‘How is she?’

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘When can I see her?’

Visiting day was Wednesday. I had to wait four more days. I walked out of the huge hospital and around the grounds. I looked up at the windows and wandered through the grounds. Then I took the street car back to Hill Street and Bunker Hill. Four days to wait. I exhausted them playing pin games and slot machines. Luck was against me. I lost a lot of money, but I killed a lot of time. Tuesday afternoon I walked downtown and started buying things for Camilla. I bought a portable radio, a box of candy, a dressing gown, and a lot of face creams and such things. Then I went to a flower shop and ordered two dozen camellias. I was loaded down when I got to the hospital Wednesday afternoon. The camellias had wilted overnight because I didn’t think about putting them in water. Sweat poured from my face as I climbed the hospital steps. I knew my freckles were in bloom, I could almost feel them popping out of my face.

The same nurse was at the reception desk. I unloaded the gifts into a chair and asked to see Camilla Lopez. The nurse checked the file card. ‘Miss Lopez isn’t here anymore,’ she said. ‘She’s been transferred.’ I was so hot and so tired. ‘Where is she?’ I said. I groaned when she said she couldn’t answer that. ‘I’m her friend,’ I told the nurse. ‘I want to help her.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the nurse said.

‘Who’ll tell me?’

Yes, who’ll tell me? I went all over the hospital, up one floor and down the other. I saw doctors and assistant doctors, I saw nurses, and assistant nurses, I waited in lobbies and halls, but nobody would tell me anything. They all reached for the little card file, and they all said the same thing: she had been transferred. But she wasn’t dead. They all denied that, coming quickly to the point; no, she wasn’t dead: they had taken her elsewhere. It was useless. I walked out the front door and into the blinding sunlight to the street car line. Boarding the car, I remembered the gifts. They were back there somewhere; I couldn’t even remember which waiting room. I didn’t care. Disconsolate, I rode back to Bunker Hill.

If she had been transferred, it meant another State or County institution, because she had no money. Money. I had the money. I had three pocketfuls of money, and more at home in my other pants. I could get it all together and bring it to them, but they wouldn’t even tell me what had happened to her. What was money for? I was going to spend it anyway, and those halls, those etherized halls, those low-voiced enigmatic doctors, those quiet, reticent nurses, they baffled me. I got off the street car in a daze. Halfway up the stairs of Bunker Hill I sat down in a doorway and looked down at the city below me in the nebulous, dusty haze of the late afternoon. The heat rose out of the haze and my nostrils breathed it. Over the city spread a white murkiness like fog. But it was not the fog: it was the desert heat, the great blasts from the Mojave and Santa Ana, the pale white fingers of the wasteland, ever reaching out to claim its captured child.