It was just another ordinary day at work in Our Lord’s Triumph Abbey and Sanatorium, except that the supervisor was here, which made this a day very much out of the ordinary.
Early in the morning, every single nurse in the sanatorium wing of the facility, including our endeared protagonist Miss Nurse Jolly, lined up in two straight rows along the hallway directly behind the front gates of the building, quietly awaiting the arrival of the supervisor. It was as if they were the females in a lair of mammals, and the supervisor the alpha male, though this metaphor was certainly inappropriate, as they all realized when the supervisor appeared at the double glass door, with a head so bald and waxed that it repulsed them to even glance at him, much less mate with him.
Nurse Jolly shared her colleagues’ opinion on their employer, but like all her colleagues she remained composed enough to show none of her actual emotions and merely smiled at the man as he passed by in brisk steps between the two rows of nurses without a single glance at them. He seemed, as there was no other mean for Nurse Jolly to learn about this man beyond that of guesswork, utterly disinterested in the reverence they were treating him with, accustomed to seeing it perhaps in other complexes he owned, and he was equally disinterested to an extent that he was almost indifferent when the chief nurse started reporting to him about the condition of the facility and its patients.
No one said a thing as the man nodded and nodded to the chief nurse’s words which had turned slowly from perfectly audible to an indiscernible drone, and soon they were all praying for this tedious conversation to be over before one of them dropped dead in her boredom. However, the dialogue did not end when their tolerance for it crumbled, and they had to raise their tolerance a little more, and then a little more a while later when it still had not ended. When it had finally reached its end after what seemed to Nurse Jolly a millennium, everyone heaved a mental sigh of relief,
But this sigh died on their lips, especially Jolly’s, when the supervisor spun away from the chief nurse and marched directly to her with a question already hurled from his mouth, which Nurse Jolly noticed as he drew closer and closer was remarkably dry and covered in translucent flecks that threatened to fall off at any moment,
“Take me to your ward.”
And Nurse Jolly had no choice but to comply, and took the supervisor to the ward she was monitoring. They strode down the hallway in a uniform formation, Jolly in the front and the man following behind, while the other nurses gazed at her from left and right with an ungrounded sense of envy, forgetting apparently the nausea the man’s gleaming bald head had stirred in them. Miserably the young nurse endured it all, and quickened her pace just a little so that her employer would not notice, making her way swiftly out of this crowded corridor into a relatively deserted hall where she felt for the first time in the past fifteen minutes, she could breathe freely again.
Then, they went on to the elevator hall where they took the elevator, many times the size of the usual passenger elevator since it was designed to accommodate hospital beds as well, to the fifth floor. Out through the glass wall of the elevator shaft, Nurse Jolly could see the abbey wing of the building where monks and nuns were kneeling in an open plaza, chanting lines from the Bible while some calmly swept down hallways with a broom, and some attended to the cows in the backyard.
They seemed so distant, but she could still distinguish their forms clearly out of the blurred blob of concrete, steel, and human flesh that this building was consisted of. For a brief moment, she wondered the same thing she had always wondered as she chanced by the abbey, if these spiritual men and women were in truth patients of the sanatorium as well, though they were so dangerous in their diseased minds that they must be housed in a different wing of the facility for the sake of everyone besides themselves,
