57 pages • 1 hour read
Friday Black
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Beta“The Hospital Where”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“The Hospital Where” Summary
The narrator is a young man and aspiring writer who is asked by his aging father to be taken to the hospital after he feels pain in his arm. The narrator takes his notebook and a literary journal and drops his father off at the hospital while he parks the car. When the narrator reaches his father in the emergency room, he finds him arguing with an attendant because no one is seeing to him.
Seeking a hospital directory, the narrator thinks about a contest-winning story in the magazine he brought. The narrator entered his own short story about a runaway kitten that returns to its family pregnant. However, the story lost. The narrator asks a security guard for help, but the guard doesn’t prove to be very useful. When the narrator returns to his father, he decides to write in his notebook.
The narrator’s father asks him what he is writing, which leads the narrator to realize he has rarely written in anyone else’s presence. He doesn’t tell his father that his impulse to write is tied to the pact he made with a supernatural being called the Twelve-tongued God. He prayed to the God to liberate his family from poverty, accepting a pact and trading tongues with the God. He was branded with a Roman numeral 12 on his back, which burns when he writes infrequently or poorly.
The narrator vaguely describes the story he’s working on to his father but admits that he doesn’t know much about it yet. His father is called by a nurse to be examined. While alone, the narrator encounters another nurse, revealed to be the Twelve-tongued God in disguise. The God rebukes the narrator for neglecting it, and when the narrator expresses his need for more power, the God encourages him to “go all the way” and “make what you want to see” (77).
The narrator returns to the car to feed the parking meter, passing a grieving Italian family, patients quietly suffering in radiology, and the security guard. Returning through the same path, the narrator stops when a doctor speaking to the Italian family accuses the narrator of being the cause of their suffering. Afraid of the Twelve-tongue God’s taunting, the narrator turns his attention to his notebook. When he is asked to retrieve his father’s insurance details, the narrator learns that the Twelve-tongued God in its nurse form has started attending to his father.
The narrator passes by the Italian family once again and consoles them, telling them to return home because the person they’re worried about has been healed by a miracle. One of the family members comments on how unlikely and cheap the resolution feels. The narrator returns to the emergency room and makes a similar declaration to everyone present. He hijacks the hospital PA system and declares that they are in “the hospital where sickness ends” (82).
The narrator’s declarations have an immediate effect. The men in radiology stand up, healed of their illnesses. One of the men begins to float in the air and observes that they are in the hospital “where the affliction is flight” (83). Soon after, he falls back down to the floor. All the other patients leave the hospital as the narrator and his father return to their car. They witness the patients briefly taking flight before crashing back to the ground. In shock, the father asks his son what he has done. The narrator addresses his father’s earlier question about the subject of his writing by answering, “It’s about a hospital where people can fly” (84).
“The Hospital Where” Analysis
By looking at the ways the narrator’s desire to become a writer resolves complications, Adjei-Brenyah shows how The Transformative Power of Magical Thinking is actualized in creative vocations like writing. At the same time, Adjei-Brenyah examines the limits of creative power, noting that some things, like death and illness, are inevitable.
The narrator’s thinking is dominated by three sets of ideas: his writing life, his relationship to the Twelve-tongued God, and the dread he feels over the possible decline of his father’s health. All of these ideas appear disparate at first; the discussion of the narrator’s failure to win a writing contest is especially grounded in comparison to the discussion of the pact between him and the Twelve-tongued God, sealed by an exchange of dismembered tongues. However, the Twelve-tongued God’s promises align with the capabilities of writers, from “putting [one’s] hurt to use” to “turn[ing] lies to truth” (74). Similarly, the narrator’s Roman numeral 12 branding makes it physically painful to avoid writing or to write poorly; on the other hand, writing well causes him to not only develop his skill but also his desire to write, represented by a craving for more tongues. The tongues are symbolic of the writer’s linguistic capabilities.
In the hospital, the narrator juxtaposes the story he submitted to the writing contest against the one that won. He sees the ways his submission aligns with his idea of what makes a “good story”—after briefly explaining the plot, he describes how the status quo of his story shifts at the end. On the other hand, the story that won avoids that blueprint while still managing to make him feel its power. The lack of recognition or external validation has affected the narrator’s writing, making him less motivated. When the Twelve-tongued God criticizes him for his neglect, it implies that the narrator has failed to write for some time. Apart from his failure, the narrator is also preoccupied with his father’s health. Everywhere he looks in the hospital, he is reminded of how his father could eventually end up. By pressuring the narrator to use his gift in the hospital, the God is reminding him what the gift is supposed to do: “to change everything, to make the life you want” (74). Through writing, the narrator can create a world in which his father—and everyone else—is temporarily healed.
The contrasting images of the patients flying and then crashing to the ground signify the limits of the narrator’s creative power. When a grieving family member notes how cheap the resolution feels, it signals the narrator’s need to continue developing his craft—this comment evokes book review language rather than a response to illness. However, the story indicates that while writing is capable of creating authentic, new worlds, it cannot change the real world. This is supported by a line at the beginning of the story, where the narrator observes that these events occur “long before we knew of the cancer nesting in his bones” (68). Despite the narrator’s interventions, his father still grows ill and dies. The extended metaphor of the Twelve-tongued God compares writing to prayer and faith—powerful tools for moving through the world and connecting with others that ultimately cannot change fate.
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