Where once there were babies lurked spiders and rats. As John swung his flashlight through the nursery in old Holt Memorial, the creatures skittered grumpily into the dusty dark corners. The return of Larry Husted’s boy violated decades of peaceful rot.
With hours to kill between Larry’s treatments and desperate for a distraction from his writing projects, John began exploring the old building within the first couple weeks. He didn’t stray far at first, rattled by the creepiness of the world he had passed into. A living hospital was unsettling enough, its coldly institutional offer of salvation constantly mocked by the ghosts of those who insisted upon dying no matter what the gauzy brochures in the lobby promised.
But a shuttered hospital spoke only of death: the death of patients not saved, and the death of the dream that took flight when the building’s doors first opened. Back in 1922, when the hospital opened, there had to have been another eager young man just like Larry Husted, inspired by the cutting-edge medical care of his day and impatient to get to work healing the sick.
Now what was once cutting edge was a blighted ruin too burdensome to tear down. The shiny and new never hear the knowing titters of the dustbin.
Larry walked these halls as an ambitious young doctor, only to eventually declare them obsolete. And now he was the building’s last living patient. Maybe that’s why he refused to check out. Someday a new Larry Husted would come to tear down his hospital next door. Larry, like the building itself, refused to let time do away with him.
When John began to feel bold with his strolls away from Larry’s side, he started to venture up to the higher floors. First he just aimlessly poked around but after enough deep four a.m. reveries at his father’s bedside, John became fixed on a destination. When his flashlight refracted off a large, dust-clouded window partitioning off two separate rooms, John knew he had found the nursery.
Feeling a time-traveler’s sense of disorientation and awe, he stood on the baby side of the viewing window. It was a small room, with space for about a dozen cribs laid out in neat rows of four. John drew a grid in his head and paced off each square, standing for a moment in each. Somewhere within this private dance, he figured he stood upon the very spot where his newborn self once lay, swaddled and cranky. If baby John had already begun hearing from that pesky new brain of his, he might’ve been reflecting on the previous nine months and his violent, wet ride into the world, and thought, What the fuck?
This recollection of events then caused John’s brain to issue him an image of his mother’s vagina and his passage through it. Thanks, brain!
John grimaced, then stepped to the other side of the viewing window. Now he stood where his father once stood. John stared into the abandoned nursery through the glass, choosing to believe that Larry once pressed his hands to the window with awe as he beheld his son. He wondered if forty-three years later a fingerprint expert could find a trace of his father’s presence here buried beneath the layers of evidence left behind by decades of anxious fathers.
But an expert wasn’t required to prove Larry’s presence here; his existence was everywhere in the old building. And he waited there still. John looked at his watch. It was just about time for Larry’s six a.m. treatment, and then John would go home to wake his wife and daughter to begin their day. John sent out his latest Next Step grant the day before. His out-box momentarily empty, he looked forward to catching up on his sleep.