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electric sockets, or the steroid tablets he had to take now—things that happened every day and never made sense, never would, never.
    Dumb nigger, Ab thought, feeling friendlier in proportion to Chapel’s perplexity. He wished he could have kept him arguing a while longer. There was still religion, psychosis, teaching, lots of possibilities. Ab had arguments to prove that even these jobs, which looked so mental and abstract on the surface, were actually all forms of kinetic energy.
    Kinetic energy: once you understood the meaning of kinetic energy all kinds of other things started becoming clear.
    “You should read the book,” Ab insisted.
    “Mm,” Chapel said.
    “He explains it in more detail.” Ab hadn’t read the entire book himself, only parts of the condensation, but he’d gotten the gist of it.
    But Chapel had no time for books. Chapel, Chapel pointed out, was not one of your intellectuals.
    Was Ab? Intellectual? He had to think about that one for a while. It was like wearing some fruity color transparency and seeing himself in a changing booth mirror, knowing he would never buy it, not daring even to walk out on the sales floor, but enjoying the way it fitted him anyhow: an intellectual. Yes, possibly in some other reincarnation Ab had been an intellectual, but it was a goofy idea all the same.
    Right on the button, at 1:02, they rang down from ‘A’ Surgery. A body.
    He took down the name in the logbook. He’d neglected to start a new page and the messenger hadn’t come by yet for yesterday’s, so he entered Time of Death as 11:58 and printed the name in neat block letters: NEWMAN, BOBBI.
    “When can you get her?” asked the nurse, for whom a body still possessed sex.
    “I’m there already,” Ab promised.
    He wondered what age it would be. “Bobbi” was an older type name but there were always exceptions.
    He booted Chapel out, locked up, and set off with the cart to ‘A’ Surgery. At the bend of the corridor, right before the ramp, he told the new kid at the desk to take his calls. The kid wiggled his skimpy ass and made some dumb joke. Ab laughed. He was feeling in top shape, and it was going to be a good night. He could tell.

    Chapel was the only one on and Mrs. Steinberg, who was in charge tonight, though not actually his boss, said, “Chapel, ‘B’ Recovery,” and handed him the slip.
    “And move,” she added off-handedly, as another woman might have said, “God bless you,” or “Take care.”
    Chapel, however, had one speed. Difficulties didn’t slow him down; anxieties made him go no faster. If somewhere there were cameras perpetually trained on him, viewers who studied his slightest actions, then Chapel would give them nothing to interpret. Loaded or empty, he wheeled his cart along the corridors at the same pace he took walking home after work to his hotel on 65th. Regular? As a clock.
    Outside ‘M’ Ward, on 4, by the elevators, a blond young man was pressing a urinal against himself, trying to make himself piss by groaning at his steel pot. His robe hung open, and Chapel noticed that his pubic hair had been shaved off. That usually meant hemorrhoids.
    “How’s it going?” Chapel asked. His interest in the patients’ stories was quite sincere, especially those in Surgery or ENT wards.
    The blond young man made an anguished face and asked Chapel if he had any money.
    “Sorry.”
    “Or a cigarette?”
    “I don’t smoke. And it’s against the rules, you know.”
    The young man rocked from one leg to the other, coddling his pain and humiliation, trying to blot out every other sensation in order to go the whole way. Only the older patients tried, for a while at least, to hide their pain. The young ones gloried in it from the moment they gave their first samples to the aide in Admissions.
    While the substitute in ‘B’ Recovery completed the transfer forms Chapel went over to the other occupied unit. It held, still unconscious, the boy he’d taken up earlier from