The Sleeper
FROM A DISTANCE, the building could be anything—offices or a factory, out in the scrub north of the city. You can see it for miles as you drive down the two-lane road, with mountains in the distance and the big sky overhead. At night, lit up from one end to the other, it gleams like a ship at sea.
But it’s only up close that you can tell what it is—a hospital, built in the middle of nowhere, where the land was cheap. From the windows of its higher rooms, you can look a long way out into the desert.
The hospital is brand-new. It was built to lure the health insurance of the suburbs. But the projections were off, and the money has come in a trickle rather than a gush. So other calculations have been made, services have been cut, and now the hospital feels shiny and bright and strangely empty at the same time.
When I work there, as I sometimes do, I’m always wary. It’s part of the endlessly uneasy solitude of medicine in small hospitals.
HE’D DRIVEN IN ALONE, a large man in his 50s, with a belly and a white goatee and wide, faintly startled blue eyes. He wore clean jeans and a T-shirt. Chest pain. But he wasn’t gasping or sweating, or clutching himself. Instead, he looked nervous and shy, like a student suddenly called on in class.
“I was on the job,” he said, like an apology. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
Sometimes our bodies only give us signs, and ask us to guess.
A foreman on a road crew, a construction site on the outskirts of town. He didn’t go to doctors much.
They handed me his EKG.
EKGS ARE MAGICAL and uncertain. They have a long history in medicine. They’re from another era, when antibiotics did not exist and the heart seemed endlessly mysterious. Like x-rays, they are throwbacks.
In the deepest sense, our lives are
