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So Long You Old Gravestone
is the book two
The
Bulgarian Quartet. Since I intended to
publish the second volume first, I actually have a first draft of the entire
novel, so it would still be tempting to follow my original idea. I don't know
and in the near future I might put it to a vote. We shall see.
The
alarm clock woke her up at 6 am as usual, but this day was going to be a hell of
a lot more different. She picked up John Hopkins’ records from the ICU nurses’
station, absently noticing that the computer must have been fixed over night
because the folder now included his medical history. The last entry in the file
was a few months old and together with the other entries, it spelled out a long
history of AIDS treatments through the outpatient clinic. The name and Social
Security number on the file matched the ones on yesterday’s sheet. Worried that
there had been some kind of computer mix-up, she picked up the previous day’s
lab report only to ascertain, that the lab computer, had indeed found no traces
of any kind of infectious organisms in John Hopkins’ blood stream. A blood type
mismatch, let alone a mix up in a patient’s medical history, could have dire
consequences for everyone involved, especially the doctors, so she rushed to the
patient’s bedside only to find it vacant. The nurse explained that Mr. Hopkins
had seemed much improved during the course of the night, so she had had him
moved to the floor. Even more puzzled than before, Myra made her way to his
room, only to find the assigned bed empty. On further research, she found one of
the night guards who had seen John Hopkins walking out of the hospital sometime
after midnight. Hardly likely that it was someone else; John was at least 6’ 6”
tall, thin as a rail and with an abundance of matted dreadlocks that according
to the guard had been his trade mark when he was playing center for the New York
Mets. Myra was not a sports fan but the duty nurse at the outpatient clinic,
assured her that John Hopkins had indeed played for the Mets until about a year
previously when a bout with AIDS related pneumonia, had laid him out for a
couple of months. All of these facts were pointing into a strange and
unacceptable direction. The AIDS-less blood test could be explained away as some
kind of SNAFU, but what about the apparently ‘miraculous’ recovery from some
very serious gunshot wounds? The untangling of the administrative trail, kept
her busy for most of the day, the hospital director becoming involved herself at
some point. Seeing that nobody had raised an outcry, and that the media was
totally unaware of the situation, it was decided to blame the whole chain of
events on computer malfunction and pretend that nothing strange had happened at
all. |
For Myra Levine, the
offshoot of this incident was that the director decided that she had fulfilled
the terms of her internship. With nothing but time on her hands, Myra decided to
investigate and not desist, until she got to the bottom of this apparent paradox
- the following is a compilation culled from over one thousand pages of densely
written hand notes, that Myra had assembled throughout her search.
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