In this tale, hospital director Graham is deflated by a subpar office and shared restroom, so spares no effort building a private one, unaware of evil forces.
This medical fiction tale is one of a collection of stories that are like “Final Destination” meets “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs, 1902). As such, they are tragedies more than either mysteries or horror, and would appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. In each story, a protagonist makes a wish that comes true with fatal results for someone, often the person making the wish. Nothing supernatural, but just how things work out. (Or is it?) The technical details surrounding the fatal (or near-fatal) event are drawn from real cases in the US OSHA incident report database or similar sources and are therefore entirely realistic, even if seemingly outlandish. The plots draw lightly from cultural beliefs around actions such as pointing at someone with a stick or knife, wishing in front of a mirror, or stepping on a crack.
Graham had settled into his new position of hospital director with some degree of dismay, discomfort, and friction. Becoming the director of 600-bed St. Barts had been his mission for a decade, and it had taken years of delicate networking, log rolling, and influence-peddling to clinch the position. Now that he had finally arrived, though, things were not as glamorous as he had expected, and the office was not, in his humble opinion, befitting a man of his stature.
The executive suite was tastefully done in oak paneling with matching drapes and carpeting, but the carpet had seen better days, and the drapes had bleached in places from relentless afternoon sunlight. The walnut desk had been a gift to the founding executive from a grateful prince, but now it was shop-soiled and showed signs of decades of use without proper beverage coasters or waxing. The furniture, and indeed the entire suite, had that slightly too “lived-in” feel that many antiques acquire, and was more reminiscent of pawn shops and poverty than flagship hospital. The whole affair looked, to Graham’s discerning eye, rather shabby.
He was also not thrilled with the layout and especially not with the “appointments,” as he called them. For example, to go to the toilet, he had to trek down the hall to the restroom that was shared with the whole fifth-floor corporate office staff. As if having to hike past gawkers was not bad enough, he had to endure the kinds of people who actually talked to each other in the restroom. The way they splashed, when, or if, they washed their grubby hands also irked him. The way they left the doorhandle damp or soapy disgusted him, and the way the place reeked revolted him. It was the unspeakable person who sat in a stall and held conversations on his cellphone that finally forced Graham to take decisive action. In addition to strongly intended but incomprehensibly vague memos sent to staff about preferred restroom etiquette, Graham contracted to have a private executive restroom added to his office suite.
The private executive restroom would leech space from his receptionist and the deputy director’s offices, but Graham felt that a smaller reception area was no big hardship, and it never made sense that the deputy’s office had the same floorspace as the director. Graham took a close interest in the ergonomics, fixtures, and fittings of his restroom, and spent hours adjusting the floorplans, choice of vessel and vanity, and faucets and fittings. He spent even longer selecting a bidet, finally settling on an option with a misting feature that used an infusion apparatus that mixed in a choice of fragrances. By the time he had finally decided on a vessel, faucet, and vanity, he would discover that one or all were on backorder, discontinued, or just not available, and he would have to start again. He fared little better with his choice of commode and matching bidet, and then there were the interminable delays and never-ending questions from the contractor. He was so insufferable that it gave Graham a headache, and progress seemed to be incomprehensibly slow.
Clive was also feeling a little irritable. In all his years as a general construction contractor, he had never met more of a nit-picking, micro-managing customer than Graham. The interior decorator had thankfully dealt with all the meetings about cloth swatches, paneling samples, and seemingly endless discussions about basins and toilets. What Graham seemed not to understand, or chose not to understand, was that plumbing and ventilation were not, like electricity, supplied to every office space. It was one thing to find a circuit to which he could add a few lamps or outlets, but quite another to have water, effluent, and ventilation hookups in the middle of a space intended to be an office. Graham also didn’t seem to grasp that cutting channeling into concrete or boring a hole to lay in a half-inch pipe was difficult enough, but finding a way to route and hide a 3-inch sewer pipe was a whole different scale of a problem.
Clive eventually found a solution of sorts for all these headaches, although it cost him a lot of slogging through outdated building plans, getting hot, hurt, and dirty in crawl spaces, and a bottle of whiskey for the building maintenance supervisor. The old supervisor knew of a disused ventilation shaft that fed a cooling tower and, almost by miracle, also had water pipes. The problem of the 3-inch effluent pipe was solved by simply taking it through a new hole in the slab and running it along the ceiling of the offices in the floor below. It was almost completely hidden from site in the false ceiling and, where it passed through the HR department lunchroom, he enclosed it in a painted sheet-metal duct. The plumbing worked to everyone’s satisfaction other than the HR department, who were treated to glimpses of a somewhat unsightly duct running along their lunchroom ceiling, making them audience to an audible proclamation whenever the new executive toilet was flushed.
Clive was relieved when he could finally hand over the finished private executive restroom and complete the long fix list of little issues. In turn, Graham was also relieved to be done with the dithering and ham-handed handyman. It went against his nature as a perfectionist, but Graham eventually made peace with the bidet not being exactly at ninety degrees to the commode and the hot water faucet handle not being precisely in line with the cold. He was prepared to put up with a dozen, a score, a hundred infuriating mismatches and irregularities, so long as this butcher of bathrooms got out of his space. Graham settled into his new life that included privacy in those intimate moments, a bidet with spray and scented mist, and no need to walk to the communal restroom like some kind of barnyard beast. There were no more issues with sourcing the water supply, with routing the toilet and basin drainpipes, or the endless delays and jabbering about air ducts. Life for HR also drifted into a new routine. They scarcely noticed the ducting running across their lunchroom ceiling anymore, and within a little over a week they were accustomed to four big flushes a day. Graham was regular like that.
Things settled into a new normal, and while Graham was still irked on a daily basis by imperfections in his private executive restroom, there were other issues that attached themselves to his day. The nurses were angry about broken equipment, missing storage, being short-staffed. The physicians were complaining about the new EHR system, fragmentation of care, and the lack of a doctor’s lounge. Everyone had grievances, they all had demands, and there was a pile of complaint letters squatting on one corner of Graham’s desk. In front of him was a letter from the owner of the building where they had a prenatal clinic. It said that the clinic was operating for longer hours than specified in the lease, occupying more parking spots than allocated, and generating more refuse than originally estimated. As such, they announced, they would be increasing the rent by 28.76%. Many more people and problems orbited Graham’s attention, resulting in a constant headache.
Now, Graham didn’t much like children at the best of times but suddenly he found himself surrounded by them and their sticky little paws. He had gone down to 1 West because the pediatrics department insisted he see firsthand how the new computer system was getting in the way of providing care. By the time he left, he had a brown handprint on one knee where some little monster had grasped his leg. His throat also felt gritty, his eyes watered, and he was sure one of them had sneezed or coughed on him. By the time he left work, he was also sure that his muscles ached and that he had a fever. It was a long drive home, and his enjoyment of a nice Chopin album was repeatedly interrupted by calls from unhappy physicians, vendors, and a very tiresome person who kept badgering him about attending some damned conference. He arrived home feeling distinctly unwell.
After a fitful night that went unimproved by a hot toddy, Graham awoke to yet another headache as well as very distinct muscle pains. He also felt a little nauseous, barely touching his favorite muesli with the little chocolate bits and dried pineapple chunks. So distracted by his symptoms was he that he wasn’t even in the mood for a chocolate croissant at his desk. He tried to cheer himself up with a frosted donut, but in his state of anxiety, he breathed in as he bit down and inhaled some of the fine sugar frosting. The coughing aggravated his headache and rounded off a sense of misery that stuck with him through the day. The cough also stuck with him. It wasn’t quite the paroxysm he experienced from breathing in the powdered sugar, but it nagged him continuously. To his dismay, his normally regular bowel movements were also off-kilter, and although he was grateful to have a private executive restroom to himself, it unnerved him that he now also had a runny tummy with which to contend.
By the time he left his office to return home, Graham felt miserable, and was busy imagining all sorts of infections those little brats had forced on him. He was also running an actual temperature. In the parking garage, he fumbled for his car keys and, when he bent down to retrieve them, he had a little accident: As he bent, his head throbbed, and he gasped. The gasp made him cough, and the cough caused a little squirt of hot unpleasantness in his purple underpants. He was paralyzed for a minute or two, facing down two monstrously unpleasant options. The thought of sitting in his pristine car with damp undies was so repugnant that chose the lesser of the bad options and scuttled back to his private executive restroom to clean up. Never had a man been so grateful to have his own bidet with a scented misting option. Afterwards, driving home without underpants felt uncomfortable and left him so self-conscious and distracted that he couldn’t even listen to Puccini. To cap it all off, he missed his exit and was forced to drive an extra five miles to get home.
Graham spent a miserable night shuttling between his toilet and his bed. Between the interminable coughing, pounding headache, and aching muscles, he barely slept at all. As dawn approached, a very glum Graham felt so anxious that his chest hurt, and he called his secretary to postpone his appointments until the next day. After dosing himself with cough medication and taking some painkillers, he phoned her again to postpone his meetings. She gently but firmly reminded him that he had already requested she do so, and asked politely if he thought he should perhaps call the telehealth physician. He tried sleeping, but felt too nauseous and had to dash for the toilet several times. When that activity seemed to ebb somewhat, he called her again, and was told for the third time that he had already postponed his meetings for the day. Distracted, Graham dropped the telephone in the wastepaper basket, and shuffled to the toilet once more.
It was next to the toilet and lying on the cool ceramic floor that the paramedics found him a day later. His cough and headache were gone, and now that his body had cooled to the same temperature as the tiles, his fever was too. He would never again use his private executive restroom, the one with the bidet with a scented mist option—and the one that shared an air duct with an unused cooling tower, where a legion of deadly bacteria had been breeding.
