Ruben sat on his hospital bed smoking a cigarette. He was naked except for a crisp white sheet wrapped around the wide girth of his paralyzed lower body, his atrophied black legs were thrust out like rotten tree limbs lying on the ground. From under the sheet a long plastic tube of urine connected his catheter to a bag hung on the side of the bed. His dark brown eyes were waiting, for something, anything, in the yellow corridor beyond the doorway. Restless, he searched backward from the wooden lockers across the orange linoleum room to the mirror above the white porcelain sink in the corner; next to it was an orange and white and brown-striped curtain closed around Cliff’s bed.

"Who thinks up these fuckin’ colors?" Ruben’s eyes were on Frenchy across the room, in the bed next to the windows. Ruben perused the summer oaks outside, beyond the glass, the parkway and the river beyond it were now a mural to him. He looked at Mario lying in the next bed. Only Mario’s belly moved up and down, which was nice for a change, Ruben thought. He watched Louise’s ebony skin move in luxurious curves beneath her white nurse’s aide uniform as she straightened the sheet over Mario.

Crushing out his cigarette in a dessert dish from some long forgotten lunch tray, Ruben studied the solitary Christmas card that no one had bothered to remove, pinned limply to the cork bulletin board near the lockers. He lit another cigarette, wondering why even a dilapidated angel would hang so long in a place like this.

An Egyptian doctor pushed open the curtain around Cliff’s bed. Ruben didn’t take his eyes off her, and still he counted nine white lab coats huddled around the bed, the faces all staring at Cliff’s haggard body. The doctors walked singly and in pairs away from his bedside. The white-haired senior neurosurgeon placed a wrinkled ivory hand sympathetically on Cliff’s shoulder, and then he too walked out of the room.

"I can’t do this!" Cliff threw an arm across his sleepless eyes, weeping uncontrollably, saliva spilling from his contorted mouth, his naked chest heaving. Under the sheet his legs contracted and extended in spasm. "Jesus, I can’t do it anymore. I can’t do it," he moaned, sobbing heavily.

Ruben watched with narrowed eyes. Mario lay staring at the dots in the ceiling. Louise folded the sheet down from his lifeless shoulders. She made his head comfortable on the pillow, brushed her fingers through his silk black hair and gently touched his olive cheek, like always.

Ruben exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Weezie, let's fuck."

"Not now, Ruben. I’m busy," she said, her voice casual.

"Weezie thinks you're an asshole, Ruben. She told me." Mario twisted his head sideways to look at him. "She says you're an ignorant, fat, mulatto, ghetto-rat asshole. Didn't you, Weezie?"

"Towel-heads," Cliff growled, dropping his arm from his swollen eyes. "I hate fucking towel-heads."