No sooner do the doors slide open than a wheeled mop-bucket (with the appropriate passenger,) barrels in and smacks the corner to my left, sending a small splash of what looks like an uneven blend of beer and milk a foot up the side of the elevator car.  Upon collision, the long handle comes to a momentary attention and then falls back into its original lean, which carries the bucket back the few feet it requires for the handle tip to tap the one button that can send us back down to the fourth floor.  I uselessly stare at the mop before panning my attention back to the opposite wall, where my cousin Ardo is subtly, silently querying me.  “Four?” he asks with raised eyebrows and the usual hand gesture.  I dumbly nod and the doors slide shut.  A quick look around reveals that surely enough, the dried outlines of previous splashes are knee- and waist-high everywhere.

On the fourth floor, Ardo is just coming off of the staircase nearby.  He’s jovial at the moment, doesn’t yet know why I’m here, and doesn’t overlook my obvious needs.  In a room near the nurses’ station, he shows me the huge industrial microwave that he swears (despite my warnings of appliance-threatening, metal grommet-borne, blue lightning storm imminence,) will dry out my shoes jiffily.  He gives me hospital socks and a cup of generation-unidentifiable re-caff with sugar and no cream, like a true captain of hospitality.  As I explain the situation at hand, Ardo digs into the back of a commonplace pharmaceutical refrigerator for what turns out to be a slice of individually wrapped American cheese that he folds and stacks again and again until he’s got a deck of about 128 much smaller pieces (certainly warm now from all the handling,), which he then eats one at a time.  He brags that he’s got such cheese caches in almost every refrigerator on all nine floors and one of the two basements.  Yes, he’s referring to the morgue.  Cousin Ardo- Eduardo, as the patch on his coveralls and hospital staff ID badge would have it, Edward as his parents would have it, Mr. Barkle as his professors would condescendingly have it, and Poop as his girlfriend would (and does,) privately have it- is only two months younger than me.