The Tenuous Line of Sanity by Frank Siegrist - HTML preview

In the meantime the nurse had finished with Mr. Zbinden. She came over, let Burri onto his bed where he immediately tore off his jacket himself and threw it on the floor, staring at Jack triumphantly.

That's how he was used to doing it - first sit on the bed and only then take off the jacket. Oh well, if Jack had known that...

The next morning Burri greeted Jack very excitedly. Early in the morning, Burri was always wide awake while Jack was still half-asleep.

“You! You! Hey you!” And when Jack at last looked over at him, he exclaimed: “Today is the fifteenth!”

“Is that your Birthday?” asked Jack tiredly.

“Eh?” said Burri, suddenly confused.

“I just wondered why it's important that it's the fifteenth...” said Jack.

“Yeah, yeah, birthday...” mumbled Burri. Then he added: “How would I know that!” And he shook his head at Jack contemptuously. And with that his conversation with Jack was over for the day.

But the day after Burri exclaimed with the same sprightliness that it was the sixteenth: “Hey you! You over there! Today is the sixteenth! Tuesday the sixteenth!” Every person entering the room was rounded upon in the same way: “The sixteenth! It's the sixteenth today!” It was true, but nobody was all that interested. Jack seemed to be the only one who wondered what Burri actually meant by it.

At midday, Burri was eating in the common room next to a window, where his wheelchair had been pushed. Jack had helped to bring the food-trays to all the patients. Now he had to wait for them to eat so that he could clear them up again. At first he stood around a bit, feeling lost, then he walked over to the common room, sat down in an armchair there and looked out of the window next to which Burri was sitting in his wheelchair and eating. He hoped the chewing-gum-chewing head-nurse wouldn't suddenly pop up again and ask him if he had nothing better to do or what.

Burri made a movement with his hand as if he were trying to shoo away a fly. He held up his index and made the movement again and again in Jack's direction.

Jack was looking out the window and trying not to pay any attention to Burri, but on the edge of his visual field he couldn't help seeing the wizened moon-face, looking childish and old at the same time, with the dead-serious expression and the watery eyes that just wouldn't let go of him, and the nasty index that kept flicking at him to shoo him away...

In the end Jack stood up and went away, leaving Burri – who so obviously didn't want him around – to his own devices.

But the next morning, Jack didn't wait for Burri to taunt him again but rather spoke to him first:

“Hey, Burri!” he said, “It's the seventeenth! Today it's the seventeenth! Wednesday the seventeenth!”
This seemed to throw Burri off the loop. He didn't know what to say.

“Seventeenth... yeah, yeah...” he mumbled in a gravelly voice. And it seemed he was going to get in a bad, uncooperative mood.
But then he suddenly turned towards Jack and exclaimed excitedly: “Tomorrow is the eighteenth! The eighteenth! The eighteenth, tomorrow!”

“Yes,” said Jack, as though he were sharing a secret with Burri, “Thursday the eighteenth!”

At midday Burri was once again sitting in the common room, and when Jack came to keep him company, he looked up in a friendly way and didn't try to dismiss him this time.

“Good,” he said happily, rubbing his tummy, “good the meal! Good, good!”

“You like it, don't you?” said Jack.

“I like it..., yeah, yeah...” said Burri, trailing off, obviously not sure how to continue the conversation. He kept silent for a while, munching his food.

Then he looked up again and said: “You, you....”

Jack turned towards him politely.

“You, you, you... you, you... you..?” At last he got it out: “When do you... do you... do you..? do you have a holiday?”
“On Sunday and Monday.”

“Tomorrow you work?”

“Yes,” said Jack, “I'm working tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that too, and then I have a holiday!”

“Eh,” said Burri, twisting his mouth disapprovingly, “not good! Not good so much work! I want you lots of holidays!”

It seemed Burri was wishing Jack lots of holidays.

It was the first time Burri showed Jack any sympathy. Maybe it was even the first time he showed some personal interest in one of the orderlies.

“Bern?” he asked. “You go to Bern when you on holiday?”

“Yes, on Sunday I'm going to Bern,” said Jack.

“On Sunday?”

“Yes, on Sunday.”

“I never been in Bern,” said Burri. “Own fault, own fault! Leg broken!” And then Burri told his usual story again about how he was an idiot to break his leg. “Not should have done, falling over! One doesn't just fall over! One goes to work! Idiot! Idiot! Why does he fall over? His own fault, own fault!”

“No,” Jack assured him, “you were just unlucky. It can happen to anybody. Just bad luck!”

“Eh... bad luck! Yeah, yeah, own fault, own fault!” mumbled Burri and turned silent again.

The next day Burri told Jack: “On Sunday! On Sunday you holiday!”

And on Saturday he said: “Tomorrow! Tomorrow you holiday!” Then he added: “Bern, to Bern!”

When Jack was back from his two days off, a visitor came by to see Burri, and Burri started making signs with his finger again, as if he tried to send away the newcomer. Jack couldn't help feeling somewhat proud that he himself was one of the chosen ones in Burri's world nowadays - one of those Burri didn’t send away!

But the newcomer didn't understand these signs and started talking to Burri most jovially. All Burri had to say was: “Eeeeeeeeeeh!...”

Jack thought to himself that poor Burri was quite powerless. Sure, there was usually something going on around him, because people around him felt they had to provide for his entertainment. But he never got the satisfaction of having started anything himself. His life was like an endless film – however artistic, exciting and interesting a film may be, at some point you're just satiated and need something else than films. Something you can do yourself, maybe? But Burri could never do anything by himself! How frustrating that must be!

Even Burris aggressiveness, which he meant dead-seriously, wasn't taken seriously. People didn't pay his angry finger any attention and just went on talking to him joyfully as if he were in the best of moods too. Nobody cared about his real mood. And it was only natural not to hold his aggressiveness against him (and thus not even to react to it), since he was mentally challenged and his negative feelings weren't his own fault...

Jack, on the other hand, shocked all the ever-blandly-joyful nurses by reacting angrily to Burris outbursts, as if he wanted to take them seriously – which of course was totally absurd considering that Burri was a mentally challenged, weak old man, not a dynamic young man like Jack himself!

But then something interesting happened – Burri didn't react to Jack's anger by becoming yet more aggressive. On the contrary, he suddenly became calmer again. His goal had obviously been to make Jack angry, and since he had reached that goal, he became conciliatory again.

Whatever Jack had done to make Burri angry, Burri's goal was to make Jack angry in return. Nobody likes to get angry. If you manage to make someone angry, you can be sure he got the message that he should change his behaviour. Whatever he did that you didn't like, he won't do it again, because if it means exchanging angriness (which definitely isn't pleasant), then he'd rather avoid it in the future. That's the whole point of anger in the first place. That's how anger works in primitive animals, as well as in more highly evolved animals and in humans too. It works quite the same way whether you're mentally challenged or not. Even a mentally challenged person deserves the feeling of triumph that you get when you were able to make someone angry who had made you angry first (and thus to show that person what he shouldn’t do to you anymore)!

And that feeling of triumph was exactly what Jack gave Burri by getting angry at Burri's outbursts. It was just very wrong (and very shocking) in the nurses' eyes...

The nurses always stayed blandly joyful so as not to encourage Burris mental illness. But by not engaging with him properly and not taking him seriously, they risked making his outbursts ever worse… And indeed, Burri was, in general, a very angry person. But when he occasionally wasn't in an angry mood he could be quite a pleasant chatter. What he said was never exceptionally interesting as such, of course – it was never much deeper than the usual eternal remarks about the beautiful flowers, the nice weather and the good food. But there was still something new from time to time, and it always came straight from his heart. It wasn't terribly interesting as such that Jack had a day off on Sunday. And if Burry kept reminding him of it every day (Hey you! On Sunday you holiday!), that wasn't so much because Jack would have forgotten it otherwise, but rather to express sympathy. It was Burri's way of showing sympathy. The message in its primary sense had no informative value at all, but it expressed the positive feelings Burri now held for Jack. It was a way of sharing those positive feelings.

Every day every nurse was always made to admire the beautiful flowers. Every day every nurse always answered: “Yes, very nice.” Then she went on to the next patient, but when she came back Burri's way, she had to admire the beautiful flowers yet again, up to ten times a day.

But when Jack was told about the beautiful flowers, he didn't just leave it at that. Instead, he showed Burri some other flowers that were beautiful too (after all, Jack was still quite lost on this ward and always happy for a chance to chat a bit and not feel totally useless). And after the discussion about the flowers, he dutifully listened to the list of all his days off and confirmed that it was correct, and then he further confirmed that he would spend them in Bern, not in Thun. And then Burri explained why he himself couldn't go to Bern or Thun (because of his leg and how stupid he had been to break it and how it was all his own fault). Bern is far away, you have to take the bus, or a car. Burri liked cars, but he couldn't drive because of his broken leg. Own fault! Own fault!

Of course, whatever Burri said, it was still always pretty much the same, with the same standard sentences coming up again and again. But he was capable of making new mental connections if you stimulated him a bit. And variations on old themes can be combined in new ways too, so that the conversation could still be new on some level, even if it consisted of old patterns.

Talking with Burri wasn't about exchanging precise pieces of information, but rather about sharing some kind of togetherness, some kind of mutual sympathy. Chimpanzees spending hours grooming each other don't catch that many real fleas either, because deep down it's not about the fleas – it's about sharing the moment, enjoying each other's company.

Some kinds of behaviour are stereotypical, meaning they are always the same, regardless of the situation. They aren't adapted to a particular situation. They just repeat themselves for no reason whatsoever. People may display stereotypical behaviour because they are unable to adapt to a new situation. But people may also display stereotypical behaviour because the situation itself just doesn't call for anything else. If the environment is simply too boring, not calling for anything at all – and since we still have an urge to do something with our time – we end up displaying stereotypical behaviour, just like bored animals in a zoo pacing their enclosures endlessly because they have nothing better to do.

Stereotypical behaviour isn't always necessarily bad – brushing your teeth is rather stereotypical, because you always do it pretty much the same way, several times a day. But at some point after starting to brush your teeth, you stop again, simply because your teeth have become clean enough.

But what if those teeth just wouldn't ever get clean enough? Would we go on brushing them all day long? Maybe we would get stuck in the act of brushing them and brush them all day long. Surely that would be terribly boring, but what can you do if the desired result (clean teeth) just doesn't ever materialize, while you can't think of any other way to reach that desired result?

It was probably the same for Burri when he kept repeating all day long that the flowers were nice. Surely he himself eventually got bored of pointing out the nice flowers, but what else could he say to engage a conversation?

If you're stuck at the bottom of a well and you're calling for help, surely that gets terribly boring too, but what else can you do if nobody comes to help? All you can do is to go on calling - hoping that someone will still eventually hear you - however boring that gets!

And that's what Burri was doing with his « nice flowers » too. Again and again and again. What else could he do if nobody ever listened?

Well, the nurses did hear him on occasion, and then they just answered: “Yes, very nice.” And with that they felt their duty was done. If Burri so much likes to point out the nice flowers, we will allow him this pleasure, won't we?

Except that Burri himself probably hated pointing out the nice flowers a hundred times a day! He just didn't have any idea what else to say!

Well, Jack was different. He wasn't much good as an orderly, he knew that well enough. But he wouldn't just answer “yes, very nice” either. On the contrary, he would forget all about his duties, all about the tasks and the hospital-schedule (which wasn't written anywhere, but which he should still somehow have learned by now), but rather waste time chatting with Burri! And Burri loved it!

And that wasn't all. Jack let himself get carried away emotionally too. Occasionally he allowed himself to feel offended by Burri and to get angry with him. So absurd! - didn't he know that Burri was mentally challenged and thus deserved special consideration?

But for Jack, systematically ignoring someone and not engaging with him didn't count as “special consideration”, on the contrary. Jack felt Burri deserved to be treated like a human being, and that includes being taken seriously enough that others could even sometimes get angry with you when the situation warranted it.

Jack wasn't distant with Burri like the real nurses were. He was rather like a patient himself, treating all other patients as equals. No wonder the nurses had started mothering him around in quite an embarrassing way! It didn't help Jack adjust to his job and feel like their colleague.

But Burri didn’t notice any of that. For him, all those orderlies and nurses dressed in white were all equal. They were all the same and they were also the only human beings he ever saw since he didn’t really have a chance to interact with anyone else. For Burri, the white clothes didn’t represent a profession that you could execute more or less well. For him, the white clothes simply meant you were a human being with whom he could possibly interact. Burri was prepared to talk to anyone who appeared in white clothes, and then to like that person or not. Actually, Burri was very tolerant - there were people he liked and people he disliked, but there weren’t any he expected to be different from how they were or whom he despised for not fulfilling a particular role. He didn’t expect anybody to be any particular way and accepted everybody for what they were, without judging. All he allowed himself was to like people or not, but never to judge them.

Jack soon felt quite at ease with Burri. In any case he was much more at ease with him than with the nurses who were somehow never satisfied with him. Jack learned to make himself likeable to Burri and even to like him in return. In the meantime his relationship with the nurses just got worse. How was this possible?

The relationship with a person like Burri can only grow, not deteriorate. It doesn’t start with preconceptions, which means he doesn’t expect anything in particular from you and thus can’t be disappointed. Burri took you as he saw you, and then he liked you or not. And if you paid attention to him and talked to him, he would like you more and the relationship would grow. But it couldn’t deteriorate, because there were no false preconceptions (since there weren’t any preconceptions at all).

In order to have preconceptions, you must first have a concept of what is normal. Once you know what’s normal, that’s what you expect, and that’s where expectations come from. But if you don’t know what’s normal, you don’t expect anything and you just take things, or people, for what they are.

For something to be normal, it has to meet a standard. And standards only exist within societies that set them up. But Burri wasn’t able to perceive society. All he perceived was individuals. And he wasn’t able to infer a society from a collection of individuals. Burri only saw Jack as a human being, not as a representative of anything bigger. If this human turned out to be a bit of a clumsy dreamer, then you might like that or not, but in any case it was just as normal as anything else. Burri didn’t expect anything. This made him accepting in a way nobody else was.

The nurses of course weren’t accepting at all. They knew Jack was a university student and expected him to behave like one, namely like a go-getter who would always see whatever needed to be done straight away. That he would so much not rise to this expectation made them angry, as if he had made a promise and wasn’t delivering on it, or as if he didn’t take them and their jobs seriously enough to be his usual go-getter self (which they apparently took for granted). In other words - they felt he was making fun of them!

Jack just didn’t fit into the norm, even though he would have loved to fit in and not to disappoint everybody all the time! Here in this hospital he had done things he had never done before, like touching naked bodies and cleaning and washing them. Such things he had never even done in his worst nightmares before! It was a big thing for him, and in some sense he was even a bit proud of himself that he could do it without coming to psychological harm! Overcoming his natural aversion to this had cost him quite an effort! An effort nobody was taking into account, even though it had been almost as great an effort as it would have been to rape a girl, stab her to death with a screwdriver and then burry her somewhere in the forest… And wasn’t it good he hadn’t been able to do that in the end? Didn’t that make him a better person? So why was he expected to do something almost as hard as though it were nothing?

What they all had to say about Jack was that he just didn’t ever take the initiative, never saw on his own what needed to be done, always waiting for someone to tell him.

« Well, » thought Jack to himself darkly, « if I ever took the initiative, and if I really did what I feel like doing deep down, nobody would fucking survive that! »

Indeed, there were many dark feelings slithering around deep inside Jack’s soul, biding their time, waiting for their chance to express themselves. People claiming Jack should just let himself go and be more open, they didn’t know what they were fucking talking about!

There was a dark monster lurking inside Jack, and he knew there was such a monster inside Burri too. Burri was always treated as the sick and silly one, and he could say whatever he liked without shocking anyone, because whatever he said wasn’t of any consequence to anybody anyway. People didn’t even really listen to him. But to someone who knew how to listen (like Jack) it was clear what there was in there - pure human monstrousness that expressed itself freely like it could never have expressed itself in Jack (unless Jack wanted to be locked up in jail or in an asylum, of course).

That was because Burri was immune to all those influences that society exerts on your feelings via your intellect. That was because Burri didn’t have much of an intellect in the first place…

Jack thought to himself that someone like Burri should be used in therapy. Not to « heal » Burri (because apart from the open wound on his leg he wasn’t even sick at all), but rather to heal others by forcing them to deal with him and his ruthless bluntness and honesty! It would force them to face unsayable things and come to grips with those unsayable things. Unsayable things of the kind that everybody carries hidden somewhere within themselves.

Everybody carries such things in themselves, not just Burri, thought Jack. The only difference was that Burri didn’t hide those things like other people did - unlike « normal » people, Burri expressed his anger and foul moods freely!

Actually, Burri was like a caricature of a human - he displayed human tendencies bloated beyond their natural size because some of the fine control mechanisms that are active in more « normal » humans were missing in his case. By observing him you could study all those tendencies that are usually very hard to see in their « pure » state in normal humans because they are always disrupted and distorted by those finer control mechanisms that normal humans possess.
Burri was the kind of man who would scare small children - he looked grownup, his voice was deep and grumpy, and he shamelessly burst out with exclamations like someone who is allowed to say whatever he likes, in other words like someone in a position of authority! Children with a good upbringing have learned to see adults almost as a godly reference to which one has to submit unresistingly. But when such children meet an adult like Burri whose expletives can be absolutely perplexing and even senseless, they get utterly bewildered and in the end even scared.
Jack thought to himself that every child should learn to come to grips with an adult like Burri. Most adults are not as unrestrained and crude as Burri, but they still aren’t god-like references either (as children with a good upbringing are led to believe). By dealing with people like Burri (as representatives of one extreme of adultness) children would learn to be less accepting and naive even towards less Burri-like but still far from infallible « normal » adults.

For one thing, they wouldn’t fall prey to sexual predators quite so easily anymore, because they would have learned long ago (through interactions with Burri-like characters) that adults can want and do things for sinister reasons of their own that have nothing to do with wanting « only what’s best for you » as when they force you to eat broccoli…

A child who knows a Burri-like kind of person would never swallow the idea that adults are god-like references.

So Burri-like characters have their uses, mused Jack, and they shouldn’t be locked up in asylums - they should hang around everywhere for everybody to interact with!

The relationship between Jack and Burri evolved so much that Burri even sometimes said « thank you »! When Burri said such a thing, it was never just politeness, because politeness is a social construct far beyond the intellectual capacity of Burri to grasp. When Burri said « thank you », then you knew it was heartfelt, because it simply couldn’t be anything else!

When someone was nice to Burri, he always believed it was out of sympathy. That was his naivety. But when he himself was nice to you, then you could be sure it was really out of sympathy! That was his trueness of heart!
Yes, Jack learned a lot during his practical training at the hospital of Riggisberg. He learned things he would never have dreamed of earlier. But, interestingly, this practical experience he got was never acknowledged or valued by anyone else apart from himself. Yes, he was supposed to get practical experience, but obviously not of the kind he really got however much he valued it himself!

For this reason Jack still sometimes felt he should have raped little Theresa, stabbed her to death and buried her in that fateful night as had been his original plan. No kind of experience would be needed anymore since he would already have experienced the ultimate one, namely cold-blooded murder, and he would be spared all the humiliation of not being able to rise up to the expectations piled onto him in Riggisberg, and he would feel better!

 

Mr. Uhler was a fat man who had suffered a stroke. That was a long time ago already, and since then he had lived in the hospital (presumably because no place in a nursing home had yet been found for him), drove around the corridors in his wheelchair, watched TV and let himself be attended to.

He was paralyzed on one side of his body and he also had problems articulating, which made him difficult to understand. He weighed almost a hundred kilos, and this made him problematic for the nurses to lift into bed or onto the toilet or wherever else he needed to go. He had a bushy, greying beard. Mentally he was still completely sane, and he very much enjoyed chatting and joking with the young nurses who didn’t at all mind it either since it was much more fun like this than if he had been a vegetable.

Jack didn’t mind fat people. He even had a theory about them:

Small children are helplessly dependent on their parents. When the parents leave, the only thing small children can do is to yell loudly to call them back. Nothing else lies within their power. But thankfully it mostly works and forces the parents to take their children with them rather than just to forget them somewhere. Luckily children are smaller than their parents, so they can be carried when necessary. As children become bigger, they also become more independent, until they are capable of walking by themselves.

Children don’t like their surroundings to change too abruptly and too often. While they are slowly developing into adults, there are already so many changes happening within themselves that the world around them should at least stay more or less stable. So children don’t like being moved about too much by their parents (even though they like it even less to be forgotten and left behind, of course).

And that’s exactly the problem, because on one hand they don’t like being moved around too much, but on the other hand they couldn’t bear being left behind either. So they can’t actively fight against being moved around, since being left behind is not an option either.

The solution is passive resistance - you nicely let yourself be carried around by your parents, but you just grow heavy enough to discourage them from moving you around too much.

The unconscious wish to grow unwieldy and heavy, in other words fat, is surely typical of infantile people who still feel, even as adults, that they get pushed around too much and that their own desires don’t carry enough weight.

Who knows if Mr. Uhler was overweight because of such an unconscious wish to weigh in more too? After all, half his body was paralyzed and so he was in need of care and dependent on others moving him around, but then again he didn’t want to be moved about TOO much either. In particular, he surely didn’t want to leave the hospital where he was very happy with all those young nurses to joke and laugh with.

Or maybe he just enjoyed his food too much and didn’t work out enough (which is admittedly difficult when only half of your body is capable of working out). That too can explain how someone grows fat, even if it’s a less elegant explanation…

Every morning Mr. Uhler woke up in a good mood, and you would find him sitting on his mattress behind the net that was there to stop him from falling out of bed, the bedsheets all entangled, his slipped singlet exposing his huge, white belly pearly with sweat. When Mr. Uhler tossed and turned during his sleep, being paralyzed on one side didn’t help him move smoothly, so a melee was inevitable.

Sitting there, all chubby and smiley and peering out at the world over the edge of the net, the white sheets messed up all around him, Mr. Uhler looked decidedly child-like, like a happy baby sitting in the bathtub with his plastic ducks in the midst of mountains of foam…

Mr. Uhler wore glasses. The two sides of the glasses were different - the left side was a clear, magnifying lens enlarging Mr. Uhler’s left eye, which could make his stare look almost scary at times, and the other side looked frosted so you couldn’t see Mr. Uhler’s right eye at all. Up close you could tell the right lens was just as clear as the left one, but it was vertically furrowed. Jack supposed this was for a bad case of astigmatism and that the lens was furrowed because else it would have needed to be impractically thick, but he couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that he didn’t like Mr. Uhler’s one-eyed stare - one huge, lively eye on one side and nothing but frosted glass on the other behind which you could guess something must be hidden, but without knowing what it might be… It was kind of disquieting!
Small children would have been afraid of Mr. Uhler and his one-eyed stare (just as they would have been afraid of Burri too). Jack wasn’t afraid because he knew Mr. Uhler was in reality nothing but a klutz owing to his one-sided paralysis. Knowing this allowed him to overcome the little fright he got whenever Mr. Uhler turned his one-eyed stare on him, and in his further intercourse with Mr. Uhler, he always tried to compensate for the initial uncomfortable feeling he had gotten by taking revenge with somewhat negative and sometimes even slightly nasty remarks. Mr. Uhler realized soon enough that Jack wasn’t a hundred percent well-disposed towards him and so he didn’t reciprocate with too much affection either.

 

The bell rang and the lamp above room number 6 lit up. Jack took charge of the case. Mr. Uhler had rung the bell - he needed to urinate.

This happened on one of Jack’s first few days and Jack wasn’t used to the ever-present smell of urine yet. He gave Mr. Uhler the urine bottle (an obscenely shaped plastic bottle with a thick neck, which was used as a chamber pot for less mobile patients) and hoped this would solve the problem. With some luck he could just come and pick up the full bottle later on and empty it in the toilet without having to look at it too much. But no such luck - Uhler wanted to stand up for pissing. Jack grasped him under the arm and helped him up onto his good leg. Then he needed to pull down his trousers.

« Hold on to the edge of the bed, please! » he said brightly.

« Can’t do that! » answered Uhler as if the mere suggestion of such a thing were an insult.

Oh dear, of course, the bed was on the wrong side, on his bad side. Jack turned him around.

Holding him up with one hand in his moist armpit, he opened the buttons of his trousers (into which about two normal people would have fit) with the other hand. The trousers fell down to his ankles all by themselves. Now Jack had to peel off the underpants. While they happily glided down along one leg, they stayed up on the other, so he had to pull them down along that other leg as well, but then the same thing happened, so he had to pull them down along each leg in turn, until they at last came all the way down.

Finally this was done and Jack held up the plastic bottle for Uhler, found the pink little dick with the opening of the bottle’s thick neck and told Uhler to get started.

Uhler breathed heavily and for a long time nothing happened. Jack stood there patiently, one hand in Uhler’s armpit, the other on the bottle, wondering why the penis was so much redder than the rest of the ghastly white body.

The urine came at last. Jack felt its warmth against his hand through the plastic wall of the bottle. He breathed in urine fumes and vapours of sweat, wrinkled his nose and wished this intimate moment with Mr. Uhler would go by as fast as possible.

After a while, only little droplets were falling from Uhler’s penis. Jack waited. He thought the last drop must have fallen. « Is that it? » he asked.

« Yeah, yeah… »

Jack was just taking the bottle away when one last drop fell from Uhler’s penis.

« To hell with that! » thought Jack to himself. He wasn’t going to check where it had fallen and change Uhler’s whole set of clothes because of this, was he? He put the bottle on the bedside table and dressed Mr. Uhler up again. Then he let Mr. Uhler plump back down into his wheelchair and took the bottle away to empty.

At the end of a day full of such adventures, Jack was always quite tired. Not so much physically (although lots of standing took a toll on him too), but psychologically. The work he was doing here just wasn’t mentally challenging enough. Of course the nurses would have said it would be plenty mentally challenging enough if he took the pains to learn the timetable and the roster and if he would know in advance what needed to be done without always waiting to be told. They would have been happy, for example, if he went down to the kitchen on his own initiative when it was time for the patients’ lunch instead of waiting for someone to give him the order to do that. But of course, when he really did that one day, carefully noting the right time and all that, there was already someone down there, and when he came back up he was asked where on Earth he had been when all the bells were ringing with nobody around to help…

And that’s how it was with everything here. Jack obviously just wasn’t spontaneous enough, couldn’t ever do anything right. Maybe the nurses would have been more tolerant towards him if he had been an apprentice nurse like all of them had once been one too. But he wasn’t. He was a medical student, a doctor-to-be. That changed everything. To the young nurses it meant he was supposed to be super-human somehow, or in any case more capable than the others. And maybe he really was more capable when it came to understanding Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism, but certainly not when it came to remembering timetables and rosters and how to interpret them correctly. Somehow the two things didn’t have much in common. But trying to explain this (namely how understanding Maxwell’s equations doesn’t have much in common with remembering a timetable) would have led nowhere. These nurses had a good job, an important job, but understanding equations wasn’t part of it. They probably mastered the « rule of three » and they knew a formula for calculating how to dilute solutes, but that was about it. And even those formulas they just remembered rather than understood. To them, everything was about remembering. The ability not just to remember a mathematical formula and use it correctly, but rather to see deep meaning in it, was beyond them and always would be.

Now things would have been different yet again if Jack had somehow managed, with suitable arrogance, to convey his superiority to them. But he wasn’t able to do that either. He was quite lost here, and that was quite visible. So he just annoyed the nurses - this guy (who after three days still doesn’t know how to make a bed or when he should fetch the patients’ lunch) was supposed to be a medical student? What a joke! And they definitely enjoyed making him feel in what low esteem they held him. After all, real doctors (as he was supposedly going to be one some day) didn’t hold them in terribly high esteem either. And not being held in high esteem by the doctors was hurtful because they - the nurses - were the ones doing all the hard work while those gentlemen - the doctors - just came by from time to time to comment and give new orders….

The nurses were only too happy to make Jack pay a bit for that! His clumsiness was a downright invitation for that!

But that wasn’t all there was to Jack’s tiredness. Jack’s whole being just bridled at the job. He himself didn’t quite know why that was so. Was he too proud to wash old people’s bodies? Did he feel too entitled for that?

Or was it rather because, for Jack, physical closeness meant something different, or at least was supposed to mean something different? Was he just not comfortable with physical closeness because he hadn’t experienced enough of it in a sexual context? Perhaps not getting enough of it in a sexual context made it hard for him to placidly accept it in a non-sexual and even explicitly non-exciting context?

In any case his feelings bridled at the job he was supposed to do here, and this bridling changed to hatred - hatred towards the nurses who did nothing but criticize him, and even hatred towards the helpless patients.

When the job was done for the day, Jack pulled off his white work-clothes and let himself fall on his bed. But as he lied there, his mind somehow didn’t find its inner peace. It was that hatred nagging him, and knowing how unjustifiable this hatred was just made it worse!

Jack knew a way to revitalize and refresh his mind and body before sleep, a way to relieve it of all the aggravation of the day and slip peacefully into a pleasant slumber: it was playing with his own body - and with erotic fantasies in his mind - all the way to an orgasmic release of tension…

And then, after a quick shower, he would lie down again and just enjoy the warmth and the peace of mind and fall asleep.

But here in the hospital, even though he had his own room that he didn’t need to share with anybody, this just didn’t really work. However much he tried, the pictures forcing themselves in front of his inner eye were not the ones of sprightly young girls tearing off their bikinis before running giggling over the warm, golden sand to the cool, blue water’s edge, but rather of Uhler’s bloated white tummy and the reddish little dick underneath, or of Burri’s hunkering body with the tube in his penis, sitting on his shit-smeared bed-clothes (as Jack would undoubtedly come upon him the next morning). Or he saw Zbinden’s wasted, trembling body waiting to be washed.

What could Jack do with his healthy sexual appetite in the stale air of the dirty bedsheets and with those frail companions? He tried to shake off those images and replace them with those of firm, young naked bodies playing on the golden sand at the sea-side, but the images of his current frail companions kept creeping back like a recurring nightmare.

And (what Jack only half admitted to himself) maybe the job here at the hospital wouldn’t have bothered him so much if there had been a REAL sprightly young girl in his life currently. His sexual fantasies regularly got disturbed by the images of his frail patients, but a REAL partner would not have been disturbed in the same way, because she would REALLY have been REAL, and no disturbing images could have disturbed the sight of a REAL, naked young girl!

Jack needed to go to the toilet before going to bed. He stood in front of the toilet bowl and let the urine splash into it gaily. The stinging smell rising weakly from the jet of urine to his nose made him sick. He had always ignored this smell originating from his own body till now - it had never bothered him before. When he finished urinating, he always flushed the toilet and it was gone - simple! But today he had sniffed this smell all day long and had developed a kind of psychological allergy to it. To discover this same smell coming out of himself really destroyed any pleasure he could take in his own young and strong body!

Whatever we expel from our own body always sort of reminds us of our own eventual end (in other words: of death), doesn’t it? Our body takes in stuff and expels stuff, it’s a natural cycle. Our body cannot just keep what it takes in - it has to expel something too. That’s because our body cannot truly dominate matter, create or destroy it. When we eat something, it’s as if we dominated that thing and appropriated it. But when we need to expel something, we realize that we can’t truly appropriate things, we can only transform them and must eventually let them go again… Just like our own lives which aren’t eternal either…

Up till now Jack hadn’t known that his urine had the exact same smell as the urine of those miserable beings he washed every day at the hospital of Riggisberg. Jack was young and strong, he still had a lot to do and a lot to experience in his life. But his urine wasn’t a proof of that, since it was just the same as the urine of those wasted beings waiting to die in the hospital of Riggsiberg…

The very next day, Jack had to bring Mr. Uhler to the toilet. This time a urine bottle wasn’t going to do the trick, because Mr. Uhler had to do more than just urinate. So first the wheelchair with Uhler in it had to be navigated to the bath-and draining-room, which required quite some maneuvering skills. Once in there, alone with Mr. Uhler in that room reeking of old shit and aggressive cleaning agents, it was up to Jack to attend to Mr. Uhler in a task he himself would never have been able to perform in such surroundings. Nobody was going to help him. He was Mr. Uhler’s attendant for now and nobody else would come.

So let’s get started and let’s try to do things in the right order. Jack opened a toilet booth, let the toilet seat drop on the toilet bowl, came back to the wheelchair and tilted up the feet-supports so that Mr. Uhler would be able to stand up. His legs were now hanging loosely without support, his feet a few centimetres above the ground. Now some kind of slippers had to be slipped over his socks.

Okay, the hard part was coming closer, there was no way to avoid it. Jack pushed the wheelchair into the toilet booth. It was standing in front of the toilet now, and somehow Mr. Uhler would have to be transferred from one to the other. But how?

Ah, now Jack remembered! He had quite forgotten the turning platform! Two plates covered in rubber with some turning-mechanism between them. Thanks to the soft rubber-coating, one of the plates would adhere to the tiled floor, the other to Uhler’s feet. With this kind of platform, even fat lumps like Mr. Uhler could be turned around safely without breaking your back.

Jack pushed the platform under Uhler’s healthy foot, grabbed Uhler’s armpit on his paralyzed side and helped him stand up onto the platform. Jack pushed the wheelchair out of the way with his foot, but unfortunately the brakes were on and it skidded away unwillingly. But Jack pushed it with enough brutality that even a brontosaurus would have moved out of the way.

Now Uhler’s pants had to be let down, and while Jack busied himself with that, Uhler started tilting dangerously to one side, so that Jack had to straighten up in a hurry to hold him back. If Uhler landed on the floor, there was no way Jack would get him back on his feet on his own. Jack would feel quite disgraced if he then had to fetch a nurse to help him!

Now came the last bit - setting down Mr. Uhler on the toilet seat. Gently, gently the huge body was lowered to the seat. But inexplicably, just before it touched the seat, the huge lump of a body suddenly tilted towards its lame side and ended up sitting on the toilet seat with only his left thigh. The rest of the huge body was jammed into the corner of the toilet booth and its genitals were dangling in mid-air above the tiled floor!

Uhler breathed out with a whistling sound, and Jack couldn’t make out whether that was suppressed anger or rather a fearful sigh or even a choked laugh at Jack’s clumsiness. The one eye magnified by his glasses gave no clue to his feelings but just continued to stare at Jack steadfastly.

Jack grabbed Uhler by the arm, pulled him out of the corner of the toilet booth where he was jammed in and dragged him over the toilet seat until he sat exactly above the hole.

« Okay, when you’re ready, just ring the bell! » he told him and left him to his job.

As soon as the bell rang, Jack was there, pulled on disposable plastic gloves, lifted Mr. Uhler to his feet (or rather onto the one good foot) and got down to the nastiest bit of the job.

Well, eventually even that was done…

In the evening there was coffee with the supper. Mr. Uhler liked his coffee quite black, and for this reason he always got two cans with coffee and only one with milk. When Jack came to see how he was doing because it was time to clear up the supper remains, he saw that Mr. Uhler hadn’t finished all his cans and asked him if he wanted a bit more coffee. Uhler let out his usual « yeah… », so Jack emptied the coffee into Uhler’s beaker (he could only hold a beaker with his one good hand, not a delicate cup) and then the remaining milk on top of it…

« Stop! » yelled Mr. Uhler, but Jack had already emptied the last drop of milk into the beaker.

Mr. Uhler’s one magnified eye stared up at Jack viciously: « I won’t drink this coffee! »

Jack, taken by surprise, didn’t react.

« I will inform the head nurse about this! »

« Mr. Uhler, » said Jack patiently, « what on Earth are you talking about? »

« About the coffee. I like it black. »

« But this was just the last mouthful to finish it off. »

« I won’t drink this. I’ll inform the head nurse. »

« Mr. Uhler, would you like me to bring you a new cup of coffee? »

« No, take it all away! »

« Okay, but then there’s no need for you to complain either. »

In his own mind, Jack thought to himself: « What an idiot! By the time you manage to finish a sentence with your laborious enunciation, the head nurse will already have moved on to the next patient! »

Uhler said: « Do you speak english? »

« Yes. »

« French? »

« Yes. »

« Do you have a pilot’s licence? Are you allowed to pilot aeroplanes? »

« No, » answered Jack, « but what’s the connection? »

« I did all that, » said Mr. Uhler, « so I won’t let little snot-noses tell me what I should or should not do! »

The vicious eye was glaring.

« Okay, okay, » said Jack, « so this good milk is going down the drain since you won’t finish it. »

And he carried away the dinner tray with the half-full beaker. To himself he thought that this fat pig claimed to be a pilot when he couldn’t even wipe his own arse!

Later he decided he hated this Mr. Uhler and started wondering why.

As a patient, Mr. Uhler was generally appreciated by the nurses. He was still of sound mind and even had a keen intellect, knew about a lot of things and had a lot of funny stories to tell. While being attended to, he often made jokes and funny comments, so for the nurses he was a welcome distraction from the half-dead patients they washed and brought to the toilet the rest of the day.

One day, when the radio was playing a Viennese waltz, Mr. Uhler told an Austrian nurse: « Listen! Music from your home-country! »

Jack knew that particular waltz, and he even knew which particular Strauss from the Strauss-family had written it. He also knew that this particular nurse came from Austria, but he would never have seen the connection. To spontaneously see such connections is the signature of a cultivated mind.

Surely Mr. Uhler would also have known how to get a phone number on the basis of a car number plate. Mr. Uhler was socially superior to Jack. Mr. Uhler possessed the magical whatever-it-was that Jack was still lacking to be a fully-fledged, manly member of human society.

Maybe that’s why Jack hated him.

Mr. Uhler possessed that magical thing that Jack still lacked, but at the same time he couldn’t even wipe his own arse! So what on Earth could that magical thing be, if even not being able to wipe your own arse still meant you could keep it? Jack had learned to walk and talk with proper enunciation (both of which this Uhler couldn’t do), he had learned to go to the toilet all by himself like a big boy - which had meant overcoming his fear of falling in or being devoured by the toilet from behind - and this too was something Uhler couldn’t do. Jack had learned all these things (which had been hard enough), and yet he still didn’t have this ease of relating to other people that Uhler did. This Uhler who couldn’t even wipe his own arse1

Yes, Jack was sure of it now, that was why he hated Uhler!

One day Uhler called Jack over to his bed and said: « May I ask you a question? Would you drink from this beaker? » And he showed Jack a dirty beaker that Jack had forgotten to clear away.

Jack answered truthfully: « Yes, if I was sure it was mine. » Jack wasn’t so particular about clean crockery as long as it was his own and he had used it last himself.

Mr. Uhler had begun mothering around Jack, just like the little Austrian nurse did. She too was always very correct and proper about everything and disliked clumsy dreamers like Jack. Jack’s answers to these kinds of challenges were considered flippant or downright impertinent even though he was just being truthful. He wasn’t very good at seeing what was proper and correct. He only had very vague notions of social norms, politeness and cleanliness, and they had all been overthrown here in this hospital where he had to clean naked patients covered in shit and then still somehow treat them like human beings. When you had to wipe someone’s bum, could there still be privacy? And if the answer was yes, then how would this privacy be expressed? How did it work? Jack was totally bewildered! The patients here were treated like fatlings (because that was the only way to get the job done), but at the same time you still had to pretend to see them as humans.

The nurses, particularly the little Austrian who seemed to take a special interest in him (but only in a disparaging way, as far as Jack could tell), always appealed to his « common sense » (that he surely must possess). But here in this hospital where everything was uncommon anyway (after all, where else did you undress strangers and wash them from head to toe?), he had simply lost his « common sense » (in as far as he had ever possessed it).

Besides, was the running of a hospital really just a matter of « common sense »? Was everything that was done here really full of « sense »? « Sense » in the sense of being dictated by an intrinsic necessity or some incontrovertible principle? Was there such a principle from which every move that needed to be performed here could be mathematically derived?

Weren’t things based on traditions and social norms, rather? Norms that couldn’t be explained mathematically right up to the finest detail? Norms that had somehow evolved one way rather than another for cultural reasons without any intrinsic necessity directly leading to them?

So « sense » - in the intellectual sense - had nothing to do with it. But maybe that was exactly the difference between « sense » in the intellectual sense and « common sense » which wasn’t intellectual but rather something you « felt ». Something normal people feel, that is. Jack didn’t feel it. He hadn’t learned it, didn’t know where it came from and thus didn’t know where he could learn about it either.

Jack was expected to find out, just by watching, what his place in this organization might be. And he failed miserably. He wiped bums, he washed naked bodies, but it was still never enough. It’s true that every time you gave him a new task, however trivial, he was completely lost with it. When he helped you make a bed, he made all the pleats correctly, but he was always just following your own moves a split second after you made them. He never took the lead.

Okay, if he had taken the lead, he might have made a mistake, but at least you would have seen that he was actively engaging in the task. That’s what drove the nurses crazy - he never seemed to actively engage in any task.

But appealing to his « common sense » obviously didn’t work. He apparently didn’t have any « common sense ».

Appealing to his common sense just made him angry. He knew he lacked something, but calling it « common sense » definitely wasn’t helpful. Someone who spontaneously saw the connection between a Viennese waltz and an Austrian origin would surely have found his place in this hospital straight away. But Jack wasn’t that kind of person.

Jack was rather the kind of person who just wouldn’t see a forest until he had become familiar with every single tree in it. Then maybe he would be able to grasp the fact that the « forest » was the set of those « trees ». Before that, the concept of « forest » would just remain mysterious to him.

Even though a hospital has a higher purpose, namely to help sick people heal, you cannot derive every single organizational item from this higher purpose. So whatever great intellect you might possess, however great your mathematical abilities might be, they won’t help you understand every single pleat to be made in the bed-clothes at some particular hospital. It has nothing to do with « sense » (though, Jack admitted to himself, it may have something to do with so-called « common sense », whatever mysterious and magical thing that may be…). If it were all about sense in the intellectual sense, Jack would have been the best caregiver of all times!

No, it rather had to do with « sensing » social norms, something Jack had always been bad at. Maybe it was a problem with perception. Jack seemed to miss all the small details which were considered important in this hospital. Small details that seemed so natural to everybody else that nobody ever gave them a thought, but which somehow made Jack drift off into complicated philosophical musings. Musings that stopped him from just getting on with the job.

So let’s say Jack had faulty perception. Maybe a kind of autism, in other words a handicap?

Jack had a handicap, and for this reason he kept being scolded and even somewhat despised! Right here in a hospital where despising handicaps is absolutely taboo!

Bloody hell, that big, fat Uhler was as handicapped as he was! But he wasn’t despised for it! On the contrary - apparently he had been on a fishing trip when the stroke began, and yet he had managed (only just) to come to hospital by his own means! What a fucking hero!

One day Jack asked Mr. Uhler whether he was still angry about the coffee, and Mr. Uhler answered brightly: « No, no! My apprentices also made mistakes sometimes. I don’t hold a grudge! »

He used to be a photographer, and apparently he still saw himself as a mentor for apprentices although he couldn’t even wipe his own ass anymore!

And apparently Uhler considered Jack’s putting all the remaining milk in his beaker as a « mistake ». For Jack, it had been the most natural of things - why would you leave that last mouthful of milk to be thrown away if you might as well drink it? Maybe it made your last gulp of coffee a bit milky, but so what? He didn’t see that as a mistake, but rather as a principle of sustainability. A principle that Uhler didn’t share with him, obviously…

Bloody hell, Jack should have a right to despise that Uhler, and if not, then why the hell not? Of course it’s very primitive to despise other people for their handicaps while they’re just trying to stay human in spite of their problems. But if you look at it that way, nobody should ever despise anybody and contempt therefore shouldn’t exist at all!

And yet contempt clearly exists, some people despise other people, and if that’s how it is, then why the hell shouldn’t Jack also despise Uhler?

And so Jack drifted off into philosophical musings once again.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that when someone is weak, it’s not their fault. So you shouldn’t despise them for their weakness. Since it’s not their fault, it could happen to anybody. You could become that kind of weak yourself one day. If you didn’t help the weak when you were able-bodied, nobody will want to help you either once you’ve become weak yourself. So if you don’t help the weak, that means, in some sense, that you are not preparing for your own future. And if you’re not preparing for your own future, you may well be a big-mouth right now, but there is a good chance it will not last. A big-mouth who might not even exist anymore by the next day doesn’t need to be taken seriously. Not taking someone seriously is a form of contempt.

Wilfully ignoring someone’s existence, not taking it seriously, that’s contempt. And one reason to feel contempt for someone is if you consider their existence only temporary because they’re not preparing for their own future. They might be big-mouths right now, but this will not last, so there’s no need to come to terms with their passing existence and you might as well ignore it. That’s contempt. A primitive reaction is to feel this for weaklings who are doomed anyway because of their weakness. A more highly evolved reaction is to feel it for the person despising weaklings, because he might become weak himself one day, and then nobody will feel like helping him either and he will be doomed himself!

But then contempt may also be a bluff - you try to sweep along others so that they would feel contempt for that particular person too, thus harming that person. One reason to do that is when in reality you’re just jealous of that person…

All this is quite complicated.
When Jack became just the tiniest bit impatient with that fat pig Uhler, this was immediately punished with contempt. Not only on Uhler’s part, but on the nurses’ part too. Because how dare you be impatient with this poor, handicapped man? How would you feel in his shoes?

But, bloody hell, Jack had a handicap too! If you’re not allowed to despise people for their handicaps, then nobody should despise Jack either! Here in this hospital he was expected to do things that he just couldn’t, namely to always know what was expected of him!

Apart from this handicap, Jack was actually quite astonished at all the hard work he was doing here, bringing fat pigs like Uhler to the toilet and all that! Wiping bums, cleaning up shit and vomit… Earlier he hadn’t even known he could do such things without vomiting himself. Shouldn’t someone congratulate him for this? Shouldn’t someone tell him that he was holding up extremely well, all things considered?

Well, nobody congratulated him for anything here. There was fucking no gratitude for anything he was doing here! This made Jack fucking angry, and he just hated that fat pig Uhler all the more for it!

But there was something else, and Jack himself didn’t know whether it was good or bad. It seemed that some of the nurses, in particular the little Austrian girl, had begun to realize that Jack was really doing his best, that he wasn’t being stupid on purpose, and so they had started treating him a bit differently, maybe still with a tinge of contempt, but in a more motherly way. They were beginning to mother him. They still felt annoyed by him, but now they sometimes had a pitying smile for him as well. Jack wasn’t completely convinced this was good for him either. It only brought it home more that he really had a problem and really wasn’t quite normal. And this allowed him to wallow in sweet self-pity rather than actively addressing the problem…

This was the frame of mind he was in one evening when he was sitting all alone in the dark canteen slowly eating his supper that had been set aside for him in the afternoon. He was in such mournful spirits that he didn’t even notice he was eating vegetables that he otherwise hated.

There had been some developments. The head-nurse had called Jack to her office. And there he had met not only her but also the personnel manager (or whatever other function that guy might have had). He was a big man, bald but with a luxuriant beard, and he looked just like a faithful servant or bodyguard. He had a calm demeanour and a pleasant voice, and he was surely quite capable of firing someone while keeping a straight face and staying so polite that you wouldn’t find anything to say.

Jack had never felt at ease with that kind of person. Such people were just representatives of a system and they would never show any kind of personal emotion. If they criticized you, there was nothing personal in it, and if they praised you, there was no real human warmth in that either.

He asked Jack to sit down. The head nurse was sitting at her corner of the desk. Jack sat down in the empty chair in the middle of the room.

Was this going to be like an interrogatory? What on Earth could he have done SO wrong? Surely this wasn’t just about not bringing up the lunch trays from the kitchen when it was lunch-time, or putting too much milk in Uhler’s coffee, or was it?

The personnel manager asked: « How do you like your practical so far? Do you feel you have already benefited in some way? »

Jack answered: « Yes, a bit… » He wanted to say something more, something about the relationships with the patients, something edifying about how he had managed to get accepted by Mr. Zbinden and Mr. Burren (although he was, of course, going to leave out Mr. Uhler)…

But he didn’t have time to think up anything more to say, because it had obviously just been a rhetorical question anyway. The head nurse took charge of the conversation now and said :

« On our part, I must say, we are disappointed. He doesn’t seem to take any interest in the job. He seems bored. »

In that instant Jack knew he hated the head-nurse with a real passion! She was a small person with a round head, short hair ending in bangs above her eyes which were huge and luminous. She was evidently trying to look youthful, always chewing on some chewing-gum, and she kept shooting out quick remarks like right now and was always gone before you had a chance to answer.

She had been the one who had called out, on his very first day: « What’s this one doing in blue trousers? Have the white trousers run out or what? »

Only then had she turned to Jack and told him curtly: « You need to find Miss Löetsch straight away and… »

Jack imagined he would tell this Miss Löetsch (the woman who had given him the lab-coats, presumably) that he needed white trousers as soon as he came across her, since it surely couldn’t be more urgent than that. But this turned out not to be necessary, because Miss Löetsch happened to be nearby, smiled at the head-nurse guiltily and said: « Yes, sorry, I heard you… »

Jack told Miss Löetsch: « Apparently I still absolutely need white trousers together with the lab-coats. »

He said it with a tinge of irony, hoping for a little sign of complicity from Miss Löetsch, as if to say: « If the head-nurse ordered it, what can we do? ». But there was no such sign of complicity from Miss Löetsch. Apparently the head-nurse was really the big boss around here, and nobody laughed or even smiled about her, not even behind her back…

The tinge of irony in Jack’s voice was just as lost on the head-nurse herself, of course, because as always she had already disappeared. She only ever made quick appearances, gave quick orders and disappeared again before you could blink your eyes, let alone say anything.
All this had happened on Jack’s very first day at the hospital. It should have been enough to warn him, but still, he hadn’t seen the interrogatory - to which he was subjected now - coming. Here she was sitting at the personnel manager’s side, ruthlessly tearing Jack down in front of him. All the while looking at him with her big eyes glowing with innocence and munching as always on her chewing-gum like a ruminant. For Jack, that ceaseless chewing was worse than what she said. Jack knew he could always argue with words against words. But there was no argument against that endless chewing, sometimes punctuated by a casual little « pop! » in her mouth. With this she was showing - better than she could have with any words - what Jack really meant to her, namely: nothing!

When you’re facing a worthy adversary, your pulse goes up, your muscles get irrigated with more blood, preparing for battle, and momentarily non-essential activities like digestion - and yes, chewing your chewing-gum or painting your finger-nails - stop! If they don’t stop, that can only mean you’re not all that impressed by your opponent. That’s why mafia-bosses always conduct deadly business while munching on a huge plateful of spaghetti - to show you that for them this is nothing at all and that they’re taking it all in a stride.

Yes, this head-nurse who just wouldn’t stop with her chewing while staring at you with her huge, glowing, innocent eyes, all the while saying the most demeaning things, casually shaking her bangs out of her glowing blue eyes, she was just like a mafia boss with a big plate of spaghetti in front of him. It’s caricatural, but it works - it most definitely works to make you feel small and insignificant!

Jack had a tremendous urge to send his big, heavy fist bang into the middle of that pert little chewing mouth!

Of course he didn’t do that but rather patiently heard her out. But before he could even think of what to say, the personnel manager made HIS statement. He was a bit more reconciliatory than she had been. He acknowledged that Jack didn’t know anything about the patients here yet, and all the more it was only natural to expect curiosity of him. He shouldn’t be too shy to ASK. Of course he was subject to medical confidentiality like everyone else working here, that goes without saying, but precisely for this reason he was also absolutely entitled to ask questions and show interest!

« I’m not saying this for our benefit, but for yours! This practical is for you. Make use of it! »

And once again, before Jack could say a single word, the head-nurse barged in: « Indeed, the student apprentices are of no use to us. They are just a burden. They only stay a short time, and by the time they could be of any use, their practical is already over. »

« I understand… » said Jack, since now it seemed he was at last allowed to say something. But in reality he didn’t understand at all. When he wiped Uhler’s big fat ass, that was one task less for the nurses, or wasn’t it? It meant they could concentrate on the more important tasks on their roster, those more important tasks at which Jack obviously failed miserably. But he still couldn’t accept the idea that he was of no use AT ALL! Maybe his only use was for little details, but for him, wiping a stranger’s ass was by no means a little detail! It was something he had never done in his life before. Why didn’t anybody realize that this was actually quite a big deal for him? So okay, maybe he still wouldn’t exactly have expected a gold medal for it, but at least a little bit of appreciation. Just the acknowledgement that he wasn’t completely, utterly useless here. That much acknowledgement would already have been something, but he didn’t even get THAT!

« Ask questions! » said the personnel manager emphatically. « We’re all at your disposal! After all, training is part of the services rendered by our institution! »

But Jack knew very well that in reality their problem with him wasn’t at all that he didn’t show enough curiosity or ask enough questions or take enough interest in the patients. He showed plenty of interest in the patients, in some cases more than the nurses who never had time, and Mr. Zbinden was even sort of a fan of his! So was Burri now in his own way, always remembering his days off. THAT wasn’t the problem! The real problem was that Jack just hadn’t settled in as far as the daily running of the hospital was concerned, that he still didn’t remember when it was time to fetch the lunch-trays in the kitchen or how the sheets had to be folded to make the beds in the way it was done here… Or indeed that he still couldn’t make the difference between the different kinds of sheets, which one came on top and which one underneath… It was always expected that he would start to see things like that on his own and do them of his own accord (rather than just bringing patients to the toilet who happened to ring the bell). But whenever he tried, it was still always wrong, the wrong bedsheet, the wrong time, or it was out of place for some other reason. Something else was always much more urgent, didn’t he see that? Didn’t he have any COMMON SENSE or what? Well, that was obviously the problem, since they kept telling him that - he just didn’t have any bloody common sense!

And now he was accused of not asking enough questions? That was just comic! Whenever he DID ask questions it just drove the nurses crazy! « What’s in this intravenous drip? », and when he got the answer: « Why does the patient need this? ». The nurses had no time for such questions, and even when they did try to answer, Jack was rarely satisfied with the answer, because he would have wanted a real scientific explanation which the nurses were unable to give…

How was he going to explain this to the personnel manager? Should he tell him that he was wrong, that in reality nobody wanted his questions? That the reason he seemed so uninterested and bored was precisely because nobody took the time to explain anything to him, or not properly anyway? How would the head-nurse react if he threw the ball back at her like that, since she was the one who had claimed he was uninterested and bored and lacking initiative? Undoubtedly she would say they had never had this problem with previous student trainees… and then add, for the benefit of the personnel manager, that of course she would talk with the nurses about this.

Anyway, Jack was too flabbergasted to say anything like that. They had sat him down as if for an interrogatory, and the only meek response he could come up with right now was to explain away his lack of initiative as « shyness ». And considering that his attitude was probably quite often considered impertinent, explaining it away as « shyness » wasn’t terribly believable, because impertinence just doesn’t fit together with shyness terribly well.

« I know, I know, » he finally said, remembering how his mother had always complained that even in kindergarten he preferred to sit in the sand-pit all alone rather than boisterously running around with the other boisterous kids, « I lack vitality. Wherever I go, I always hear the same criticism. It’s a general problem. »

« Lack of vitality? » exclaimed the head-nurse, « Come on! Nobody ever said that! »

But then she started musing: « On the other hand, if you’ve heard the same criticism before, that seems to show the problem is really on your side. But maybe this is your chance, here in this open community of nurses and caregivers, to open up a bit. You know, nurses and caregivers are a very colourful and mixed group of people, much more so than in many other professions where the teams are much more homogeneous. Among us, you might get your chance to express yourself and feel freer. One is often amazed at how people can suddenly open up… »

She babbled on for a while. She was obviously much more talented in talking than in listening. But Jack was actually a bit surprised that she talked so much. Up till now she had only ever made quick appearances, given an order and disappeared again, not babbled on and on like this… He supposed it was for the benefit of the personnel manager. Otherwise she would never talk so much to a simple underling!

Finally the man with the beard said: « I hope we have now encouraged you to be more proactive, so that the next few weeks won’t pass as inconsequentially as the first one has. We want you to benefit from this practical! »

So Jack thanked them both, left the office and went back to work: the next dirty arse to be wiped was waiting!

All this had been in the morning. Now it was evening and Jack was sitting all alone in the dark canteen, illuminated only by the lamp above his table, and he was going through the scene with his mind’s eye once again.

He allowed himself the luxury of letting himself sink into self-pity and feeling like a victim. A victim of a huge injustice! Here in this hospital - where it was absolutely taboo to dismiss people on account of their disabilities - he was expected to do things he had never done before (and could never even have imagined doing) as if they were the most natural things in the world! He should have had the same right to be offended as Uhler when Jack expected him to stand on his bad leg or hold himself up with his bad hand!

Did this actually mean that Jack was just as sick as Uhler, except that in Jack’s case it was psychological rather than physical? Did he perhaps have what is called a « personality disorder » in psychiatric jargon?

It seemed his brain just wasn’t capable of absorbing and classifying all the little details of daily interactions within a group of people in the way normal people’s brains did. Probably that’s what they meant when they kept appealing to his « common sense ». Jack knew he had « sense » in the sense of being capable of rational thought. But this « common sense » they kept talking about was something different, namely something he apparently lacked…

At that moment in Jack’s train of thought there was a tapping on the window-pane right next to his head. At first he didn’t react, thinking maybe a small bird had flown against the window-pane or something like that. But then he remembered birds usually don’t fly in the dark. And then the tapping was repeated, not very loudly, but clearly and insistently.

Jack turned towards the window and tried to see outside. At first, of course, he only saw his own reflection in it, since it was lit inside and dark outside, but then gradually he managed to make out a ghostly face and hands in the dark world out there. They had come so close to the window that they were illuminated by the lamp above Jack’s table now. They looked like they belonged to a drowned body visible under the surface of the water…

But it wasn’t a drowned body, because it moved! Now Jack saw that the pale hands and pale face were joined by a dark coat.

« Open up! » said the mouth, but through the thick glass you couldn’t hear it. Nevertheless Jack could lip-read the words quite clearly.

Jack hesitated and the lips formed the words once again, big and clear. Finally Jack told himself it was no use waiting till a stone would come crashing through the window, so he opened up.

The man started pushing his way in before Jack had even let go of the window-handle.

« We’ve got a wounded man with us! » he whispered, as though it were somehow not allowed to speak up in here.

« I’ll get someone, » said Jack and tried to close the window again, but the man pushed against it from the outside and grumbled: « You’re not going to leave us out here, are you? Take us to someone who can help us! »

Jack didn’t like any of this too much. He didn’t like being ordered around like this by these strangers stumbling around in the dark. He had already been ordered around enough today. And what were they doing out there in the bushes anyway? Why didn’t they go to the well-lit main entrance where there was surely some alarm-bell or something to call for help if they needed it?

For a moment Jack thought of shoving the window back into their faces. The men would then surely try to break in, but in the meantime Jack would have gotten hold of some nurse on night watch or something, and then the whole thing would be her problem, not his…

But then it was too late for that because the man had already slipped a leg into the gap of the half-open window, and a moment later he had pushed it wide open and was busily climbing into the room. Jack didn’t resist anymore. The man twisted his body through the window-frame and jumped into the room. Then he stood in front of Jack and Jack saw how big he was. He was much taller than he had seemed crouching behind the dark window. He looked unkempt and scruffy, and his face was strangely expressionless. He was obviously not the kind of person who cares about the impression he makes on others. He was the kind who totally lacks self-consciousness, who is unaware of how others see him (or simply doesn’t care) and who is unable (or unwilling) to take anybody else’s vantage point about anything. He probably didn’t see Jack as a human counterpart at all, but rather as a jumping jack to be manipulated at will.

His breath smelled of beer and cheap cigarettes. His beard was half-shaven, as if he had been interrupted while shaving recently. His fat but colourless lips formed an irregular curve above his deeply cleft chin. A messy moustache underlined his broad, reddened nose in whose large nostrils Jack suspected you could find all manner of interesting organic matter…

His cheeks were rounded and as red as his nose, giving him a somewhat clownish appearance that could have been funny if his eyes weren’t so cold and expressionless. They stared fixedly and had an unnatural-looking shine. Maybe he was on drugs. The unkempt mop of hair above the low forehead had a brownish colour that Jack couldn’t have named.

Otherwise the man was just a big, broad, manly figure in a haphazard collection of clothes.

Now that the gleamy window-pane wasn’t between him and the outside world anymore, Jack could see plainly what else was moving around out there. There was the long, thin and very passive body of a gaunt man being carefully shoved through the window by a third man. This was undoubtedly the wounded man the first man had talked about.

The first man grabbed the legs of the gaunt man and helped the third man to lift, shove and drag him over the window-sill and into the room. They set him down, standing precariously on his own two feet, and then the third man jumped through the window after him and helped the first man hold him up.

Now the gaunt man was hanging more than standing between the two other men, each arm slung around a pair of shoulders. Jack closed the window behind them.

« He needs to be operated, » said the first man. « Bring us to the operating room. »

Jack looked at his half-finished supper that he would now leave standing here to get cold. Well, he didn’t feel all that rueful about it, to be honest. Nor did he feel rueful about the dismal pondering he had been engaged in before being interrupted.

He wondered whether he had been right to let in these three scoundrels (because that was undoubtedly what they were). Was he entitled to do this? There were so many rules here in this hospital about what he should or shouldn’t do…

Well, he thought to himself, if he hadn’t let them in they would just have broken in. On the other hand, that might have given him time to raise the alarm…

« Come, » he said and led them to the big lift that was big enough to roll in whole beds. While the lift slowly cranked them up past one floor and then another he had time to eye up the three men carefully.

The gaunt one looked quite young with a youthful, almost child-like face. There were some bloody marks in his chest and abdomen and he didn’t seem to take in all that much of his surroundings.

The third man - the one who had climbed through the window last - wasn’t any taller than Jack, he wore expensive clothes and above his high forehead he had glistening black hair brushed back over the crown of his head. His eyes were sharp and cold.
The lift ground to a halt. Jack opened the wide doors to let through the three men, the unkempt one and the well-groomed one holding up the gaunt one between them. They half walked, half dragged him out.

« Here’s the operating theatre, » said Jack showing them the imposing green entrance portal right next to the lift.

« Well then, call the doctor, you dummy! » snarled the unkempt man.

« At this hour there is no doctor around anymore! » said Jack, but he nevertheless strode away, looking for the nurse on night watch.

Tonight’s night watch was a small, roundish man who didn’t look much like a nurse or caregiver except for his white blouse. Jack explained to him that there were two weirdos with him who had brought a wounded man they claimed needed to be operated straight away. The night watch didn’t seem to understand, but Jack took him to the three strangers to see for himself. Later on he wondered why he hadn’t rather fled with the night watch and raised the alarm by calling the police from some other part of the hospital or something, because, as it turned out, it would have been his last chance to do so.

« Can you operate? » asked the unkempt man.

« What, me? I’m no doctor! » said the night watch.

« Then call a doctor, damn it! » said the unkempt man.

« All the doctors have gone home. What do you want? » asked the night watch.

Now the unkempt man pulled out a rather big handgun from a shoulder holster concealed behind his coat, waved it around and said: « My buddy here is hurt and needs a doctor! Call a fucking doctor! »

« Straight away, straight away… » stammered the night watch and trotted away.

« Not so fast! » the unkempt man called after him.

Jack was trying to get back into the lift unnoticed but the unkempt man who seemed to have eyes at the back of his head held him back: « And you stay here! »

Without letting go of Jack’s arm and with the gun in his other hand and an arm of the wounded man still wrapped around his shoulders, he said: « We’re all going together, SLOWLY! »

This suddenly made the situation much clearer, and so all four of them accompanied the night watch back to the office next to the reception. This was the very office in which Jack had been told off earlier today for being too passive and not taking initiative… Till a moment ago that had seemed like such a big deal that he had ruminated on it for half the evening, but now it seemed ridiculously inconsequential.

« Doctor Stucki is on call tonight, » the night watch said nervously, pulling out a roster.

They sat the wounded man down on a chair where he started showing some signs of life, moaning, his head teetering from one side to the other.

The night watch had picked up a phone and started dialling the number in front of doctor Stucki’s name on the roster. The well-groomed man who hadn’t said a word up till now came closer. The night watch held the ear-piece to his ear and listened for the ringing at the other end. The well-groomed man came even closer, put a well-manicured hand on the shoulder of the night watch and held his ear against the outside of the ear-piece so that he could follow the conversation too.

The ear-piece was humming with the ringing at the other end of the line, even Jack could hear it.

« Yes? Stucki here, » said a voice from the outside world. A calm, level-headed, sensible voice.
« Dr. Stucki, please come immediately! » said the night watch nervously.

« What’s going on? Who are you anyway? »

« This is Riggisberg hospital. Spör here. It’s an emergency. »

« What happened? » asked Dr. Stucki.

The well-groomed man loosened his ear a bit from the outside of the ear-piece, stared the night watch in the eyes and tapped against his lips with his index.

« An emergency! Come quickly! » said the night watch.

The well-groomed man took the ear-piece from the trembling hands of the night watch and rang off.

« Will he come? » asked the unkempt man.

« Of course, » answered the well-groomed man calmly.

« Without calling the police first? » asked the unkempt man.

« He won’t think of that, » answered the well-groomed man confidently.

A buzzer and a light went on in the corridor. Probably some patient who needed to go to the toilet.

« I have to go and see! » said the night watch.

« You stay here! » ordered the unkempt man sharply.

« Let him go, » opined the well-groomed man in a more conciliatory tone. « Just go with him. »

« Okay, let’s go! » said the unkempt man to the night watch. « And no sudden moves, okay? »

The night watch didn’t look capable of any sudden moves, he was too jittery. The two of them left, and apart from the half-dead wounded man on the chair Jack was now alone with the well-groomed man.

Should he try to start a conversation with him? What is the normal thing to do under such circumstances?

Perhaps there wasn’t anything normal to do, because the circumstances themselves weren’t normal.

A moment ago Jack had felt sort of protected in the crowd. Now he had the well-groomed man’s full attention because there wasn’t anyone else in the room (or in any case no one conscious). Jack was standing alone and in some sense « naked » in front of this man who held a gun.

Should Jack try to influence that man? Should he try to convince him of something? Was this his chance to do something?

Or should he be content with finding out that this man - behind his well-groomed, icy-cold countenance - was really only human just like Jack himself? But to discover that he would need to talk with him. He would need to say something, whatever, to start a conversation. If the man got involved in some kind of conversation with him, he would surely reveal his human side, wouldn’t he?

But the well-groomed man remained utterly silent, his stare absolutely expressionless, and Jack didn’t dare to advance against this stillness.

Jack stood still and tried to conceal his nervousness the best he could, but his desire to talk, about whatever topic, just to fill the silence, became bigger and bigger.

But he was probably doing quite a good job at hiding his nervousness. He was standing just as still as the well-groomed man (who was probably nervous too, since things - whatever these « things » had been - certainly hadn’t gone quite according to plan now that one member of their party was wounded). Whatever nervousness they felt, they were both concealing it. Nevertheless Jack felt small and stupid in the face of the steely-cold silence of the well-groomed man.

The night watch came back, followed by the unkempt man who was waving fresh air in front of his nose rather theatrically.

« Yuck, you can’t imagine what one gets to see in here! » he exclaimed. « One of them had shat in his bed! Everything full of shit! You should have seen it! Not to mention the smell… »

The well-groomed man didn’t seem all that interested, but Jack smiled inwardly. At last someone was expressing freely what he had felt every minute of every day from the moment he had first arrived here to do his practical! Ever since then, it was as if he hadn’t been allowed to see a shitty mess as a shitty mess! Perhaps he was really the only one in this hospital who saw a load of shit as a load of shit, and this had made him feel very, very lonely. But here at last were some people who didn’t mind calling shit what it is, and who would perhaps even dare to let out a few heartfelt curses!

The wounded man drew attention by soughing loudly.

« Will he live? » asked the well-groomed man.

« I don’t know, » answered the night watch, « I’m not a doctor. »

« So what exactly are you doing here, then? » asked the well-groomed man impatiently.

« He cleans up shit, » the unkempt man answered for him.

The well-groomed man turned his blank face to Jack: « And you, do you clean up shit too? »

« Yes, among other things, » answered Jack simply.

« Among other things? » asked the well-groomed man and blinked with one eye, but keeping his face straight and blank as before.

« Are the nurses pretty? » asked the unkempt man, joining the conversation.

« Unfortunately they’re not here for me, » answered Jack.

« Sure, » said the unkempt man nodding his head. « During working hours they’re here for the patients. » And then he added with a smirk: « What about afterwards? »

Jack quickly thought up an answer: « When you’ve spent your whole day smelling urine vapour, you just couldn’t bear to see any more genitals, you know… »

The unkempt man laughed dirtily. « Fresh, young pussy, that’s different, you know. Well, maybe you wouldn’t know. Or maybe you do and just don’t feel like talking about it, right? »

The well-groomed man hardly changed his expression, but he seemed to condone the silly conversation.

Jack had hoped for a conversation, any kind of conversation. But he still didn’t feel at ease with this one! Luckily he didn’t have to think up an answer, because outside there was the sound of an approaching car.

« That’s the doctor, » said the night watch hopefully.

They all left the office. As they walked through the corridor, they heard Dr. Stucki unlocking the big front door.

Dr. Stucki opened the door and stepped in: « Good evening, Mr. Spör. You sounded very nervous on the phone. What on Earth happened? »

Dr. Stucki was a tall, lanky figure. In spite of the late hour his face looked fresh and his cheeks rosy. He had a kindly, almost child-like face. But his dark hair was steeped in grey.

The night watch started to say something: « These men… »

The unkempt man held up his gun and the night watch fell silent. Dr. Stucki was startled for a second, but then his military training took over (he had served in the army) and his stance and tone immediately became firm.

« We have a wounded man with us, » said the unkempt man calmly.

« Where? » barked Dr. Stucki in his now military tone.

« Come with us, » said the unkempt man and led the way back to the office.

« Here he is, » he said.

Dr. Stucki bent down over the man in the chair and made a friendly and at the same time serious face. The wounded man didn’t react to the new face in front of him and the doctor started examining him.

The doctor carefully unbuttoned the shirt of the wounded man and pushed the shreds aside. Then he prodded the wounds tentatively with his fingers, listening to the moaning and soughs of the patient.

« Two lung shots and one in the abdomen, » he finally declared.

« Yeah, and what does that mean? » asked the unkempt man. « Will he survive? »

« Of course. But the bullets must be removed right away. And tomorrow morning he must be operated. »

« Everything must be finished before sun-up! » ordered the unkempt man.

The doctor turned around very suddenly, as if he had been attacked from behind, and said with a burst of authority Jack wouldn’t have expected from such a kindly-looking man: « Impossible! For an operation like this I need competent help! He’s got a pneumothorax, do you even know what that means? »

The unkempt man looked down. He himself wasn’t « competent help », of course. In this case waving around his gun wasn’t going to be of any great help.

« So what can you do tonight? » asked the well-groomed man, taking control.

The doctor answered earnestly: « We can take out the bullets, clean and disinfect the wounds, maybe stitch up the abdominal wall depending on the inner damage and then put on sterile bandages. »

« Then we can move on? » asked the well-groomed man.

« It would be better to leave him here, but he won’t be in mortal danger anymore, » answered Dr. Stucki.