Stephen King – Night Shift – The Woman In The Room
THE WOMAN IN THE ROOM
The question is: Can he do it?
He doesn’t know. He knows that she chews them sometimes, her face wrinkling at the awful orange
taste, and a sound comes from her mouth like splintering popsicle sticks. But these are different pills . . .
gelatine capsules. The box says DARVON COMPLEX on the outside. He found them in her medicine
cabinet and turned them over in his hands, thinking. Something the doctor gave her before she had to
go back to the hospital. Something for the ticking nights. The medicine cabinet is full of remedies,
neatly lined up like a voodoo doctor’s cures. Gris-gris of the Western world. FLEET SUPPOSITOUES.
He has never used a suppository in his life and the thought of putting a waxy something in his rectum
to soften by body heat makes him feel ill. There is no dignity in putting things up your ass. PHILLIPS
MILK OF MAGNESIA. ANACIN ARTHRITIS PAIN FORMULA. PEPTO-BISMOL. More. He can
trace the course of her illness through the medicines.
But these pills are different. They are like regular Darvon only in that they are grey gelatine capsules.
But they are bigger, what his dead father used to call hosscock pills. The box says Asp. 350 gr, Darvon
100 gr, and could she chew them even if he was to give them to her? Would she? The house is still
running; the refrigerator runs and shuts off, the furnace kicks in and out, every now and then the
Cuckoo bird pokes grumpily out of the clock to announce an hour or a half. He supposes that after she
dies it will fall to Kevin and him to break up housekeeping. She’s gone, all right. The whole house says
so. She is in the Central Maine Hospital, in Lewiston. Room 312. She went when the pain got so bad
she could no longer go out to the kitchen to make her own coffee. At times, when he visited, she cried
without knowing it.
The elevator creaks going up, and he finds himself examining the blue elevator certificate. The
certificate makes it clear that the elevator is safe, creaks or no creaks. She has been here for nearly
three weeks now and today they gave her an operation called a ‘cortotomy’. He is not sure if that is how
it’s spelled, but that is how it sounds. The doctor has told her that the ‘cortotomy’ involves sticking a
needle into her neck and then into her brain. The doctor has told her that this is like sticking a pin into
an orange and spearing a seed. When the needle has poked into her pain centre, a radio signal will be
sent down to the tip of the needle and the pain centre will be blown out. Like unplugging a TV. Then
the cancer in her belly will stop being such a nuisance.
The thought of this operation makes him even more uneasy than the thought of suppositories melting
warmly in his anus. It makes him think of a book by Michael Crichton called The Terminal Man, which
deals with putting wires in people’s heads. According to Crichton, this can be a very bad scene. You
better believe it.
The elevator door opens on the third floor and he steps out. This is the old wing of the hospital, and it
smells like the sweet-smelling sawdust they sprinkle over puke at a county fair. He has left the pills in
the glove compartment of his car. He has not had anything to drink before this visit.
The walls up here are two-tone: brown on the bottom and white on top. He thinks that the only two-
tone combination in the whole world that might be more depressing than brown and white would be
pink and black. Hospital corridors like giant Good ‘n’ Plentys. The thought makes him smile and feel
nauseated at the same time.
Two corridors meet in a T in front of the elevator, and there is a drinking fountain where he always
stops to put things off a little. There are pieces of hospital equipment here and there, like strange