Sprebas

Clean sheets. And the smell of stale waiting rooms like in every dentist reception you could imagine. The hotel feeling of someone, some stranger, slept in this bed right before you did. And when you get declared healthy enough, when you´re cured, someone else will take your place.

You could ask me and I would not be able to tell you. But I´m alone in here and the nurses and doctors and what you would call my family had all stopped knocking. Had given up calling through the door. Begging me to open up. To unlock the door and let them in. You need help they´d say. It´s time for your medication. Before people give you medicine, they have to convince you you´re sick.

So they gave up. I can still hear people outside coming and leaving. To check if I´ve changed my mind and decided to give in to my state and to do what they tell me to. To accept. That´s all some of these people keep telling me. I have to accept this and that. Drugs going into my system through tubes into my arms. Those people in white robes, clean hands and friendly faces. Their sweet salesman smiles.

This nurse. The one who treated me at first, before they had her replaced on her own initiative. Oh how she loved to talk. And that would be fine and all. Any sane person loves a good conversation, right? But she. She does not talk to you as much as she kicks the words into your face. There was something with her. The way she moved. Wobbled. Her voice, like ten thousand fingernails on a blackboard. Her hyena laugh, everything about her - you could tell a mistake had been made.

Then came the other. The replacement nurse. Pushing me around. Threatening me with some Mephistophelian horror if I did not behave. She even lifted me clean of the ground once, last time I tried to leave, and shoved me back down into bed. Since then, she insist on jamming the thermometer up my dirt hole. A real nurse Ratchet. I think I love her.

You would think someone would tell you why you´re at some hospital. If it weren't for all the people bothering me, I'd stay. I have food here. Not good food, but there is a lot of it. There is a TV in my room with channels I don´t have at home. But then some kid walks in.

All young and pimpled. Dressed in this black shirt with some angry guy screaming right at me. Stuff in his nose and ears and everywhere. He did not even bother to not have holes in his pants when he came by.

He´d sit by my bed all concerned and ask how I was and stuff like that.

And when I asked, he´d simply say, "Well, I´m your son, dad."

"The hell you are."

All those people. The doctors. The nurses. A shrink and even a guy claiming to be a priest. They all insisted on telling me these things about me.

How I lived my life all alone. My wife, they tell me, died last fall. Cancer. They even bothered to get some calamity in here telling me we were related.

And why would they do this you ask?

I don´t know. But I do know this, you don´t want to be cured if the disease makes you happy.