Was somewhere in the bowels of this hospital. At the mercy of people with covered faces. In a hospital that had recently been cited for acquiring rusty cannulas to cut costs, a revelation that caused no uproar in the media. This hospital that had supposedly removed organs without consent in numerous cases. Father, said Hannah, waiting for him to look at her or hold her or do something else that could have contributed to improving the situation. He was an adult, after all. Adults were supposed to know what to do in cases like this.

But

As always happened when Father had a problem, he forgot that Hannah was a child. That a child wasn’t so good at solving problems alone. That a child always imagined the world coming to an end if nobody said everything would be fine. Nothing would be fine. Hannah looked with panic at the commotion spilling out into the waiting room from the surgical wing. Activity. Nurses. Blood supplies. Always at the end of a commotion in a hospital stood a young doctor, who with a practiced look of dejection on his face said: We did everything we could. We’re still awaiting additional details.

The additional details

DR. BROWN

INTELLIGENCE: average

POTENTIAL FOR AGGRESSION: high

ETHNICITY: pink

HEALTH STATUS: onset dementia due to chronic fatigue

CREDITWORTHINESS: not available

SEXUALITY: S&M with tendencies toward rape

Should have known.

The emergency surgeon had been working for twenty-three hours.

And he knew: it was the universe’s punishment for attending the wrong university. And not having connections. The rest was the fault of the system. You know how it is: the system has to shoulder the blame for most botched lives. At Brown’s age, parentheses forty-four, you were a head physician, working at a private clinic, had gone into plastic surgery.

Or.