LITMIR.BIZ

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air until I pulled it back to my side. Dwayne continued staring at my shoes.

      I held out the money where he could see it and he took it quickly, pulling a paper off the pile he held with a practiced motion.

      I tried again.

      “I’m so sorry about Jimmy.”

      The narrow corners of Dwayne’s mouth had been tending up, like a smile might even appear, but when I mentioned Jimmy, the corners sagged down into a sad little droop. He looked so much like a Disney mouse I imagined I saw whiskers drooping too. Then he looked directly at me with his pale, almost unlashed eyes and nodded. For a moment, there was a flash of quick intelligence, I thought. Though was I imagining that?

      I moved on, a little unsettled by meeting Dwayne. I’d gotten used to bantering with Jimmy, and except for that brief eye contact, Dwayne seemed like he might have developmental problems, or perhaps he just had a speech impediment and was consequently shy about speaking.

      Well. I shook myself. Whatever problems he might have, selling papers was better than making brooms in some protected workshop, inside all day. Despite being so shy, he was out in the public, meeting people, doing a hard job. Behind me I heard “StreetWise” again.

      The ordinariness of courage. It’s easy to miss it.

      3

      The rat likes the cheese

      Not the trap

      But rats gotta eat

      Don’t they?

      “Traps”

      Abigail Collins, #584

      StreetWise

      Wednesday, May 17, 7 p.m.

      I was late to the reception, of course. That’s what Kelly had intended. But what she didn’t know, and I had no intention of ever telling her, was that it didn’t really matter all that much. Her Dad would probably have an emergency and be later still, if he made it at all.

      You have to have a pretty thick skin to date a surgeon. I’d discovered that nine times out of ten you were left at the restaurant, reception, dinner party, opera (pick one), either dateless or abandoned after he got an emergency call.

      Oddly enough, it didn’t seem to bother me, a fact Tom found astounding. I’ve always liked surprises—it was the unpredictability I actually liked. Will he? Won’t he? And the times we did get together became all the sweeter for it. Augustine of Hippo, a really randy Christian saint, wondered why, when he was a kid, pears he’d stolen out of an orchard tasted the sweetest. Why is stolen pleasure sweeter? Augustine couldn’t figure it out (well, actually he thought it had a lot to do with human sin, but I couldn’t buy that convenient out). I did respect his insights into the perversity of the human soul though. A lot.

      The Anderson building was directly in front of me now. Ames Anderson was a wealthy racetrack owner and he’d bankrolled this hospital construction project with a single, fifty million dollar donation. Atonement? Tax write-off? Probably both. Though, can one genuinely atone while also reducing your tax bill? Kind of ruined the sacrificial aspect of atonement, I mused.

      Tom had told me this pile of steel and concrete was going to double the number of beds at the hospital. His voice had carried both awe and worry. The clear trajectory in medicine these days is to reduce both health care costs and delivery, and thus increase profits. Eventually, I thought, health care could completely disappear for all but the rich. So why expand the in-patient capacity when reducing costs and increasing profits meant sending people who’d had surgery home before they passed go? Who knew? Privately I thought the honchos who ran this university hospital thought so much of their august brand (“First in Medicine!”) that they figured they could buck these obvious trends. Well good luck with that. The titanic plates that were moving under American society these days were crushing all kinds of human care, and health care was sitting right on a major fault line and the cracks were getting wider.

      As I turned the corner on University Avenue, a concrete truck was just pulling out from the ramp that divided the block-long building into two sides on the ground level. Above, an arch on the second level connected the two halves. It seemed to me that these construction guys were cutting it a little close, since not a hundred feet further down the block, long black limos were discharging formally attired attendees under a rented marquee. Even though the month was May, the covered walkway was a smart idea. In Chicago, it could have been snowing. And just because it wasn’t snowing this minute didn’t mean that this clear, fairly warm night would remain so. It was common for a front to surge down Lake Michigan from the North Pole and drop the temperature 30 degrees in an hour. Well, make that half an hour now as abrupt and violent climate change was accelerating and aggravating our weather patterns.

      As I got even closer I could see some demonstrators on the sidewalk across from the entrance the reception-goers were using. I’d read about these protests not only in StreetWise, but also in the big Chicago papers. The people of the neighborhoods surrounding the university wanted a trauma center to be included in this multi-million dollar medical skyscraper. Nightly shootings in these areas took lives that might have been saved if there had been an adult trauma center close by. And so far there was no adult trauma center planned here, or anywhere in the hospital complex that I knew of. Signs read “Save Our Youth” and many were wearing “Trauma Center Now” tee shirts. I knew negotiations had started, but if demonstrations were still going on, no trauma center deal had yet been struck.

      I just stopped walking and looked at the faces. I wondered how many of the older African American women and men who were demonstrating had lost children to gun violence. Their faces were grim, and determined. A small group of what looked like students, many of them white, stood behind them, partially hidden by the signs carried by the front line of demonstrators. Good for them. They knew where to stand, too, behind those who were literally on the front lines of this battleground. But they were up against not just the money and power of this particular hospital, but a whole national shift toward health as a profit center. And if it wasn’t profitable, death of the unprofitable was clearly the preferred business plan. I made a mental note to check if these protestors had a website, see how I could help.

      Finally, I turned in at the marquee and approached a reception table. I presented my invitation. Much to my amazement, the young woman behind the table in black sheath, pearls and a vacant face plunged her hand into a large cardboard box next to her chair and pulled out a white construction helmet with the words “Anderson Building” printed across the front in maroon letters. She handed this to me, showing no embarrassment at all. I took it from her, too bemused to do anything else. With my construction helmet dangling from my hand along with my tiny evening purse, I walked into the building. I stopped walking again, my stomach churning from the contrast between the needs of the demonstrators outside and the obvious luxury here.

      Nearly a hundred people in formal wear carrying hard hats in one hand and drinks in the other were milling around. Waiters circulated with trays of hors d’oeuvres, but there were few takers. Unless the waiter dropped the crab puff or bacon-wrapped scallop into your construction helmet, there was no way to get the food and hold a drink as well. That was currently fine with me, and with my upset stomach.

      The area where the reception was being held was obviously going to be the main lobby of the new hospital building. It was several stories high—and it seemed from looking up that this would continue—and was an impressively large space. Of course, the lack of walls helped with the sense of immensity. The concrete floor had been swept and all the construction equipment pushed back behind ropes along what would be the outer wall of this area. Above this atrium-like lobby, I could see floors rising in tiers—ropes had been strung along them to keep people from falling off. The effect was rather like the back of a huge doll hospital, a Barbie-becomes-a-brain-surgeon set. Now that the toy manufacturers had Barbie stop saying she hated math, there might be a chance of that. I stood still and marveled at the size of this lobby. The architect must be aiming for a Hyatt-hotel kind of effect. I’d heard, in fact, that this atrium would contain a Starbucks coffee shop, a decent restaurant and even a few shops. Now that airports are virtually indistinguishable

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