The hospital cafeteria is empty except for all these people.

They walked us in here single file. The floors are clean lemon-white tile. We choose tables like in junior high. I'm sitting with Blon Oloonski, who looks like a Russian Bill Murray, a pockmarked suburban woman who works for Morgan Stanley and a stack of books and papers I brought here myself. We're all extras for a Bollywood film. Except the papers. They're a fire hazard.

The woman keeps explaining her weight away. No one has asked her to, but seven times she has said "My husband can make anything taste so good, I put on 40 pounds. He's a chef and I gained 40 pounds. I used to weigh a hundred, now...everything tastes so good."

The slightly Korean girl with the concave face, mostly flat and flat entirely as well in her starlet dress, deliberately wide-eyed, heavy blush under her cheeks makes her look like a beauty school skeleton. "Think thinner" she must chant. Moves like wires.

I stood in the cash register line with the real people...the hospital workers. I opened the humming case which was a wall of soft drinks and water on shelves caked with spilled orange soda. I reached for a water. My hand brushed the orange mess and gathered one long black hair that had been fossilized in the amber thick of the soda. I had a moment trying to pull it off with the very tip of my fingers. It kept getting stuck between my fingers.

When the clerk in her green X-ray smock said a dollar sixty, the phone rang on the wall. I wasn't sure whether to hand her the money or the water. The hum of the case, the phone ringing...my mind froze, I guess. I guess I handed her the money.

The phone rang on the wall. I took a drink. No one answered it.