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One of the older nurses, with gray wings of hair framing her face, said, “I believe I have heard of Dr. Spriggs.” The other three nurses looked over at her, waiting for her edict. She furrowed her forehead. “You should’ve called ahead.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “It’s five till five. What did you want to see?” she asked Wilson.

“He wants to see the OB clinic,” Marylou said.

“I want to see the labs,” Wilson said.

The nurse, after telling her underlings that she’d be back in a few, walked Wilson and Marylou to the elevators.

Wilson’s back felt stiff after his long ride in the car, but he was exhilarated, too. “Sixth floor,” Wilson said.

And the winged nurse, who was wearing a baggy yellow uniform, took hold of Wilson’s elbow and said, “That’s right, Dr. Spriggs! They’re still on the sixth floor!” and gave him a big smile. She might’ve been cute if her haunches had not been so large. “But this late on a Friday afternoon, I hope somebody’s still up there.”

Marylou, trailing behind them, looked like a forlorn white ghost. “Whatever happened to Nurse Bordner?” she asked, but nobody answered her.

The sixth floor, unlike the first floor and lobby of the hospital, was essentially unchanged—a coat of paint perhaps, new lighting. The locks on the doors looked sleeker and more efficient than the locks he remembered. There was the same smell, though, a smell that came rushing back to him, slightly sweet with a layer of bleach underneath. Off the long hallway were the labs with the Bunsen burners and beakers and centrifuge machines, the lab techs bent over test tubes, siphoning away with their pipettes. His friend Ebb Hahn had worked in that room there, processing blood samples from Wilson’s radioactive iron study. What were they working on in there now? He had no idea.

They passed the biohazard labs, where the workers now wore goggles, caps, paper gowns, and latex gloves—fancier versions of the same old stuff—and the central supply room where two women loaded beakers into the steam machines. Martha Meharry used to work in there, perched on a stool between loads doing the jumble and crossword in the Commercial Appeal.

Their nurse stopped beside an office that said Nuclear Medicine on the door. “This here’s Dr. Wilson Spriggs,” she announced to the secretary inside, and then ducked off down the hall.

The secretary, a pinched-faced woman, sighed, then got up from her desk, disappeared into a warren of offices behind her. She emerged shortly with two doctors in tow, two doctors who looked remarkably, eerily, like Wally and Theodore Cleaver.

Wally and Beav, in their pressed plaid dress shirts and tasteful neckties, grinned at Wilson, who was wearing his yard clothes. They shook his hand—one of them shook it twice—and told him how much they admired him, how much they admired his work on the therapeutic use of radioactivity in the treatment of cancer. “This gentleman published the seminal articles on radioisotope therapy,” Wally informed the secretary, who was feigning interest while playing solitaire on her computer. Seminal articles! The adjective, one Wilson had used himself once upon a time, sounded absurd and pompous to him now.

The two doctors also mentioned Wilson’s work at the University of Iowa, his treatment of malignant effusions in lung and uterine cancer, what a pioneer he’d been, how he had changed the field, and so on and so on.

Wilson, bleary-eyed from the drive, felt like he’d stepped into another dimension. He was unable to believe that these two men had heard of him and that he was being treated like something other than a pariah. He glanced at Marylou, who glared at him. She hadn’t come here to witness this. Wilson didn’t know how to introduce her so he just stood there like an idiot.

Finally Marylou spoke up. “Howdy, fellas.”

“This your wife?” Beaver asked Wilson, reaching for Marylou’s hand.

“I’m his guinea pig,” Marylou said, but she shook the Beav’s hand and then Wally’s. “Dr. Spriggs experimented on me in the fifties. Remember the