dermatitis and pustulant sores be cured; and so many, by chance or by choice, wore no underwear at all.
Marlowe, a microcassette recorder in one hand, a Powerhouse candybar in the other, alternately dictating and chewing, stood against one wall as the chronics shuffled past him on their way to be fed. Their faces were as shapeless as their bodies: some smiling, some grimacing, some frozen from the effects of too many shock treatments, too many drugs. A few seemed to recognize Marlowe, and waved or winked or muttered. Some, Marlowe thought, had been in Graceland longer than Marlowe, and that was forever. A grey-mustached grandmother in a shapeless polyester sack dribbled excrement as she shuffled past. The corridor stank of urine and feces and unwashed living dead, and no antiseptic nor disinfectant would ever cleanse it. Marlowe finished his candybar breakfast, waiting for them to pass before resuming dictation.
“If God exists,” a patient had once told Marlowe, “then what sort of sadist is he to curse the elderly with the indignity of loss of sphincter control?”
“An angry god ,” Marlowe had replied with bitterness. “And vengeful.”
By midmorning Saturday Marlowe decided he had completed Friday’s tasks and it was time to recognize Saturday. He had contemplated napping on his couch, but there were two voluntary admissions waiting on West Unit, and the adolescent runaway on East had pulled her stitches out.
Marlowe dragged a toilet kit from his filing cabinet and paid a visit to the staff restroom, where he washed his face in cold water, brushed his teeth, gargled mouthwash, brushed his hair and beard. Returning to his office, he pulled off his red Hawaiian shirt, sprayed on deodorant, and changed into a blue Hawaiian shirt, also from his filing cabinet. Sleeping quarters were provided for on-call physicians in a cinder-block horror known as married residents’ housing, but this was detached from the hospital unit, and after a night when it took Marlowe twelve minutes to respond to a cardiac arrest from there, he decided to take calls from his office.
East and West Units cared for women patients, North and South Units for the men. Whatever symmetry had been intended by this plan had been completely obscured by the addition of the Adolescent Unit, the Med Unit, the Alcoholic Rehab Unit (again segregated by sexes and separated by a five-minute walk), and Central Administration—not to mention the semi-automonous Taggart Center for Special Children (once known as the State Home for the Mentally Retarded), the Crawford Training School (the state had seen fit to include a center for juvenile offenders within Camp Underhill’s disused facilities), and the R Everett Amberson Clinic (a former hotel refurbished as a drying-out spot for the less shabby class of alcoholics and pill addicts). It took new psychiatric residents a few months to find their way around, and a car was necessary to reach the outlying centers—a complication in that many of the foreign residents had licenses to practice medicine but not to drive.
Marlowe, who was not moved by tears and found them a bit bothersome, considered East and West Units more than a little bothersome. Granted that tears were nonverbal communication, women patients tended to use them as dramatic expression or as means to terminate an interview. A generalization, but an accurate one, for Marlowe had timed things. Even allowing for the additional time entailed by a pelvic exam on new admissions, as opposed to a quick grope and cough to check for inguinal hernia, it took half again as long on the average to complete any task on the women’s wards as on the men’s. Marlowe compared notes with several of the women psychiatrists and found their experience to be the same. Marlowe saw the basis of an article for the journals in this business of tears, but he left it unwritten as he hated the journals. The crucial point was that, given too many tasks and too little time to accomplish them, East and West Units demanded a disproportionate share of that nonexistent time.
Marlowe spent most of the day between East Unit and West Unit. It was a pleasant day, and families liked to carry their senile grandmothers and Valium-addicted aunts to the hospital on weekends. Everyone was off work, the children could come along, and it was a nice outing for Grannie or Noonie or Auntie or maybe Mom or Sis, who had begun to wander into traffic or seduce the paperboy after two bottles of vodka. Major holidays were worst of all,