"Okay, okay," Alex said. "Sure, no problem. I'm doing lots better lately, though. I don't even need the chair."

Concepción nodded and helped him out of bed, shoving her solid shoulder under his armpit. The two of them made it out the door of the suite and a good ten meters down the carpeted hall before Alex's knees buckled. The wheelchair, a machine of limited but highly specialized intelligence, was right behind Alex as he stumbled. He gave up the struggle gracefully and sat within the chrome-and-leather machine.

Concepciôn left Alex in the treatment room to wait for Dr. Mirabi. Alex was quite sure that Dr. Mirabi was doing nothing of consequence. Having Alex wait alone in a closed room was simply medical etiquette, a way to establish whose time was more important. Though Dr. Mirabi's employees were kept on the hustle-especially the hardworking retail pharmacists-Dr. Mirabi himself hardly seemed oppressed by his duties. As far as Alex could deduce from the staff schedules, there were only four long-term patients in the whole clinica. Alex was pretty sure most of the clinica's income came from yanquis on down from Laredo. Before he himself had ~ckecfin last April, he'd seen a line of Americans halfway down the block, eagerly picking up Mexican megadosage ~strums for the new ultraresistant strains of Th.

Dr. Mirabi's treatment room was long and rectangular and full of tall canvas-shrouded machinery. Like every place else in the clinica, it was air-conditioned to a deathly chill, and smelled of sharp and potent disinfectant. Alex wished that he had thought to snag a fotonovela on the way out of his room. Alex pretended distaste for the nave-las' clumsy and violence-soaked porn, but their comically distorted gutter-level Spanish was of a lot of philological interest.