The Tao of Apathy Read Online Free PDF Page B

even
‘we’ll be ready in a minute or two.’ Why don’t they say something
if they could see me standing there?”
    “ Bigger.”
    “ Joe, it’s true. Sometimes I take
a cart and someone says, ‘Why is that cart leaving so early?’ If I
weren’t invisible, they would know why. Because I’m taking it. And
and and in the elevator. Everyone stands in my way and don’t let me
out even though I have this huge cart-”
    “ I hate when you talk like this.
There are no invisibility rays and there is no reason for Seuss
making you conform to the dress code. It is just the way things
are.”
    “ Well, Seuss told me I better be
in all white soon or I’ll be suspended until I am. He also hinted
that people who caused problems could be let go in some major
changes that hospital will be going through.” Bigger stood up
seeing that Joe was finished with his Marlboro.
    Joe raised his eyebrows. “Why? What did he
say?”
    “ He said, ‘we are going to
re-organize this place so that we won’t need degenerates in green
pants.”
    “ Pretty good hint.” Joe opened the
door and they walked against a strong wind the short way to the
entrance near the kitchen.
     
    From her room, Yolanda Carver watched two men
in paper hats step into a steep wind. “I began smoking when I was
just twelve,” she said to Janis, her nurse. “It began as just
something to do while hanging out on street corners to avoid my
father. In college, it made me feel sophisticated to be a young
black woman sitting at parties and flicking ashes into a beer can.”
She continued to stare out the window as Janis filled out her
chart. “I gave it up during my student teaching, but then I began
teaching in my old neighborhood. Even as principal here in Lansing,
I didn’t give it up even though I had to sneak smokes behind the
school with the custodial staff.”
    “ You should close the blinds,”
Janis said.
    “ I thought of smoking as part of
living my life to the fullest. Really, it was just a way of passing
time. I spent my whole life passing time.”
    “ Lay down and get some
rest.”
    “ And now because of smoking, I’m
at the end of my life.”
    Janis took Yolanda by the shoulders and guided
her to bed. “I can get you a sedative so that you can rest.” Janis
knew it was her job to get patients to rest. She was dedicated to
patient’s rest. She was a firm believer that bed rest was
ineffective. And if it was ineffective, it couldn’t hurt. “It will
do you some good.”
    “ I don’t think anything will do me
good. They didn’t get all the cancer in the surgery. I can just
feel it.”
    “ Now, the doctor would know that.
Just take a nap.”
    “ Then why do I have to go through
radiation, if all the cancer is gone?”
    “ To kill any cancer in the nearby
tissues. You were explained all this. I’ll dim your
lights.”
    “ It doesn’t matter, Janis. It has
its hold on me. It has been two weeks and I still feel weak and out
of breath.”
    “ I wished I looked as good as you.
God, you look thirty, but you’re what? Forty-five. I look like the
one with lung cancer. Look how pale I am.” Janis knew it could take
months for a patient to recover from the surgery and she should
expect to feel weak and out of breath, so without another word, she
gave Yolanda something to make her sleep.
    After Janis got Yolanda to bed, so that she
could stare at the ceiling and wish that she wasn’t spending her
precious moments of life staring at the ceiling, Janis went to find
her supervisor. She wanted to go home, turn on a soap opera and
take a nap.
    Janis’ supervisor, Mary Eddy, had been the
head nurse of the Cancer Wing for nine years. At forty-six, Mary
was tall and svelte. Her permed red hair helmeted her red
complexioned face. She liked to wear dark eye make-up as she had as
a teenager and had a young face that showed wrinkles only when she
smiled or laughed. She was one of the unofficial leaders of Saint
Jude’s with almost every invoice from