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don’t have to thank me, I should be thanking you.”
    There was movement at the door. Sten glanced up, expecting the police, but it was only another patient, a boy of ten or so, his head wrapped in gauze and the right side of his face looking as if somebody had taken a cheese grater to it. The woman with him—his mother, his aunt, maybe a big sister—looked likea saleslady from one of the high-end stores, pink dress, heels, eye shadow, but the face she wore was the face of despair.
    Distracted, he watched the woman guide the boy across the floor to the admittance desk and begin making her case to the secretary there, who barely glanced up from her computer screen. The boy was unsteady on his legs, leaning into the woman for support, and Sten could see where her dress had begun to go dark under the arm and across her breast with what might have been perspiration but wasn’t. He couldn’t understand what she was saying, but her voice rose up suddenly to jackhammer the secretary, who kept pointing to the seats in the waiting room with an increasingly emphatic jab. The woman in pink was having none of it. Her voice raged on until there was no other sound in the room. The lights flickered. The air conditioner blew. And then, as if it had all been decided beforehand, a nurse emerged to escort her and the boy into the inner sanctum and the little sounds came creeping back, people coughing, sneezing, conversing in low voices against the pain that had summoned them there. Sten could feel his blood racing. “High drama, huh?” he said.
    Oscar, who’d been watching the boy too, turned back to him. “Bicycle,” he said. “Or motorbike. Bet anything.” His eyes flicked to the doorway behind the desk and back again. “And a concussion on top of it.”
    Sten shifted in the chair, which had begun to dig into his backside. He wanted to stand and stretch, but instead he just sat there, bearing it. People crowded the room, faces everywhere. Somewhere a machine was whirring. Babies cried. Somebody’s phone rang. “So what now?” he said, shifting again. “I mean, what are the police going to do—I’m not in trouble, am I?”
    “You? They ought to give you a medal.”
    “Right, sure. But do you know anything about the laws down here?”
    The thin stripe of mustache quivered and it took him amoment to realize Oscar was working up a grin, as if all this was funny, as if now, sitting here exiled in this little chamber of horrors, the real fun was about to begin. “They ought to give you a medal,” he repeated.
    An hour crept by. Nothing happened. More people came dragging through the double doors and they brought more squalling babies with them, more bandages, more broken bones and abrasions, more grief, but the police never showed. Oscar, depleted of small talk, leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. Carolee kept saying, “This is ridiculous,” and Sten kept agreeing with her. Beyond the windows, the sun stood high still, though it was past five now, cocktail hour, and he couldn’t help thinking about what they were missing aboard ship, the outward-spooling loop of activities that lassoed every moment, as if to sit on deck and look out to sea would crush you with boredom. He didn’t need activities. He needed rest. He needed a drink to wash the bad taste out of his mouth. The Martini Bar was all ice, the bartop itself, frozen and planed smooth, and the air-conditioning was like the breath of a deep cave in the hills back home in Mendocino.
    At some point, he must have closed his eyes too. He’d been thinking about the first time he and Carolee had come south of the border, a summer vacation when they were in their twenties, backpacking through Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. Carolee had stepped on a sea urchin in one of the tidal pools and the spine had broken off in her heel, which became instantly infected, and so they’d had to go to a clinic like this one, or was it a hospital? That was in Mexico, in the