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incubation period for your types of bites is rarely less than fifteen days and I guarantee you’ll be in the examining room by then.”
    I asked the Finnish woman to tell Milos what the man had just said. She again left her father in the care of a stranger sitting beside him and spoke to Milos. He shook his head and began repeating something to her.
    â€œHe’s apparently saying the incubation period might be for fifteen days. But you have to take virus injections in the stomach for fourteen days starting from the day you were bitten, which leaves you both with only one day left, he says, and conceivably he about ten minutes fewer than you.”
    I told the admitting man what Milos had said.
    â€œSo you have one day left. You still won’t be waiting here that long. Even the chances of a dog getting rabies in this city are practically nonexistent, so please sit down.”
    We waited another hour. The child with the swollen belly and the man with the cut face and the father of the Finnish lady were taken before us. Then the beebite lady and Milos and I were called. We sat in one of the examining rooms with four other patients, all on stools in a circle, my knees touching the knees of the Finnish man whose daughter, standing behind him and holding his hand, said he’d come in to get a splinter removed that she had dug and dug at but couldn’t even reach. A woman was telling a man with a bad cough of the beautiful mad golden retriever that had bitten her this morning.
    â€œThat’s a coincidence,” I said, “for I was bitten too.”
    â€œSame here,” the beebite lady said.
    â€œBoth of you by golden retrievers?” the woman said.
    â€œNo, a pack of bees.”
    â€œMine was a mutt. But yours couldn’t have been on Broadway in the eighties, was it?”
    â€œConnecticut.”
    â€œI wish I only got bit by a dog in Connecticut,” the beebite lady said, “or at least only by one bee. But hundreds. Right on West Fifty-first in the heart of the restaurant district when I’m out dumping my garbage bag.”
    The woman said she was driving in on the thruway when she saw a car ride off the road right in front of her and turn over a couple of times before it came up on its wheels. “I parked. A few cars got there before me and someone said the driver looked dead but that there was a dog on the seat who wouldn’t let them open the door to help the man. All the windows were shattered. I tried coaxing the dog out. I’ve a way with them and especially retrievers—I’ve two myself. When it wouldn’t come with words I held a strip of beef jerky through the window to get him to sniff it and eventually follow it out of the car with me, but he bit my hand.”
    A nurse asked each of us our medical problems and assigned the beebite lady and the cut man to special rooms. The man with the cough was given a throat swab and a prescription and told to come back tomorrow for the results. A doctor came in, gave the rest of us tetanus shots, washed our wounds and while the nurse prepared the Finnish man for minor surgery, bandaged us up and asked about the dogs that bit us.
    Mina, the woman, said she’d phoned Connecticut just before and was told the retriever was licensed, had had all his shots and was now quarantined, and the doctor said the vets there will know if the dog shows any clinical signs of rabies within seven days. “What about your dogs?” he asked Milos and me.
    â€œIt has no license and probably never had any shots or will ever be found,” I said and he told me if the dog isn’t confined in two days we should return to this hospital and begin taking our fixed virus shots.
    â€œI hear they can be very painful,” I said.
    â€œAnd possible severe reactions to the treatment can happen, so in actual fact we don’t recommend them.”
    â€œBut if we get rabies we can go into convulsions and