The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [161]
Making his way through the throng outside, Mitchell went through the inconspicuous door and down the steps into the semisubterranean space. The tunnel-like room was dim, the only light issuing from street-level windows high in the exterior wall, through which the legs of passing pedestrians could be seen. Mitchell waited for his eyes to adjust. Slowly, as if being rolled in on their beds from a netherworld, the stricken bodies appeared in three shadowy tiers. Able to see now, Mitchell walked down the length of the ward to the supply room in back. There he found the Irish doctor, consulting a sheet of handwritten notes. Her glasses had slid down her nose and she had to tilt her head back to see who had entered.
“Ah, there you are,” she said. “I’ll have this ready in a moment.”
She meant the medicine cart. She was standing in front of it, placing pills into numbered slots in the tray top. Behind her, boxed medical supplies rose to the ceiling. Even Mitchell, who knew nothing about pharmaceuticals, could tell that there was a redundancy problem: there was way too much of a few things (like gauze bandages and, for some reason, mouthwash) and scant wide-spectrum antibiotics like tetracycline. Some organizations shipped medicines days before their expiration dates, claiming deductions on their tax returns. Many of the drugs treated conditions prevalent in affluent countries, such as hypertension or diabetes, while offering no help against common Indian maladies like tuberculosis, malaria, or trachoma. There was little in the way of painkillers—no morphine, no opiate derivatives. Just paracetamol from Germany, aspirin from the Netherlands, and cough suppressant from Liechtenstein.
“Here’s something,” the doctor said, squinting at a green bottle. “Vitamin E. Good for the skin and libido. Just what these gents need.”
She tossed the bottle in the trash, gesturing toward the cart. “It’s all yours,” she said.
Mitchell maneuvered the cart out of the supply room and started down the line of beds. Dispensing medications was one of the jobs he liked. It was relatively easy work, intimate yet perfunctory. He didn’t know what the pills were for. He just had to make sure they went to the right people. Some men were well enough to sit up and take the pills themselves. With others he had to support their heads and help them drink. Men who chewed paan had mouths like bloody, gaping wounds. The oldest often had no teeth at all. One after another the men opened their mouths, letting Mitchell place pills on their tongues.
There was no pill for the man in bed 24. Mitchell quickly saw why. A discolored bandage covered half his face. The cotton gauze was deeply recessed into the flesh, as if adhering directly to the skull beneath. The man’s eyes were closed, but his lips were parted in a grimace. As Mitchell was taking all this in, a deep voice spoke up behind him.
“Welcome to India.”
It was the beekeeper, holding fresh gauze, tape, and a pair of scissors.
“Staph infection,” he said, gesturing toward the bandaged man. “Guy probably cut himself shaving. Something simple like that. Then he goes to wash in the river, or perform puja, and it’s all over. The bacteria get in the cut and start eating away his face. We just changed his bandage three hours ago and now it needs changing again.”
The beekeeper was full of information like this, all part of his interest in medicine. Taking advantage of the lack of trained medical staff, he operated in the ward almost as an intern, taking orders from the doctors and performing actual procedures, cleaning wounds, or picking maggots from necrotic flesh with a pair of tweezers.
Now he knelt down, squeezing his body into the narrow space between the beds. When he laid the gauze and tape gently on the bed, the man opened his one good eye, looking frightened.
“It’s O.K., fella,” the beekeeper said. “I’m your friend. I’m here to help.”
The beekeeper was a deeply sincere, deeply good person. If Mitchell was a sick soul, according to William James’s categories, then the beekeeper was definitely healthy-minded.