If the days are delineated by breakfast, lunch and dinner, what’s to distinguish one day from another? Is today Wednesday or Thursday? Is it the twenty-third of January? Or the twelfth? Or the seventeenth? Who knows? Who cares?
Except today, Bunny knows, is January twenty-first, and she’s been here for nineteen days. Dinner on January twenty-first is roast chicken, mashed potatoes, string beans or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which, for reasons unexplored, Josh, as of late, has been referring to as a jelly and peanut butter sandwich. Bunny uses a spoon to fold the string beans into the mashed potatoes, which is the only way to make the string beans palatable. Then she puts down her spoon and asks Josh, “Does it hurt?” Because she realizes that everything hurts, she clarifies, “The ECT. Does it hurt?”
Josh says no, that you’re under anesthesia, you don’t feel a thing, but Howie says, “Yeah? And what about that guy who woke up in the middle of it? I heard you could hear him screaming from three blocks away.”
“That never happened,” Chaz says. “That’s just one of those stories. Like the one about the people who took a little dog home from Mexico, and it turned out to be a rat.”
Although she’d rather be telling only Josh, she nonetheless announces, “I start tomorrow. January twenty-second.”
“Today is the twenty-second?” Jeanette asks.
“No,” Bunny says. “The twenty-second is tomorrow,” and, although it makes not a lick of difference to her either way, Jeanette says, “That’s a relief.”
“Start what?” Howie wants to know. “Start what?” he persists.
“ECT,” Bunny snaps. “I start ECT. Are you happy now?”
Howie raises his paper cup of apple juice to make a toast, and Andrea says, “Put that down. She’s going for ECT. She’s not getting married.”
“Did they tell you which doctor you’re getting?” Jeanette asks.
It’s Not Allowed, but no one other than Bunny knows that Josh has his hand on her knee, and he gives it a squeeze.
“I’d kill for ECT,” Andrea says. “General anesthesia is so fucking nice. If I could figure out how to put myself under, that’d be my drug of choice.”
Bunny nods. “Dr. Tilden.”
Dr. Tilden is Josh’s ECT doctor, too. Josh tells her that Dr. Tilden is very peculiar, which is something significant considering where they are.
“Peculiar?” Andrea says. “The guy’s a freak. But,” she adds, “he is the big-deal expert, the one who trains the residents.”
Teacher and Jeanette have Dr. Futterman. Chaz says, “I got the black guy. He’s okay. You should ask for the black guy.”
“Tilden’s like those space aliens,” Andrea says, “from that movie, the one where the aliens look human, but something’s off.”
Howie wants to know which movie that is. Chaz remembers the movie but not the name of it, and Teacher, having given up on the plastic knife and fork, picks up the chicken breast with his hands, and eats it as if it were corn on the cob.