How long will he be in, Doctor? Only God knows that. I should have seen this child weeks ago. There are twenty beds in the ward and there are men and boys with bandages around their heads, black patches on their eyes, thick glasses. Some walk around tapping at beds with sticks.A man cries all the time that he’ll never see again, he’s too young, his children are babies, he’ll never see them again. Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ, and the nuns are shocked at the way he takes the name of the Lord in vain. Stop that, Maurice, stop the blasphemy.You have your health.You’re alive.We all have our problems. Offer it up and think of the sufferings of Our Lord on the cross, the crown of thorns, the nails in His poor hands and feet, the wound in His side.Maurice says,Oh,Jesus,look down and have pity on me. Sister Bernadette warns him if he doesn’t mind his language they’ll put him in a ward alone and he says, Heavenly God, and that isn’t as bad as Jesus Christ so she’s satisfied. In the morning I have to go downstairs for drops.The nurse says, Sit in this high chair and here’s a nice sweet. The doctor has a bottle with brown stuff in it. He tells me put my head back, that’s right, now open up, open your eyes and he pours the stuff into my right eye and it’s a flame going through my skull.The nurse says, Open the other eye, come on be a good boy, and she has to force the eyelids open so the doctor can set fire to the other side of my skull. She wipes my cheeks and tells me run along upstairs but I can barely see and I want to stick my face into an icy stream.The doctor says, Run along, be a man, be a good trooper. The  whole  world  is  brown  and  blurry  on  the  stairs. The  other patients are sitting by their beds with dinner trays and mine is there too but I don’t want it with the way my skull is raging. I sit by my bed and a boy across the way says, Hoi, don’t you want your dinner? I’ll take it, and he comes for it. I try to lie on the bed but a nurse says, Now, now, no lying on the bed in the middle of the day.Your case isn’t that serious. I have to sit with my eyes closed and everything going brown and black, black and brown and I’m sure I must be having a dream because Lord God above, is that the little fella with the typhoid, little Frankie, the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, is that your- self, Frankie, for wasn’t I promoted out of the Fever Hospital, thank God, where  there’s  every  class  of  disease  and  you  never  know  what germs you might be bringing home to the wife in your clothes and 227