"Monday."
"Be quite a long weekend."
He commenced writing a prescription.
I had told him how well he seemed, when the nurse had ushered me in.
He didn't seem well any more. The vestige of his White Mountain tan
was saffron. In fifteen minutes, circles had come under his eyes. He
handed me two little rectangles of paper. "No--pain?"
"Not yet." It was a cruelty.
He flinched minutely. "That's for pb. Quarters. If you spook yourself
up. And sodium amytal. Grain and a half. Sleep. You can take the whole
bottle, if you want to. Then the biopsy will surely be negative and
you'll have thrown away your other six lives." He put his arm around my
shoulder. "See you tomorrow--at your hotel--around seven."
I walked through the patients--through people who had nothing more
serious than hypertension, or gastric ulcer, or diabetes. Or perhaps
they did have fatal afflictions, though. Cancer, for example. You
couldn't say what they had--sitting there, tremulously thumbing the
magazines. They looked at me. They looked at the fat girl who rose
because her turn was next.