The next day, as promised, Kraft spent half the day keeping David company in the clinic, along with a punishing amount of work.
It was the kind of job that demanded long stretches of concentration with no end in sight—a merciless grind on one's patience and energy, and the perfect breeding ground for frustration and fatigue.
The general process was to sit in a small room and let in one person at a time, or two, or sometimes several. Ask the same questions in the same tone, distill subjective accounts into concise, logically clear descriptions, and record everything on paper for filing.
Every so often, they had to interrupt the patients and their families to steer the conversation back from some digression they'd been enjoying.
Local dialects and slang made communication even more difficult. It was common for a patient's family member to anxiously rattle off a long explanation while the listener felt as if they were in a foreign country. David had to step in and "translate" before they could continue.
Kraft also had trouble making himself understood. Even simple instructions like asking someone to sit down or lie flat often had to be repeated once or twice. After repeating such details enough times, each repetition began to make his frustration rise.
None of these things was a major obstacle on its own, but they piled up drop by drop, preventing the whole process from running smoothly like an assembly line. Instead, it was slowed by all sorts of little snags, foreseeable or not, and the drop in efficiency was plain to see.
Every time the clinic door opened, he glanced outside and saw that the crowd showed no sign of thinning. If anything, it grew as the sun climbed higher.
At this pace, they couldn't see more than