In the last of the day on the Friday before Christmas, rags of cloud scud off the prairie, soar over the lake. As they change from lemon to rose, orange to violet, so do the cracked terracotta, sand-yellow brick, and old wavy glass of the hospital facade. 

Among the pigeons in Pasteur Park, a man in a quilted coat flings bread crumbs at the wind. He tears open his empty sack and shakes it at the sky, body uncoiling as he steps toward the hospital doors. Pigeons spring up before him, a billow of wings. Then darkness and the halogen lights come on. 

Hanging holly violates the fire code, so inside halls and office walls are decked with tinsel, cutout Santas, plastic stockings. Poinsettias sprout from file cabinets. On desks and charting tables, open eggnog cartons, empty soda jugs, and shopping bags from Fields sit by paper plates strewn with bits of icing, crumbs of cakes and cookies, cornbread, pilaf, tamales. Saint Nick is a big woman on the trauma unit in a red felt hat with acrylic fur and a brass bell over one ear who’s dishing out Demerol to gangbangers who know she brings better joy than any big-bellied reindeer jockey ever could. 

Outside the day’s last operation, an anesthetist in wrinkled pink sits on a steel stool, singing carols to an empty hall in gospel-trained tones. Downstairs on the wards, the singers are awkward adolescents, girls of every race. In plaid parochial school uniforms, they sing to gaunt men dying from alcohol and cigarettes, cancer and AIDS about kings and drummer boys, silent nights, and dreams of a Christmas just like the ones they used to know. They dance away down high-ceilinged halls and stairwells incensed with burnt marijuana: God rest you merry gentlemen. 

Brown leaves blow down the main hallway every time somebody ducks out for a smoke. A crowd jams the lobby, and the pharmacy line rounds the corner and doubles back. The dead leaves skitter past unshaven, unwashed panhandlers asleep on benches outside the MRI scanner. One opens an eye on a passing Azteca in jeans tight as a tomato skin, in lipstick dark as a cracked scab. An old Filipina sits next to him, settles against the plastic grocery bag that is both purse and pillow to wait with him for morning.

A medical resident throws open steel fire doors and trots toward the emergency room, his shined black shoes and sober white coat drab beneath an electric blue turban and Sikh warrior’s beard. Squat women with the round faces of Mayan figurines herd flocks of children out of his way. The open coat that flaps behind him brushes a viejo with skin tanned by cigarettes and the Mexican sun who moves as fast as arthritis and emphysema allow, almost keeping up with the young inmate in a tan jail uniform and leg irons that clank like jingle bells all gone to rust. 

Elegant as night in silver, navy, and black leather, two cops chat up a chunky blonde in stirrup pants and earrings hung with chips of colored glass that jingle when she laughs at them. Three kids in baggy pants, hightops, bits of beard as big as they can grow, and parkas bulky as grown men’s muscles run up and down the stairs from the ward where their homeboy lies recovering from three bullets in the belly. They whoop and shout as they vault the steps, rounding square iron banisters cast with black florets: they might be mistaken for children, but for eyes careless and black as gun muzzles.  And when they jog laughing down a hallway past the men in wheelchairs who wear green cotton gowns open to show off chest hair and bandaged gunshot, they pause no more than does the commissioner in the gray double-breasted who’s through big glass doors for the taxi that will carry him away.

In the bad light just behind him, a dark man hides a white cardboard box inside his long green coat. He sidles up to men and women waiting for the Harrison Street bus like a dope peddler, one eye out for cops who have no time for him. He works the queues, the crowds, the solitary idlers, red light from a passing ambulance spilling over all. Like a hoarse beer seller at a Sox game he cries his wares in a whisper:  “Sugar cookies? Sugar cookies? I got sugar cookies here. Come on, people: it’s Christmas!”