Aslan Norval

2.

Twenty minutes later, you could not tell the hospital apart from a disturbed anthill. The only difference was that it was human beings and not ants who seemed to have suddenly gone crazy, and, from the perspective of an outsider, for no reason whatsoever. But the doctors, residents, nurses, orderlies, bedpan changers, cleaning ladies, and toilet cleaners, who were all running around with their heads cut off, screaming at each other, were well aware of the cause of this mayhem and of the ensuing consequences. The victim of a well-insured Cadillac had gotten away. The hospital was losing a patient who could have earned it at least two thousand dollars without much effort.

Instead, the director, the doctors, and the nursing manager were now very worried that this untreated “patient,” might turn up in half a year to score lifelong payments of three hundred dollars a month.

Anyone wearing a white coat or a white apron was sent on the manhunt by their superiors, also wearing white. They were dashing from one room to the other, from the attic to the basement, from the kitchen to the bathrooms, and from the laboratories to the bedrooms of the residents. But no matter how frantically these ants-in-white ran from place to place, and no matter how many secret torture chambers they crawled into, there was no trace of him. He had disappeared into thin air. There was just no other explanation. Perhaps he had snuck into one of the residents’ rooms, thrown on a white coat, and left the hospital in this disguise with a quick nod to the doorman.

“Where is the doorman?” yelled the hospital director, while a vein swelled on his forehead. “Where is that gangster? Find him! He is fired.”

Worried about his job, the doorman swore on the grave of his mother that no one had left the hospital except visitors, and there had only been three of them, since it wasn’t visiting hours at the moment. No one else, not even the cat, had left.

“But the patient can’t possibly have escaped through the window,” yelled the director. “He must have passed you.”

“No, he didn’t pass me. Not here. And I haven’t had the time yet to check all the windows.”

“I didn’t ask you about that. Send me the front door receptionist. I will decide tomorrow whether or not to fire you when this whole matter has been resolved. Understood?”

The receptionist appeared, also shaking with worry about her precious post. As she was getting married next year, she desperately needed the money that she planned to save from her wages.

“What is the man’s name? Where does he live? How old is he? How tall is he? What’s his weight?” the director asked, practically attacking her.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You don’t know? What in the world do you do at this hospital if you don’t even know that?”

The vein on the director’s forehead had grown even larger and now it also turned bluish. “It’s your goddamned job to receive every new patient and to register their personal data.”

“I didn’t have enough time for that.”

“You didn’t have enough time? Not enough time? What do you have time for, then? Maybe an affair with one of these amateurs in white I keep getting stuck with. They can’t even do an appendectomy without removing half the liver or who knows what else at the same time. You’re probably busy having affairs instead of doing your job. Where is his personal information, I said?”

“I had neither the time nor the opportunity to get them. The patient arrived on a stretcher and was rushed upstairs so quickly that I assumed he would have to be operated on immediately.”

“Well, at least that’s an excuse. But don’t let anything like this happen again!”

The receptionist returned to her tiny cubicle while one of the older doctors entered the director’s office.

“In my opinion, this can be remedied easily, very easily. I will just write a report: ‘Unknown man, approximately twenty-six years old, supposedly hit by a car, admitted—here we insert the day and time—ran away immediately after being admitted, before personal information could be collected. His escape was only possible because he was not injured.’”

“‘Escape was possible since the patient was not injured in any way and was only brought in for a routine medical examination,’” supplemented the director. “It sounds better that way. And since he was able to run away on his own two legs, we are covered.”

“Covered for today and maybe for the next few weeks,” said Dr. Snyder, “and at least for now the insurance company is covered. But if the guy fakes it, of course, and wants to sue for a large sum, his lawyer and a ruthless doctor can say that the accident, minor as it was, confused him and that’s why he fled, and that the serious consequences only appeared later, after several months.”

“That may happen,” agreed the director, “it may happen. You know we have that other patient Merquer; every six hours, on the dot, he has a fit of screaming that lasts ten minutes. You know as well as I do that he is a malingerer. But one day, he will walk into a trap set by the insurance company and he will serve several years for his crime. That’s his problem, not ours. So, report the case as we agreed!”

Dr. Snyder was already at the door and wanted to leave.

“Snyder”—the director called him back—“did you personally examine the man?”

“Just briefly.”

“What did he look like?”

“Tall, about six feet, strong and muscular. Built like a wrestler. I would say, an athlete.”

“I pray to all the gods I have ever heard of,” said the director, “that he wasn’t a Korean War veteran.”

“Why?”

“You know, Snyder, hundreds of veterans who returned from Korea have gone a little bit crazy after serving several years there. The only thing wrong with them is that they received a nervous shock there—and now all kinds of things can happen.”

“For example?”

“They run amok and don’t mind at all raping women and girls and strangling them afterward—”

“You don’t need to worry about that. This guy who escaped may have served his time, but he is not the type to have lasted any amount of time in Korea.”

“I hope you are right, Snyder.”

The young man who had inadvertently caused such a ruckus in this very respectable hospital had only wanted to avoid having the residents mess with his body, examining every mole and drawing blood from every wart, just to have it examined by the apprentices of bacteriology in the labs. It seemed idiotic to him that finally, after weeks, he would probably just find out something he had already known for years. He had an ingrown toenail on his left toe that did not bother him in the least.

All of the above was completely unnecessary and a waste of time, even though he had plenty of time to waste ever since he had realized that he was wasting his youth calculating logarithms and cubic square roots and tangents.

By the way, the young athlete was twenty-eight years old and born in Texas, which was not his fault, of course. His name was Beckford and he was just as innocent of having this name as he was of being Methodist, the only religion that led to salvation. When he received this name and religion, he’d been completely defenseless and you could just as easily have labeled him Buddhist, Confucian, a sun or moon worshipper. At the moment, he would have preferred to be a Muslim.

He had been sent to Korea against his will to fight against Chinese volunteers and others in uniform who had not volunteered. His orders were to kill them with machine guns, hand grenades, and flamethrowers.

Otherwise, there was nothing special to report about Beckford, at least nothing about his personal information.