Beds

by Karen Heuler

There were twelve beds in the hospital ward today; tomorrow there will be eleven.

My right-hand bedmate was instantly conciliatory to the hospital staff: “Of course you are overburdened,” she said, her voice dripping with compassion, “and there is at least one person here who is creating his own disease, just for attention. At least one,” she said and shut up, her hands placed saintly on the top bed sheet.

“Is that me? Is that who you mean?” This came from the end of the row against the wall, at the end of the line. “I have been dragged about by life—do you think you can be dragged all over the place without being wounded? That life doesn’t wound you? That life doesn’t kill you? There’s no worse thing than that. I ask you,” he said, pointing to the nurse with her cart of medications. “Do you have a cure for life?”

“Oh, we all get cured of that eventually,” the nurse said, largely ignoring him and moving on. “I want to watch you take that, now,” she said severely to the skinny man past the conciliatory woman, who took it glumly and popped it in but didn’t swallow. “It could be you on that bed tomorrow, dearie. Is that what you want?”

He swallowed hastily and she put a tick on the chart on her clipboard.

“Where’s the bed going?” I asked. They all had such narrow concerns; their fear overruled their curiosity. One bed less, one patient less; what did it matter? I was feverish and wobbly; they would let me stay. Surely. Neither the healthiest nor the sickest. Safe.

She handed me three pills and a pink liquid, and never looked to see if I took any of it. Was that a good sign?

“This one over here,” the bed opposite me said. She was younger than most of us; and she often had cheery people tromping in and out. “With the annoying voice. Get rid of that one.”

I gloated over her spitefulness. Young and spiteful! Let her be the one.

“Don’t you think I know about my voice?” the accused woman said. “Isn’t that why I’m here? I will do anything, suffer anything to fix it, this curse of mine. I know how irritating my voice is, I hear about it over and over; I see how people turn away. I cringe when I speak,” she said, closing her eyes and bringing her hand up to her throat. “How I detest it. Imagine—hating it and unable to stop it. It is a terrible fate. Terrible, terrible.”

“The least you can do is stop talking about it so much,” her tormentor said. “Like some electronic screech, you should really start using a pen and a pad. Give us all some relief.”

“And you think I don’t suffer?” the  horrible voice asked. “To see how people react, to hear how you insult me: do you think I am heartless, soulless, without feelings, cursed as I am with a voice that doesn’t suit me, doesn’t match me—”

“Oh, it matches you, all right. You are not a quiet person; try being a quiet person.”

“Oh? I’m the only one who should be silent? I suffer just to please everyone, I’m to be cut open from nose to throat, all to please you, and people like you, and never to speak?”

“That would be lovely.”

“Well, let me tell you—” she began, but the nurse with her cart handed her a raft of pills, and she had to swallow them.

In the bed to her left, a businesslike man said, “And who judges which bed goes? And when will this take place? And where does the bed go? Will it be the sickest or the least sick? Or,” and here he shot a look at the woman with the awful voice, “the most annoying?”

“The doctors will decide,” the nurse said indifferently. “They have been trained for it and as to where the bed goes—why it goes on a truck and we never ask where. Once you leave, you know, you don’t exist for us. We are busy enough as it is, constantly reading your charts and discussing your medications and seeing who is doing well and who is not—”

“I want to do well,” the thin man said. “I concentrate every day on a healthy attitude—”

“Which I take it to mean that it is your attitude that will cure you and not the medical profession?” the nurse asked darkly.

He realized his error and produced a sticky grin, saying, “Of course not—very much appreciated,” and flattened himself out against the sheets.

All the patients had their pills by now and they shifted, awaiting effects and peering glumly at the doorway. Evening rounds: surely there would be evening rounds? And would it be decided then?

“My brother-in-law knows the head of the hospital,” my neighbor whispered. “It won’t be me, I can tell you. I hate the man, but he has his uses.”

And I thought: I know no one. It felt electrical at first and then the stab of it broke off in a kind of dreadful flutter of the gut. I threw my eyes around the room, and I began to see their criteria in different terms: not the sickest or the healthiest, but the one most likely to leave no ripple behind, their disappearance unremarked, even satisfying, acknowledging an utter uselessness. There is one like that in every room, in every plot, in every family—the one who won’t be missed, who stands at the back in photographs, or perhaps only a hand is seen, thrust from the outside of the group, or who is turned away, always turned away, when everyone else is gazing forward.

I was torn from my reveries, hearing my own name called, and indeed it was the lead doctor, head of the ward, standing at the foot of my bed, radiating certitude. She smiled at me, assertive in her white coat, her white bright hands, the preparation of her words jostling toward her tongue.

“Enough!” I cried before she could speak my name again, and I sat up and then stood, panting until the room steadied and the multitude of faces settled back to the eleven others, and I saw the nurse departing, and the doctor watching me with a bored clinical eye. “It is enough!” I cried again and I took the cloth jacket neatly folded out of my bedside table, and the shoes from their plastic case. “Don’t speak my name,” I shouted to the doctor and I turned to the beds and said, “I know you think it should be me—I know in the back of your heads you said of course it must be that one, and I’ll throw it back at you, then: Of course it’s me! But I shall walk away from you, not be rowed away to Lethe on a bed. Cowards! You force me to it because I can see how vile are your fears, your contempt, yet they only give me vigor! I’ll go, then, I’ll set you free, you worthless dregs, you broken toys!” And I began feebly to make my way to the corridor.

“Now hold on,” said the doctor. “I merely meant to compliment you on how well you’re doing. Quiet, uncomplaining—though we’ll have to make a note now, won’t we?” She turned to face the center of the room as, with a sigh of relief mixed with disappointment, I removed my coat, my shoes, and inserted myself back into bed. The doctor went to stand at the foot of the bed of the thinnest man, the man who had to be watched to swallow his pills.

The doctor lowered her voice, though we all heard it still and it thrilled us. “You, Hanley, it is your bed that we have chosen.”

“Ah no!” he cried, pulling the sheets up to his chin, his eyes wide and unreflecting.

A cheerful buzz rose from the other patients. “I apologize,” I said, “it was the fever that did it to me, for I have loved you all as brothers, sisters, hating you sometimes, it’s true, but only as one hates within a family, intimately—all save Hanley, who doesn’t provoke me at all.”

“All save Hanley!” responded the other beds, as the orderlies came and pushed him away. He clutched the hem of his sheet, his lips quivering, his thin head with its pointed bones swiveling to gaze at each of us in turn. He may have said something—in fact, I’m sure he said something—but it was feeble and lost in the murmurs that rose up once his bed rounded the doorway and faded into the corridor.

“How odd,” said my neighbor to the left, “but I feel—suddenly—finer. I can think clearly, I’m sure of it.”

“That pounding in my chest is gone,” another declared.

“Do you know—I think I’m hungry.”

And we all had grins on our faces at the prospect of returning health. Was it coincidence that it had to do with Hanley’s removal? Was it an accident that once he left we all felt better?

Hanley was the cause of all our distress, and without him, we agreed, our lives were sure to be long and safe. “We will live,” we murmured to each other, “we are whole; it was Hanley all along!” And we blessed our doctors and our nurses and the orderlies who took Hanley from us, the creature who would blacken our hearts.

Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in anthologies and in dozens of literary and speculative publications from Alaska Quarterly Review and Fantasy Magazine to Weird Tales. She has published two novels and a short story collection, and has won an O. Henry award. Her latest novel, Journey to Bom Goody, concerns strange doings in the Amazon. She lives in New York City with her dog, Booker Prize, and cat, Pulitzer. Learn more about Karen Heuler at Moon Milk Review’s Author Talk.