I'm writting a story about my hospital say, I've taken the liberty to not stick to the facts completely, its a story not a biography, so if I want to end it with spiderman coming through the window and saving me, then I'll do that. For now this is just like chapter one. Nothing is final yet.
So there really isn't anything else to do but think about how I ended up here. Well that isn't completely true, there are my fellow...um...guests I can talk to, but I don't have the energy right now to weed through them and see who is at least lucid much less interesting, right now I'm just trying to get a lay of the land. I'm sitting in a room that is a cross between a kindergarden class and a hospital waiting room. It is a big room but well over half of it is taken up by a huge table with these blue ergonomic chairs flanking it on all sides. The chairs are cleverly designed to support your back and let you recline all you want without tipping over. Despite the lack of padding they manage to be comfortable, instead of padding they are made of some sort of synthetic nylon or plastic, which everyone knows is easy to clean in case someone has an accident. It only made good sense to make everything washable. It's the walls that give it the kindergarden feel. There are crayon colored construction paper monstrocities posted everywhere, flanked by other art projects that consisted of pictures being cut out of magazines. Some of the greatest art has been made by people who were mentally ill, but that doesn't make every mentally ill person an artist.
On the table there is an old newspaper so the residents and I can keep up with violence and entertainment. No one seems to have been looking at the employment ads. There are also travel magazines highlighting the perfect European adventures, or exotic trips across Latin America. Why travel magazines are provided to people who are not allowed to leave a building is beyond me, perhaps the magazines are put there so people can think about setting a long-term goal for themselves. That is the most likely explanation, but the actual effect is that the magazines are a tease, showing a world that most (if not all) of the people in here will never get to see. When the newspaper is done giving its news of horror and violence, and the magazines have shown us all the beautiful things we will never see, we try to entertain ourselves with playing cards, dominos, coloring books. We are provided with markers but no pens or pencils; they are too easily used as weapons.
On the wall there is a calendar, but not the normal kind that opens up like a book, with a picture of something you like on top and the days and weeks on the bottom. This one is more like a concept calendar, its basically a board with a bunch of slots where the day of the week, the month, and year are all removable, that way the same month can stay up all year, with a little editing of coarse. Being October, naturally the 'O" is replaced by a pumpkin, and there is a little friendly bat flying above the 'r'. The calendar says 'Today is Friday', but I'm pretty sure it is actually Saturday. I remember getting paid yesterday, so today has to be Saturday. This is not good news because when I get interviewed they are going to ask me if I know the date. It doesn't help that the calendar is feeding me bad information.
Most of the people I share this room with are older, and a lot of them are in really bad shape. It doesn't take much effort to see that everybody fits into one of a couple of types. There are the vagrants with their sun damaged skin, tangled hair, and blank expressions that can only be achieved by burning holes into their frontal lobes by either pounding booze, tweaking, smoking crack, sniffing glue or any combination of these skid row recreations. Then there are the innocently terminal: The people who are simply suffering from the effects of age, disease and birth defect. I'm not positive as to what they have, but I can't be too far off by guessing Alzheimer's, dementia, and autism. Everyone else seemed pretty rational and alert, so I can only guess they are the suicide attempts.
This is a warehouse for the lowest of the low. The people who are no longer welcome on skid row, abandoned by their families, alienated by their peers. Now I'm here to join the ranks. Already I'm in uniform. I'm wearing one of those hospital gown jobs, the kind that never really stay closed in the back. The staff tells me that I can wear my own cloths when it comes back from the laundry. I tell myself that getting blood out of jeans doesn't take long, but then again, why would they rush, they know I'm not going anywhere.
"Daniel?" An attendant with a clipboard is trying to track me down.
"Yeah, I'm Daniel." I respond.
"You showed up just as everyone finished eating, would you like to eat now or wait till dinner time?"
What the hell, I'm hungry and a little bit of protein would help me replace the lost blood. "Lunch sounds wonderful." The attendant leaves the room to go get me my much anticipated first meal.
It was not wonderful. The attendant gives me my tray and tells me I can eat right here in the activity room. As soon as I lift the lid on my tray I regret asking for lunch. I can only describe my so called lunch as a thick brown meat stew with rehydrated fava beans, served with a side of yellow rice and tiny cubes of over steamed carrots mixed in. A nurse comes in and asked me if I'm ready to be examined.
I hesitate, wondering if I would prefer to eat this slop before or after a stranger has me strip down. "Can we do that after I eat?" I figured if I have someone checking to see if I snuck in some drugs or a weapon inside my ass before I ate, I wouldn't have eat at all.
"Ok Dan, I'll be back in a 10 minutes them."
I try a sporkful of the stew, but my body doesn't want to keep it down. I make the mistake of trying the yellow rice which I imagine the so called cook neglected to add any salt. I decided to cut my lunch short and let the nurse do his job. The examination wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, I wasn't asked to cough, and I didn't have to find out if the guy had cold hands. When my exam was done I went back to the activity room and I saw an old lady walking around with my tray. I could tell she was a patient, either a vagrant or an innocent.
"Excuse me, can I take that tray back?" I asked the old bag lady. It isn't that I want to finish my lunch, I just don't want her to drop it or throw it around and make a mess. Everyone else had finished eating by now and since they know I'm the only one with any food, if she makes a mess, I might be blamed.
"Oh don't worry I'll take care of it. We need to clean up so we can all go to the picnic." She walks out of the activity room with my tray. I follow her to her room and watch as she proceeded to flush my so called lunch down the toilet. She couldn't make a mess anymore so I just walked away. Plus I figure that she did find the most appropriate place for that stew. When I returned to the activity room, one of the alert inmates tells me that the old bag used to be a nurse and the silly bitch thinks that she works here. I take a seat next to him over by the large window, but we don't talk.
Out of the window I have a great view of China Town. I love China Town. It one of the few places around here you can walk around and see whole roast ducks hanging for sale on store windows. I remember some dumplings I've eaten down there and how much reverence I had for the cooks in those Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants. I picture them poaching dumplings with unknown white meat and vegetables inside, flavored with lemon grass, chicken broth, leeks, garlic and other spices and herbs the cooks in the hospital's hidden cafeteria could never understand.
The cooks that work for this place will never cross paths with Chinatown's best. Although it is only yards away, this place is a world onto itself. Down stairs, or possibly underground, deep in the bowls of this proverbial bird cage, these passionless cooks punch the clock and unceremoniously pull out their dirty box cutters and open up the stack of plain white boxes tagged with today's date. The boxes are white with no pictures, only brief descriptions printed with unpretentious black letters to give away content. On the bottom next to the bar code there is a little black list of the very scientific descriptions of the various compounds that month after month keep the food from going bad. The quality of our food brought so low that not even bacteria would dare invade it.
It is obvious that our food is either dumped in a stainless steel vat, or spread across a sheet pan, awaiting a trip into a giant microwave. The food is so uniform I can tell it has been systematically assembled in a factory, put together either by machine or poorly paid hands, it goes down a conveyer belt, flash frozen, wrapped in plastic and then put into white boxes. It's an effective system that removes any character and charm. I wonder if maybe the hospital is trying to use this to their advantage. Perhaps they are trying to capitalize on that old proverb, 'you are what you eat.' Everyone here for some reason or another has found it difficult to fall in with societies standards. Perhaps if we are fed well disciplined food, then maybe we too will lose our character and begin to conform.
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Josepha
Annaliese
Kaia
Eileen