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Tip! Tip! Tip! Tip! Tip!

It's quarter of an hour before lunch and he's already coming down those stairs, and so quickly and noisily too. Some of us actually like to spend our free time in soothing silence, but that interminable devastating din of each foot dropping down the darkened staircase… Brother Lawrence is trying to drive me insane. Look at him: he's here already -- he's down the stairs so soon, -- "Salve tibi!" -- as if he had flown, and the noise his slippers produce is just unbearable. The decibel count must have skyrocketed to at least 2½!

When I descend the staircase I come down elegantly, quietly; no one can hear neither pit nor pat. Why, sometimes I remove my shoes and softly take the steps slowly in threes, for the Trinity, and let the sweet fragrance from my feet fill the air… I take a deep breath -- believe me, there is nothing more lovely than the scent of biscuits and toe cheese at noontime.

Everyone chats frivolously and casually over the meal, and Lawrence always seems the most intellectual of us all, and speaking of his flowers and interrupting the uncomfortable silences. Oh, here he goes again, saying that tomatoes are related to some other God forsaken flower by family or genus, and let’s not forget about kingdom.

Look at him with his chin up, smiling politely; he thinks everything is delicious. Mr. High-and-Mighty resting his knife and fork across the top of the platter, not cross-wise for the Trinity, but all clean and spotless and reflective as if he had spit-shined it. How is it possible to not leave any residue or particle upon your plate, to not trim your meat before you eat it -- and that disrespectful Brother Lawrence drinks his goblet down in one large gulp! Oh, he does it gently and muffled so no one notices; he thinks this is acceptable and he attempts to not swallow hard and reverberate throughout the dining hall, but his efforts are unsatisfactory. One should take orange juice in three sips, for the Trinity.

Fifteen years in a mental institution will do one thing to you: it makes you tolerant of people's incompetence, having to deal with it all the time in every way, people thinking you have some mental disorder or terrible personality problem.

I, of course, was put there under false pretenses when I was accused of continuous torture of old women. My actions were justified, however, for out of the thirty-five hags I got hold of thirty-three of them were evil incarnate, I tell you. They treated me like a small two-month old tiger cub, and my grandmother was the worst of all.

My father said my grandmother was kind and generous, and that I was being unfair to her. On the contrary, any educated person knows for a fact that any female relative who bakes cookies and cakes and presents you with gifts and sponsors your trips and tuition is trying to drive you mad until you don't know what's what, and then they kill you in your sleep. Oh yes, I have seen it before… I have seen it before…

I can hear him talk of the kind of weather, the season, the time of year -- could it perchance be imperative to know or even dare to care about these sorts of things?

"What’s the Latin name for parsley?" Brother Lawrence curiously inquired, followed by my dutiful response: "What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout?"

Is that humming? -- Of a tune not suitable for a saintly brother like yourself? Goodness gracious, could it be some complex, forbidden, classical hum? I peering around the walkway corner, there sits his wretched pride and joy, his blithering flowerpots, and that ridiculous rose requires some hydrogen oxide? Drown that rose would I, if only it were possible to transpose it into your goblet. Maybe then, by its thorny touch, would your sips decrease in amount.

Oh dear, his myrtle bush wants trimming! Perhaps I should fetch him… he seems to have wandered off -- his eyes at least -- to Dolores squatting outside the convent bank. With her blue-black, lustrous hair flowing down, what does Brother Lawrence care of her activity? Oh ho! How pleased I am to see this! Actually begun my work for me, over-watering your flowerpots? I laugh: Hell's flames will parch it soon enough, and you and your symbiotic friends can wither together for all eternity.

Brother Lawrence is trying to lead me to sin, leading my gaze towards the lovely, irresistible, voluptuous, horse-haired, delicious -- melons, trying to drive me to madness by your external goodness and piety, getting in nice and cozy with the abbot, providing him with entire melons and us with mere slices, you ungrateful swine! Someday the abbot will die of congestive heart failure due to your overfeeding him melons, and then you’ll be running the show. You'll be Satan’s Number-Two Man for murdering the abbot, and you'll have your little palace in hell, with all the melons you could never scoff, surrounded by the droning of tunes and feet climbing stairs, you floating in an endless vat bursting with pulpy orange juice, while myrtle bushes trim and roses water you; if hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, oh, would not mine kill you!

Brother Lawrence is always so dramatic and flourishing and not without great ability when it comes his turn to read at Mass. He never misses a word or phrase and everything is pronounced perfectly. If you wish to get the fullest from the Scriptures, however, it must be interpreted literally and read with a monotone deep respect and understanding for the inspired Word of God, and the customary mispronunciation is essential to style of a great reader.

Heh-heh-heh-heh! What a perfect, flawless, ingenious plan I have concocted! It will be sure to trick that babbling, bumbling ignoramus of a swine into his undoing… a swift, wrangled passage to Hell indeed.

I mustn't let the smirk crawl into my face; it will give me away. There sits Brother Lawrence; he folds his hands with clasped fingers, how foolish is he, for one must fold his hands with fingers together in threes, for the Trinity.

We take turns reading during the services, and next will be Brother Lawrence's. How opportune this is… when everyone is out I will mark the page at Galatians at the passage which if spoken incorrectly yields twenty-nine damnations unto the reader. I will fold the page down and double it over to the next where I place a page from one of my scrofulous French novels on gray paper with blunt type. Simply glance at it, and it will consume his whole, and there will be no escape…

He passes me in the hall as I exit the chapel. "Salve tibi! There's Vespers! Plena gratia Ave, Virgo -- "

Ah, finally he mounts the marble stairs to the pulpit, where my plan will go without a hitch. I can hardly restrain my sense of self-satisfaction. Soon I will be the one who condemned the devil’s advocate to his eternal fate. That ignorant, incompetent, churlish, asinine, wretched, slow, idiotic, cheerful, holy, disrespectful, lighthearted, sophisticated, adhesive, clever, carefree, sanitary, jest-full, disaccharide, pompous, courtly, carbon-based, leaf-loving, bush-burping, stem-smelling, garden-gorging, plant-popping, tree-tasting, dirt-devouring, insanity inducing, purple-skinned, educated, mortal, homologous, pleasant, consistent, average-height Brother Lawrence won't know what hit him.

"Ahem… Brother Lawrence has taken ill today. I will be reading in his place today," and Brother Eugene began.

My blood boils, and my skin crawls every time I see him now. His skin growing paler, his gestures weaker, and yet he still does everything with the same enthusiasm. As if illness is not the master of him! That smart aleck has something to say to everyone: "Hello," and "How art thou?" or "The weather is fickle today." The rose in leaden vase wilts; the myrtle bush droops. You wonder why your flowerpots remain so close-nipped. If I act not swiftly, there will be all time gone, and you most assuredly will be trapped between here and hell. You need a nudge -- trust me; I will provide you one.

I dream about bolsters, racks, and impalement techniques. Medieval torture is long forgotten and sadly so. Quartering does not sound too unpleasant. None of these, however, would suit my grandmother. Only one so obviously evil as Brother Lawrence could deserve such short painless deaths such that these produce. I can picture him now, the fuzz clears, the blur dissipates, lying there; I can discern…

Standing now at the gates of Heaven, awaiting our judgment, he smiles at me. The hate consumes my soul and I scowl towards him. St. Peter with the Keys smiles too. How aggravating and frustrating this is: so many smiles -- all the saints and souls and angels smiling at our angle.

"Ah, Brother!" says he, looking down at the book. "It seems you have done many a great deed in your lifetime. As promised, you have rejected Satan and all his works. I commend you and the gates are opened to you.

"And you, Brother. You have lived sinfully and have tried to bring others down with you. Torturing others and trying to earn their admission to Hell is not something we look lightly upon. I am sorry, but this decision is made in the interest of all the good souls that have come into this Heaven before you."

Brother Lawrence was banished to Hell for all eternity.

"…And killing people in their sleep, too…"

The receptionist's window is situated behind a bulletproof pane in a little pseudopod to the right of the main waiting area. Yellow and red stains spatter the aluminum walls. The floor is cold and gritty. The tin chairs closest to the receptionist are bolted to the floor and lack padding. The waiting room with the padded couches is full, the emergency room past the legal capacity. And no one seems to be moving.

The room is illuminated by a blinding dim sunset ambience from the few shorting fluorescent panels in the ceiling. The flicker surges above the incessant shrill clamor, unheard by those engrossed in their reason, whom silence encircles. The setting provides no kind repose to troubled parents.

The receptionist's face is apathetic. Beneath her sits a man, out of tissues, sputtering blood onto his flannel shirtfront. His face is pale white except where it had been discolored by his regurgitations, and his diaphragm is eternally oscillating. Maybe he had taken a roller coaster ride too subsequent to major surgery, the extreme forces unfastening what the surgery had fixed. Or maybe he has pneumonia, or a severe case of bronchitis.

To the left of the man against the wall perpendicular sits a young blond-haired boy staring at his right hand. He bends his index finger and blood runs down his wrist, his expression wavering as the bones and flesh in his hand shift in disorder. His hand is crying out to him, and he can't take his eyes off of it although it disgusts him. His endorphins are getting tired. There is a bullet hole clear through his hand, bone shattered and tendons snapped. The boy's violently energetic best friend had thought the saying "there's always one bullet in the chamber" was mere superstition.

And I sit across from the window in our cramped asylum, the whole atmosphere poisoning me, churning around me and through me, the clock making no progress, the batteries dead. Every fiber of my body is burning and bruising, and the unpadded chairs are only adding to my madness. No one is moving, and I want to sleep.

Occasionally a doctor comes out from the back but never takes anyone in. It has to have been five hours -- but I can't ask; I have no control -- since my temperature was last read. 105.2 Fahrenheit and rising. My head is exploding, I need something to drink, but there are no vending machines, no water fountains; my dad comes back after an unsuccessful search for something for me to drink. The staff will provide nothing. I have to wait. My vision somersaults as I look across and to my right at my new friends in torment.

They don't care; we don't care. Our eyes are red and watery. We each want to go first. We each want to survive, but we are all going to die because some people don't believe that the emergency room should only be used in emergencies.

Maybe we should have taken an ambulance.

We stood in a circular room painted dull blue with no windows and five corners. The ceiling was lower than most of us were tall and the metal chairs against the curving walls were rusty, damp, and home to several species of invertebrate living harmoniously on the underside. Our vessels waited outdoors glistening under the gray light and the torrents of rampaging cats-and-dogs. Premature thoughts of promotion from command of smaller to larger vessels scampered through our minds with each maddening pitter-patter that penetrated the saturated singly sheet-rocked paper-thin wall.

"Take a look at the person on either side of you." Everyone's eyes shifted to either side for a moment to obtain a faint glimpse of everyone else. Then the man speaking to us, wearing a ruffled button-down shirt, mayonnaise stained pants, and untamed red hair, would add: "One of the three of you is not going to make it!" -- meaning, not be hired or would be fired within a short period of time afterwards.

After interviewing us each briefly about the type of person we were, the leader allowed us to remain in the dank empty room instead of journeying home through the storm while in his cardboard box of an office he decided which applicants to accept and reject for the next four hours. Within five minutes we could hear Rocky’s high-pitched squirrel voice and the man cursing the bad reception on his fifty-year-old Zenith television set.

When he finally emerged from the "room," the man bit off a chunk of his pink donut and informed us that we had all been accepted. Having heard this news, I was overjoyed that I would finally fulfill my lifelong dream of joining the Metropolitan Transit Authority and commandeering a vessel of my own, a city bus. Within just a few days, it began to be clear which of the twelve original applicants had actually had the right stuff.

When reports of four crashed city buses and 35 passengers injured or dead reached the big man's ears, Jimbo Jones, who had careened over a streetlight and through the north wall of St. Salisbury preschool on Schley Avenue, and Steve Oedekirk, who couldn't reach the brake pedal and splashed into the Long Island Sound, were the first to be fired because neither had a valid driver's license -- Jimbo was surprisingly still only 11 years old, and Steve was a double amputee from World War I, who had worn such a long trench coat on the day we all applied that no one could tell that he had no legs past the top of his pelvic bone.

The next one to go was Hazel Motes after two full months in the service. Everyone knew he was blind from the start, but we all had money on how long we each thought it would be before the Man found out the truth and fired him. Hazel Motes had blinded himself several years before, preceding a near-death experience, after which he chose to try his luck with the transportation industry. Finally accepted in New York, the man had not even looked at his application, which was gibberish scrawled randomly on the sheet, because Steve Oedekirk had gone out in the storm that first day for a smoke where he saw every application soppy and running. Hazel Motes, knowing his route and the timing of the traffic lights only through routine, had had a good run -- especially for an alcoholic, but unfortunately no one got to know him before he ran down five second graders on a school crossing. Except for these minor physical handicaps, any one of these men would have had the right stuff.

The signs on a city bus read "No Radio Playing," "No Smoking," "No Food or Drink," "Stand Behind Yellow Line," and "Do Not Talk to Driver While Bus Is in Motion." Of course if you had the right stuff, you the driver would seek ways of distracting yourself from the road in order to exercise reflexes and to test the extent of one's focus. However, the Man doesn't necessarily promote this kind of activity. Rumor has it that he got a desk job because he tried to throw some unruly teens off his bus fifteen years ago. The bus came to rest in the path of a freight train that tore the bus in half and threw him into shock that emptied him, and he never used any transportation personally again. He literally lived in his cubicle. I suppose if he couldn't emotionally handle a freight train balding him, then perhaps he doesn't have much to say about who does have the right stuff, but then again, who would park city property in the path of a speeding locomotive unless they truly possessed the essence of the right stuff?

No one really knew what was required of us, and no one spoke to the Man except regarding refilling the racks with bus and train maps and schedules. Finally, two were questioned about complaints in response to the "How's My Driving?" signs and late arrivals at regular stops, but no one had been killed, so from what we could see through the windowless walls, the Man simply let them out of his office with pink frosted donuts. The rest of us were awestruck, because the right stuff had been discovered in these two drivers. We added nitroglycerine to their fuel tanks for not sharing their secret, but we now believe we have truly found the right stuff. Our concept has been accepted universally now, and as a rule of thumb every bus must now be at least twenty minutes late to each stop scheduled -- and as a bonus can even skip them entirely after the long wait, all this in the name of the right stuff.