Day One
Within reach of Bed SOS in Waters Memorial Hospital is a heavy-cloth brown bag from a beloved port of call. Marked New York City STRAND 8 Miles of Books, its contents are consulted as needed. She has also brought a framed poster of Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) and has a panoramic view of MDs of every specialty (a conference is in town) as they make side bets over their skills with golf clubs. Shots are botched. SOS’s IV drip, which she calls her hour glass, has a tendency to run dry, causing the attending’s surrogate, a plastic cabinet of vital signs affixed to her blood stream and a metal pole, to emit SOS signals and distress the patient, reawakened to consciousness of pain. Tears roll after an RN announces that the dosage of opioids has been reduced. Chair H asks about future pain management.
We don’t use painkillers to treat motility disorders.
The hour glass is refilled. H’s request for the titles of SOS’s books to be entered in her chart is met with incredulity.
Framed photo on SOS’s nightstand: a swim with Mom.
On the nightstand are Alice in Wonderland and The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, with homemade bookmarks inserted at The Queen’s Croquet Ground and The Premature Burial.
Bed SOS: Hold my hand and say something.
Chair H: I see a flamingo urging you to use your attending physician as a club to strike white balls toward a rabbit hole. The balls, upon closer inspection, are crumpled drug prescriptions. A queen of hearts, made furious by the MD’s reluctance to accept the treatment prescribed for him, screams for her troops.
Bed SOS: «Off with his head!»
Chair H: The executioner performs the grim but necessary surgery, a white rabbit takes practice swings with the late white coat’s clubs, gardeners turn green patches of grass into brown patches of grass and the queen’s husband plays bridge with a Cheshire cat. Before you can gather up the prescriptions, the flamingo prods and vocalizes you away, the wind scatters the prescriptions, the queen’s troops dig a grave and the executioner lowers the excised head into the earth.
Day Two
On the nightstand is Madness in Drama (ed. James Redmond), with a homemade bookmark inserted at Representing mad contradictoriness in Dr. Charcot’s Hysteria Shows by Dianne Hunter.
During the golden hours when suffering has been stanched, SOS goes walkabout with her IV and cabinet. A scarf, beret or other personal article of clothing distracts from the pale-blue standard-issue gown. Today she detours into forbidden territory, the operating theater. Her reflections on/in its steely surfaces usher in another disturbing cast of characters.
Day Three
Bed SOS closes À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) after a new neighbor arrives, Bed AL. An instant chemistry bonds her with Aunt Léonie, who extends an invitation to her «drawing room» (AL’s characterization of her bedside), where wordplay determines social standing. She and Madame’s nephew, Marcel, a salon fixture, have a thing or two to say about childhood. Wearing a lab coat, stethoscope and a frown for everybody in scrubs, Chair H is not the life of the party.
Day Four
Before being discharged, Bed SOS relives with Chair H their 2008 experience of the Wooster Group’s Hamlet. With the urgency of surgeons demanding a scalpel, they consult three «scripts» from the Strand stash: a book (Shakespeare’s Hamlet), a DVD (2013 Wooster Group Hamlet), their notes about all four texts (Burton’s 1964 Hamlet counts). An excerpt from the notes:
During Act V, Scene II soliloquy ending with «…leave betimes. Let be.» video turns from b/w to color as if Burton from the past is trying, w/o success, to reach/help Scott. Color signifies life, a portal to life. Video in color also is «noise» in color.
While signing release papers, they are reminded for the last time (until the next time).
We don’t use painkillers to treat motility disorders.
outside consultants
Nicolas Abraham, Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis (1988, trans. 1995)
Barbara Acklin, Am I the Same Girl? (1968)
Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea (1988, trans. 1994)
Duran Duran, Come Undone (1993)
Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa (1819)
Brian Goldstone, The Pain Refugees, Harper’s, April 2018
Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, Água de Beber (1963)
Ariel Levy, World Without Pain, The New Yorker, Jan 13, 2020
The Polyphony (thepolyphony.org)
Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (2001)
David Foster Wallace, The Soul is Not a Smithy (2004)
Allen S. Weiss, Algebra is Drunkenness: Melvin Way’s poetics of the ad infinitum, Cabinet, Fall 2002
shoutouts to past beacons in the night
Gary de la Peña, MD †
Elisabeth R. Evans, NP
William J. Sandborn, MD