more hospital stuff

Okay. Now it's starting to feel like the beginning of some kind of story. It could easily become the first part chopped away in edit, but it's the spark that lights the story.
Please read the previous post before this one...this is the continuation, and purely fictional...kind of backwards huh?

Hospital Setting

End of previous...
(He raises his clip board, "So...I'll put 'no' for that."
She sighs and lays her head back.)


I look at my wife lying on the gurney. She’s sleeping. This is going to be along night. I walk out to the waiting room and take a seat next to a guy wearing a blue Amoco cap and a blue Amoco jersey. He smells like he just got back from smoking a cigarette outside the front door.

“So what do you think?” he says, nodding at the television on the wall. I look at him. “This guy, Bush? Is he just some kind of ignorant jackass or a fucking genius, or what?”

I have to decide pretty quick if I want to get into a deep political discussion with Mr. Amoco or if I just want to be left alone. “Probably some of each,” I say.

Amoco looks back at the TV and then at me and he laughs. “Yeah. Maybe. I mean, that tax thing, it sounded good, but now they ain’t got no money. I don’t know.”

“I don’t know,” I say and start plowing through a pile of dead magazines. Does anybody outside of waiting rooms really read Field and Stream anymore? I get lucky and find a coverless copy of a year old Smithsonian and begin my study of this tribe in the Chilean Andes that harvests silk from spiders that they keep in these odd little woven grass cages.

“So, what do you think?” It’s the Amoco man. His name is Rob. It says so on his jersey and by way of confirmation, he tells me so, too. I say, “Nice to meet you Rob.” I don’t offer my own name. We aren’t that close yet. He nods toward the TV. Somebody has changed the channel. Regis is looking pensive and a pretty girl looking nervous and thoughtful and panicked is trying to remember if she ever knew who Wagner’s father-in-law was. “I don’t know much classical stuff,” says Rob. “Maybe Schumann?”

Schumann is one of the four possible answers the girl is pondering over. One of the other answers is Lizst. “Lizst,” I say. The girl says, “Liszt.” Regis makes a happy shout and the girl is up to a quarter million dollars. I feel very superior. Rob says, “Huh. Lizst. Yeah, well, gee, let me think…he wrote les Preludes in eighteen thirty two…I guess that makes sense. And Wagner got married in…”

I look at Rob and say, “So, what do you think? Want to go get a smoke while the commercial is on?”
Rob gets up. I get up. On the way out I say, “So, what do you think? About Bush? Crazy? Smart?”

Rob looks at me, “Maybe some of both?” We each burn up three cigarettes before the chill breeze gets us and we move back inside.
Heading back to our chairs we see the million dollar qusetion appear on the TV screen. It reads, “The predominent mineral underlying Niagra Falls is what?”

“Mr. Collier? Collier?” The ER desk clerk looks for recognition.

“Yeah?” says Rob as he turns to walk up to the desk. Over his shoulder he calls to me, “Dolomite. Niagra Dolomite.” Sure enough, five seconds later Regis tells the sad faced girl that indeed, Niagra Dolomite is the stuff the falls is built of. I sit down. I find my Smithsonian and notice that the man across from me is reading Field and Stream.