These days I work for a Boston agency called Protemp, as a visiting nurse. When I was hired, I asked for easy patients; I was tired of high acuity levels. Now that I’ve been there for ten years, I don’t think I could hear a heart murmur if it were as loud as sandpaper on sandpaper. But I’m happy. And when I sleep now, I am back to dreaming only gauzy mysteries.

I have some clients I see daily: Rose Banovitz, who lives in a seedy area on Commonwealth Avenue and needs her morning dose of insulin, and who often sings to me in her high, quivery voice. Fitz Walters lives in Chinatown and needs me to check his blood pressure and his wildly erratic heartbeat in order to determine his dose of Nitropaste. He goes to strip clubs every night, Fitz, though he is blind. The Schwartzes live in the heart of Brookline and need weekly visits to supervise their medications and to keep them from killing each other. Another once-a-weeker, a black woman in Dorchester appropriately named Marvelous, I will keep on seeing even after I’m no longer paid to help her with her colostomy. I also see one DeWitt Washington, because nobody else will put up with the combination of his personality and his neighborhood in Roxbury. I have to go every afternoon and change the dressing on his gunshot wound.

I give eyedrops daily to a rich woman in Back Bay, Ann Peters, who can’t see to do it herself and whose family can’t be bothered. And since last week, I’ve been going to Allston to see a fifteen-year-old girl named Grace to help her with the baby she just had. I gave her my home number, and she leaves me messages at least once a day. Things like, “Okay. His shit looks exactly like scrambled eggs. No way is this normal. All I do is fuck up, and he don’t even cry. Can you call me? Sorry for the swears, can you please call?”