Babylon and Other Stories Read Online Free Page B

hated going to work every day until he no longer had to do it. Everything about it—the commute, the workplace banter, the fluorescent lighting and bad coffee—had filed him down into points. Carl had no ear for gossip, didn't tell jokes, was uneasy with the siege-like camaraderie of the office. He was not a people person. And now, away from those things, he was a great deal happier. He worked only with voices he turned into reports.
    Transcription was a habit that could be mastered and even internalized. When he was watching television with his uncle or shopping for groceries, he would hear people's voices and almost unconsciously transcribe them, his foot tapping as if he were working the foot pedals. In medieval monasteries there was a room called a scriptorium where certain monks labored all day long transcribing the world into text, and it seemed to him there was an equivalent purity to the work he did in this bare basement room. Correct spelling and grammar, the unadorned finality of the perfect text, these had an astringency that pleased him.
    VITAL SIGNS : steady and strong;
    TEMPERATURE : 99.6 degrees
    RESPIRATORY RATE : 20
    Carl worked for exactly one hour. It took him forever to get through reports by Dr. Sabatini, who was his least favorite of all the doctors. Here was the height of rudeness: he ate while dictating. Chomps and smacks between words, slurps and molars grinding. It was disgusting and necessitated guesswork on the part of the transcriptionist, which Carl hated; but it was either that or ask him to clarify every other word. Sabatini sounded like a jerk, too, his syllables impatient and clipped. For some reason that Carl couldn't specify, he also sounded bald. This suspicion hadn't been confirmed, though, since they'd never met.Carl avoided the hospital as much as possible, which was very nearly completely. The world of technology made this miracle happen.
    Most days he stayed downstairs until five, at which time he and Walter ate dinner while watching
Jeopardy.
Between the two of them they always did better than the contestants. If they could go on as one person, Walter sometimes said, pretending they were Siamese twins or with one of them hidden behind the other, well, they'd clean up. Walter was a game-show fanatic. The first summer Carl had come to live with Walter, when he was eleven, there was a guy on
Tic Tac Dough
who had a summer-long winning streak, and at the time, through childish superstition, he felt that as long as that guy could keep winning, as long as Walter cheered him on, then everything would be OK. He and Walter watched every day, and the tension was almost unbearable. This was years ago, of course, after Carl's mother died of what Walter liked to call “the rock-and-roll lifestyle.” In the stairwell there was a picture of her, Jane, from high school, smiling broadly, even crazily, as if she were drugged—a glimpse of the future, maybe. And there was a picture of Marie, as well, even though she and Walter had only been married five years before she left him for an army man and went to live on a base in Germany. She was still there, and every year she sent Walter a Christmas card. On the inside she crossed out the German words and wrote “Merry Christmas!” instead.
    SKIN : unremarkable
    HEAD : Atraumatic
    CHEST : There are coarse mid-inspiratory crackles heard at the right lung.
    FACTOR CONTRIBUTORY TO CONGESTIVE HEART FAILURE : smoking 30 years
    At the end of the hour he went back upstairs. The television was on, sound turned up loud, and both Marguerite and Walter were dozing, their cards still spread on the table. Marguerite had gin. Carl stood behind the couch and coughed softly. Marguerite made a kind of low moan and her face sagged terribly in the second before she pulled herself into her usual cheery expression.
    She glanced at Walter and then at Carl. “I guess I'd better be off,” she said.
    “I'll call your cab.”
    “Thank you, dear. You're a …” She looked