“Mr. Simpson just wanted me to stop by and check with you. Lots of reporters want to see you, but for the peace and privacy of the other patients we’ve been denying them visiting privileges. And we’ve screened the calls to your room…that was your brother’s idea.”

No wonder I’d been able to recover in peace. “Thanks,” I said. “That’s really a big help.”

“Good. Because it really wouldn’t be fair to the other people in this wing, to have all kinds of strangers tromping through.” She gave me a serious look to show she took my reporter problem as a bad thing. And then she slipped out the door, closing it gently behind her.

The most interesting thing that happened after her departure was the tray guy removing my emptied tray. After that surge of excitement, I tried to watch television for a while; but the laugh tracks made my head ache. I read for maybe half an hour. I gradually grew so sleepy that I left the book where it fell on my stomach and just moved my hand enough to switch out the light I could control from my bed rail.

I was awakened by a brilliant flash and the sense of sound and movement very close to me. I cried out, and flailed my good arm to drive the attacker away. In a moment of sense, I punched the button that turned on the light and the one that called the nurse. I was stunned to see there were two men in the room. They were bundled up in coats and they were yelling at me. I couldn’t understand a word they said. I punched the nurse’s button over and over, and I yelled louder, and in about thirty seconds there were more people in my room than it was designed to hold.

The evening nurse was a starchy woman of considerable width. She was tall, too, and she scorned makeup, but she’d met a bottle of red hair dye she was real fond of in the past week or so. I admired her more by the second. She went for those reporters with both guns. Actually, if she’d had guns, the two men would’ve been dead without a doubt. Hospital Security was there (a man older than my doctor and not nearly as fit), an orderly was there (satisfyingly tall and muscular), and another nurse who added her opinion to that of my big nurse, as I thought of her.