Read Online Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber - Free Book Online Page A

cash and my ID and keys in a pouch hung around my neck, a trick of travelers in the third world. My purse is plastic, yellow, $6.99 at Kmart, in case anyone wants it.
    When I say “invisible” I mean American urban invisibility, not faila’olo, the invisibility of the sorcerers, which I have not learned how to do. I rather suspect my husband is well up on it, though.
    We work underground, in the basement of building 201, next door to the emergency room. Medical records don’t require the cheering rays of the sun. Sometimes I imagine I can hear the cries of those in emergency care, but it must be only the ambulance sirens. Still, it contributes to the impression of being confined in a dungeon at hard labor. I pass through the swinging doors and into the reception area, where the files are dropped off and picked up by the ward messengers. I nod to the clerk behind his counter, which is barely acknowledged, and pass through to the file room where I work. It is long and low-ceilinged and brightly lit by tubes behind rectangles of frosted plastic. Two rows of desks march down the center, and on either side are the banks of motorized filing cabinets, with corridors between them. As I enter, one of the messengers shoves off with a cart loaded full with brightly tabbed hanging files. “Yo, Dolores,” he says, waving. I always get a nice greeting from Oswaldo, as he is mentally retarded.
    Several of the messengers are similarly afflicted. We file clerks are thus the elite of the medical records section. We are required to have total mastery of alphabetical order. Some of us, like me, work on retrieval, while others work on putting the files back in their proper places in the cabinets, or, to use our technical term, “filing” them. Lives are at stake here and well do we know it. If we forget, Mrs. Waley is there to remind us. Mrs. Waley is our supervisor, and I see her now staring out at us from her little glassed-in office, as if she were a tourist in an aquarium and we were the fishes.
    Mrs. Waley is a yellowish, freckled woman with hair like black plastic, shiny and sculpted around her circular face. She must weigh well over 250 pounds, and I am afraid that some of the younger staff call her the Whale. I don’t. I have the greatest respect for Mrs. Waley. She’s been at Jackson for nearly twenty years and claims never to have missed a day of work. She began before computers, as she often remarks, and I believe she thinks they are something of a fad. She dresses in very bright colors, purple, scarlet, primrose yellow, and today she wears a pantsuit the color of the green stripe in the flag of Mali. She wears a purplish lipstick and artificial nails, also brightly colored, and more than an inch long, like those of a mandarin. I suppose she is a mandarin, of sorts. She is careful never to do any physical work.
    Mrs. Waley does not like me overmuch. At first I thought it was because Dolores Tuoey had claimed on her phony résumé a college degree and a spell as a nun, but I heard from some of the other staff that she thought I was a management plant, a spy. Why else would someone with an education work here? I gave out that it was doctor’s orders; I couldn’t take any pressure. This seemed to satisfy her, and ever since she’s treated me as a potentially dangerous lunatic. I hoped at first that she might relent, and move me into the harmless lunatic category, for I’ve given two years and four months of good service, never once forgetting the order of the alphabet or foisting a McMillan in place of a desired McMillian, a common error among the retrievers. Latterly, I’ve decided that she does not like me because I am a white person, the only one in her domain.
    My in-basket is full of record request forms that have accumulated during the night. I sort them by service and last name. This is something of an innovation, I’m afraid. Mrs. Waley instructed me during my orientation that I was to take the eldest, or bottom,