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stopped. I sat alone at the bar and sipped from the small eight-ounce bottles of Little Kings, intent only on the flavor and the intense coldness and the burn and rush of the cigarettes and of Jerry or his fat wife, Estelle, reading the morning paper behind the bar, waiting for someone to need something and the smoothness of the wood and the darkness and quiet and the low pleasant stench of that old place.
    The workday sunlight and empty house I woke into later on the weekdays I didn’t have early classes felt like a place I’d only come to visit yet I found some peace there. I began to walk through the tight neighborhoods in the afternoons, then to run—I’d once been a halfback and a sprinter; now I came to crave what opened in me only after a couple of miles. When you start, the legs ache and the chest burns from the cigarettes and the chilled air, but soon the muscles relax into that state of spring-like tension and the chest opens and deepens and finally the mind stops registering pain and begins to take in the world in a way that you otherwise feel only when you are stoned or in a city you’ve never seen before, when the sky is clear and hard and every detail, the faces of women and the shapes of buildings and the sounds of language and traffic, is exotic and beautiful and unspeakably fresh.
    My nights off felt endless. I went out sometimes on the weekends with other students or a few times with hospital people, I studied and read novels, I watched television until I couldn’t stand it, I lifted the basement weights Brigman had long ago stopped using. Sometimes I sat at the window in my bedroom and peered through the telescope Sandy bought me when I turned twelve (back when my scientific curiosities went beyond the human body to encompass the heavens) into the houses on the next street or into the three-story apartment houses that rose beyond them. I might sit for more than an hour waiting for that flash. I never saw anything of real consequence or carnal value but it didn’t require that; a glimpse was all it took, a man stepping to the window to lower the blinds before getting into bed with his wife, a high school girl bathing open-mouthed in the azure cast of her television, a woman sitting under a desk lamp chewing her pencil, turning it in her mouth. I closed my eyes then and grew harder and hummed to myself until I came in silent unsatisfying waves.

    One night in the Med-Surg ICU I couldn’t find a scheduled draw. It was a bed number I’d never seen in the main open ward where the critical lay separated from each other by green drapes. I found it finally—an isolation cubicle in the back, a room barely big enough to maneuver in. It was an old old woman, older than people I knew who’d died of old age years before. The birth date on the work order, 7/23/78, had confused me, since Peds had its own ICU on a different floor. The patient was a hundred.
    She lay still, her dark skin glazed and creased, lips drawn back, eyes closed. I tied a tourniquet on her upper arm and felt at the antecubital. It was warm but nothing came up, no hint of venous turgidity. I touched her hand and then jerked away as if its coldness had burned me. I saw then that she was too still. A handwritten note taped over the bed said NC in red letters—No Code. I felt up along her arm and found the line of demarcation midway between her wrist and elbow, the point to which the heat of life had receded.
    A nurse stepped in. She wore green scrubs and over them a blue cotton smock. A red stethoscope hung around her neck. Something in her face went into me and I did not speak, neither of us spoke for a long moment. Then she looked at the woman and back at me and said, “Is she—?”
    I nodded.
    “I am so sorry,” she said. She came over and rested her palm on the cooling forehead and brushed back the sparse white hair. Against it her hand with its high blue veins looked beautifully strong and vital. “Poor old dear,” she said. “Are