At one time, it was a small gymnasium. Maybe when the hospital opened in the twenties, patients came to the dank room John stumbled upon in the old building for physical therapy. While too small for a regulation basketball court, a hoop still hung forlornly on a far wall. Its net was long gone, probably appropriated for the nest of the great-great-great-grandparents of the rats whose black eyes studied John from the shadows.
Whatever its original intent, the room was given over to storage long ago. Walls and walls of ancient file boxes created a haphazard maze of clutter, many of the cartons split open from age and the weight of the stacked containers. Some towers of boxes collapsed, flinging paper records haphazardly through the long-abandoned room.
The air was heavy with a musty, mildewed cloud of rotting paper, causing John to sneeze convulsively when he first came upon the room during his nightly explorations. When he encountered the door to the gym, sealed shut behind a heavy chain and padlock, the suppression of its secrets was sure to fire John’s curiosity.
He finally returned one night with a bolt cutter to cut the padlocked chain, and he was disappointed to find that the room held merely decades’ worth of medical records. Stretched before John were cartons and cartons of the meticulously kept details of lives and deaths no longer of much interest to anybody.
The faded scrawls on the crumbling boxes stretched back to at least the sixties. The farther the boxes stretched toward the far corners of the gym, the further back into time they reached. Sagging floorboards and the angry murmuring of immense-sounding creatures—he had met snarling, dog-sized possums and raccoons during his nightly tours—kept John from exploring too far into the room.
Grabbing randomly at documents strewn across the floor, he found densely packed records made nearly unintelligible by complexly coded medical jargon, the faint legibility of carbon-papered typewriting, and the usual middle-of-the-night mush of John’s brain. Trying to read by flashlight, he quickly realized nothing could be gleaned from the dry, context-less hieroglyphics of the files.
* * *
It wasn’t until several nights later that John’s restless mind drifted back to those boxes he found. He sat with Larry, imagining his father’s work there in the old building. Had Larry ever assigned a patient to room 116? Weren’t the odds pretty good that Dr. Husted once stood in this very room—maybe countless times—dispensing medical miracles, long before he became its perpetual patient? John decided that he had.
He welcomed into the room the vision of his young, vital father, perhaps a bit cold with his bedside manner but bringing authority and care to someone whose life may have depended on him. Some of his patients most likely didn’t make it. Maybe Larry stood there right in room 116 and watched a patient die, and then turned to find family members to give them the sad news.
Because of the rote veneration that amassed around the memory of poor, dead-before-his-time Larry Husted, sometimes it was easy to forget that John’s father was just a guy who went to work every day and tried to help people get better and not die. If he came home from work a little cranky or withdrawn from his family, maybe he had his reasons.
But then it occurred to John that Larry’s history in the old hospital didn’t have to be left to his imagination. Stored in all those decaying boxes, reaching back to the time when Larry first came to town, had to be the record of Lawrence Husted’s career. If Larry’s personal life was a murky patchwork of family photos, selectively calcified memories, and whatever pretend history John was making up about his father, the details of Larry’s medical service could probably be retrieved with fine specificity.
* * *
John borrowed work lights from his neighbor Burt, who tinkered with his late model Ford late into the night for years until his wife left with the kids and Burt switched his hobby to drinking in the dark. John also borrowed hundreds of feet of extension cords, patching them together and snaking them from Larry’s room to the gym. The power beyond the B wing had long ago been cut.
When John fired up the lights, the rats and whatever else called the gym home stirred and spit in unified protest. Instantly, hairy blurs of fangs and infestation leapt from their nests, bouncing off John’s ankles and causing him to hop and scream like a dowager with a bat in her wig. He tore from the gym and retreated to Larry’s room, embarrassed and queasy.
It wasn’t until after he gave Larry his final treatment and packed up for home that he remembered to unplug the work lights left burning in the gym after his hasty escape.
Driving home on empty, predawn streets, he shivered to think of those hot lights bearing down on a room full of dry paper and cardboard, sparking a fire in the dead hospital that would have exposed Larry for sure. John pictured the firefighters, following the trail of extension cords back to Larry’s room and staring in bewilderment at the scene they uncovered.