Who is Mary Stark by Lloyd Kropp

Author:Lloyd Kropp [Kropp, Lloyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81497-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

15

Dividing by the Number of Bones

He was always tired now. He would go to bed early, wake up exhausted, and move through the day in a haze of fatigue. Things that had been interesting became dull. Things that had been dull became painful. He watched the movements of the patients on his floor and listened to their voices with a peculiar mixture of listlessness and fear, like a drunken man crossing against the light: the abstract, nagging fear of death balanced against a profound indifference to the fortunes of the moment. He looked forward to his morning coffee break with Joanna. They would talk about food, travel, their high school adventures, and old movies. He looked forward to little else. Something he could not understand or put into words had happened to him since Mary Stark’s suicide. The hospital baffled him in a way it had never baffled him before.

Kurtz had bought a new game over the weekend and spent most of his time shut up in his room studying the rule book and the accompanying book of strategy and playing games with himself. On Monday he opened his door, smiled, and invited David in to play Afrika Korps. The game traced the career of Erwin Rommel in 1942 along a map board that ran from Cairo to within a hundred miles of Tripoli. David spent twenty minutes reading the rule book, and in the game that followed, the German army under Kurtz rolled across North Africa in less than six months (twenty-four moves), and the game ended abruptly with the encirclement of David’s shattered army at Benghazi. Kurtz was happy for the rest of the day, talking with everyone and eating two helpings of everything at lunch,

On Tuesday, Dennis finished his molded vase and put it in a row with the fourteen others and then failed to appear at OT for the rest of the week. He ate a great deal, slept most of the mornings, and worked picture puzzles in his room through the long afternoons.

“I wish Mr. Maitland would leave me alone,” he said one morning to David. “I don’t like excuse me colored people. They give me the willies.”

“Mr. Maitland doesn’t bother anybody,” said David. “He does his job and he minds his own business.”

“He tells about excuse me funny things. Did you know that his mother used to give him turpentine and water when he had a cold? Did you know that? Did he ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s the sort of stuff he always talks about. And besides, he moves too fast. I don’t like to see him excuse me coming down the hall at me. Always coming in some doorway when you don’t expect it. I hate stuff like that. Narrow little doors. I hate going in and out of things all the time. Why can’t everything be in one room?”

“Dennis, I’m not following you. Are you saying that—”

“I’m saying that Mr. Maitland loves all that door stuff.”

“Door stuff?”

“Popping in and out all the time.

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