The Tao of Apathy (9 page)

Joe was smoking and talking with Dan from the
Audio/Visual Department. Dan was the specialist who handled all the
filming and video taping needs of the hospital with only one
assistant. Lately, when Dan was not bemoaning his work schedule, he
was asking for advice about his bride of eight months. That was
being married just long enough to realize he was doomed, but not
long enough to accept it. For these reasons, Bigger knew it didn’t
matter if he interrupted Joe.

Joe kicked a chair across the room and paced
angrily.

“
Nice clothes, hair and face,
Bigger,” Joe said in a dissipating growl. “Why are you crying,
Bigger? Are you that hung over?” Joe looked at his friend.
“Actually, I heard why. Come sit down, Biggs.”

Bigger sat down on an old waiting room chair
that had been in the Butt Hutt since the seventies. “I have never
seen you like this. Why are you pissed off, Joe? Oh, sorry,
Father.”

“
Shut the fuck up, Bigger. I got
bigger things to worry about than you using the P word. They have
renamed me Spiritual Concerns Services and bill patients a
consultant fee if I visit them, but I am not allowed to mention
God. Which is a good thing because I am now convinced that He can’t
hold a candle to modern medicine.” Father jerked his head away then
as Bigger, Dan and Joe stared at him.

“
You see Joe like this everyday,
Bigger,” Dan said, putting his hand on Joe’s shoulder. Dan had
blonde hair, an adolescent mustache and red eyeglasses. He had been
too nerdy in college to smoke, but now that he was married, he
smoked and kept a bottle of caffeinated Pepsi in his
desk.

“
Hey, how’s the wife, Dan?” Bigger
asked, then felt bad for making the jab.

Before Dan could get into one of his whining
sessions, Joe said, “I should have known better, but I actually
believed those people when they said all of us that hadn’t had our
wages go up were finally going to get a raise. I know you don’t
care about a future here, Bigger, but this is my career. I need a
raise just for the sake of getting a raise.”

“
I’d take a raise,” Bigger said
looking up from massaging his forehead. “Ain’t they giving us
one?”

“
Dan says no.” Joe lit a new
cigarette off his old one and snubbed the old one out. His fingers
trembled as he did so. “Because if they give us kitchen workers,
the housekeepers and the guys in central supply--all of us at the
bottom--more money, then that would throw off the pay scale. If
they give us a raise then they would have to give raises to
everyone above us which is friggin’ everyone, a raise. Well, they
don’t want to do that because the professionals all got raises at
the beginning of the friggin’ decade.” Joe picked up the metal
ashtray and flung it across the room. “In other words, we don’t
make enough god-damn money to get a raise.”

“
So let’s get this union going,”
Dan said in cheerleader fashion. “Everyone is talking about
unionizing, but this may get people to actually do
something.”

“
Yeah,” Bigger said, his spirits
returning with a little color in his cheeks.

“
No,” Joe said flicking his ashes
on the floor. “It doesn’t pay. This proves to me that losers always
lose. And we are losers.”

This took the wind out of Dan’s sail. “My wife
wouldn’t want me in a union, anyway.” Dan stood up to leave. “I
mean, I know, I’m not a loser. I already got my raise. But you’re
right, Joe, in the end the administration will win. Those guys are
my friends and even I’ll admit that they hate us.”

“
I hate them first,” Joe said.
“But I’m too busy to cultivate my hate like the management does.
It’s our job to work, but their job to screw us over. Basically,
their meetings, which are all they do, are strategy meetings to
battle their employees and keep us in check. They are able to hate
us employees eight hours a day, five days a week.”

“
Perhaps only the lonely and
bitter make it to the top,” Bigger said. “Maybe that’s the secret
of their success.”

“
I thought I told you to shut up,
Casper,” Father Chuck said, flicking his cigarette ash at
Bigger.

The words lonely and bitter slammed around in
Dan’s head. They had been floating around since his honeymoon, but
they took on pointed edges with Bigger saying them. He was happy
with his light workload, weighty paycheck and ample vacation
allotment, but each day as a professional with a stable home life
did seem to make him more bitter and lonely. So because his wife
would hate it and because Bigger dared him, he decided that he
would help organize the union. “It will serve the bitch right,” he
said aloud.

“
Ah, Hello, Dan.” Bigger raised a
white eyebrow. “What will serve your wife right?”

“
I changed my mind. Plenty of
businesses have a union and a union is the only thing that could
make things better here. So I’m going to do what I can do to get
one here.” Dan pictured himself as a renegade with his bosses, but
then in the end, them thanking him for making things better at the
hospital and then coming to him for help because the employees
trusted him so much.

“
I dare you,” Bigger
said.

Joe went to the slimy, yellow window and
looked out to the charcoal, churning sky. For a moment he imagined,
a tornado hitting the Butt Hutt and everyone having to hold on to
the fat man in the corner to keep from blowing away. “Okay, I have
two questions. The first is why an audio/visual geek making sixty
thousand a year to push TVs on carts around care about a union. My
second question is why in the hell did you dye your hair white,
Bigger?” He turned to look at Bigger and his frost color
hair.

Bigger looked down at his white shoes. “Joe
you are my best friend. That has nothing to do with why, but I
wanted to let you know. Anyway, I wanted to conform like you told
me to do last night. I thought if white clothes were sanitary, then
white hair would be sanitary. At least, that’s what I believe I
thought. I don’t actually remember dyeing my hair. But I want to be
great at this job. I have to be.”

“
No you don’t. Seuss isn’t going
to fire you and they pay you the same whether you do a good job or
a crappy one.”

“
But if I can’t handle this peon
job, then when what can I handle? I couldn’t handle being fired
from this stupid job. What would my dad say? He put himself through
college doing odd jobs and then became a professor.”

Joe threw his cigarette to the floor. “What
does that mean? Odd jobs. Did he have jobs that were odd? Did he
have to clothe dead people at funeral homes or was he a circus
geek? I hate that phrase ‘odd jobs-”

“
Anyway,” Dan butted in. “I will
tell you why I am going to get this union going. Are you guys
listening?”

“
No,” they said. Joe threw the
door open and he and Bigger ran through the slapping
rain.

Inside, they put on their white hats. Joe put
on his apron. “You know why Dan wants to form a union don’t
you?”

Bigger shook his head.

“
Its because whenever St. Jude’s
employees try to fight back and demand that the administration
treat them fairly, the administrators say and do anything so that
they come out on top. See? That is where that tie-wearing,
newsletter reading, stock-having slacker relates to us. We have the
board of trustees and he has his wife.”

Chapter 15

Mr. Grumby sat behind his desk with his hands
folded on his blank planner. It was ten minutes to five. Tomorrow,
Mr. Petty would officially take over Grumby’s office and he would
be gone. Betty stood in front of Grumby with a pen and a pad of
paper in hand. She felt bad for him having to watch while Petty
took over his job. Mr. Grumby had been quiet all day, until now
when he had called her into his office. “Come in here please,” he
had said. “I want to perform my last official act as president of
Saint Jude’s Hospital and Medical Center.”

“
Heather, will you stroke my
penis?” he asked Betty.

“
What?”

“
Touch it. Please, my wife left me
two years ago,” Grumby pleaded. “And my girlfriend is so cold and
unsympathetic now. I just need human contact. Something to let me
know I still exist.” He stood up and walked around his desk. “It
has been forever since anyone has touched me even in a friendly
way. A child’s hug. A pat on the back. A hand touching another’s
arm in reassurance. My life is devoid of all of those intangible
things a person needs to survive.”

“
But you didn’t ask me for those
things, Jonas. You asked me to pet your one-eyed mole.” As Grumby
moved forward, she got ready to touch his genitals with her
knee.

“
Well, if you’re going to ask a
favor, you may as well ask for what you really want.”

Chapter 16

Dykes smelled her cigarette and bacon breath
as he got on the elevator. He went to a corner and rubbed the
bridge of his nose as if he had a headache. She gave him a smile
and a wink. “There is a union meeting tonight, my friend. We need
everyone there. Are you coming?”

“
Sure,” Dykes lied, surprised how
everyone was united in organizing the union and how potent her
breath was. Dykes crunched his eyes shut. The nurse stopped talking
and looked at the floor indicator.

He felt the elevator stop and its doors open
and shut, but when he opened his eyes back up, she was still there.
What was worse was that she was looking at him again. He gave out a
feverous moan, but she still talked to him. “Hope to see you
there.”

Dykes found that if he looked like he wasn’t
feeling well, people didn’t make small talk with him. For those
that insisted on small talk, he would mumble a yes or a no in reply
to whatever they said. If they were to ask him if he was taking the
elevator up or down, he would say yes. He might also say no. If he
was feeling friendly, he would say okay. But mostly he could keep
his fellow elevator riders from conversing with him by looking like
he had the flu. Deep down he wished he was one of those people that
were friendly. Cheery people that were able to make polite small
talk to strangers awed and annoyed him. He was glad that there were
friendly people like that in the world, but he wished they would
stay the hell away from him.

A few people like Bigger and Joe had slowly
become true friends to him, although he did not realize it.
Everyone had found him quiet and standoffish when he first got the
job in supply and after four years, they still found him to be
that. Many, however, had grown to like him anyway. Some liked him
because he was wry when he delivered their supplies. Others liked
him because he had slept with them. The women could not not like
him because he had rugged features and big brown eyes. When they
ran into him in the bars, he would be drunk and funny. The men
could not not like him because he had slept with a lot of women. As
he stood in the elevator, staring at his feet, Dykes often wondered
why people were not friendly to him.

Dykes was not going to any union meeting
because he didn’t want to have to sit and talk with anyone.
Especially this nurse who had never had a nice word for him until
now, when she had a vested interest in getting as many people to
the union meeting as possible. Since Dan had talked with a union
representative in May, the union was all people were talking about.
That and the ghost that was haunting the Critical Care Unit.
Doctors went to the CCU in pairs and CCU nurses called in sick for
their shifts. Dykes was the only person willing to deliver supplies
there. He didn’t care about the ghost as long as he didn’t have to
make small talk with it.

Irene, now that she had been retired, was the
only housekeeper that cleaned the Critical Care Unit. Her boss, Dr.
Daneeka, had waited until after he had gotten rid of Irene to find
out what she did and then asked her to come back as a limited term
employee so that the work she did could still get done. But of
course, her position went to one of his full-time people, so the
only job he could offer her was the one that no one
wanted--cleaning the haunted CCU. Irene, covetous of groceries and
her car insurance, faced the ghost.

The most afraid of the ghost was Bigger. “I
just can’t stop thinking about him,” Bigger told Joe as they stood
in the warm sunshine outside the exit nearest the kitchen so that
Joe could sneak a smoke.

“
About who?”

“
About the ghost.”

“
The one that doesn’t
exist.”

“
Yeah, that one. He has me really
scared, Joe.”

“
You’re invisible, remember? The
ghost can’t see you.”

“
Joe can you try to be sensible
for a moment. Everyone knows the rumor got started when that
elderly lady scared me. That’s why I think I might be a
ghost.”

“
That’s logical,” Joe said,
looking at his watch. “Do you know that lady is still on the wacko
ward. They’ll keep her until she goes insane.”

“
Joe, I wore bright pants and
gaudy shoes and no one noticed that I existed. Then I tried not to
make a spectacle of myself right down to bleaching my hair so that
I would blend in with the whiteness of the walls like a chameleon.
Suddenly a lady I have never seen before and a bunch of staff that
I have worked with for six years start screaming at me that I am a
disembodied spirit.”