He's got his nose pressed against the glass and he's sliding it around in the spotty fog left by his breath - kind of gross, right? But it's not the nastiness of what he's doing that's got me craning around in my sticky faux-leather seat to stare at him every couple of minutes. The kid's just, I don't know. He has that aura of sagely composure that most people pretend to see in children, yet secretly don't believe they have. Like he knows the world is completely chaotic, but still nothing can touch him. Hare Krishna, hare hare little kid. People are trying to use the revolving door, but he doesn't pay them the least attention. Scrawling in his slimy breath with a pinky, stars and spirals, primal cave drawings, his bony little legs crossed underneath him. You can see the bruisy pink spots where his legs were crossed before he shifted his weight, which he's doing a lot on the dirty linoleum. If I'd had just a couple of drinks this afternoon, I would have sworn he was perched on a lotus blossom inside that revolving door. He's got to be five years old, six maybe, and I keep looking around the room for his mother, but he doesn't belong to anyone there. Nobody is telling him to get out of the door. He's basically set up camp in that glass display case and he's even brought a little knapsack with him.

The day we learned about blood was a lot like this one. I didn't believe that I had any, and Max told me to shut up and prove it. He was almost in high school, he said. He was five years older, he said. He knew five times as much as me. Chairman Meow had been screaming all morning because we were so wrapped up in the new model train we couldn't remember to let him out or even feed him. Gant was taking a break between ninja shows to watch the New Kids on the Block on TV, dancing in his socks. He never spoke at that age; just sang to himself. Max and I couldn't get the model train to stay on its tracks. It would shriek along the line until it came to a curve in the elliptical track, then flop over on its side and just vibrate, muffled by the Berber carpet. Back in the old house in Portland, even the basement had normal carpet. Not that muppet-bright shag we had after we had to move in with mom's family in Tulsa. Every step you took, you'd be impaled on a hidden Lego. Max was too old to care about the train, but he also didn't particularly care to think of a better way to entertain both of us younger brothers for the day. With the noise of Chairman Meow and the train derailing and Gant belting out "The Right Stuff" filling up the basement, we didn't hear Dad hit the bathroom floor away upstairs. It wasn't until Mom came home from the grocery store and found him lying there that we knew. She held the wall as she lurched down the stairs, whispering to Max to call an ambulance. The two of us ran upstairs. Mom locked Gant in the toy closet with the light on so he wouldn't follow us up to see Dad teach us about blood.

And today I'm back in another ER waiting room becoming more convinced than ever that I haven't got any blood. The stains on my shirt must belong to Max, not me. He is all grown up although he's undergone the process in a backwards circle, taking up Dad's role as bleeder as his rightful inheritance, primogeniture of the worst kind. Gant's away in college on the coast but I'm still chugging around the same track, derailing at the curves. There's a TV mounted on the wall, an *Nsync video flickering on its face. No one in the waiting room really watches it. We watch each other. I watch the kid in the revolving door.

And then the nurse with the huge angular forehead summons me to fill out some forms. Paperwork for Max and all. Damned if I know what his insurance carrier is. I had to sign a witness form to explain the situation and ascribe it to whatever or whomever I wanted to blame it on. The hospital administration expressed a keen interest in knowing exactly who or what it was that sent Max's tooth through his face, crap like that. I tried to get through it all quickly but you know how it is in emergency rooms. Everything plays out in slow motion like you've suddenly been plunked down on the moon, and gravity just doesn't give a fuck any more. They're sure taking their time on Max tonight but I know it's going to take an infinite number of stitches to alter him, like mending a doll, into someone other than who he is. Although I have to admit even I don't know who he is. One minute we were puttering down the highway in his van on the way back from a camping trip, the next, he'd parked outside a junkyard and was crawling around on a mountain of car parts and kitchen appliances. He disappeared over the twisted mound of rust and ten minutes later, reappeared with some kind of motor in his arms and a trio of barking pit bulls at his heels.

"Start the van," he screamed. I turned the key and shifted into reverse and just as I looked back up at him, he tripped on a banged-up toaster oven and flew down the hill. He landed face down on a pile of jagged scrap metal. The dogs wouldn't let me drag him away until I practically mowed them down with the van.

Max had mentioned the dump the last time we'd been camping, describing it in terms that would better fit a picturesque landscape, that fussy Romantic era English sort. He seemed to think it was the cool place to hang out now. The first time he'd brought it up, he'd explained that he went every couple of weeks to salvage parts.

"I need scrap metal for the project I'm building at home," he said cautiously.

"What project?" I asked.

"You'll think it's too weird," he answered, but I goaded him to explain it. 'All right. I'm building a carousel.' I laughed and told him he was full of shit, but before he could tell me the real reason he spent his free time stealing thousands of pounds of rusted garbage, his phone rang.

"'Lo?"

"Hey, Dan. What's shakin'?"

"Lily? I don't know. I haven't been home today."

Max turned his back on me.

"Oh no, was it Vicodin again?"

"Well of course she told you it was aspirin."

"The house to the left of ours? That's Mrs. Anderson. Yah, the prize-winning azaleas. What's she on about this time?"

"Oh Christ," Max started to strike the tent with his free hand while he talked. I stood up and carried our duffel bags to the van.

"In the planter box? I'm coming home." And that was the last time we talked about the dump.

I'm slightly wired on pills that are definitely not aspirin. I'm afraid of ephedrine, but I let myself chomp it, anyway, and now I'm launching into an increasing level of panic. I'm staring at the kid in the door and at the other eight, no, ten people in the waiting area all at the same time and I'm still waiting for Max to get stitched up. Stitches all over the place, sewn back together out of pieces of himself. Frankenstein's monster. He'll come skulking out of that ER in a few minutes hobbling a little on the foot he broke a few years back in his first fight. It healed a long time ago ' he just drags it around when he's freshly injured, for the sake of nostalgia I guess. It's all part of the dramatic slouch that pulls his entire body into an elegantly deformed S-curve. And he'll survey my own injury, a puffed up gash from one of the pit bulls, and he'll tell me what a coward I am, but mostly because he knows he'll be jealous of the cool scar I'll have on my cheek once it heals. And then he'll demand that I hand over the half-empty bottle of pills he knows I have because 'that crap gives people heart attacks.' The only thing that will actually bother him about tonight will be the bloodstains that have already ruined his Fugazi shirt.

Everyone in the waiting area is either antsy or terrified. You would think they'd invented death themselves. Now, I'm a creepy guy and I acknowledge that. I love to watch people and if it makes them uncomfortable, that's their own problem. But goddammit after four visits to the same emergency room, all the crying white trash girlfriends and screeching mothers of kids who've swallowed things and dumb dudes who fall off roofs start to look, not the same, not repetitive. Obedient? As if they're following a script. Or maybe the whole lot of them are just so strangely focused, especially the ones who pray. You can see their imaginary spotlights, spreading a hazy nimbus over each of them as he assumes that God himself is watching and considering whether to give him a boost up to that plateau of spiritual ease for a few more years. And I've seen them all leave with their damaged loved ones, and no matter who they are or why they are here, they always wear the same expression. The certainty of 'that-won't-happen-again.' And these people go home to their people lives thinking they've been through rough times, and they've triumphed, and by gum they're going to make every minute count from now on and be good Baptists and wax the truck every single weekend. They've suffered, so they must be Good. As if the simple fact of being injured was a meaningful component of some greater plan. You could base an episode of 'Oprah' on each of them. I've been sitting on a cigarette lighter for the past half-hour.

Damn. I have to turn around to chuck it on top of the pile of half-read magazines on the nearest lopsided table, so I can't help but let the kid in the door catch my eye for the hundredth time. I've been trying not to stare. Fuck it. I get up, grab my satchel, and dump myself down on a chair facing him. He's moved again, but he's still sitting in the door. It's like standing in the reptile house at the zoo, waiting for the snakes behind their windows to wake up. You don't know why, but your happiness depends entirely on whether the creature will or won't shift position and look you in the eyes. I don't know why I care about the kid in the door. I'm wondering whether or not he knows that he's trapped. He's been in the revolving door for at least an hour, and still nobody's claimed him. I'm hoping to God that he's not all alone, his bleeding mother getting a leg amputated, or his babysitter O.D.ing in the next room. Something makes me hope, a little morbidly, that the doctors have skipped Max's turn with them, through some clairvoyant ability to see that he'll be right back in as soon as they release him, and the kid's mother is spread out like the evening sky on a table instead. The stitches don't even hurt and instead of blood she's dripping strawberry fucking jam and she will never make her son wait alone on the cold linoleum again. He's going to stop trying to swallow that harmonica, and he's going home to a bedroom crawling with toy trains that stay on their tracks. He's going to be tucked into bed by a hand only lightly bandaged against something as minor as a kitchen burn, and in the morning he'll be at school. Maybe some jerk schoolteacher will take away that harmonica and he'll smile and fold his hands on his lap, hare hare little kid.

I just gnawed my thumbnail until it started to bleed. Funny, the things you don't notice. I've managed to scuff the bejesus out of the square of linoleum under my left foot. Must have been pounding on it with my heel and not felt it until now. My whole foot's throbbing. The fat nurse behind the reception desk has looked up from her conversation with the nurse with the huge angular forehead and an enormous orderly with a face the color of oatmeal, and she is not at all amused. I offer a weak smile. Nurses always make me feel caught. I haven't been able to go outside for a cigarette since I got here ' they would see me through the revolving door, provided I had the heart to ask the kid in the door to let me through. I'd come back with heart disease from smoking, a few years from now, and the nurses would cluck, "We told you not to smoke," and then they'd each raise one eyebrow right up to the hairline and turn back to scribbling on their clipboards.

Old oatmeal face motions me over and nods. Oh my God, he heard me thinking about smoking. I hate to turn my back on the kid in the door, so I walk to the desk real slowly like if I take my eyes off him, the little bastard will just get up and leave, all by himself, at nine o'clock at night, downtown.

A male nurse in blue scrubs has slipped out into the waiting area and he's got some very longwinded news about Max. But I'm watching the kid in the door. He's finally gotten up and has taken to walking around in circles so he can listen to the screech and whoosh of the revolving door on the linoleum. You'd think the door would be too heavy for such a gangly little fawn of a kid but he's going at it like an old pro. The nurse drones on. Max has lost, a what? An eye? I can't tell whether he's building me up to say my brother is dead, or if it's no big deal and I can haul his ass home in the next five or ten. I don't know, medical terms are impossible to understand. I've got another brother where Max came from, no problem. I just want to see the revolving door stop spinning, and I want to see my little friend with the harmonica tucked in his sock get out of this stupid place. It's easy enough when you're a little kid like him.

God, little kid, oh kid. Kid kid kid. I want to take you home.

Leah Freeman lives in San Francisco and works as a freelance writer.