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He dropped a pill of paper into Carl's hand. His dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt, rested on Carl's sleeve. "There is the matter of my fee." Carl slipped him a wadded banknote... and the doctor faded into the grey twilight, seedy and furtive as an old junky. Carl saw Joselito in a big clean room full of light, with private bath and concrete balcony. And nothing to talk about there in the cold empty room, water hyacinths growing in a yellow bowl and the China blue sky and drifting clouds, fear flickering in and out of his eyes. When he smiled the fear flew away in little pieces of light, lurked enigmatically in the high cool corners of the room. And what could I say feeling death around me, and the little broken images that come before sleep, there in the mind? "They will send me to the new sanitarium tomorrow. Come and visit me. I will be there alone." He coughed and took a codeineeta. "Doctor I understand, that is I have been given to understand, I have read and heard -- not a medical man myself -- don't pretend to be-that the concept of sani- tarium treatment has been more or less supplanted, or at least very definitely supplemented, by chemical therapy. Is this accurate in your opinion? What I mean to say is, Doctor, please tell me in all sincerity, as one human being to another, what is your opinion of chemi- cal versus sanitarium therapy? Are you a partisan?" The doctor's liver sick Indian face was blank as a dealer's. "Completely modern, as you can see," he gestures toward the room with the purple fingers of bad circu- lation. "Bath... water... flowers. The lot." He fin- ished in Cockney English with a triumphant smirk. "I will write for you a letter." "This letter? For the sanitarium?" The doctor was speaking from a land of black rocks and great, iridescent brown lagoons. "The furniture... modern and comfortable. You find it so of course?" Carl could not see the sanitarium owing to a false front of green stucco topped by an intricate neon sign dead and sinister against the sky, waiting for darkness. The sanitarium was evidently built on a great lime- stone promontory, over which flowering trees and vine tendrils broke in waves. |
