The Sun King

             I overdid it with my insulin –or underdid it with my lunch- and by the time I reach the hospital, my blood sugar is well below the level I need it to be to allow me to function normally. I'm dismayed to see that the stanchions have been removed from the metal detector and its green lights are beckoning. A man sits leaning on the conveyor belt. I roll up to him and he says, "Oh I don't work here, I'm just waiting for a ride." I roll off before any guards materialize. 

Fortunately, my appointment is later than I thought, so I have plenty of time to roll into Starbucks for a box of apple juice. As I sit in the waiting area upstairs sucking it down, Bree dashes out of the office with her coat on. 

“Done for the day?” I ask. She says yes and I ask if I should tell them I’m here. “Oh I told them,” she says, though I don’t know how she knew. Does she have a surveillance camera in there?

An old man shuffles out of the office with a cane. When he presses the elevator button he releases a loud, wet fart. 

    Bridget comes out as well, pushing a wheeled contraption with a series of straps and buckles dangling from it.

“Ooh, is that for me?” I ask.  

I throw out my empty juice box just as the office door opens again. 

    “Get in here, you.”

    When was the last time I saw KC? August? I knew she worked Mondays, but I wasn’t sure if I would actually see her this visit. I warn her that my sugar is low. She says she can get me some animal crackers and peanut butter, then leads me to the far room. “We won’t be bothered back here,” she says and as I plop into the chair, she hops on my scooter and speeds away on it. “Whoa, this thing is wobbly,” she says. 

    “If you break it you have to buy me a new one,” I say. 

    She returns and closes the curtain and then it’s just the two of us. I’m the last patient of the day and the office is quiet. 

    “I heard you were talking about how violent I am,” she says, and starts pummeling my arm. 

    “I hope you don’t abuse all your patients like this,” I say. 

    “Only the special cases.”

    “The ones who come here for years and refuse to get any better?” 

    The blood pressure machine bleats pitifully to warn that its batteries are dying. She ignores it. My blood pressure is too high for her liking. I tell her it’s probably because someone’s been punching me. “Try not to think of anything,” she says, her breast brushing against my arm. Between her proximity and my lack of glucose, my head is spinning. I close my eyes and try not to think of anything. 

She examines my foot. I’ve warned her that it’s been looking pretty rough. “It just gets bigger and bigger no matter what I do,” I say. 

“I don’t know, it doesn’t look that bad to me,” she says. “Moderate drainage." She keeps adjusting the paper ruler. "And it’s about the same size as it was last week. Point six, point seven.” 

“I'll take point six,” I say. She measures it again, and then again. I ask how her holidays were. 

“Not great to be honest,” she says. “The whole year really blew. I had to have a front tooth pulled,” -I remember her talking about that months ago- “And it took forever for them to replace it. It was supposed to be eight months but it turned into nine, then ten. But you know how that goes." I ask if she stuck a piece of corn in the space and no one will ever know, vaguely aware that I've made this joke before. New start my ass, I'm already starting to repeat myself. 

She laughs anyways. "I should've carved myself a wooden one! Healing is so slow," she says. "I didn’t leave the house the entire year except to go to work and the gym.” 

“I bet you got a lot of reading done,” I say. 

“Oh god no I hate reading,” she says. 

“What?” I laugh. 

“No really. I just hate it. I listen to audio books sometimes but even then I have to go back and relisten half the time because I get distracted. I mostly spent the time watching shows.” If this has felt like a date up to this point, this is the moment when you have to decide if you’re still going to try to take this person home with you or if you need to catch the waitress’s eye for the check. 

“I rewatched Outlander, and now I’m watching Versailles.” I ask if Versailles is any good. She shrugs. “It’s all about Louis XIV. Everyone dies young because he forces them to move into the palace then when they tick him off he has them killed. And oh God the men are so effeminate, with that long hair and these crazy high heels they clomp around in.” I ask if she’s ever been to Versailles. “No. I did get to Paris but I was only twenty. I’d like to go back.” 

I tell her I’d love to go to Paris for the art, and somehow find myself talking about the series of drawings I did at the end of the year. I tell her about how for a long time I’ve wanted to do pictures of homeless people, especially the ones frozen in place by their cocktails of fentanyl cut with animal tranquilizers. “You’ve probably seen them twisted in all kinds of crazy poses, standing bent over for hours. I wanted to capture that.” She looks at me intently the whole time I'm babbling. I can’t tell if she’s interested or just being polite but I can’t stop myself. This is the most important thing in the world to me right now and it’s all I want to talk about. Even if I’m probably boring the hell out of her. I mean, this sweet, adorable woman doesn’t even read.

“You know, my brother back east goes to a methadone clinic every day,” she says. “Otherwise he’d be back on the steeets.” 

She asks if I’m getting a cast put on today. I say yes, surprised she isn’t already aware of this somewhat important fact. “Okay then I’ll tell the doctor you’re ready for her,” she says. 

“No debridement today,” Vicki says, poking her head. Has she been sitting just outside the curtain this whole time? “Oh, hi Seann.”

“She’s not debriding?” KC sounds confused. 

“Nope, just doing the cast. Thompson will debride him on Thursday.”

“Alrighty then, guess I’ll get you ready to get casted up,” she says. “How long since you had one of these puppies?” I tell her it’s been since October. “What? Why has it been so long?” I tell her about being on vacation and the series of footballs and the holiday and Thompson being on vacation. “Oh yeah I heard something about you needing to wait for permission from work?” I tell her it was a miscommunication with Dr. Baylor. Her face twists in irritation –maybe I’m not the only one who isn’t thrilled with the substitute doctor- but she doesn’t say anything a she starts preparing the undercast. 

“All this news is getting me down as well,” she finally says. “I keep trying to limit my consumption but it’s all just so awful, I can’t look away.” 

“I know,” I say. “It’s horrible. And it’s frying all our brains trying to make sense of it all.”

“It all happened so fast,” she says, and looks like she’s going to cry. 

“Yeah but this has been building for years,” I say. “But how’s Cathy?” 

She instantly lights up. “She’s great!”

“Is Ghost still coming around?” 

“God he’s a nuisance,” she says. “He stops by four or five times a day when I’m home. I mean, it’s my fault, I keep giving him treats. He’s Cathy’s secret boyfriend. She pretends to be annoyed by him but I saw them boop noses just the other day. It was precious.” She takes out her phone but she can’t find the picture so she goes back to wrapping my foot. "I haven't done this in a while, I'm out of practice," she says. I don't take the bait. She goes about preparing the water and the rolls of casting. Bad date or no, I realize we’ve been talking a really long time. I wonder if Doctor Taggert is waiting for us; it’s nearly five.

Just then the doctor herself appears and gets right to work. Instead of scolding me about my wound, she congratulates me that my hemoglobin a1c is so good. I thank her without mentioning that the only reason it’s so low is that I keep bottoming out, like I am right now. But it's still progress. 

“You should be proud of yourself. Look at how far you’ve come since you started here,” she says. 

“You’re right. But I’m frustrated that this is taking so long.”

“Well you’ve got a new cast now,” she says, vigorously rubbing the wet Fiberglas to smooth it out. “Think of this as a new beginning.”

I laugh. “I am! In fact I planned on coming in today and pretending it was my first visit at this new clinic, with a new doctor and her new lovely assistant… what was your name again, young lady? CK, was it?”

KC laughs. Taggert laughs. We all laugh, safe in our tiny curtained room as the mad king’s minions murder people in the streets. The Sun King lived a long life, and died with his head still firmly attached. The powder keg wouldn’t ignite for decades. But KC’s right. Unlike the healing of a wound, or the replacement of a tooth, this is all happening so fast and no one can tell how things will  turn out.

In the meantime, I forgot how heavy these fucking casts are. 

Amnesiac

     Thursday afternoon, a coworker surprises me by arriving early to relieve me so I can leave for my appointment. It's nice not to have to rush down to the bus stop, but once I'm there I find that the bus is running late. 

    Karen leads me in to room two, where Jenny is waiting. I don’t feel any of the dread or despair of last week, despite the fact that my cultures did in fact come back positive for MRSA and another bacterium called proteus miribilis. All day I’ve been nervous about my appointment, but now that I’m here, I exhibit signs of a sort of nihilistic perkiness. 

    “It doesn’t look great,” I warn Karen. The last time I changed the bandage, the wound was huge and inflamed and rimmed with dead white skin.

    “Oh my,” says Jenny.

    “Yep,” I say. “Worse than ever.”

    “I don’t know”, says Karen. “A lot of this is callus. It doesn’t actually look any bigger than last week. She measures it. “Okay, maybe a little bit bigger.” 

    “Yeah I’ve pretty much given up hope of it ever healing,” I say cheerfully. “It’s kind of freeing.”

    “Don't make me smack you,” says Jenny. “She’s right, it really doesn’t look that bad. And it’ll look even better once the doctor cleans it up. And then you’ll get your cast on Monday and things will turn right around.”

    “But it was almost completely healed,” I say. “Twice. And now look at it.”

    “Apples and oranges,” she says. “Think of this as a new beginning,” she says. “We’re starting fresh.” 

    I laugh. “But what about all this time I’ve wasted up to now? All this time on the scooter, coming in here every week, only for it to get worse and worse. What was any of it for?”

    “Apples and oranges,” she says again.

“I don’t know what that means,” I say. 

    I have no more surprise or disappointment left in me so when Doctor Baylor comes in I greet her warmly. She doesn’t seem concerned about the wound or the infection, just cuts the callus -there is a lot of blood- and tells me in a chipper tone of voice that she’s prescribing me a different antibiotic to battle the proteus miribilis. When she leaves I ask Jenny if Dr. Thompson is still in Sri Lanka. 

    “Yeah, she’ll be gone for three weeks.” I tell her it’s already been three weeks. “No, she just left last week,” she says. 

    “But this is my third week with Baylor” I say. 

    “No, she’s only going to be gone three weeks.” 

    "So she'll be back next week."

    "No, she'll still be in Sri Lanka."

    To keep my head from exploding, I ask her how Dave is. She shows me pictures of the lanky blond tomcat. His fleecy fur looks like spun gold in the sunlight. 

    And the sun is shining a half hour later when I roll up the hill to the bus stop. The days are getting longer, if not warmer. So what if the past six months of appointments have been for nothing? It’s not really all just a pointless waste, is it? And even if it is, what good does it do to fixate on that? I’ve done the best I could and it wasn’t enough. The hole is larger than ever, I'm months away from even being close to healed up. And who knows how long that will last. A week? Two weeks? 

    But Monday is a new beginning. I can pretend none of this ever happened, that I’m preparing for my first day of treatment in an office I’ve never been to before, with a brand new team of doctors and nurses to get acquainted with. It’s all very exciting! I will wheel into that office like an amnesiac anxious to learn about this life he has no memory of having lived. 

*

The next day I leave work early again for my eye appointment. I haven’t had one since summertime; what with my weekly wound care visits, then vacation, then the holidays, I just didn’t feel up for it. But I need to get back on the eye-stabbing wagon.  

I sit in the big waiting room until I’m called, then stare into the mirror and recite the diminishing lines of the illuminated Snellin chart mounted on the wall behind me. I open my eyes wide as they check my eye pressure with an instrument the size of a pen. I sit in the waiting room for a while longer, follow the technician into a tiny dark room, gaze into the box at the blue circle and flickering red horizon line. I roll off to squeeze into the tiny waiting room. I could do this in my sleep.

    As I open my sketchbook, a baritone voice rumbles, “Hey, Seann.” I look up and see Mark from the Goose there. I feel vertigo that comes from seeing someone out of their usual habitat. I ask what he’s there for and he says he’s having some issues. He doesn’t elaborate. Mark used to be a submarine captain. I ask him a few questions and he answers them and then I go back to drawing. I can tell he’s nervous. In a few minutes they call his name and I wish him luck. 

    An elderly man sitting across the room takes the chair next to me so a couple can sit together. He watches me drawing intently, and eventually starts making small talk. He is a mechanical engineer from Missouri, friendly enough though not terribly interesting. I ask what kinds of things he worked on and he says he received a patent for a sewer pipe fitting. "It proved quite lucrative," he says. 

    In time they call him, and finally it’s my turn. An assistant administers the numbing drops, then leaves and comes back and administers more. She’s kind of blandly pretty, and when she turns her back I have an urge to grab her ass. After quite a while she returns. “The doctor’s dealing with an emergency, but you’re next,” she says. “In the meantime, I need to give you more drops.” 

    Finally the doctor comes flying in, gives me some more drops, flies away.

    After a long time, he dashes back in and uncaps the syringe and slides it into my eye. A blood-rimmed bubble blooms instantly in my vision. I must make a face, because in a concerned tone of voice he asks, “You doing okay?” 

    “I’m okay,” I say. 

    And I am. I’m alone and miserable and wracked with loss and tired of the endless medical drama and repulsed by all the loathsome acts being perpetrated in this country by all these cretinous buffoons, sick of the cringe and the cruelty and the sheer batshit craziness of it all… but aside from that, I’m doing okay. As I mount my scooter, my trusty wheeled steed with its ragged tires and wobbly handlebars, I look into the mirror at the Snellen chart. When lit, it’s a scrambled alphabet that spell nothing as it shrinks to the point of illegibility. Turned off, it’s just a black rectangle, all its backwards letters lost in the darkness. But still there.

High Levels of Exudate

     As I do every week, I remind my various coworkers that I need to leave early, and once again when two o’clock arrives I have to call over the radio to have someone relieve me. Two of them eventually arrive simultaneously, and while I know it’s not the end of the world, and that I will most likely make it to my bus on time, today I feel something snap inside and I am blinded by rage. 

    I don’t show it, though. I just clock out and speed down to the bus mall. 

    An old woman gets on the bus and sits across the aisle from me. Out of her left sleeve sticks a metal claw. Unlike last week’s unlucky fellow passenger, this woman’s misfortune does not make me feel better about my own. My foot looks like shit and my blood sugar, which has been well-controlled lately, has suddenly zigzagged out of control this week for reasons I can’t figure out. I try to use the training I practice in meditating to stop myself from worrying about this, but my thoughts fly to stress like nails toward a powerful magnet. 

In the waiting area, I feel myself sinking further, and I am too tired to fight it. By the time Shelley throws the door open, I have no energy for niceties. Warm, gentle Jenny is once again waiting for me in the middle room but I just grunt hello and collapse into the wide chair. 

    Vicki had ordered my medical supplies from a company that first calls you, then makes you pay in advance before they ship your order, so unsurprisingly my stuff didn’t arrive until yesterday. When I opened the package I was surprised to find that it contained nothing but a single box of ten foam dressings called Zetuvit Plus Silicone Border. There were detailed diagrams on the outside of the box, and inside was a set of instructions, microscopically printed in sixteen different languages on a thick sheaf of onionskin Though they are basically just fancy Band-aids, requiring you to just peel off the backing and slap them on, the instructions are astonishingly thorough and feature ten headings including Intended Purpose, Indications, Incident Reporting, Contraindications, and of course Product Disposal. 

    Zetuvit Plus Silicone Border absorbs and retains up to high levels of exudate in the absorbent pad and the dressing is able to redistribute pressure. It features a micro-adherent silicone interface and adhesive borders, so no other materials are necessary to secure the dressing.

    Maybe I missed some important step because when Shelley pulls off my sock, the bandage is bunched up and has slid half off the wound. Despite this, it doesn’t look much worse than last week. The foot looks slightly redder than usual though. Jenny asks if it hurts and I tell her yes. 

“That’s odd, you don’t usually feel much pain,” she says. 

    “How is it on a scale from one to ten?” asks Shelley. I tell her three and a half. They exchange looks and Shelley places her gloved hand over the end of my foot. “Temperature seems okay. It really is red though.”

    “Maybe it’s finally time to chop it off,” I say, and I mean it. Let’s end this charade. Let’s stop pretending this is ever going to get better. Time to shed that last scrap of loathsome hope. 

    Karen pops her head in and asks if she wants to see the latest videos of Dolly. I shrug and she shows me the dog wrestling with her doggie best friend, who looks exactly like her. I watch without comment. 

    “Isn’t she the cutest?” she gushes.

    They leave and I hear Dr. Bayliss’ voice on the other side of the curtain and my spirits dip further. I take off my glasses with one hand and cover my eyes with my other, which would be a lot trickier with a metal claw. A moment later the doctor comes in, followed by the new nurse whose name I’ve already forgotten. Helpfully, he name Judy is embroidered on her white coat.   

“So we’re still waiting to see if you can get permission from work to take off so we can put the cast on,” Bayliss says. 

““I don’t need permission, I just need two weeks’ notice so I don’t fuck them over.” Though I’m not sure why I’m worried about fucking them over at this point, when they can’t be bothered to even show up to relieve me even once. “I was waiting for you to call me.”

“Well I guess we had a misunderstanding,” she says, cutting away the callus as the new nurse watches intently. “Hmm, this is red, and a little swollen. I’m going to get you some antibiotics just to be on the safe side. Have you ever had MRSA?” Holy shit, I think, does she think I have MRSA? Why does she think that? I feel like I would know if I did. I tell her yes, I had it once. She tells Shelley to take a culture, and she digs a tube and a long cotton swab out of a drawer. 

“I can’t take any more of this,” I say, a little louder than I mean to. The room is very quiet. Vicki slips in for some reason, and they all stand there and stare at me; Jenny, Karen, Dr. Bayliss, Vicki, Shelley, Judy. I am so fucking sick of all of them. “It’s never going to heal up, and even if it does, it’ll just open right up again. This has been going on for years and there’s no fucking end in sight. I’m starting to lose it.” 

“What does your podiatrist say?" asks Bayliss. "If there’s a spur that keeps growing, they can sometimes shave it down.”

“I know. They've shaved it down so many times that it doesn’t help anymore. I'm not seeing a podiatrist at the moment because none of them seem to know anything. No one has an answer except to never walk on it again. It’s maddening that this is all just because of a tiny hole. I don’t want to do this anymore. Nothing helps. I'm done.”

“Are you thinking about… harming yourself?” the doctor asks. 

    I think about last night in the tub, using the opportunity to finally have my foot unwrapped to take a

rare bath. I kept closing my eyes and picturing that painting of Marat. He looks so serene.

    “No, nothing like that,” I say. 

“Your primary probably has a counselor who visits the office, or else he can write a referral to see a…”

“When am I supposed to see anyone when I’m already coming here every week?” I snap. “I don’t have any sick time left.”

    “Have you tried to get permanent disability?”

“Yes and I got turned down. I know you have to try a number of times but I don’t want it it anyways. I’ll go crazy being at home all the time. I’m already starting to crack. I am so. Fucking. Tired.”

“Can you get people to help manage things?”

“What people? There’s just me. There’s always just me.”

Judy comes and shows me a meditation app on her phone. I don’t bother telling her that I already use one and I actually like it a lot. But it’s not enough. It’s hard to believe that a few weeks ago I felt like I had an okay handle on things. 

“I’m not sure what your spiritual beliefs are,” she says, “But I’m happy to pray with you.” 

    Oh for the love of God.

    “No thanks,” I say. “But that’s very kind of you.”

    “Well I’ll pray for you regardless,” she says. I tell her I think my mother’s already praying too much for me as it is and she laughs politely. 

    No, seriously, I think. Do not fucking pray for me.

Bree pops her head in and asks if I can come in two Mondays from now for my cast fitting. I say okay, and then they all filter out except for Shelley, who tears open a package of Aquacel and a foam dressing.

“Where’s Doctor Thompson, anyways?” I suddenly ask.

“Sri Lanka,” she answers. “Lucky stiff. I can’t wait until I can travel like that but it’s hard with the kids needing things all the time. And they want a little sister really bad.” She tells me about what a disaster her house is, what with the water leak and them having to redo the kitchen. She says her oldest came home from school last week and told her about another outbreak of lice. "She has really thick hair and she throws a fit when I brush it much less try to run a comb through it." 

    How long ago was it that she told me this same exact story?

    “It never ends,” she says. 

    “You can say that again,” I say. 

    No doubt, she will. And I'll probably be here to listen to her say it. And to hear her tell the story of the kids at school getting lice year after year until both her girls are out of elementary school and in middle school, then high school, then college, then having kids of their own to be afraid of getting lice. Year after year I will keep wheeling up here as the doctors and nurses age and retire and eventually die, and then it'll be my turn, passing on without ever having managed to fix that tiny hole that held out until my unquestionably bitter end, sticking to its guns, never backing down, getting smaller and bigger and smaller and bigger but never disappearing completely, exuding various amounts of drainage, my one constant companion I can count on to never abandon me. 

Ladder

  The bus crosses the bridge and stops for a woman on a fancy, streamlined electric  scooter. She looks compressed, like a cartoon character squashed by an anvil. I pull my own non-fancy, non-streamlined scooter closer but there’s plenty of room for both of us. A few stops later, the bus lowers and the ramp extends and an enormous woman sitting in what looks like a hydraulic lift thunders on. Her chair has six wheels, and she's not so much sitting as lying on it. I move out of her way as best I can, wedging myself into a corner. As she tries to settle in, she keeps knocking into my scooter. “Sorry,” she keeps mumbling. “Sorry.” I smile and tell her it’s fine. When we get to my stop it takes some tricky maneuvering to extricate myself. 

Inside the hospital, the tree and decorations have been taken down and the lobby has returned to its depressingly bland state. As I’m speeding toward the elevators, I pass Bridget hurrying in the other direction. She says she's headed to the lobby to get a wheelchair for someone. They must be low on volunteers. 

Upstairs, Karen fetches me from the waiting area. She's wearing glasses for a change, and they make her look remarkably like Shelley, who we pass as she leads me to the far room. Maybe their personalities are merging like in some Bergman movie. Jenny is already seated at the computer in bright burgundy scrubs. I’m happy to see her but I don’t have much to say, despite the fact that I haven’t been here in three weeks. Last year's calendar still hangs on the wall. 

Karen unwraps my makeshift dressing. The wound has gotten bigger, but I already knew that. On New Year’s Day my foot had once again looked almost healed, but a few days later it had once again opened up, the blood soaking my bandages. That same day, the U.S. invaded Venezuela.  

As we wait for the doctor, Jenny and Karen and I talk about how pleasant our holidays were. I usually struggle not to feel gloomy over Christmas, but this year I didn’t sink into my usual seasonal rut and actually enjoyed the lights and the music and the festivities. For once, I felt grateful and blessed.

“Of course, that all went out the window this week," I tell them, "What with my foot, and everything going on in the world." Jenny and Karen nod and we all look at each other in silence. 

“I hate them so much,” Jenny snarls through clenched teeth.

To try to break the pall, Karen starts talking about her dog. She shows me some pictures in which the usually placid Dolly resembles a demon from hell, snaggle teeth pointing in every direction.

“Jesus, I’m going to have nightmares,” I say.

They leave and I hear a new patient in room two talking to Vicki about the sores on the backs of her legs that won’t heal. “They won't do my back surgery unless they heal up,” she says.

“We’ll get them healed up for you,” says Vicki. “What is your pain level, from one to ten?” 

The woman emits a bitter bark from deep within her. 

The substitute doctor, Dr. Bayliss, comes in and performs the debriding without much comment, aside from marveling at how extensive the calluses are. I’m too weary to joke about them at this point. “We have you approved for skin graft, but it’s a new year, so I’m not sure how much your deductible is…” I ask if I can hold off. She says of course. “You still want to do the contact cast though, right?” I say yes and she says someone will call me to schedule it. 

“And we’re not doing another football, right?” she asks Karen. 

“There was too much drainage,” she says. 

“Okay, so in the meantime…what did he have on it when he came in?”

“Nothing. He was dressing it himself.”

“What were we using before that?”

“Optilock. But there’s more drainage now.”

“Hm. Let’s do Hydrofera, then.”

“That stuff slips all over the place. I was thinking Aquacel.”

Christ this is fucking tedious. 

“Aquacel is is. Okay I’m done here.” Bayliss leaves, once again failing to reveal so much as a glimpse of personality.

Karen slaps a patch of Aquacel on the wound, covers it with a bandage, and says, “There you go.” 

“That’s it?” I ask. I haven’t gone around with my foot this exposed since I don’t remember when. It doesn't seem right. 

“That’s it. Do you want a stocking or something? I’ll cut you a stocking.”

    *

    The enormous woman in the motorized recliner is already on the bus when I get on, but luckily there’s no third contraption to complicate matters. I wonder what happened to her to bring her to this state, what combination of bad luck and bad choices made her this person. I try to picture her as a young woman, a child, a baby. I wonder what it’s like to live inside that mound of flesh. How uncomfortable it must be, how awful to live without hope of ever living a normal life. I spend so much time complaining about my own limitations, but I feel humbled looking at her, just as I assume healthier people are when they look at me. 

But as damaged as she is, at least she can still get around, can still roll down the street and get on the bus and ride across town. Maybe there’s someone she knows who is much worse off, bedbound, or dying of cancer, who she looks at and is grateful she’s not them. It’s like a chain of suffering, or perhaps a ladder, and it’s difficult to look at those clinging below without pity, almost as hard as it is to look at those on the rungs above without envy. 

And in Minneapolis, an innocent woman was shot to death by an immigration agent as she sat in her car in the snow.

I hate them so much.

The woman in the chair presses the button for her stop. As she’s rolling out, she gets stuck going down the ramp. She revs the motor and tries to rotate the wheels but they’re wedged tight. The driver watches her for a minute then gets out of his chair, pulls on a pair of nitrile gloves, and patiently, carefully, starts to push.