sad story about adoption, a silly musical to fill out the bill, and a newsreel in between. While women around her cried at the feature, she sucked on root beer barrels and thought how the faces up there were no more false or true than those she remembered with wens, warts, goiters, or masked behind gauze. And then, during Movietone footage of the Miss Citrus contest, she was the only one laughing. Afterwards, she went to a tearoom for barley soup and sweet rolls. From the drugstore by the trolley stop, she bought magazines to take home. A back-cover layout announced that the latest achievement in typewriters made for writing perfection with silence. “Allows clear thinking, reduces fatigue, improves accuracy.” She thought of pretty pool typists chatting together, window-shopping, and wondered if there really was any such thing as a “normal” job. Had she been missing out? Her eyes were reflected in the trolley car window, just above the condensation of her breath. She opened to a full-length novelette by someone named Anne P. Radcliffe.

“She’s a lovely corpse,” said the intern. Looking at the crushed girl, he knew she wasn’t just another hit-and-run. He was wheeling this ambulance on the trail of murder!

AFTER the asylum was sold for a tax judgment, she went on to Highcroft Academy, a boarding school for girls wanting individual remediation. With field hockey, tennis, riding, came sprains and contusions for treatment; there were viruses and allergies, the menorrheal, the homesick, the hysterical. The campus was large, thickly wooded, and walking out with her sweet-grass basket to gather mushrooms, she sometimes found girls necking or smoking and once, a tramp asleep in fallen leaves. Her reticence in these matters led to respect and the receipt of confidences — the ostracized girl, daughter of missionaries; the girl who stole food; the girl seduced by her grandfather; and finally the would-be suicide, her lips blue with bichloride of mercury, who sobbed, “You’re the only one who cares about me, and I don’t even know your first name.” She could recognize that love came like gas from a hard rubber mouthpiece.

RID of pride, she went to the agency with a new haircut, her face rubbed plain, her hands dry and smelling of white soap.

“I want a terminal case,” she said.

Miss Barton rearranged papers on her desk, frowning. “We’re not here for your accommodation.”

“I would wait until something was available.”

She had walked all the way here, crunching rock salt on the downtown pavements. She had purpose that was no dream, though she saw it over and over in her mind.

Miss Barton pressed her thumb into a gum eraser. “Do you mind living in?”

“Not at all.”

“Ever worked with a pediatric iron lung before?”

“Once or twice.”

In her sleep she had peeled the last rules away, and woke up clean. She had foreign aromas like summer cabin wood, gardenia jelly, and words brittle in her mouth as a thermometer.

“Don’t be too sure of yourself,” Miss Barton said.

SHE stares through mullioned windows at the running lights of a barge. Dogs flee from a bucket of water. Spinning newspapers come to rest, and sigh. It isn’t early; it isn’t late. She hears the small shy coughing and turns back into the room.

CYCLING POSTURE

RILEY EATS OUT ALL the time because it is less sad. She moved out on him in December; plane trees now are tipped with early April green, but sweeping, matching socks, heating stew — these things are still sad for him. Normally, he has dinner at La Campaña d’Oro. They serve a beer called El Señor Presidente. Sad maybe, lonesome, but he doesn’t flaunt it with a book propped against the napkin holder. He reads the menu (Chinese on one side and Cuban on the other), always gives the same order: ropa vieja, black beans, yellow rice.

And at this she would show her fine exasperation. “Don’t you have any curiosity?” And Riley would say that yes, he did; that it was about the two Campaña families running from Mao in ’51, from Castro in ’62. And he supposes now that routines were what pushed her away.

RILEY bicycles to work because it makes him feel quick and bold and slightly European. Six miles down, six miles back. His calves are spectacular. Normally, he keeps the bike right next to his desk. Moretti doesn’t complain any more.

Gravity Media publishes three monthlies (Our True Lives, Terror/Counterterror, Global Detective), a bimonthly (Cat Fighters: The Journal of Female Combat), and whenever possible, one-shots like Amazing Pet Stories Annual, or Cudgo Bros. Tour Scrapbook. Moretti, as executive president, must hustle. He has a full-time staff of only five and a distributor who can’t seem to penetrate the national convenience stores. He says acts of contrition all day and drinks milk in defense of his stomach.