The David B. Kriser Division of Emergency Medical Services at Beth Israel is located on Sixteenth Street between First Avenue and Stuyvesant Square. Its emergency room is dirty white and contains, on this night, about thirty or so patients lolling about on chairs as if they are midway through a cross-country bus trip. A television set is playing the local news with the sound turned low. The top story concerns Alonzo Mourning, who is about to undergo a kidney transplant operation. There is stock footage of him fiercely dunking a basketball against the Knicks, followed by him sitting meekly at a press conference, dressed in a bulky suit and surrounded by concerned doctors. It seems to be a parable of sorts. Two Coke machines stand against the back wall and across from them is an ominous blue door that says, “Do Not Enter.” There are three windows– numbered one, two, and three–where the sick are summoned to process their forms by a needlessly loud and garbled loudspeaker that sounds like the subway PA. On the wall above the windows is a clock whose hands read 9:05.

A very friendly nurse greets us as we enter the emergency room and briefly examines my girlfriend’s bleeding finger. “Oh, that’s a shame, honey,” she says, like a loving elementary school nurse. “You’re going to need sutures.” She gives my girlfriend some gauze and instructs her to keep the finger above her heart. “Make sure you fill out the form, honey.” And then she exits through the blue door that says “Do Not Enter.”

“What are sutures?” my girlfriend asks. “Are they the same as stitches?”

“It’s a simpler procedure,” I say paternally, but the truth is I don’t really know.

My girlfriend can’t fill out the form, so I do it for her. It takes her half a minute to get her precious insurance card out of her pocket, and another half a minute to sign her name, which she does in wonderfully precise cursive, leaving beside it a small dramatic drop of blood.

We hand the form to the woman behind window number three.

“Take a seat and we’ll call you,” the woman says.

We take a seat. “They’ll call us soon,” I say confidently.

Ten minutes later no one has called us.

“When will they call us?” my girlfriend asks.

The clock reads 9:21. Sixteen minutes have passed.

©2006 Excerpted by permission of Columbia Journal.