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Without Cost Or Obligation

We went past the Allied checkpoint, past the American, the Brit, and the Frenchman, past the sign in more languages than we could read — YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.

From A Distance, Paradise

The children grew rapidly after birth, until they were weaned from the breast, and then never grew again. We never saw any cases of diaper rash because nobody could afford diapers. I had never before thought of diaper rash as a disease of affluence.

Harvest Moon

Portrait Of A Nursing Home

We all die, and most of us grow old, and for a certain inevitable number of us age brings its sisters: dependence, frailty, and a gut-wrenching perishability. Age is the last place and time most of us will inhabit, and the fact that age seems so foreign to most of us, as though cleft from the known world, is one of life’s sly tricks.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Inside The Modern Hospital

Every little odd ache, cramp, tension; each sore throat, swollen gland, headache; a sudden pain when you reach for something on a shelf, a morning lethargy, an unexpected reluctance: all these whisper cancer.

Why I Like Dead People

I like dead bodies: at no other time am I so aware of my own animation. This isn’t because I am lucky and this poor fool is not, but because here before me is the mute, incontrovertible evidence. Some force drives these shells, and it drives me still. I am a witness, an attestant, to a foresworn truth.

Emergency

It is, in a phrase aptly supplied by a nurse, like five hundred hells. Apparently the whole town has converged upon the hospital, all migrating to the Emergency Rooms.

Gift Horse

Cancer Is The Answer

Cancer, which had begun to affect as many as one in four, was a disease whereby an essentially weak, immature, dysfunctional cell invaded and occupied surrounding territories, dislocating the inhabitants, destroying the territory, devouring the resources, providing no exchange whatsoever until the entire territory was devastated and the inhabitants died of starvation, suffocation or toxicity. This dread disease became endemic to the second half of the twentieth century as tuberculosis had been in Europe in the nineteenth, and the plague earlier. Ironically, cancer, which perfectly mirrored imperialism, became through its proliferation the agency of spiritual and social — and therefore political — conversion.

Prisons (All Kinds)

A subway ride, a military prison, a 1950s chain gang

Cold Steel

She could have been cast as a nun in an old Bing Crosby movie, the one who trailed the heroine and only came in on the chorus. Charlotte was a person who seemed to have no childhood, whom you could not imagine as younger than she was at the moment you met her.