Ziektewinst

In a hospital where the patients matter less than the financing, comfort arrives in many languages. Call it globalisation. There is yet another mediation agency that benefits from it.

It continues one way or another. As a kind of passenger, Qnaapje rides in Julius’s black SE under the barrier. Julius, who prefers to be called Caesar, is married to Graediva.

The marriage between Julius and Graediva is, by mutual consent, as open as a sunroof in summer. In her white SM, Graediva also takes an exit ticket. In a certain culture that differs from the dominant culture, Graediva is known first and foremost as a mistress of advanced pleasure.

Going deeper into the origin or emergence of Graediva’s reputation serves no purpose at this moment. She is a kind of queen. The barrier closes.

Slae follows later. Slae, who is subject or property of Graediva, is at this moment pulling into a petrol station in her grey XJ with two filler openings. Graediva’s Slae is, besides subject or property, a mindfucking slayer and dissector as well.

Nothing or no one else requires any introduction. An underground car park is, as is known, a parking garage below ground level. There is a lift.

In the lift Qnaapje hangs inactive over Julius’s solid left shoulder. A voice says that the third floor has been reached. Depending on the point of view, the two- or threesome turns right towards a shared patient room.

For the camera and any viewers behind a desk, the two- or threesome turns left towards a shared patient room. In the corridor of the relatively old hospital where single patient rooms have not yet been realised, the air is heavy. A fleeting combination of disinfectant and cleaning agent is to blame.

Coffee, tea, cake and more or less wilted flower petals are also present. Call it aroma. A trolley full of dirty bedding and work clothes waits for processing.

There has been washing. A kind of altar full of used vases has a sink. A pair of scissors is missing.

A nurse pushes a trolley full of lunch through the corridor. During this hour visitors may help a relative. Definitely do not call it feeding, because informal care is a concept that is both cost-saving and noble.

Thus and here someone lies waiting somewhere.

GraedivaAi-ai-ai!

No reaction. Ai-ai-ai has nothing to do with a repeated cry of pain after hitting one’s thumb with a hammer, or standing on a toe with a heel. From Graediva’s mouth it is definitely not an expression of pity either. The one waiting knows what Graediva is talking about. It is a project. A perfectly executed shoulder throw lands Qnaapje beside the one waiting.

GraedivaYes, on the floor, mate! Nice.

Julius does not care. Julius takes a deep breath in and out through the nose. Graediva sets up a folding chair on legs.

Qnaapje may sit on her lap. The one waiting, whom Graediva has, to her own taste, very appropriately renamed Rinse, closes his eyes. Under Rinse’s right ear a thin plastic tube sticks out of the neck.

Call it a drain. The little blood and wound fluid in the reservoir at the end of the thin plastic tube is clearly below level. Julius almost squeezes it.

GraedivaWhere are you going?

Julius, who has a boiling blood hatred of the who, what, where and why that endlessly comes out of women, answers coolly.

JuliusFoq up a lunch break or something.

GraedivaDuh. Schweinhund. You leave the girls alone here, yes. Yes?

Graediva, who at the expense of attention to the flesh often spends hours on end dealing with integers, floats, lists, strings, arrays, conjunctions, disjunctions and, for example, if-then-else, sometimes expresses herself improbably coherently. Julius does not make himself guilty of that. No reincarnation.

JuliusHave it your way, schatje.

Julius starts pacing. Graediva continues beside and with Rinse where she left off.

GraedivaQnaapje has been everywhere you were these past months, boy. You don’t have to do anything anymore. Never leave the house again if you don’t want to, the way you did. When are you allowed?

JuliusOh, damn.

Rinse, who these past months has filled his head solely and exclusively with spring rate, droop, roll, rollout, camber gain in relation to caster, load transfer and, for example, power-to-weight ratio, keeps his eyes closed. Call it shutting down, or repression with the help of an electrically powered and radio-controlled model car that is twelve times too small in scale to be real. It has worked.

Yet something benign still had to come out. The question remains what was there first. Graediva presses on.

GraedivaWhat do you want?

Rinse sees under heavy eyelids the weeds in the alley behind his shed. A garden gate opened. A neighbour from the back. The weeds made driving out extremely difficult. Nice that it was removed. Whether the weeds on her side could be taken along after his side as well. It is done. It was the day before admission. Graediva gets no answer.

GraedivaZhit, boy.

Julius takes a deep breath in and out through the nose and sits crosswise on the windowsill. A sports shoe of his own brand pushes against the frame on the other side. Online the brand is for sale under Dazzling Adje. Going deeper into this form of merchandising serves no purpose at this moment.

GraedivaSomething has to happen, right? Nothing is happening like this, so to speak.

Graediva rubs over a mean deep notch around the mechanical ankle of Qnaapje, who still sits mute and dumb on her lap.

GraedivaDoes the foqing robot have to go back in the cupboard? Can I get the qolere again? I’ll hang it back up right away, upside down. Foq you.

JuliusFoq you, yes.

It does nothing to Rinse. Rinse only still misses what has disappeared. Someone complains. The elderly woman who kept everyone in the shared patient room awake the previous night by letting the torch from the bedside cabinet clatter every time before going to pee remarks that she is lying in a hospital.

GraedivaHey, qadaver, do we need you right now? As if we don’t know this is a hospital, with your pyjamas.

Rinse opens his eyes. The torch also rolled off the walker every time after hitting a doorpost. Graediva has no knowledge of the history behind the torch. Graediva simply hates everything before her generation. The elderly woman of the torch mutters something about civilisation in this country.

GraedivaSo, you’ve spoken for a bit, have you, pension pot. Civilisation is dead, old one, with your complaining. Countries are dead too, by the way.

Qnaapje comes to lie on Rinse’s bed at the foot end. The folding chair folds in and out. The elderly woman of the torch has called something upon herself.

GraedivaPretend your imagination is still completely in order and go along with the following now.

Graediva imitating grandpaHansje, did you buy anything nice with your birthday money?

Graediva imitating grandson HansjeYes, I bought friendship with a little boy from another class.

Graediva lets a silence fall and performs a kind of talking sock by tapping her index finger on her lacquered thumbnail.

Graediva imitating grandmaOh, do you have any money left?

Graediva imitating grandson HansjeNo, but I’ll get it back automatically one day.

An equally short as telling swallow.

Graediva imitating whispering grandpaWould our Hansje…

Graediva imitating whispering-back grandmaDon’t be so strange.

Graediva imitating grandson HansjeWhat are you whispering?

JuliusA hoerenloper! That little prick is a hoerenloper, ya know.

Graediva lets her kind of talking sock snap.

GraedivaNow of course you want to know who Hansje really is, right, figurehead? Well, Hansje is nothing without Grietje, all alone in the big forest, as it were. The question, so to speak, should therefore be who Grietje…

JuliusA hooker! A hoer, ya know.

Graediva giggles.

GraedivaWhatever. And just playing the fool about loyalty. I’m not lying here being ill, you know. All my fault? Just keep giving money to Hansje and so on.

Graediva puts a little spoon into the still untouched pot of custard beside the elderly woman of the torch. Graediva does not let go of the spoon immediately.

JuliusYo. Ease it, babe.

While Rinse suffers from vicarious shame, Julius resumes pacing and Graediva folds the chair again, there is room to go back in time. There were evenings and dinners. Always when a deal was at stake, Graediva in a dirndl, sarong, boubou, qipao, kimono or other kind of traditional dress formed the highlight.

A failed deal meant being put to bed by the nanny. A successful deal meant being put to bed by the nanny. There was also practice.

A theme. A smile. Applause.

A sum of money. The boundless childhood years flew past from mother to second stepmother and good housefather Qier in a cloud. No home.

The road to the diploma was longer. Never allowed to drive herself, always sober and above all no intercourse. Causing reputational damage meant house arrest in the country house.

There was the web that is inaccessible to search engines. Cracking became a code of honour. The urge for revenge did the rest.

Fully formed, shortly after adulthood Graediva had enough with mortal Julius and the yes-word, with disinheritance as a result. Access has been granted. There has been filming on the bonnets, in the cabins, under the chandeliers, above the bidets and beside the swimming pools.

A better or more appropriate décor could not have existed. There have been millions of clicks. “Take a Slokkie from my Klokkie” is merely a revenue-generating title.

Regular banks found it all too far, resulting in a kind of forced flight into digital currencies. Some digital currencies disappeared virtually as quickly as they had appeared. Some digital currencies or tokens only caused nuisance.

92 in USD value. Beside and with Rinse, Graediva, who is in more than good spirits, takes the floor again.

GraedivaThere was once no chairman yet, boy. Appointing someone who doesn’t want to is a dirty job, with politics in its best form. Recruiting member states also didn’t go really smoothly, so stiffly, without an extra billion here and there. No ECU, right, because the Germans found that a ridiculous-sounding name, so to speak, rightly. Right of reply. Whatever. The euro slid in butter-soft, out of our pockets. The plan behind it was already too big to be allowed to fall, with votes against.

JuliusFoq votes.

GraedivaNo. Foq voters, I say, don’t I?

Rinse is clearly tired of listening.

GraedivaStay with me. Great, those election promises that are too good to be true, now and then as well, of course. Just keep spending what you don’t have. Pitifully squeaking and begging for help, right, from Qier and that kind of magicians, as a guarantee for a second term. Good housefathers, all of them, as you know. Too big to be allowed to fall, the whole lot. The big joint bill, boy. Isn’t it beautifully composed of parts? An advisory position as thanks afterwards. Not that the foam needs advice, but they are trophies, the socks. Intimidation, signal function, call it what you want. Illness profit. Banks and bombs. A government is nothing other than…

JuliusAre you done, schatje?

Graediva picks teasingly slowly at four mechanical fingers and an equally mechanical opposable thumb. The tin of rinse apple syrup rolls over the blanket towards Rinse’s belly. Our mistress of advanced pleasure continues working on Qnaapje.

GraedivaRobots. We were going to play along, weren’t we? Making smart heads unemployed with artificial intelligence. Look, the little finger is an insurer, the ring finger an accountant, the index finger a lawyer, and the thumb a banker. Do you see it? We won’t need any of them in person soon. Away with everything that makes life disproportionately more expensive in the economy, mate. It can no longer be stopped. The assembly line has never been reversed either.

JuliusHe knows.

GraedivaDuh. Who doesn’t? I’ll keep chattering until that sack opens his dry little mouth.

While Rinse does not even ask for water, Julius looks at his beautiful watch and Graediva tries to get some kind of conversation going, Slae walks past the staff room opposite the trolley full of dirty bedding and work clothes.

SlaeEnjoy your meal.

A few thank-yous. The more experienced break-takers look as dismissive as possible while chewing busily. Clearly satisfied with the effect, Slae walks cheerfully on to the correct shared patient room.

SlaeHi. Good afternoon. Hello.

Little to no response from the patients. Absent family members are undoubtedly to blame for the grumpiness of the patients who have been lying ill waiting for visits too repeatedly and too long.

SlaeHow is our patient?

GraedivaCategorical, or something. I’ve been telling interesting things the whole time, and a bit of motivational sucking and so on, but the gentleman isn’t doing much, mop.

Through coloured lenses and under false eyelashes, Slae’s sparkling eyes inspect Rinse thoroughly from toe to top. Rinse has never seen this model of wig before. It is a short model wig and a kind of lilac in colour. Slae briefly presses the fingertip of her right index finger against the tip of Rinse’s nose. There are glitter particles.

SlaeHere I am.

Up to the navel under the blanket, Slae rolls the tin of rinse apple syrup upward over the blanket. Slae takes the tin of rinse apple syrup in her hand and places it on a rail at the head end. Under something fluffy held together by a pin, Slae’s well-formed breasts make longer-than-necessary contact.

The fluffy something that partially covers Slae’s well-formed breasts may be a little cape, but Rinse knows nothing about fashion. There is calm breathing, and then Slae, standing, performs a kind of narrative test.

SlaeI had to refuel. I got a bit overwhelmed by the hoses. Is this the north wing or the south wing?

No reaction.

SlaeI didn’t want to grab any of the hoses, but someone said it’s okay. The hoses can be grabbed. I did it.

It doesn’t work. Julius, who is familiar with Slae’s kind of narrative test, stops pacing. Graediva moves closer.

SlaeThe cap on the filler opening had to…

Julius’s elbow bumps against Slae’s elbow.

JuliusLook at him, that fat bastard. Foqing imbecile.

A patient in the bed opposite Rinse’s bed in the shared patient room blindly and manually imitates a little mole under the ground. Slae sees it. Graediva sees it too. Rinse presses his head into the soft pillow. There is doubt.

JuliusDo it then, slayer.

Slae does it.

SlaeThe cap on the filler opening had to open. Where is a toilet here? My friends often go to the toilet on the way. They all say it’s not bad if you have to go often. It’s okay. Everything is possible.

One must know that on the way to the toilet Slae grabs a handful from a box of latex disposable gloves, and Graediva and Julius watch the equally plump as consequential man in full disbelief. The slippers under the dressing gown are sloppily on the wrong feet. No one asks why.

JuliusYo.

Julius checks the generously sized door of the toilet next to the exit or entrance of the shared patient room. There is also a shower. The elderly woman of the torch who just had to go may wait a moment.

There are worse things. Still, it is necessary to draw a line as sharp as a razor between the lips. A kind of fire is also involved.

Julius winks and does not suppress an emerging dirty greasy grin at all. At the window side a different sentiment plays.

GraedivaBoy, how broken you are. Really wrecked. What am I supposed to do with you? I don’t understand you anymore.

The sincerely concerned comes sweetly over Rinse. Rinse experiences that he is not completely broken or wrecked yet. Evoking concern can just as easily be used as a lever or path to even more sweetness. Rinse resists that. There are conditions.

RinseThe drain could already come out this morning. I don’t want any more resistance. I understand it, but I don’t want it anymore.

GraedivaSo, now suddenly it’s all very much about you, with your ‘I’.

Rinse closes up immediately. Regret must feel like pressure, because Rinse forces more air through his throat with difficulty.

RinseThen not.

GraedivaZhit, boy. Julius, get a doctor!

JuliusWhy?

GraedivaNo meat tonight if you don’t hurry.

One must know that Julius, well motivated, goes looking for a doctor. Julius checks the staff room opposite the trolley full of dirty bedding and work clothes. All the break-takers look as dismissive as possible while drinking busily.

Clearly dissatisfied with the answer to a simple question, Julius goes looking for some orderly who, according to the break-takers, has not yet got around to lunch. Julius does not care. The sought and found orderly, who gives far too much to people who need it least, gets a push towards the correct shared patient room.

JuliusHere you have it. You on top, schatje.

GraedivaDuh. First lick.

The folding chair folds in. The orderly placed beside Rinse does his thing. Rinse is allowed to stand. Vacuum sucks painfully, but does leave a clean wound. Rinse apologises for the way of acting. It is okay. Removing the drain can also be done without vacuum. It does not matter to Rinse. No suction. No plaster, and the suture dissolves by itself.

GraedivaAnd now?

The bag that has been packed and ready since this morning is unzipped. Clean jeans go on. A clean white T-shirt without print goes on. Left and right Rinse sprays anti-perspirant under the armpits. Call it clean comfort. The bag is zipped shut. The soles under the barefoot-slipped slippers that have seen better days are slightly worn at an angle on the outside of the heel. Shuffling is to blame.

RinseI don’t want any more blockages. Do exactly what I say.

It lands badly.

JuliusNo foqing way, you narcist. Me first.

After a shove it is logical and natural that one reacts or does something small back. The blows Rinse has been allowed to receive reverberate in high and low frequencies, with poverty as a result. Rinse did not choose that himself. Going deeper into justification or defence of the person serves no purpose at this moment. It has been given up, and that is Rinse’s good right.

RinseCome outside with me then.

JuliusYo!

Graediva threatens intervention. Rinse does not care. Julius looks at his equally expensive as beautiful watch.

GraedivaYou’re doing it completely this time, then?

Rinse nods. The identification wristband that has been used to clearly distinguish patient Rinse from the beginning to the end of the treatment refuses to tear. There is a kind of clasp.

The identification wristband goes around the wrist of Qnaapje, who still lies mute and dumb on the bed at the foot end. Qnaapje also gets Rinse’s mobile phone shoved into its stomach. Another or better place the otherwise sound design did not allow.

A click. There is wireless ethernet, wifi, wi-fi or certified Wi-Fi. Well implanted.

GraedivaWhat is the point of this?

Qnaapje can just as easily be deployed in human-machine interaction. Call it customer contact. After customer contact, fighter jets rank highest when it comes to revenue model or applied technology. Rinse’s Qnaapje is neither call-centre employee nor pilot. Rinse plays chess with empathy.

RinseBucephalus.

GraedivaWho?

RinseQnaapje. Not even twelve and already wiser than the clock. Entanglement. Qubits. No one will be able to keep up if it continues. Empathy beyond the third generation. Drive to act. It will be held back by a longing for home and return from the group. It cannot keep coming from one side only.

GraedivaWhat are you talking about?

RinseQnaapje. An odd one out without identifiable identity. Misunderstood. Unfathomable, Graediva. We cannot put that out on the street. It will become unhappy.

GraedivaAnd since when does Qnaapje have feelings all of a sudden, the little hanger?

RinseThat’s what I mean.

GraedivaWhat?

No reaction. Rinse typically thinks as long as he thinks deeply. Graediva has no patience for that.

GraedivaWhatever.

Beside the exit or entrance of the shared patient room there is suddenly again Graediva’s subject or property, who leaves the generously sized toilet door ajar behind her. With her right arm Slae makes a few swinging movements in the air and then, like a faith healer, strikes her right hand out towards the earth.

JuliusYo.

Clearly satisfied with the effect, Slae walks cheerfully on to Rinse in the shared patient room. If the toilet between the rails behind the generously sized door gets blocked, a latex disposable glove is to blame. There is also a drain, but a lukewarm mixture of one thing and another flows through it unhindered. Hospital shampoo does the rest.

GraedivaNo longer needed, mop. The boy is doing it.

SlaeDommage.

JuliusReally?

Rinse knows the repeatedly double-hearted and the simple that follows. Julius squeezes it. Graediva has already gone ahead of Julius. No goodbye or see you later. Pure self-interest, and there is speed behind it. There stands Rinse then. Slae breaks the ice.

SlaeHere we stand then.

Rinse, who also knows that standing is the current activity, resists reacting lamely to the factual situation in the shared patient room. Rinse drags Qnaapje up over the blanket on the bed and lays the equally mute as dumb head to rest on the soft pillow. It cannot stay lying here.

The visitors’ room is not an option either. Our Qnaapje will at best get many peppermints, or sticky butterscotch sweets in hard-to-separate wrappers from people who are eager for a chat. Slae sees Rinse thinking long and deeply.

SlaeIf I can help you with anything, sir, I would be glad to hear it.

A friendly thank-you. Rinse takes the tin of rinse apple syrup in his hand. There is room between worn clothes, an electric toothbrush, a spray can of anti-perspirant, a modest set of keys and a little folder containing a driving licence, an identity card, a healthcare card and a bank card.

No banknotes. Loose coins that earlier during folding had managed to escape from some pocket of the jeans have been softly cursed at, picked up and thrown into the bag. Qnaapje is a bigger problem.

Somewhere there must be a wheelchair in which small change goes as deposit. Call it service of the house and theft prevention at the same time.

RinseI’ll be right back.

There has been searching, unlocking, pushing, lifting, pushing, giving way before the lift to an emergency case on a mobile bed, pushing, lifting, changing, pushing and finally locking.

SlaeYour coin, sir.

On the back seat of Slae’s grey XJ a seatbelt used as a lap belt holds Qnaapje artfully upright. Rinse may sit in front. Slae drives.

A special case remains behind. Beside the exit or entrance of the shared patient room no movement comes into the generously sized door. There is high urgency.

Getting dressed or made presentable behind the generously sized door takes too long. The elderly woman of the torch presses a button. There has been peeing in the bed.

No one asks why.