The hospital’s walls were white, and colourless linoleum rose from the floor to slightly above hip height. This was to stop people scuffing the walls when patient beds were wheeled into them. It could have also been for safety; if you ran head-first into the linoleum then maybe it would be slightly softer than drywall, I don’t know. I played with my lanyard as I waited in the cafeteria line. Gone to bed too late, moved too slowly this morning, forgotten breakfast again. It’s not that I did anything that I wanted to do. S. de-existed and so I just allowed time to pass while I did things I didn’t enjoy and then suddenly it was after midnight. And I’d been wanting to get up earlier today: the receptionist in my private rooms said that a parcel had come for me. I don’t know why they didn’t just send it to my house, but that’s how things were. It was probably the employment contract: I’d been offered a position at the new company-affiliated soul research laboratory, something part-time to complement my clinical work. I had time to spare and not much to do at home. S. was there less and less and it’s not like we spoke much anyway. Maybe she’d even approve of me working with our company, researching something slogan-related, notice it.
So there was no time for me to get to the private wing of the hospital, to my rooms, pick up the parcel and be on time for the ward round. I was already late, anyway. But I dreaded another round of seeing the same interchangeable patients with the same untreatable pathologies, so I procrastinated and waited in the cafeteria queue, tried to pick the least bad option from a selection of unappetising meals. Several nights ago at a company function, a woman told me excitedly of the phenomenological diet. Fasting, cold showers, unpleasant sleeping conditions, small stones placed in your shoes each morning; the more discomfort, the slower the subjective perception of time. You don’t extend your life, but it feels a whole lot longer. The greatest benefit would probably be fewer meals to worry about each day. I stared at the scratched photograph of my face on the lanyard, at the counter, the food, the back of a woman’s head who was a few places ahead of me in line, back to my lanyard. Today I would fast, an expression of intent rather than indolence. My registrar and interns met me in the cafeteria.
"List, list, where’s my list?" Paper fluttered as I snatched the list from the intern without looking at her.
"A few came in overnight," said my registrar.
The overnight registrar looked tired during handover. Recent admissions: several severe repeated objectification syndromes, a garden-variety melancholia, one overwhelming Apollonianism, catastrophic soul decompression and a soul stasis.
I think I said this exact thing at the start of every round: "New ones first, then ICU. And how many patients can I make private?"
The hospital lobby was large, high-ceilinged and the entrance was mostly made of glass. It used to let a lot of sunlight in but then The Tower got big enough and its shadow blocked out most of the sun in the morning. By the afternoon, the lobby felt like a greenhouse. Grey linoleum floors, corridors split off at seemingly random angles, no symmetry in sight. The scattered potted palm trees made everything feel even more barren and artificial.
I hadn’t been concentrating and barely noticed that my registrar was talking to me: "—two week history of decreased motivation as reported by family, pathologically relaxed. Patient too relaxed to give a proper history. Past history of a soul decompression episode, maybe a few subclinical episodes of the same, some other physical past history that I didn’t get, you, intern, can you chase his physical history? Ask one of the corporeals, if they’ve bothered showing up to work, ok? Anyway, so ah, ah, yep—" Shuffling papers. "—right, decreased motivation associated with increased enjoyment of lying aimlessly in the sun, spending increasing amounts of time with the family parakeet—"
Listening really wasn’t necessary, I’d heard this story a thousand times before. I wondered whether I should decompress my soul a bit, especially after the previous week’s stress. Yes, I would probably be less productive, but it would be a nice break. I could self-prescribe decompression therapy. Take a month off, leave the city.
"—uncharacteristic new affinity for loud silken shirts, top three buttons undone, sea shell necklace in situ—"
Having decided to begin the round in the cafeteria, I gathered my team’s orders: "Which coffees are we getting, you, espresso, I remember that, latte? No, cappuccino. Cappuccino. You, you don’t drink coffee do you? Still pure, I see. Me? No, no coffee for me either, it’s this new diet, have you heard of it? Phenomenological diet—"
Of course everyone had heard of it; every self-respecting professional had heard of this new prestige game. I talked with my reg about their phenomenological diet experiences, they’d been following it before it got big. The cafeteria sat directly beside the lobby and had a cold light without windows, under which everything seemed too sharp and defined, the world more unadorned than usual. The tables and chairs were made of a slippery plastic material which was easy to clean but good for little else. There were a few plants scattered around the place. My neck prickled and stomach turned. A stasis lay over everybody here. Everyone was either sitting or standing and seemed to transition instantly from one to the other, no one apparently moved. Life slowed here under the halogen sun. My registrar was now asking a med student what they wanted to specialise in; I really didn’t care.
A commotion caught my attention, a small crowd had formed. Lining one wall of the cafeteria were counters, sections of glass cabinets holding food alternating with cash registers. One cashier, a woman behind the counter, was standing motionless while a customer tried to pay for his meal. Increasingly frustrated, he started gesturing towards the register more and more emphatically. The woman ignored this customer and continued to stare at me. More people protested as the queue to order and pay lengthened. Some disappeared elsewhere, the more devout stayed and complained. The other employees took orders and payment as usual, but this particular cashier stayed in place and did not blink and she began to smile long teeth at me. It began as a slack jaw with slightly pursed lips and progressed to a full grin with her face turned slightly downwards and her eyes leering from under a tilted brow. The teeth grew longer the more she smiled. Those queuing didn’t seem concerned by her appearance at all; they were annoyed because she refused to serve them. She was treated as a very slow, but otherwise completely normal cashier and nobody paid attention to her smile. The others at my table glanced without concern at where I was trying not to look, her hot gaze on my throat, quick blinks in her direction. Her canines slid over her lower lip as she bared her teeth. I had seen these same teeth at a company function a few days ago, growing from the mouth of a company employee.
Once again, my reg had been speaking and I had been noncommittally nodding and agreeing. "—which patients do we have today? Let’s go through the list from the top. First, ok, let’s divide up the jobs that we’re aware of now, see if we can do anything before the round starts. Alright, so we need to contact—"
The customers in the line had formed queues around the woman the same way that water flows around obstacles in a stream. Her arms were held straight at her sides and her shoulders were packed tightly together while a row of pearlescent teeth glinted from between her lips, wet and glistening as she licked them.
A man in an untied hospital gown loudly wished for a second opinion from the table behind me: "—doctor told me to stop. Well, what if I don’t want to stop? No one can tell me—"
I stood up and announced that the round urgently needed to start. We left, throats scalded from swilling our drinks quickly and her head turned to follow me as I left and her tongue rolled out of her mouth, panting. The rest of the cafeteria remained uninterested in this woman. Fellow cashiers operated her register, reaching over and under her shoulders while customers spoke past her to those serving them. To them, this woman was an obtrusive but otherwise unremarkable object, everyone worked around her. Her head was twisted backwards one hundred and eighty degrees as she watched me leave, the rest of her body did not move and she never broke her gaze and never blinked.
"Are you alright?" asked my reg as we left the cafeteria.
Discreetly pointing at the cashier, my voice cracked: "Is the cashier there, that woman behind the counter, is she looking a little, uh—" Her head was still pointing backwards, snarling. "—um, atypical?"
And my registrar knitted his brow, looked at each of the cafeteria staff behind the counter and pretended to see what I was seeing, nodded noncommittally. First Hat and Briefcase, and now I was seeing things that nobody else noticed. But it’s not all bad; if I lost my mind, maybe S. would pay me more attention.
Getting around the hospital was slow for many reasons. Crowding was one, patients got lost and blocked every corridor. Dodging stretchers being wheeled between rooms was so common that nobody noticed it after a few days of working here. The layout also prolonged everything. It was the busiest hospital in the world, so close to The Tower, far too busy to shut down any section for repairs, renovations or to build something new. So whenever it needed to be expanded, more beds added, the new addition was just stuck onto the existing structure. It was a mess of architectural styles and, from the outside, looked like about thirty different buildings blended together in a mess of cubes and rectangular prisms, mostly grey concrete or bricks, sometimes luridly coloured metal; its interior was no more coherent. Tucked away, high up and overlooking the plaza which lay in front of the hospital’s entrance, was the private wing. There it was cleaner and quieter because we kept public patients out. The elevators rarely worked so the team and I took the narrow square spiral stairs, coiling around a central shaft. I let the rest of the team speak while I fought down nerves and tried to forget about the woman in the cafeteria. We’d all accepted bracing changes in the post-slogan world, especially here in this city: The Tower seems to invite it, the fracture between the old and the new widens the closer you are to its base. But these changes, dog’s teeth from a woman at a recent company dinner, the same teeth and same expression in the cafeteria, Hat and Briefcase, they weren’t imposed on large populations at once like the trips, objectifications or high performers. These changes were too personal, unnoticed by those around me.
The lanyard flapped against my leg as we walked down a faceless corridor studded with locked doors, patient cubicles. My shoe slapped on the ground, but nobody commented on it. Its sole had come loose at the front and lolled like a tongue when I walked. Just laziness; I kept meaning to fix it, but it hadn’t gotten bad enough yet. I could hear our new Dionysian patient through the wall of her cubicle. She was waiting for a bed on the Dionysian ward, somewhere dark and sound-proofed. My reg informed me that she’d been picked up by police last night, drinking wine from a champagne flute in the shape of a fawn. Opening the door to her cubicle and stepping inside, her voice was loud and vigorous. I couldn’t make out what exactly she was singing about, but if it were anything like every other acute exacerbation of Dionysianism, it would involve some type of excess. Her hospital gown had been worn backwards like an open robe, proudly baring her naked body to the world as she gestured passionately and sang. We tried to treat her as well as we could on the general almological ward, but lacked the specialist equipment we really needed. What was truly required was a dedicated Dionysian cubicle, an anechoic chamber, pitch black, minimal stimuli. She probably wouldn’t get better there, either. At night she barked at the moon and scratched herself bloody. But all of this was done with normal human teeth, so everything was fine. Through the windows in her room I could see The Tower.
Looking sideways at my registrar: "Done?"
"The complete soul stasis?"
I’d already forgotten about them. "They’re not going anywhere, let’s— actually, you know, we should— yep, probably should see them. Let’s go, it’ll be quick."
A person separate from their soul is barely a person at all, they are only a body in space. What causes the rupture? There are theories: intense emotional states, frustrated love, some company fanatics say it’s from not paying obeisance to The Tower. One academic proposed that the scent of drying laundry and freshly baked bread in a warm, well-lit wooden room during a haze of languid summer days evokes such strong memories - real or imagined - of an ideal childhood that the soul falls out of the body, as if trying to tumble back to a different time. Whatever the cause, the effect of soul stasis is dramatic. The soul stops moving with the body, it picks a spot - or the spot picks it - and it stays there. Instantly, the body becomes ambivalent to everything and only exists to continue existing. Moving this body closer to the soul makes no difference, the two are separated by something more fundamental than distance. Soul stasis is a misnomer, so I always thought. It is not so much a stasis as a total severance.
The nurse was speaking: "—quiet overnight, eating and drinking as normal, not sleeping. Can we give something to make him sleep?" The nurse must have been new and didn’t know.
My registrar filled him in: "They never sleep. No more dreams to have without a soul."
While my reg and the nurse spoke, I tried to have as brief an interaction as possible with the patient and their family. "How are you feeling today?"
The patient drank sips of orange juice and didn’t acknowledge us. His expression wasn’t sad or one of discomfort, as some expect. Just blank. It was at home, likely in a wicker basket filled with shoes beside the front door, that’s where his soul probably was. He was putting his shoes on when his soul fell from his body into the basket. It was his husband who found him when he returned home, sadness quieter and quieter and the husband now only stood in the corner and played with the hems of his shirt. He held his hand sometimes and would talk to that blank face. There were no questions today because there wasn’t much more to explain. Everybody had normal teeth.
"Any questions for us?" I asked, hopeful that this would be a brief consult.
"No, no thank you. I think we’re ok here." He looked at his static husband and nodded.
From a woman in the room, maybe a sister, a friend, words that had been brewing, evidently for a while: "It’s that— it’s that tower, isn’t it? The Tower took him, didn’t it? He just bought shares."
I opened my mouth to reply, they didn’t know about me and S., I could appear unconflicted.
Before I had to say anything, the husband interjected: "We’re ok here."
He would go to the static wards when a bed opened. The static wards were colourful and inviting, and while the inpatients were indifferent, the staff seemed to do better. It wasn’t that the statics were difficult patients to care for on a moment-to-moment basis; but the more time you spent around them, the more the colour in the world faded, slightly. You couldn’t put your finger on it, but each sound would be a little less full, the smell of a clear day thinner than it should be. Almost like an entropy of souls, a void where a soul should be tugs others in its direction, they move to fill the space. Not that any of this is proven, but I’ve heard about the same feeling of inevitable decay from several people and have felt it myself. Not unwelcome, this man dulled my worries a little.
Time to end this ward round: "I’ve got— there are private patients I need to attend to. Call me if there are problems. Or, or not, I trust you, I’m sure you’ll work it out."
My discomfort, I couldn’t forget the teeth. It was time to do what I had planned on getting done this morning: fetch the parcel from my private rooms and get home, have some quiet time alone. A few people greeted me as I crossed the hospital, most didn’t. Crowds thinned as I approached the private wing. The elevators there worked and I examined my face, reflected and distorted in a window beside me as I waited alone for the lift. Normal eyes, normal teeth.
The elevator opened straight into my private rooms. They used to be co-owned, but I bought everyone else out with company money and now I was the sole owner. I’d hired a few other radioalmologists to reduce my workload and even had my own SEARI and CARI in there. It was an intrusively faceless series of rooms, corporate-chic paintings on the walls chosen to be as unobjectionable to as many people as possible. Cream-coloured paint, a carpet whose pattern I immediately forgot, the reception desk was vacant.
A voice called out from the staff room behind the receptionist’s desk, out of sight: "It’s in your office!"
There were no patients waiting.
Again, the same voice from the staff room: "The parcel! I’ve left it on your desk, in your office!" My receptionist; I couldn’t remember her name.
Thanking her, I went straight to my office. I had socialised enough that day. Pneumatic hiss, I had to lean on the door to close it. So many patients slammed the door shut behind them that my receptionist had a new door installed, only in my office. It closes itself, and very slowly. My office was bare: I’d hung my framed degrees on the wall behind my desk, someone put a plant in the corner. Instruments to examine almographs on my desk, chairs for me and the patients, that was all I needed and wanted.
I opened the blinds and first saw the dust in the air, which the afternoon light made faintly golden. The room felt quieter with the lights off and I heard myself breathing, views of The Tower through my window. Several storeys below the hospital plaza was busy; light-grey paving was sparsely interrupted by trees rising from the concrete. Tides of bodies swept in and out of the hospital’s entrance. Like a goose walking over your grave, that’s what S. used to say when she shivered without meaning to. It felt like a goose walked over my grave as I looked through the window at the people below, rested a hand on the glass and left smudged fingerprints. I shivered again.
People were crossing the space from every direction and a group of hospital security staff were corralling herds of objectified staff members through the crowd to get them out of the way and onto the street, where they could travel to The Tower. The glass was thick enough and I was high up enough that everything was silent. Another shiver, The Tower billowed with objectified and sun glittered from its windows, observing its city. Waves of people continued to churn and the swirl hypnotised me and I took a moment to watch them wander, calm my nervousness which had been worsening all day. It didn’t help, the more I watched the more unsettled I felt. Heads bobbed in ripples as they walked. A flash from the crowd, but there was nothing. I couldn’t see their faces clearly and blank people milled below. Another flash or shimmer, but only in my peripheral vision and there was nothing to see when I looked square-on. A pack of performers ploughed through the middle of it all, knocking over anyone in their way. The performers’ songs were so loud and clearly enunciated that I could hear them from my office. And there, in their wake, I saw him: a man, an unmoving lynchpin at the centre of the maelstrom. He stared at me and I stopped breathing for a moment, froze rigid and then my legs went limp. So direct, even from that far away there was no doubt, he was staring at me and nothing else. The woman in the cafeteria had unnerved me and I propped myself up below the windowsill to sit. His yellow eyes shone brightly enough to illuminate my office, I watched flickers dance over the bare walls. Was it the man I’d seen earlier? I couldn’t make out any features but for his eyes, which were unmistakable. Two little glistening jewels. I reached up and closed the blinds while I sat.
The reception was empty, so was the lift, I couldn’t stay in my office because he had found me there. Had they followed me to work? I’d have to leave via the hospital’s back entrance; there was no way that I’d walk through the plaza where he was, whoever he might be. Would the woman with long teeth also be hiding down there in the crowd? Uneasy, watching the eyes and teeth of every person I passed, I escaped underground.
Beneath the hospital lay a warren of faceless and airless corridors to get lost in. No matter how long someone had worked here, they could still find themselves disoriented in a stretch of grey or a dead end where there once was a door. They could be lost for days before a search team found them, wandering the quiet corridors and accompanied only by the hiss of multicoloured pipes and the occasional sound of the pneumatic tubes. There was no complete light or dark, only a continuous twilight of echoing places. These used to be plain old corridors; slowly talk emerged, wrong turns taken, corridors would repeat themselves. Of course nobody said anything about it, not for a while. People would blame their own forgetfulness or put things down to absentmindedness, why they took ten minutes longer than usual to leave work or arrived so late for a meeting. Employees and eventually even patients and families avoided the hospital underground of their own accord long before anyone said anything out loud about the confusion. The shifts in layout grew worse until, with a great deal of relief, it was suddenly and universally acknowledged that something really was going on, down there. Confused excuses of ‘I thought I left on time but I must have walked here too slowly’ became ‘the corridors became longer,’ more confidently stated, people knew that they weren’t going crazy or at least were descending into insanity with many other companions. While disappearances could range from inconvenient to fatal, people adapted. It became a fact of life. I twisted and turned through the corridors until I reached the radioalmology offices. We had our department down here. Once the slogan manifested and these underground corridors started to shift, we were offered a new place for our offices but we all said no. Fewer people bothered us, this way.
The sole of my shoe flapped and I tried to walk quietly, echoes chasing themselves far away to somewhere unknown. Would they hear it, all the noise I was making, the stalking yellow eyes and dog’s teeth? About half-separated from the rest of my shoe, the sole opened and closed like a mouth, like the open mouth of the cashier in the cafeteria who drooled after me. Or would the shoe begin to speak, like Hat and Briefcase had? I sped up and just wanted to be home. Did they want something, this man with yellow eyes and woman with dog’s teeth? Was it because I looked at the documents in Briefcase, because I had spoken to Briefcase and Hat? A habitual penitent, I trace everything back to my crimes.
It was cool and dark here under the hospital, and I felt like I was floating. Nothing was painful or sharp but rather a march of days and nights that arrived now without me knowing it, an endless expanse of existence with the edges smoothed off and no light or shadow.