Dimiter by William Peter Blatty

uncle?”
    “Shopkeeper.”
    “Shopkeeper. What do you sell?”
    “Souvenirs.”
    “Ah, I see. And now business is bad?”
    “Yes, bad. Very bad. It’s the war.”
    Mayo’s gaze ran a scan of the Arab’s face. And then abruptly he stood up. “Upstairs they will probably X-ray your skull,” he pronounced, “but I am guessing your headaches are due to stress. When the tourists come back you’ll be fine. In the meantime, eat fried green bananas. Doctor’s orders.They’re rich in potassium, uncle. Your people all love them. They’re a Puerto Rican specialty. Eat them.”
    Mayo turned and strode away.
    “God be with you,” the Arab called out.
    “
Fried bananas
!”
    Mayo stepped around a charwoman’s flailing mop and then made his way slowly to a bank of elevators. Finding one open and waiting, he stepped into it and pushed a round black button marked “3.” The doors closed. A slight lurch and then soundless ascension. But on arriving at “3,” Mayo did not get off. He impulsively pushed the black button marked “Mem,” rode down to that floor, and then again pushed the button marked “3.” Because the hospital’s elevators during normal hours were crammed to asphyxiating fullness, Mayo’s sense of untrammeled space was luxurious. At one point, he murmured, “Toyland, please.” He left the elevator glutted with satisfaction.
    Headed for his office, Mayo stopped as he came to a nurse’s station where behind the high counter, head bent low, a pretty, dark-haired nurse in her thirties was entering notes into a patient ledger.
    “Good morning, Samia.”
    “Good morning.”
    Still writing, the nurse had not looked up and her tone of voice was flat and cool. With a sigh, Mayo lowered his head and shook it. He had recently injured the nurse’s feelings by scoffing at the story she’d excitedly told him concerning a patient named Isabell Lakhme, an elderly woman with mild dementia who’d been recently crippled by a fracture of the hip. “I was checking on the burn case in 304 about one in the morning,” the nurse had recounted, “when I hear someone
shnuffling
around in the hall. I look up through the doorway and who do I see walk by? Swear to God? No lie? Mrs. Lakhme!”
    “You’re not serious.”
    “I swear. Absolutely. It was her. Except she looked—well . . .”
    “How, Samia? How did she look?”
    “Well, like rosy. You know? Sort of youthful. And she turns and looks me straight in the eye and she smiles. Well, my jaw drops a foot. I mean, I can’t believe she’s walking! Right? So I blurted out, ‘Hey! Mrs. Lakhme!’ I was shocked. She walks on and out of sight, so I go after her, okay? But by the time I’m in the hallway she’s gone. There’s no one there. She’s disappeared!”
    “Samia? . . .”
    “No, no, wait a minute! Wait until I tell you! I went straight to her room, and . . .”
    “She wasn’t in her bed, you’re going to tell me?”
    “No, she was. She was there. She was asleep.”
    “Tell me, what is the point of this, Samia?”
    “It’s this: The next day, I’m in her room when her daughter comes to visit and—”
    “You told them that you saw her?”
    “Can you stop interrupting? No, Moses. No, I didn’t say a word. So now the daughter takes her hand and she gives it a kiss. I can see she’s kind of shaky. You know? About to cry. And then she says to her mother how she wishes that she weren’t always ‘stuck in this bed.’ And then Lakhme—swear to God, Moses! God’s honest truth!—Lakhme says to her, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not stuck here at all. I go traveling with young people all of the time.’ Then she turns to me smiling a little, and she says to me,
‘
And
you
know I’m telling the truth becauseyou saw me last night, Nurse, didn’t you?’ Oh, my God, I almost fainted, Moses! Can you believe it?”
    “No,” the neurologist had answered. “Moreover, you haven’t any right to be delusional, Samia. That’s a privilege reserved