So I have this wife… She’s in the hospital, see? She’s in a better room now. She may come home this week—we’ll see.

There’s this one story I could tell about an entire shift getting in trouble because photos of nurses sleeping may or may not exist but I won’t get into that now.

A few days ago I dreamt Wolfgang Puck was serving me some dessert-type thing through a sliding glass window at some amusement park or county fair. I asked him something about flambé and he was not hesitant in displacing his frustration with serving food out of a smelly box in the midsummer’s heat.

After the Austrian tonguelashing I awoke at 3:00 A.M. to roam the desolate halls of a sleeping hospital with my now insomniac wife. I was surprised to learn the most of the night shift nurses do what everyone else does during those vampirish hours, they sleep—up against walls, in waiting area chairs, sometimes even in empty beds—they sleep unrepentantly, en masse.