In the hopeless and drawn out war that the housekeeping department was waging against the nursing staff at Chesterfield St. Luke's Hospital, in greater Bangor, Maine, Peaches Scribner was a skilled general.  Every morning, long before any of the other staff arrived, Peaches set her 350 pounds on a  rotating, industrial-strength stool in the bowels of the pathology wing.  She planted her two feet on either side of her and braced her elbows on her desk and met the day's challenges with dead-pan bovine determination. No gum stuck in a hospital carpet or emergency urine spill ever stirred Peaches from this pose. She was massive and serene, an emblem of immaculate imperturbability.
     Imogen Ulrich worshipped her. Peaches' singleness of purpose, her stony embrace of the demands and imperatives of duties that seemed to have been allotted to her by destiny seemed awesome and religious, as if Peaches were some monstrous antiseptic Buddha set over the teeming cesspool of vice and bacteria that would otherwise overwhelm Chesterfield St. Luke's. In Imogen's considered estimation, Peaches was a very old soul. Ancient. Evolved. Wise. No doubt Peaches was living the very last of her lives in the current karmic cycle, and the plain blood-red housekeeping uniform with its poly-blend striped collar was draped on her like the robes of an lifelong ascetic.
     By contrast, Imogen's was a distinctly infant soul. At all times, her soul was pulled this way and that by the most compelling but short-lived whims, as if it hoped to live each of its remaining lives all at once. As her father often complained, Imogen could not subscribe even to the most basic of biological imperatives. His complaint was, of course, a snide reference to Imogen's decision to shed the oppressive trappings of gender and begin wearing a dress.
     Imogen thought the criticism was overstated. Certainly, she acknowledged, back three years ago when she had hit the ripe age of twenty-one and had realized to her great disappointment that she possessed a soul of merely moderate years, she had plunged into a psychic tailspin. But once Imogen had sworn off the coke and her nasal septum showed signs of healing, she had decided to fully commit herself to embracing Hinduism. Or Buddhism. Or really any Eastern discipline that held out the promise of enlightened unity.
     Unfortunately, Imogen's embrace had not fully survived Energy 101, a night class at the local community college taught in equal parts by a lithe soccer Mommy and a host of sandalwood candles. Imogen's fellow students would hold their hands an inch above the surface of one another's skin and gushingly profess to be able to "move"one another's energy. Imogen had really, really, really wanted to move energy. Desperately so. But all she had ever felt was a faint tremor in her hand that made her think perhaps she should cut down on her drinking, too.
     As a back-up plan, Imogen had then decided to re-embrace Western medicine and enroll in nursing school down in Boston. Peaches never counted Imogen's brief stint at nursing school against her. In fact, Peaches said that the experience gave Imogen the ability to think like a nurse, to get in the mind of the enemy. It was, Peaches assured her, the special advantage she had over other housekeepers who had been in the trenches in the war against the nurses years longer.
     Nevertheless, Imogen suspected that her brief history of student nursing was regarded as a character flaw by her coworkers. Even 'Tard -- the good-natured, mentally challenged orderly, who was not technically an employee of the hospital, but who was of such limited intellectual capability and who wielded a mop with such genuine glee that he was allowed to show up in the housekeeping uniform as often as he liked -- was a little suspicious. Never mind that Imogen had not been able to get beyond first semester anatomy class."Once a nurse, always a nurse" was the attitude, and when the war was finally won, Imogen knew she would never really have a place in the new antiseptic housekeeping regime that would rule the halls and byways of Chesterfield St. Luke's.
     Still, Imogen was damned if she was going to lie about her past. Ever since she had started wearing a dress, Imogen -- whose birth name was Arthur -- had zero tolerance for liars. Which was why, in part, Imogen was so enamored of Peaches Scribner, who had never given Imogen a single word of bullshit about the dress.  Peaches had patiently listened for a few minutes to Imogen's impassioned explanation as to why it was important that, if she were hired, she be issued the female version of Peaches’ housekeeping department uniform, and only then had interrupted.
     "Art..."
     "I prefer to be called Imogen."
     With infinite gravity, Peaches had consulted the application on the page before her and directed a finger the size of a Twinkie at the appropriate line of the page. Her nails were carmine.
     "What's it say here?"
     "Arthur," Imogen conceded, "but..."
     "Then that's what I'll call you."
     But she didn't. Peaches continued to call Imogen "Art," a diminutive that Imogen loathed more than her given name itself. To her, it sounded like the barking of a small and ineffective terrier.
     "Art, let's cut through the bullshit," Peaches advised. "Can you use a mop?"
     "Yes."
     "You're hired."
     On Imogen's first day, Peaches assigned her to the geriatric ward. This caused Tard to laugh and issue a cryptic warning to "Beware the Q's."
     "What's a Q?"
     Tard just giggled some more, his little belly jiggling all over like a jello mold on a fault line. It was Peaches who explained the O's and Q's for her neophyte housekeeper.
     O's, Peaches explained, were garden-variety geezer: open-mouth, toothless, sunspotted, and astonished, as if just yesterday they had been children and now old age had just come up suddenly and bit them on the ass, and they had realized too late that they were never again going to flip marbles or play Kick-the-Can or achieve enlightenment in this lifetime. In fact, likely as not, they would die alone with poop in their Depends and underpaid and oversexed orderlies copulating unawares in the broom closet.
     Q's, on the other hand, were beyond all this drama and confrontation with mortality. Q's were O's who had ripened. The stare had gone vacant and the tongue lolled from the open mouth (providing the telltale curlicue that made an O into a Q).
     As Imogen digested this information, it immediately seemed to her that the Q's were, in their own way, enlightened. They had resigned themselves to their lot and, in giving up the struggle, had found a certain fulfillment. Sure, they were old and ruined, but they had decided not to sweat it any more. It was very zen. From a housekeeping perspective, the only advantage to an O was that drool production was somewhat less prolific.
     Although Imogen firmly believed, after a single lesson from Peaches, that she had mastered this classification, the surface of things, of course, could not be trusted. For example, Mrs. Olsen appeared at first glance to be a total Q. But the impression was destroyed when she latched onto Imogen's crotch with a stick-figure, steel-trap grip and refused to let go. Imogen cried out for help, but the nurses had suddenly all dispersed on important errands and whoever was left at the nurses station took a sudden new interest in scribbling something in charts.
     It was Imogen's first exposure to the open hostilities between nursing staff and housekeepers. She was on her own. She achieved freedom only by breaking Mrs. Olsen's grip with a toilet bowl scrub brush.
     That maneuver brought the nurses running, demanding to know what on earth Imogen thought she was doing.
     "Don't you know," the head nurse demanded, "that housekeepers are not allowed to touch?! That's our job!" The head nurse was a chain-smoking army brat from a family of ten sons whose father had insisted on sufficient progeny to field a football team. Imogen had immediately dubbed her Nurse Ratchit.
     Nurse Ratchit fluffed Mrs. Olsen as if she were a pillow. Looping a pair of sedatives into the patient's open mouth from a two-foot divide, she boomed: "HELLO, MRS. BROWN, HOW'S THE DIAHRREA THIS MORNING?"
     "That's Mrs. Olsen!"another nurse hissed.
     Nurse Ratchet ignored her. Turning to Imogen, she pointed out cheerfully, "Mrs. Brown just had half her colon removed!"
     Hurray for Mrs. Brown! Imogen thought. The nausea from her bruised testicles was just beginning to subside. Give her a gold star on the top of her paper and something to take home to put on the refrigerator with magnets. As if she had a refrigerator, or a magnet, or even a home.
     Then the nurses dispersed, leaving just Imogen and Mrs. Olsen and Mrs. Olsen's shortened colon.
     Shit changes in the blink of an eye,Imogen thought. It's a full-time job just to try to keep up with it.

     Peaches listened to the story with a wise and knowing look. 'Tard, who had overheard the tale, also listened, picking his nose and nodding wisely, like one of those strategic advisers the Pentagon dispatches to third world dictatorships that need propping up.
     At the conclusion of Imogen's recital, Peaches announced that it was time for Imogen to learn some of the basic guerilla arts. Peaches explained how to strategically block the entrance to the nurses' private restroom with "Wet Floor" signs precisely at 9:15AM, their first break, so they would have to trudge all the way to the next floor to relieve themselves.
     She demonstrated how neglecting the trash cans in the nurses'lunchroom would lead to unpleasant infestations of fruit flies and maggots. "And it goes without saying," Peaches added, "never, ever remember to refill the toilet paper rolls or put the seat back down after you clean the restroom."
     Tard nodded enthusiastically, and Peaches raised a cautionary hand.
     "Remember," she advised, "the secret is patience, not Passion." Peaches was relentlessly reasonable. Imogen was ready to build a booth around her and worship her to high Heaven.
     The nurses' retaliation for Imogen's new-found guerilla tactics was swift and unforgiving: Nurse Ratchit ran over Imogen's left ankle with the Meds Cart. Twice. (Although the true source of injury, Imogen admitted only to herself, was Imogen's kicking the med cart swiftly on its hind axis immediately after the incident.)
     To speed healing, Imogen was permitted to spend the first hour of her housekeeping shift in the Physical Therapy department. One morning, as she prepared to submerge her ankle in the steaming whirlpool, Imogen watched a pair of nurses wheel a cherubic eight-year-old into the pediatric burn unit next door. The child was screaming-howling-begging them to leave him alone. Although he weighed no more than sixty pounds, it took two nurses to pin him down. They grit their teeth and shouted that he knew it had to be done and it was for his own good. The little boy was unpersuaded. He howled and howled.
     Imogen dunked her ankle into the whirlpool, blanched and quickly yanked it out again.
     "Ow! I burned myself!" she shouted. The boy's nurses shot her a withering look. Sheepishly, Imogen submerged her foot without further objection. That was the kind of thing, she decided, that help put it all in perspective.Pain is an illusion. Submit, she thought. Don't fight it. And in that way, take power over your destiny. Imogen began to think that maybe she was making spiritual progress.
     Attributing the gain to the little boy, a clear choice for a Lama, Imogen hounded Peaches for a transfer to the pediatric unit, where she quickly made the cherubic, charred eight year old's personal acquaintance.
     His name was Ronnie Kulaks, and he had a keen sense of injustice that, frankly, had long preceded his suffering burns over eighty per cent of his body from a nasty grilling incident with his now-incarcerated stepfather. Ronnie blamed the nurses for every twinge of pain he ever suffered, and a host of other worldly wrongs besides. (He did not waste any blame on his stepfather, who, the boy confided in Imogen, was probably being raped four or five times a day.)
     Ronnie and Imogen became instant friends. He cheered whenever Imogen deliberately neglected to put up "slippery when wet" signs after mopping and together they would watched the nurses go boom on their flowered asses. It was much better than the usual games Imogen played with the used needles and the biohazard bags.
     The nurses again struck back, however. One morning, as Imogen wheeled past the nursing station on the geriatric ward toward Ronnie's room, Nurse Ratchit called out, "Hey, Doctor's kid! Come here."
     Imogen haughtily explained that the geriatric ward was no longer her responsibility.
     "Think again," Nurse Ratchit said. "Call your boss. The word's come from on high."
     Peaches was apologetic. It was a strategic concession, prompted by the nurses' appeal to the highest levels in the hospital administration."Sometimes you fight it," Peaches sighed, "and sometimes you don't. You've got to pick your battles. It's a long war."
     As Imogen well knew, however, the fault for her exclusion from the pediatric ward could not be laid entirely at the nurses' feet. Imogen's recent raid on the pediatric narcotics supply had no doubt played a part. In a weak moment, in the guise of dusting the shelves of the pediatric nurses' station, Imogen had managed to sweep a bottle of child-size valium into a garbage bag, which she later retrieved from the dumpster in the dead of night.
     That night, Imogen had consumed enough Valium to cause her tongue to loll out. Even her toenails had been relaxed. Over the course of one full hour near dawn, she had managed to form only one coherent thought: This is what it's like to be a genuine Q. Mrs. Olsen, eat your heart out.
     It was with great dismay that, the next day, Imogen had discovered the video camera that relentlessly panned the nurses' station. She realized that somewhere out there was incriminating videotape. She had probably been spared arrest only because she was the Doctor's Kid.
No doubt, she thought, that tape will get public some time in the future when it's least convenient and ruin my life.
     With the echo of Peaches's unspoken disappointment ringing in her ears, Imogen grudgingly directed her cart in the direction Nurse Ratchit indicated. She zigzagged through a gauntlet of Q's and O's strategically potted in wheelchairs by the nurses to make her passage most difficult. As bidden, Imogen entered Room 111.
     Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw. Mrs. Lowenstein -- who had since retreated to her bed -- had apparently exploded. Muck was splattered as high as the bathroom ceiling!
     Nurse H_____ -- whose last name had no vowels, which made her seem deep, academic, and Hungarian, but made her sound like she was retching every time she introduced herself -- joked about chemical warfare, and it took Imogen a full half hour to restore the bathroom's former glory.
     "Jeez, babe," Imogen said aloud, not guessing that Mrs. Lowenstein might be something other than an O or a Q, "next time maybe you can get some of it in the toilet bowl, what do you say?"
     In response, Mrs. Lowenstein reached a trembling hand into her side table. She extracted a little purse, and unzipped it. A coin fell. It hit the tiles and described a long slow circle on its edge until came to rest flat, with a finalized plink.
     Imogen, who had followed the coin's path, looked up and found that a crumpled dollar had flowered in Mrs. Lowenstein's ivory fingers.
     "I was going to use it for the newspaper," she croaked, "but you take it."
     A deep breath made a withered breast came loose from her johnny. Imogen, whose only interest in female breasts was developing a pair of her own, looked away.
     "Take it!" Mrs. Lowenstein insisted. "Take it!" She exhibited considerable rage for a dying woman, and Imogen brandished her mop as if she might ward Mrs. Lowenstein off in the event of a full-scale attack.
     And when she finally decided, what-the-hell, I'll take the dollar, Imogen found herself wrestling with to take it from Mrs. Lowenstein's gnarled hands, a tug of war like you would have with a stubborn dog over a stick. This, too, would be caught on tape, and Imogen's vast library of sins be compiled somewhere and ultimately used against her.
I am a better person than those tapes show,Imogen told herself. She pocketed the dollar.

     On her way back from lunch one day, Imogen blundered across six hospital volunteers cheerily outfitted in purple-velvet skin-tight butterfly costumes and rollerblades. They were clustered around 'Tard at the employee entrance. As Imogen passed, one of the butterflies lost her balance. Her right skate shot out from beneath her and struck Imogen directly on the shin. The butterfly collapsed backward in a heap impaled on her delicate wings. 'Tard shrieked. Imogen sunk to her knees, moaning softly.
     The other butterflies expertly slipped the wounded butterfly out of her wings and hastened to soothe Tard, who was inconsolable.
     "Tard, wouldja shut up already?" Imogen griped, as if there were a direct connection between the volume of 'Tard's shrieks and the throbbing in her shin.
     "What did you call him?" one of the butterflies asked frostily.
     Imogen shrugged. "'Tard. So what?"
     Tard stopped shrieking for a moment and loyally came to Imogen's defense. "It doesn't matter what you call a body," he said, "jus' so long as you don't mean nuthin' by it." Then he resumed his shrieking at the same volume as before.
     One of the several butterflies stood apart, a queeny thirty-year-old of such incomparable height and thinness that he appeared as a perennial question mark, self-consciously doubling over to make himself appear smaller. He sniffed and said, "Ach!" as if it were terribly unfair to expose someone with sensitivities as delicate as his to the spectacle of human suffering.
     Imogen's pain was replaced by a glimmer of sudden hope. She had come to believe that no one in Bangor was gay, but the Thin Man looked quite likely. (Notwithstanding his disturbingly Republican belief that she must have deliberately placed herself in harm's way.)
     There's someone like me, Imogen thought. Love is possible.
     At that moment, the hospital doors burst open and Nurse Ratchit and Nurse H____ barreled out. They were escorting a pair of butterfly wings on a gurney and congratulating themselves for having effected a fix using just ace bandages and a hair net. The rehabbed wings were re-fit to the shorn butterfly. Tard's complete happiness was restored. All was again right with the world.
     Nurse Ratchit fixed Imogen with a scurrilous glance, as if she had been the cause of the crisis. "Lookit," she said to Nurse H____. "It's the doctor's kid."
     "What's wrong with you?" Nurse H____ demanded.
     Imogen pointed at the purpling golf ball on her rather finely turned calf and hoped the Thin Man might also notice.
     "You're late, aren't you?" Ratchit snapped. "Christ, some people I guess don't have the same worries as the rest of us." The two nurses retreated inside, shaking their heads, impressed with their own virtue and the general unfairness of the world toward working class stiffs like themselves.
     Later that day, on her regular rounds of the patients' rooms, Imogen had occasion for a second visit to Mrs. Lowenstein, who was sitting up in bed. She had made a remarkable recovery from her catastrophic bowel movement.
     Imogen greeted her warmly, as if they had been through a battle together. "Hi there!" Who am I, she thought, to hold someone's incontinence against them?
     "Umph."
"     So...what're you in for, anyhow, Mrs. Lowenstein?"
     "I'm dying, thank you very much."
     "No kidding! When?"
     "I'm dying
     "Um, OK. Well, you just think of it as a brand new adventure, Mrs. Lowenstein. Can I get you a box of fresh tissue?"
     "What for?"
     "Well, your relatives."
     "Screw my relatives! Crocodile tears, that's what that is. They're just looking for an inheritance. I'd've been out of here weeks ago, if they hadn'been bribing the doctors to poison me." She eyed Imogen suspiciously; there was still some fight left in her: "You aren't taking bribes, are you?"
     "Just in the low three figures."
"Boy, why in God's name are you wearing a dress?"

     At her afternoon break, Imogen tracked down the Thin Man and his fellow butterflies. They had descended on Ronnie Kulaks's room and had succeeded beyond all expectation in cheering him up with their bumbling antics.
     "If I had that much morphine in my veins I'd be easy to make cheerful, too," Imogen grumbled, pressing her face to the glass, as if Ronnie were a newborn she would soon be allowed to carry.
     "I've seen worse," the Thin Man sniffed. Unlike his fellow butterflies, he had elected not to participate in the group cheer-up. He had, he confessed, only agreed to play along with this charade in order to suck up to some delicious hunk in his choir, who was the brains behind the volunteer butterflies.
     As the Thin Man spoke, Imogen was thinking to herself, I'm going to be an O or a Q before I know it. Just this once, I've got to get the balls to ask this guy out on a date.
     But before she mustered her courage, Nurse Ratchet and Nurse H____ bustled down the hall together, cursing amiably.
     "It's the apocalypse," Nurse Ratchet was declaring to Nurse H_____. "Did you see all the fags?
     Nodding to Imogen, Nurse H____ said, "No offense to the doctor's kid. Right?"
     "Oh, yeah. No. Hey, don't sue me, ok, Doctor's Kid?" Nurse Ratchit said. She indicated the volunteers in Ronnie's room, without apparently taking notice of the Thin Man. "It's those fags in there, that's what I was talkin'about."
     "I'm transgendered," Imogen explained coldly. "It doesn't mean I'm a fag." For the benefit of the Thin Man, she added, "Necessarily."
     "By the way," Nurse Ratchit asked, frowning, "what are you doing here?"
     "What do you mean?"
     "We just had a birth down in maternity. There's a birthing room to clean up."
     "Oh, gross," remarked the Thin Man, who clearly never in his lifetime would date anyone who ever had any commerce with after-birth.
     "Aren't you the designated birth guy?" Nurse Ratchit persisted. (One of the oddities of service on the geriatric ward was the corresponding duty to clean the delivery room.) "I mean," Nurse Ratchit said, "the designated birth gal" She put big air quotation marks with her fingers around the word "gal" and rolled her eyes at Nurse H___ and the Thin Man.
     Then her face fell."Oh," she accused the Thin Man, "you're one of them"
     Nurse Ratchit's venom shocked Imogen. Certainly Nurse Ratchit was not politically correct, but where had this display of unadulterated piss-and-vinegar hatred come from? Only as she was mopping up bloody afterbirth did it occur to Imogen that Nurse Ratchit was as jealous of the purple butterflies' success with Ronnie Kulaks as Imogen had been. It frightened Imogen to realize that she might have something in common with Nurse Ratchit.
     Look on the bright side she thought to herself, Peaches was right: you are beginning to think like them. Use it to your side's advantage.
     In the birthing room, Imogen leaned on her mop. She was confused, tired, and utterly astonished at the ugliness of the world. She poked at the pulp of bloody and jellified placenta with her broom. It seemed to Imogen that the breeders ought to be able to accomplish the same end without so much blood and gore.
     Maybe if they didn't force it so hard?
     That evening, Imogen asked her father: "Is it possible that there's another way to get the baby out that you breeders have been neglecting?"
     Dr. Ulrich had steadied Imogen with a look and asked when she planned to attend college.
     "It's just a suggestion, father. No need to get all snippy about it. You keep right on breeding the way you've breeding, no skin off my nose."
     As far as I'm concerned, she decided, I'm a more perfect woman than women themselves, because I will never have to go through this shit.
     "Imogen," Dr. Ulrich warned. The name still had an unfamiliar ring on her father's voice and his lip curled when he said it, as if it were difficult to pronounce.
"     It's Imogen, father. Im-oh-jen. It's from Shakespeare!" To Imogen, this genesis gave her new moniker all the legitimacy it would ever need. She reflected suddenly, There would be a lot less to clean up if we went back to the good old custom of eating the placenta.

     Her date with the Thin Man did not go as well as Imogen had hoped. It seemed that they did not have much in common. Imogen found herself filling the lulls in conversation with rambling revelations about her personal life.
     "I decided," she explained, "to embrace who and what I am, to starve myself, and insist that everyone address me by my new name, that they say 'her' instead of 'him,' and that they dismiss for the time being any facial hair I've not succeeded in eradicating." (This was another ongoing war that was not turning out as she had planned, after a disastrous bout with tweezers and a bottle of Nair for Men.)
     "So you just came out of the closet? Just this last year?" the Thin Man asked, as if this was the moral of Imogen's heroic story.
     "Um...yes."
     "Oh, I don't date people who haven't been out at least a year."
     Imogen was flabbergasted. She stared at the Thin Man a long time, before she accused, "It's because of my dress, isn't it? That's why you hate me."
     After the disastrous date with the Thin Man, Imogen was not sure what she really believed. Who was really like her, if not the Thin Man. Who was really on her side?
     Imogen again had an overwhelming desire to be like Peaches Scribner except,she conceded, for the fat. I'd like to be a thin, svelte Peaches. Peaches at least had accomplished something. She had her own place in the world.
     Imogen's father said delicately, "Housekeeping is quite all right for someone like Ms. Scribner. But you -- you are my son-"
     "Daughter."
     "--you have the skills to accomplish more. You're different than she is."
     Tired of being different, Imogen wore pants to work the next day, but the ever-practical Peaches Scribner insisted that Imogen put on the uniform she had been given.
     "We can't have people dressing any which way, Art. Others have to know who you are. What your role is here in the hospital. It makes them nervous to have strangers poking around their rooms. You know what I mean? You should be proud to wear that uniform."
     Imogen was crushed by this lecture. Again, she had disappointed Peaches. She simply did not seem to have the moral and spiritual capacity that Peaches had. Or even that Peaches expected in a good member of the Housekeeping staff. Imogen was a dilettante. And she was beginning to suspect that she might have to stay in the housekeeping field for the rest of her natural life in order to make it up to Peaches.
     A good swift blow to the head with a hammer would help in that regard,she thought. It would keep me from thinking or looking into things too much.

     Mrs. Lowenstein's relatives pestered the nursing staff because they wanted to know precisely when she was going to die. They even pestered Imogen, until they discovered to their horror that Imogen was not a nurse. Nor even, for that matter, necessarily a woman.
     When one of the relatives complained about Imogen's deception and the lack of a reliable forecast concerning Mrs. Lowenstein's demise, Nurse Ratchit snapped, "Hey, look, I haven't got a crystal ball, sweetheart. And I left my loopy earrings at home.";
     he other nurses thought this was Comedy Central. Nurse H____ went around clicking their fingers like castanets and dancing the way they imagined gypsies dance.
     Imogen reported the exchange to Mrs. Lowenstein, who cackled in delight. Imogen immediately felt guilty for her brief alliance with the nurses, as if she had personally betrayed Peaches Scribner and the rest of the housekeeping staff. The karmic boomerang was swift and unforgiving: Ronnie Kulaks died from a sudden and raging infection.
     The nurses did not blame the housekeepers, however, for stray microbes. There seemed to be some code of unspoken honor in this war that she could only guess at. Instead, Nurse H____ wiped away her tears and announced that the outcome was precisely as she had predicted: "The kid was a Goner from day one." Not a single nurse would admit that she had ever held out any hope for Ronnie. Instead, as Nurse Ratchet bluntly allowed, "It would have been better if somebody had had the courage to go in there the first night and hold a pillow over his head."
     As she delivered this judgment, Nurse Ratchit was staring at Imogen, as if smothering might have been part of Imogen's job description. Or, perhaps, to give Imogen permission to smother in the future without hesitation whenever she saw fit.
     Imogen was amazed at the weird gratitude she felt at having won, however briefly, Nurse Ratchit's confidence.
     How deluded they all were, Imogen thought. Little did they know.
     In Ronnie's empty room, Imogen parked her cart and collapsed full-length on the bed. She thought: If only I had paid more attention. If only I had done the job right. If only I hadn't lifted all those Valiums and gotten myself mixed up with Mrs. Lowenstein and the geriatrics, I would have been in a position to save Ronnie from the killer bacterium, that one deadly germ that had been the cause of it all.
     She held a pillow over her own head to see what it felt like. To give in and let go. To be in the land of Q's
     But 'Tard had slipped into the room behind her. Dutifully, he set aside his broom and removed the pillow from Imogen's face. He cheerfully fluffed it up, slipped it beneath Imogen's head and assured her she was wearing it the wrong side out.