be some ruckus in the emergency wing, but I didn’t hang around long enough to see what it was.
I did seventeen files immediately, all outpatient visits that I could hold in one hand without much effort. Then I started on two stacks of thicker files from surgical, which were mostly in the same area of the filing room, meaning not a lot of walking, and one even ended up on the bottom shelf, which isn’t all that common, because those files are older. The rest of the day was spent dealing with six cartons of files from the early ’80s—five hours and I didn’t even finish. It never ends. Last year’s numbers for the entire hospital system, which includes several facilities throughout the city, when touted around by the PR department went something like: 625,000 home care visits, 90,000 inpatient discharges, and more than 1,000,000 outpatient visits. The emergency rooms alone saw 255,000 people.
It’s not boring, what I do. It can be infuriating—when a particular file doesn’t know where it belongs, and so I have to pore through the paper innards looking for the right detail. Anything that looks like a patient number will do in some cases. And it can be numbingly mechanical. Sometimes I get four hundred incidents in a single day, none of them admitted, just treated and released. Those files lack any sort of tangible personality, and often you can file several of them at a time because they’re sequential, so there’s no detective work. But I never find it boring, exactly.
Boredom indicates that although you are mentally fixed on a single task—waiting, reading, listening to a stranger’s conversation—what you would rather be doing is something else. And I find that often what I would rather be doing is filing. Meaning, I never say to myself, “Wow, I’d rather be getting fucked right now by a dude on his lunch break.” I like the motion of this work, the back and forth between the aisles, the quietness of the room. The immediate gratification—when I’m finished, I’m finished, and I get to go home.
There is a peace to the bureaucracy. Among the crowds of humanity I feel infinitely small. Inconsequential. These files were here long before I was, and they’ll be here for years after I’m gone. I only intersect them briefly, passing into their lives and then out, invisibly. Someone once told me that the job sounded like horrific humdrum torture—stacks of befuddling paperwork and bloody, hapless fingertips—but I disagree. I take the opposite point of view. Didn’t Camus say that we have to imagine Sisyphus happy?
Mr. Bartlett is in the kitchen when I open the door.
“Come in, Simon. It’s so nice to see you again. I was wondering if you would show up today.” Our meetings are weekly and scheduled. He likes me to pretend that I happen to be stopping by; it creates the illusion of a genuine friendship. “Would you like a glass of water?” A blur of lavender and baby powder introduces him to the foyer. A blue wash pauses in the air, the nebula around him congeals. I wonder if he’s taken a bath.
He stands against the doorjamb, waiting for me to decide if I want a glass of water, which means he’s hoping that I’ll piss on him, or sometimes I piss in the ice cube trays so he can save it for later.
“Fine,” I say. Mr. Bartlett keeps my money in a purple envelope. He has a strange sense of morality—he would never actually hand me the cash—and so he leaves it on a desk near the front door. “So you won’t accidentally forget it,” he says. Does he remember that this is what I do for a living?
The first time I fucked him at this house I went into the kitchen after he offered me a glass of water and looked into the looming china cabinet, probably antique, only to see that there was one plate, one glass, and one set of utensils. “Why do you only have one plate?” I asked. “Oh, you know,” he said. “All the others must have broken.”
Mr. Bartlett continues his monologue. “I thought about cooking a little dinner for the two of us and then I said to myself, ‘You don’t even know what that dear young thing likes to eat, or if he even prefers to eat dinner at this hour. Instead, simply offer a glass of water. Something to fill his stomach.’ That’s what I said to myself. And do you know what? I think I was exactly right in thinking those thoughts, don’t you?”
“Water is fine,” I say.
“Perfect.” He smells my shoulder as he slides past me. “I’ve had the Brita in the cooler all day, because I knew you would say that yes, you would like a glass of water.” He fills a glass and hands it to me. I take a big gulp.
Today he looks like a sagging version of himself, like his skin is two sizes too large, and the real Mr. Bartlett must be shrunken, perhaps captive, inside. His feet are like props from a horror film, pale and rubbery. Sometimes he smells like medicine, like an old person. And I don’t tell him that, in some circles, there are plenty of men out there, some boys even, who would gladly do for free what I do for a measly hundred bucks. I wouldn’t even know where to start guessing his age. Seventy?
“Oh dear, your hands,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “I know.”
“You’ve cut your fingers worse than ever.”
No, not worse than ever. I remember worse.
“What do you want to do today?” I say. The sooner we’re done the sooner I can get the hell out of here.
“Oh, honey, drink your water before rushing into the details of our evening. The last thing I want to do is to have my life planned out like prime-time television. Let’s do things at random. Do you know what I mean? Let our hair down?”
“Okay.” I finish the water and he offers to refill it. I decline. I had three glasses of iced tea an hour ago, figuring this would happen.
“Now, don’t call me cloddish, but I seem to have left the latex in the bedroom. Would you mind following me in to retrieve it?” He runs his finger along a moth-eaten hole in his sweater.
“Sure.” I follow Mr. Bartlett up the stairs and to the bedroom. He’s pulled the sheets off the bed so that I have to fuck him on the bare mattress, which is okay. We’ve done that before.
After, while I’m putting my pants back on, he bothers me about another glass of water, and when I tell him that he forgot to stick the pitcher back into the “cooler” his face sinks. His posture slacks.
“At least have a glass of milk. It’s still in the cooler, I’m sure.” He sounds confused, lost like a victim of horrible temporary amnesia.
“No thanks,” I tell him.
I take the envelope off the desk, open it, fold the bills and shove them into my pocket. He walks over and lays his hand on my shoulder. I try to move out of the way so he can’t touch me, because he just had his hands all over me. And the money is in my pocket, which means that we’re done, and if I don’t want him to touch me, I don’t have to let him.
“We could watch the television. I don’t have cable, who needs all those hundreds of channels? But I’m sure we could find something worthy of our attention. Come on, sit down over here on the couch and I’ll find something on the networks. Now, let me see.” Mr. Bartlett moves quickly, brushing past me with the remote. He motions me with it and pushes some clothes off the cushion next to him. “Want to watch the networks?” he says. The screen flashes talk-show hosts, soap operas, an advertisement for a seafood restaurant with a crab leg snapping at the joint. “They’re so different these days than they were when I was younger.” He tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. I turn back to face the door. “Maybe I can find a new situation comedy. There’re so many of them these days. Practically everyone watches different shows now. Oh, Simon, this electronic box used to bring whole neighborhoods together. Well, all that’s gone now. New shows each season. No one to root for, really.”
I don’t turn around to look at him. I don’t want to see him staring down at his feet, glaring at the loose skin, the old bones.
I do have a menu. And everything is negotiable. Blow job active, blow job passive, fuck top, fuck bottom, piss top, piss bottom. Jerk off and come, jerk off without coming, eat my own, come on my face, on my ass, come before, come during, come after. Pain, bad pain, really bad pain. Soldier, Motorcycle