I first realized the hospital's proximity after the shit happened on Yafo St. The dead Arab didn't need any transfusions but the passengers in the bus he overturned with his front-end loader might have, and the sirens passed close by.
The girl I'm staying with flicked on the television, her eyes wide, and I looked at her in a clinical way. In truth I was excited too, in a way that I rarely get for news back home. The terror here is a community event, so alive and raw, so "it could be me" that you can't look away. I got a text immediately after: "Are you ok? Hope you're not on Yafo St." I got a few more calls later on. I was ok, I told them, but wow, how close.
Later, at night, I found myself walking on the shoulder of a steep mountain road toward another hospital. I foolishly hadn't brought out a map, and was less and less sure of my direction. But I kept walking toward the hospital, the university behind it, the two monumental landmarks that would help me find my bed in the dense Jerusalem fog.
At the hospital gates, I asked directions to the university campus. The guard loosely waved a hand to the right and said, "Just follow the road." A half-hour later I asked him again, having just completed a loop, in which every direction giver had told me, in more or less English, to keep going. But this is not the interesting part. I asked the man to elaborate, a bit worried. He told me:
"Ok, you go through the shopping center to the second floor. Then you walk across the air bridge to the hospital, not the emergency room, but to the right. You go through turning doors to the elevator bank to -1. Then you keep turning right, right, right, you will see it."
I thanked the man again and got to the meat of my Kafkaesque journey.
1:30 AM: When I got to the main entrance of the hospital, the security guard seemed to know what I was talking about. I bought a Coke and walked past the smokers, through the turning doors, inside. I found the elevator and took it down. The exit sign glowed further down the hall.
The hall was crowded with pallets, and my hustler's sense distracted me. I began to look them over for value. It gave me some comfort to see there wasn't anything that stood out, that this was a moderately safe space for the immoral public to access.
I walked down the hall to the exit door, and found it locked. A wave of tiredness hit me. I walked to the nearby stairwell, another exit sign. I followed exit signs through immaculate white halls. I said, "Hello," and got no reply. Everyone who was going to leave had left already.
There's no feeling like being lost in a hospital in a strange place. I thought back to Bosnia, to Sanela peeing blood and the nurse smoking in the emergency room, to the late night taxi to the properly-equipped hospital in Zenica, still pock-marked with mortars fired ten years earlier. The fluorescent hallways in that hospital flickered like the fever scenes in Jacob's Ladder, and I was glad the lights were calm and white this time around.
I followed the exit signs, conscious of the way back. In the end I found the exit, at least from that white-painted and sterile hell, and ran into a doctor with time on his hands. He showed me the university. It was a closed wing of a few classrooms. I was in the wrong hospital, searching out the wrong university. The landmarks I'd charted had turned out to be too common.
In the end, I took a 36 shekel taxi back to the place, and soon forgot my ordeal over tea and some late-night internet surfing. The experience wasn't so harrowing. But for just a little while I made it off the path, I traveled so far I wasn't sure I was ever coming back.
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