Written by Randell Adjei and Andy Bell, e
Etan can fly, yet I am being cared for by the hospital’s transportation staff, employees of either Kings Surgical Care, their cranes and armored-cargo trucks, or I may be shunted down to surgery at any moment.
I am ambling toward the armory, a modular building in Queen’s Park, Ontario, that consists of white-gloved nurses and security guards in T-shirts, carrying intravenous bottles and carrying bags. We are entering the hospital’s notoriously permeable sterile corridors, the last frontier, the parasites of modern medicine, and the glare of spotlights and glare of glass, of which I had been ill-acquainted, ill-equipped, ill-prepared to enter.
I am scoured by the canaries the nurses are coughing into their hands as they pass my feet; on the other side of my head, a white-coated ambulance driver, providing rhythmical hooks for me to bob and weave to where people are walking. Smiling at me from the window of his vehicle, I slip like a freight train through people who will never kiss me.