House of God (19 page)

‘Stop drinking and see what happens.'

‘I tried that. I get thirsty.'

‘Perhaps you have Addison's disease,' said the Fish, and his attention shifted to my cigarette until he couldn't stand it any longer and said, ‘I don't understand how, knowing what you know about lung cancer, you continue to smoke. Maybe you don't inhale?'

I did not inhale, and so I said, ‘I inhale.'

‘Why do you do it?'

‘It feels good.'

‘If everyone did what feels good, where would we all be?'

‘Feeling good.'

‘You're too loose,' said the Fish, ‘I don't know how you do such good work, being that loose. Enjoy that cigarette, Dr. Basch, for it's three minutes off your life.'

Just then Little Otto marched in, went to the blackboard to leave a note for me, saw the space taken up with a fresh ripe

let out a sharp bark which turned all our heads toward him, and finding no eraser handy, spat on the board and wiped the thing off with his sleeve, snarling.

‘Now, that's just the kind of thing I resent,' I said to the Fish, ‘having that damn * * * MVI * * * smeared all over the House under my name. Your kinky bouncers haven't done anything. Can't you stop it?'

‘I tried,' said the Fish, ‘but it didn't do any good. The damn thing may all be a practical joke anyway.'

‘That's not what I heard. I heard that the prize for the * * * MVI * * * is a free trip for two to Atlantic City for the AMA meetings in June, with you and the Leggo.'

‘I didn't hear that,' said the Fish, beginning to leave.

‘Damn!' said Chuck. ‘Man, would you look at that!'

The Fish and I and Towl and Little Otto looked at that, which was, somehow, under my name on the blackboard, in all the colors of the rainbow, that neat yet ornate insignia:

Later that week the Leggo and the Fish called a B-M Deli luncheon to announce another award, which we were to nickname the Black Crow. Since this was the first time all the terns had been gathered together since July the first, we greeted each other warmly and with relief. Everything had happened. Most of us had learned enough medicine to worry less about saving patients and more about saving ourselves. Although some of our ways of saving ourselves were beginning to seem bizarre, they weren't so far-out, yet, as to be dangerous or intolerable. Looking around the room, hearing the simmering jokes and laughter and chatter that from time to time popped its lid and boiled over into a happy roar, I realized how much we'd grown to care about each other. We were developing a code of caring, helping each other leave early, not fucking each other over, tolerating each other's nuttiness, and listening to each other's groans. Each life was being twisted, branded. We were sharing something big and murderous and grand. Sensing that, I felt close to tears. We were becoming doctors.

Eat My Dust Eddie, being run ragged in the deathouse, the MICU, looked awful, and was talking about his previous night on call: ‘I was admitting my sixth cardiac arrest and I got this call from the E.W.—Hooper, it was you—saying that there was a guy down there who'd arrested and you were thinking of sending him to me if he survived. I hung up the phone, got down on my knees, and prayed: Please, God, kill that guy! I was on my knees, I mean ON MY KNEES!'

‘He died,' said Hooper. ‘Jo was the resident, and she wanted to keep pumping his chest, but I said, “As far as I'm concerned, this guy was dead ten minutes ago,” and I left.'

‘Hooper, you're a great man,' said EMD. ‘I feel like kissing you.'

‘Kiss me you can, kiss me if you like, but all I know is that if a human disaster like that had shown up in Sausalito, he'd have had to sign his own postmortem permission slip to be admitted at all.'

‘I think that's a bit crass,' said Howie, grinning.

‘Stay out of Sausalito when you're having your cardiac arrest.'

Potts came in, late, made a thin sandwich, and sat down, and I was reminded that the Yellow Man had yet to die. Potts was haunted by him, linked with him, and whenever we saw Potts, we saw the Yellow Man. Potts was becoming more withdrawn. He hadn't come out for our touch-football game. He was a tree with a limb ripped off, the pulp a harsh raw white. No one ever mentioned the Yellow Man to him. Or to the Runt. But if the Runt was infected, at least he'd have done some snazzy dirty things with Angel before he died. I asked Potts how he was.

‘I don't know. OK, I guess. Otis loves the fall, the leaves. I keep thinking I'm not doing a good job here, you know.'

‘You're all doing a good job,' said the Leggo, standing before us, ‘but you as a group have not been getting enough postmortem permissions. It's hard to describe the importance of the autopsy. Why, the autopsy is the heart—no, the flower, the red rose—of medicine. Yes, the great Virchow, the Father of Pathology, performed twenty-five thousand autopsies with his own two hands. It's crucial to our understanding of disease. For instance, that Czech, nicknamed—what was he called, Dr. Fishberg?'

‘Not
was
called, sir, is called. The Yellow Man, sir.'

‘Yes, take the Yellow Man . . .'

The Leggo went on to take the Yellow Man, stressing how important it would be for us to get the post when he died, and as he spoke, each word seemed to rip into poor quiet Potts.

‘When I was an intern,' said the Leggo cheerily, ‘we got seventy-five percent post permissions. Of course, in those days we did the autopsies ourselves, but you know something, we didn't mind. Because we were helping to advance the science of medicine.'

The Leggo said that the terns were not getting enough postmortem permissions, and since he knew ‘how hard it is to approach the family for permission in their hour of need,' he thought of ‘a way to raise the incentive: an award. The award will go to the intern with the most postmortem permissions for the year. The prize will be a free trip for two to Atlantic City for the AMA in June, with Dr. Fishberg and myself.'

There was dead silence. No one knew what to say, until Howie, puffing and smiling, said, ‘Damn good idea, Chief, but maybe it should be a trip to the American Pathological instead.'

‘I don't think it should be the most posts,' I said, sure that the Leggo was joking, ‘I mean, after all, wouldn't that put a premium on death? The tern with the most deaths would probably win, and that would make us lay off treatment, or, even worse, kill off patients to win the prize.'

‘Yeah,' said Eddie, ‘why not make it a percentage of deaths?'

The Leggo and the Fish didn't laugh, and as the meeting broke up, no one was sure whether they'd been serious or not.

‘Of course they're serious,' said Hyper Hooper, ‘and I'm gonna win it. The Black Crow! Atlantic City, here I come. Saltwater taffy, strolling along the boardwalk.' He grinned, and started to sing to us: ‘Under the bo-o-orrdwalk down by the seee-eeee . . .'

And so if they were serious the Black Crow Award came into being, at least as much being as the * * * MVI * * *. Hyper Hooper, the tern who got off on death, really got off, and we others, who still didn't like death and were repulsed even more by autopsies, felt that once again the odds were getting stacked against the living, and that we had to work even harder to protect the poor unsuspecting patients who came, trusting, into the House of God oblivious to that incentive for their deaths and posts, the Black Crow. Hooper didn't waste any time, for the next afternoon as I was dictating a discharge summary, from the next cubicle I heard his familiar voice: ‘The patient was admitted in good health except for a urinary-tract infection . . .'

I went on dictating, but tuned back in a few seconds later:

‘. . . the temperature rose to 107 and a resistant strain of
Pseudomonas
grew out of the spinal-fluid culture . . .'

Spinal fluid? I thought it had started in the urinary tract?

‘. . . the intern was called to see the patient and found her unresponsive. She expired three hours later. Permission for the postmortem was obtained. Yahoo! This is H. Hooper, M.D.'

As he was rushing out I caught his arm and asked him what had happened, and he said, ‘The usual, Death City. And I got the post. Atlantic City, here I come, Black Crow, Black Pants, and all.'

‘But she came in healthy.'

‘Yeah, and then she boxed, and I get credit for the post. The Black Crow's gotta go. So long.'

‘That award's a joke. They couldn't mean it.'

‘It's no joke. Autopsies are the flower—no, the red rose—of medicine. The Leggo wants more posts so he looks good.'

‘To whom?'

‘Who cares? With that awful birthmark, he'll try any cosmetic procedure. Hey, I gotta go. The little woman and I are going to the Eucalyptus Room again tonight. Trying to float the M off the R.
Ciao
!'

And so the intern first out of the starting blocks for the Black Crow Award sped off down the hallway, out of the House of God, with that same glitter in his eye that the Fat Man had had over his food and his Invention and that Chuck and I had seen in the Runt's eye when he talked pornographically about Thunder Thighs, and the same glitter that Chuck had had when he'd made mincemeat of Ernie on the court or talked about Hazel, and the same glitter that I had whenever I thought of Molly.

Whenever I thought of Molly, I thought of her bendovers and her lacy underwear and the tears that she'd shed when she knew she was going to die when she pulled down her panties to show me the mole on her thigh. Whenever I thought of Molly, something rolled over in my pants and I felt younger than I was, and I got a glitter in my eye and I thought about my first love, and that bittersweet chaos of fumbling with hooks and belts and zippers and parents on couches on front seats on back seats on movie seats on rocks and everywhere except on beds. I imagined Molly as young and innocent and fun.

Young and innocent? How could I have known that that preceding figment had been brought to me through the courtesy of my imagination? Feeling guilty about trying to seduce this young and innocent fun, I tried my hardest to seduce her. In the House, I would touch her, when we worked together, putting a hand on her shoulder, on her hip. She would brush my arm with her breast, she would leave her dress unbuttoned, and in addition to the bendover, she showed more of her repertoire, including what Fats had called the ‘flash sit down,' where in the instant between the sit down and the leg cross, there's the flash of the fantasy triangle, the French panty bulging out over the downy mons like a spinnaker before the soft blond and hairy trade winds. Even though, medically, I knew all about these organs, and had my hands in diseased ones all the time, still, knowing, I wanted it and since it was imagined and healthy and young and fresh and blond and downy soft and pungent, I wanted it all the more.

So finally she asked me to go out with her and some other nurses, and we went to this bar where the rock music blasts off only the ossicles of those, like me, over thirty, and leaves unshaken the under-thirty, who want the volume turned up, and then she taught me to do a dance I'd never heard of to music I'd never heard of, and then we went back to her apartment she shared with a toothpick of a nurse named Nancy, and Molly asked me if I'd ever seen her place before and I lied and said No and she started to show me and we wandered in on Nancy undressing and Molly said, I was showing him the place, and Nancy, remembering that I'd been there before, said, He's seen the place before, and Molly looked me in the eye and I gulped and said, Yup, I've seen the place before, and she said, Well, let me show you my bedroom.

Delight delight. She showed me her bedroom with her little girl trinkets, furry toys and an alive furry kitten and Halloween masks and temple bells from the Far East and a make-up kit with backstage-type light bulbs and the usual prints and strewn panty hose and bras and then in a fit of romance I feared I was too old for, we embrace, and I fumble with her bra hooks and then I get caught up in things so I don't notice what I'm fumbling and after a little bit of protest from her with my mouth all over her long nipples and my hand on her own furry thing we are kind of wrassling, she gets on top of me, in the middle of a NO she says OOPs and in I slip, and she shows me her secret, which is that she fucks not like a young innocent little girl but like a moaning Byzantine courtesan, all gold and warm oil and myrrh.

‘Now you know my weakness,' Molly said the next day in the middle of the nursing station, holding a Fleet's enema in her hand like a pistol.

‘What is it?' I asked.

‘I'm very physical.'

‘How is that a weakness?'

‘It just is.'

‘Not if you can handle it.'

‘What do you mean handle a weakness?'

‘You wouldn't call it a weakness in me, would you?' I asked.

‘That's different, you're a man.'

‘You're not going all sexist on me, are you?'

‘No.'

‘Then it's not a weakness in you any more than it is in me. You're just going to have to learn how to handle it.'

‘Yeah,' she said in a way that confused me, since I couldn't tell if she were concerned or not, ‘I guess I just will.'

Only later, when it became obvious that both of us loved the sex and, in a loose way, each other as much as we did, when the moaning
mons
had moved out of the little-girl bedroom into the on-call bunk bed whenever I could get rid of the Bruiser, and then moved into the ward bathroom for a five-minute one sitting on the can, and even, late one night, crooned to by the gomer band of renown, moved to a darkened corner of the ward standing up with our orgasms racing against the appearance of the patrolling night supervisor, only then did Molly—who called the feeling of making love the feeling of having a centipede walk through wearing gold cleats—only then did she tell me that she didn't give a damn about my havin another woman, a steady woman, that she had been hurt by ‘involvement' and hurt by the nuns with their spiritual whips and that what she was ‘into' was ‘freedom in relationships,' which I thought was terrific and too good to be true until I wondered whether someone else with the old gold cleats was hearing those chuckles and moans and glittering rainbows of orgasms when I was with my long love, Berry.