his audience well in hand, Franz noted. Dorotea was listening with as rapt delight as Bonita; Cal and Gun were smiling indulgently; even Fernando had caught the spirit and was grinning at the long drug names. For the moment the sidewalk in front of the German Cook’s was a moonlit gypsy encampment, lacking only the dancing flames of an open fire.
“Every night, two hours after supper, Olga would make her druggy-wug rounds. Sometimes she’d have the L.V.N. or an aide carry the tray, sometimes she’d carry it herself.
“‘Sleepy-bye time, Mrs. Binks,’ she’d say. ‘Here’s your pass to dreamland. That’s a good little girl. And now this lovely yellow one. Good evening, Miss Cheeseley, I’ve got your trip to Hawaii for you—blue for the deep blue ocean, red for the sunset skies. And now a sip of the bitter to wash it down—think of the dark salt waves. Hold out your tongue, Mr. Finelli, I’ve something to make you wise. Whoever’d think, Mr. Wong, they could put nine hours and maybe ten of good, good darkness into such a tiny time-capsule, a gelatin spaceship bound for the stars. You smelled us coming, didn’t you, Mr. Auerbach? Grape juice chaser tonight!’ And so on and soon.
“And so Olga Wortly, R.N., our mistress of oblivion, our queen of dreams, kept the locked ward happy,” Saul continued, “and even won high praise—for everyone likes a quiet ward—until one night she went just a little too far and the next morning every last patient had O.D.’ed (overdosed) and was D.O.A. (that’s Dead on Arrival, Bonny) with a beatific smile on his or her face. And Olga Wortly was gone, never to be seen again.
“Somehow they managed to hush it up—I think they blamed it on an epidemic of galloping hepatitis or malignant eczema—and they’re still looking for Olga Wortly.”
“That’s about all there is to it,” he said with a shrug, relaxing, “except”—he held up a finger dramatically, and his voice went low and eerie—“except they say that on nights when there’s a lot of moonlight, just like this now, and it’s sleepy-bye time, and the L.V.N. is about to start out with her tray of night medicines in their cute little paper favor cups, you get a whiff of paraldehyde at the nurses’ station (although they never use that drug there now) and it travels from room to room and from bed to bed, not missing one, that unmistakable whiff does—the Invisible Nurse making her rounds!”
And with more or less appropriate oohs, ahs, and chuckles, they set out for home in a body. Bonita seemed satisfied. Dorotea said extravagantly, “Oh, I am frightened! When I wake up tonight, I think nurse coming I can’t see make me swallow that parry-alley stuff.”
“Par-al-de-hyde,” Fernando said slowly, but with surprising accuracy.
9
THERE WAS SO much stuff in Saul’s room and such a variety of it, apparently unorganized (in this respect it was the antithesis of Gun’s), that you wondered why it wasn’t a mess—until you realized that nothing in it looked thrown away or tossed aside, everything looked loved: the stark and unglamorized photographs of people, mostly elderly (they turned out to be patients at the hospital, Saul pointed out Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Willis); books from Merck’s Manual to Colette, The Family of Man to Henry Miller, Edgar Rice to William S. Burroughs to George Borrow ( The Gypsies in Spain, Wild Wales , and The Zincali ); a copy of Nostig’s The Subliminal Occult (that really startled Franz); a lot of hippie, Indian, and American Indian beadwork; hash-smoking accessories; a beer stein filled with fresh flowers; an eyechart; a map of Asia; and a number of paintings and drawings from childish to mathematical to wild, including a striking acrylic abstraction on black cardboard that teemed with squirming shapes and jewel and insect colors and seemed to reproduce in miniature the room’s beloved confusion.
Saul indicated it, saying, “I did that the one time I took cocaine.
“Every night, two hours after supper, Olga would make her druggy-wug rounds. Sometimes she’d have the L.V.N. or an aide carry the tray, sometimes she’d carry it herself.
“‘Sleepy-bye time, Mrs. Binks,’ she’d say. ‘Here’s your pass to dreamland. That’s a good little girl. And now this lovely yellow one. Good evening, Miss Cheeseley, I’ve got your trip to Hawaii for you—blue for the deep blue ocean, red for the sunset skies. And now a sip of the bitter to wash it down—think of the dark salt waves. Hold out your tongue, Mr. Finelli, I’ve something to make you wise. Whoever’d think, Mr. Wong, they could put nine hours and maybe ten of good, good darkness into such a tiny time-capsule, a gelatin spaceship bound for the stars. You smelled us coming, didn’t you, Mr. Auerbach? Grape juice chaser tonight!’ And so on and soon.
“And so Olga Wortly, R.N., our mistress of oblivion, our queen of dreams, kept the locked ward happy,” Saul continued, “and even won high praise—for everyone likes a quiet ward—until one night she went just a little too far and the next morning every last patient had O.D.’ed (overdosed) and was D.O.A. (that’s Dead on Arrival, Bonny) with a beatific smile on his or her face. And Olga Wortly was gone, never to be seen again.
“Somehow they managed to hush it up—I think they blamed it on an epidemic of galloping hepatitis or malignant eczema—and they’re still looking for Olga Wortly.”
“That’s about all there is to it,” he said with a shrug, relaxing, “except”—he held up a finger dramatically, and his voice went low and eerie—“except they say that on nights when there’s a lot of moonlight, just like this now, and it’s sleepy-bye time, and the L.V.N. is about to start out with her tray of night medicines in their cute little paper favor cups, you get a whiff of paraldehyde at the nurses’ station (although they never use that drug there now) and it travels from room to room and from bed to bed, not missing one, that unmistakable whiff does—the Invisible Nurse making her rounds!”
And with more or less appropriate oohs, ahs, and chuckles, they set out for home in a body. Bonita seemed satisfied. Dorotea said extravagantly, “Oh, I am frightened! When I wake up tonight, I think nurse coming I can’t see make me swallow that parry-alley stuff.”
“Par-al-de-hyde,” Fernando said slowly, but with surprising accuracy.
9
THERE WAS SO much stuff in Saul’s room and such a variety of it, apparently unorganized (in this respect it was the antithesis of Gun’s), that you wondered why it wasn’t a mess—until you realized that nothing in it looked thrown away or tossed aside, everything looked loved: the stark and unglamorized photographs of people, mostly elderly (they turned out to be patients at the hospital, Saul pointed out Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Willis); books from Merck’s Manual to Colette, The Family of Man to Henry Miller, Edgar Rice to William S. Burroughs to George Borrow ( The Gypsies in Spain, Wild Wales , and The Zincali ); a copy of Nostig’s The Subliminal Occult (that really startled Franz); a lot of hippie, Indian, and American Indian beadwork; hash-smoking accessories; a beer stein filled with fresh flowers; an eyechart; a map of Asia; and a number of paintings and drawings from childish to mathematical to wild, including a striking acrylic abstraction on black cardboard that teemed with squirming shapes and jewel and insect colors and seemed to reproduce in miniature the room’s beloved confusion.
Saul indicated it, saying, “I did that the one time I took cocaine.
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