Samantha despises hospitals, same as anyone. There’s a thin froth of brain activity that chats inappropriately on and on about how everyone hates hospitals. You’d think, she thinks, her feet following the blue line, that after all these years they’d finally be able to make hospitals a place where people like to be. Then she counteracts this thought by thinking that it’s not the hospitals themselves that are dreadful, inherently, it’s simply that people go there on dreadful business and they get that dreadfulness all mixed up with their response to the architecture and the acoustics. Then she looks up from the winding blue line that the receptionist said would lead her to the Intensive Care Unit and she looks around at the grey walls and the countless doors adorned with cryptic plaques and the carts full of soiled laundry and the periodic banks of vending machines, and she listens to the pings and pages that bounce through the air, and she tries to judge this place objectively, tries to forget that hospitals are basically storage units for human beings in every imaginable sort of pain, tries to forget that somewhere in this place there are swelling red trash bags full of severed arms and breasts and colons, tries to forget that there are probably dead bodies within five hundred yards of her, tries to put all of that aside and just figure out if there’s just something about the way the building is built that creeps her.
There’s another big part of her that wishes that that her brain would just shut up. But when she puts the plug on the idle yammer she has to think about Dmitrovitch. And that’s no good. Still too upsetting.
You’re going to have to think about it soon enough, she thinks, scoldingly, but this reprimand is buried under a mental landslide of denials, denials that are more impulses than words—so many that to even attempt a transliteration of their essence you’d need to fill a whole page with nos and shut ups and ssshs.