BUILDING SEVEN, THE TB building, had grown aloof from the rest of Mulloy Veterans’ Hospital in the five years since the war. It lay less than fifty yards from Building Six, the paraplegic building—they faced the same flagpole on the same windswept Long Island plain—but there had been no neighborliness between them since the summer of 1948, when the paraplegics got up a petition demanding that the TB’s be made to stay on their own lawn. This had caused a good deal of resentment at the time (“Those paraplegic bastards think they own the goddamn place”), but it had long since ceased to matter very much; nor did it matter that nobody from Building Seven was allowed in the hospital canteen unless he hid his face in a sterile paper mask.

Building Seven was a world of its own. It held out a daily choice between its own kind of virtue—staying in bed—and its own kind of vice: midnight crap games, AWOL, and the smuggling of beer and whiskey through the fire-exit doors of its two latrines. It was the stage for its own kind of comedy—the night Snyder chased the charge nurse into the fluoroscopy room with a water pistol, for instance, or the time the pint of bourbon slipped out of old Foley’s bathrobe and smashed at Dr. Resnick’s feet—and once in awhile its own kind of tragedy—the time Jack Fox sat up in bed to say, “Chrissake, open the window,” coughed, and brought up the freak hemorrhage that killed him in ten minutes, or the other times, two or three times a year, when one of the men who had been wheeled away to surgery, smiling and waving to cries of “Take it easy!” and “Good luck t’ya, boy!” would never come back. But mostly it was a world consumed by its own kind of boredom, where everyone sat or lay amid the Kleenex and the sputum cups and the clangor of all-day radios. That was the way things were in C Ward on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, except that the radios were swamped under the noise of Tiny Kovacs’s laughter.