=19=

In a wheelchair pushed down a corridor between floors, Neena, in the standard paper gown, is only vaguely alarmed. Her wrists and ankles have been secured to the wheelchair, which is specially fitted for patients such as her, the kind, who, as one doctor put it jocularly, “isn’t going anywhere, anyway.” Her legs are immobilized in such a way that—as if the ridiculously inadequate paper gown weren’t already too small and too flimsy to conceal anything significant—her plump, pretty and freshly plucked vagina has been put completely and lavishly on display. To make matters worse, she is often left parked in the hall as the attendant, who she never sees, goes off to attend some other business, a call to assist in an impromptu surgery, perhaps, or to administer an overdue injection, lethal, or merely agonizing.

Other patients, doctors, and even visitors, pass by, sometimes looking and sometimes not, and, once in a while, a surgeon or enthusiastic hobbyist, will read the chart in the plastic sleeve attached to the back of Neena’s chair, placed purposely so she can’t see it, for its contents are forever forbidden her. Whoever it is, he or she, will stand there, reading, nodding in amusement, murmuring with a connoisseur’s appreciation (“ah those clever doctors…”), until finally, returning the chart to the sleeve on the back of the wheelchair, he or she might lean over and give Neena’s cheek or nipple a playful and/or painful pinch, stroke her clitoris or stick a finger up inside her front or back, and say, usually in an off-handed fashion, “buck up sweetie, after all, you’re getting the very best of care.”

Sooner or later, sometimes as long two or three hours later (so it seems), the attendant returns (or another just like him or her), and continues pushing Neena’s chair down the rest of that and then other of those between-floors hallways that seem to never end, turning this featureless corner and that, until she loses track, never seeming to get anywhere at all. Neena, who sits there paralyzed and silent, is nonetheless ominously admonished by the attendant pushing her “to rest now while you can; you’re going to need all the strength you can muster.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Neena can see the black IV drip running into the back of her hand, black as sludge, and she wonders if it’s a side-effect of whatever it is that they are pumping into her that is making her remember, so vividly, and in such oppressive detail, meaningless events from a life of utter pointlessness that she so clearly did not live.