House of God (31 page)

Midafternoon. Lull. Breathing a little easier inside my space helmet, thinking I might just make it. Suddenly the doors slammed open. I and Gath and Elihu were thrown into that surreal hyperacute time sense brought about by real disaster. Sirens blared, lights flashed, and there, carried by a priest on one side and Quick on the other, in came Gilheeny, sheet-white, the right side of his body all blood. We jumped up and in an instant were in the major-trauma room. Gilheeny was alive. In shock. As the nurse cut off his clothing and we put in the big lines and went over his vital parts—head heart lungs—we heard Quick, shaken, tell us what had happened:

‘There was a robbery at an ice-cream shop. We chased the thief, and he turned on us and emptied a shotgun into Finton.'

‘Officer Quick,' said Gath, ‘you bettah leave the room.'

I felt hyperalive, and found myself doing five things at once. Despite my concentrating on Gilheeny, I felt amazed that on a Sunday afternoon of the coldest day of the year, not only should some bastard rob a store, an ice-cream store, but that it should be done armed, and with a shotgun? How much cash could there have been in an ice-cream store on a freezing Sunday afternoon in winter? As I looked at the bloody mess that was the right side of the policeman's body, I wanted to have the robber in the room, to beat the shit out of him.

Gilheeny was lucky. His leg might not work right ever again, but it didn't look like he was going to die. Gath, shaky as the rest of us, trying bravely to make a joke, told Gilheeny that OPERATIONS ARE GOOD FOR PEOPLE and that the redhead was about to have one. I sat with Gilheeny while he waited to go to the OR, making sure that nothing bad could happen. Quick came in, shaken, and sat down, and then in walked the priest and the biggest policeman I'd ever seen, with four stars on each shoulder, braids on his blue coat, a big gold badge, gray hair, and elegant orange tinty glasses.

‘Top o' the mornin' to you, brave Sergeant Finton Gilheeny.'

‘Is it the Commissioner?'

‘None other. The young doctor says that with the aid of an operation, with the usefulness of the scalpel being demonstrated, you will survive.'

So this peculiar speech pattern comes from the very top. I wondered how many years the Commissioner had served in God's House.

‘Dr. Basch, I believe that I now have no need of the last rites. If so, could the priest depart? He scares me in the memory of how close to heaven or that hot other place I came.'

‘And is there a message for the little woman, the wife?' asked the Commissioner as the priest left.

‘Ah, yes. Don't call her, for you see, I told her always I would send someone by, and if you call her instead, she will think I am dead, and with the epileptic daughter and the wife continually having the nervous breakdowns, it would be a sorry mistake. So send someone by the house, sir, if you could.'

‘I will go myself. Oh—the robber has been caught. Yes,' said the Commissioner, cracking his knuckles, ‘and after apprehending him, we asked him to “step outside for a moment for a private interrogation,” if you catch my drift. A long and careful “private interrogation,” for you are a dear policeman to us. Sure, and didn't I myself hit him with a few hard interrogations? Ah, well, all the best, boyo and I'm on my way to your wife and will soothe her with my boyish good looks and TV-cop mien. Good-bye, and for the young scholar here who saved your fine red life, SHALOM and God bless.'

Savage, all of it, savage. Gilheeny went to his operation, and Quick sat with us the rest of the day, shocked and drained. Abe, who had witnessed most of these events, went apeshit. Despite Cohen's efforts, he kept screaming over and over I'M GONNA KILL THEM I'M GONNA KILL THEM and he was finally put in four-point restraints and carted off to the State Facility.

Day passed, night came. Gilheeny made it through. Quick went home. Abe was gone. I stumbled through the night and finally at about two
A.M
., just before falling into a deep sleep, I thought that that moment, a kind of ecstasy of escape, would have been the perfect time to die. Not dead, I was awakened at three. I tried to focus on the clipboard: Twenty-three-year-old married woman; chief complaint: I was walking home and I was raped. No. Come on, will you? It's ten below out there. I went and saw her: at eleven that night she'd been walking home from her friend's house, a man jumped out of a driveway, held a gun to her head, and raped her. She was in shock, dazed. She hadn't been able to go home to her husband. She'd sat in an all-night diner and finally had come into the House.

‘Have you called your husband yet?'

‘No . . . I'm too ashamed,' she said, and she lifted her head up for the first time and looked me in the eyes, and first her eyes were dry cold walls and then, to my relief, they broke apart into wet pieces, and she screamed, and screamed out sob after sob. I took her in my arms and let her cry, and I was crying too. After she'd quieted some, I asked for her husband's number, and after I did the workup for rape, I called him. He'd been worried stiff, and was glad she was not dead. He couldn't know, yet, that part of her had died. In a few minutes he was there. I sat in the nursing station as he went in to see her, and sat there as they came out to leave. She thanked me, and I watched them walk down the long tiled passage. He went to put his arm around her, but with a gesture that I knew was her disgust at the ruination of her body by a man, she pushed it aside. Separate, they walked out into the savageness. Disgust. Revulsion. That was how I felt—revolted, enraged, pushing the hand away, because the hand can't ever help, because it's a myth that the hand can touch the part that's dead.

The
finale
that night was an alcoholic homosexual addict with a potentially lethal overdose of something unknown. In white pants, white shoes, a white sailor outfit with a red kerchief and a white sailor hat, his fingernails painted white, he was comatose, near death. I thought of methadone, and gave him, IV, a narcotic antagonist. He came out of his coma and became abusive. He took a knife from his pocket. I thought he was going to come at me, but no. He grabbed the IV tubing and cut it. He stood up and walked to the automatic doors. To be sure I'd be able to save him if he'd started to go down the tubes, I'd put in a large-bore needle, and now the blood flowed easily out, dripping in big red globules onto the polished floor, and I said, ‘Look, at least let me take your IV out before you leave.'

‘Nope,' he said, flashing the knife, ‘I'm not leaving. I want to bleed to death, right here on your floor. You see, I want to die.'

‘Oh, well, that's different,' I said, and I called the Bouncers from House Security.

We sat there, afraid to jump him, watching as the red dots on the floor coalesced into blobs, small pools. He smeared the blood around with his cute white shoes. When it became a puddle, he splashed it at us, leaving lines of blood reaching out toward us like rays from a Mayan sacrificial sun. I'd ordered four pints of blood, typed and crossed, and Flash was waiting in the blood bank for my call, ready to rush the blood down. As I sat there engorged with despair, I tried to get the arms of my mind around the savageness of the day. I could not. I waited for him to faint.

Berry and I were in Our Nation's Capital, visiting Jerry and Phil, who'd been at Oxford with me as Rhodes Scholars. While I'd chosen the fanaticism of American med school, they'd chosen that of law. At present they were each clerking for Supreme Court Justices, an ‘internship' similar to mine. There were many parallels. The Chief Justices, like the House docs, were a mixed lot, some borderline incompetent, some alcoholic, some dummies, and a few just plain nonfolks like the Leggo and the Fish. Jerry and Phil were delegated the task of making the highest law of the land, just as I was the one dealing with the actual bodies and deaths. Their main job was to periodically wind up their particular Justice and ‘launch' him on a particular side of a decision that would affect millions of great Americans. In fact, they spent much of their time at the de
facto
‘highest court,' the basketball court on the top floor, directly above the slightly lower, de
jure
Supreme Court chambers. One of their main thrills was throwing elbows at a body-beautiful Commie-hunting Nixon Court appointee.

Despite my newfound penchant for viewing all persons as sick and despite their newfound penchant for viewing all persons as defendants, things went well for a while. Walking through the echoing marble Court, we laughed at various farces making the gossip columns, the choicest being the rumor that a reporter, using high-powered binoculars from a hidden vantage point on the bluffs over San Clemente, while watching Nixon and Bebe Rebozo walking along the beach in their dark suits, had seen the President stop, turn, and kiss Bebe squarely on the lips.

And yet neither friendship nor a weekend away from the House could contain my rage. Feeling free, more like a person, made the contrast even more painful. I carried my suspicion and contempt with me. At one point Jerry and Phil were surprised at my vehemence, and at how far I'd moved, from English Socialist Left to Alabama Right a la Dwayne Gath. For some reason my friends' cynicism did not extend into the realms of paranoia. The trip turned sour, and on the plane back, Berry said, ‘You've got to be socialized all over again, Roy. No one can be that angry and be in this world with anyone else. Your friends are really worried about you.'

‘You're right,' I said, thinking how every part of my life had suffered from my experience in the House of God, and how, from all the awful venerealia, even my sex life had curdled and quit.

Things got only worse. At the New Year's Eve party which I had to leave early because I had to report, for the last time, to the House E.W. at midnight, and at which I got pretty drunk, Berry blew up at me: ‘I hardly know you anymore, Roy. You're not like you were before.'

‘You were right about this time of year,' I said, leaving. ‘It's sick, and it's crazy, and it sucks. So long.'

I walked out the door into the bitter cold, through the frozen snow and over a snowbank turned black from the city dirt, to my car. That terrifying empty space between what was love and what is no more loomed large. I sat there disgusted, alone, the blue mercury arc lamps adding to the surreal night. Berry appeared, trying to pull me back to the human. She leaned in through the window, hugged me, kissed me, and wished me a Happy New Year, and said, ‘Look at it this way, the New Year means you're halfway through.'

Feeling that I'd been cheated, promised a life and then saddled with death, I went into the E.W., drunk, searching for whoever it was who had cheated me. At precisely midnight, as the old year rolled over and showed its white underbelly and the new year starting sucking at its first black morning, a naked drunk celebrated by vomiting something awful into his lap. I sat at the nursing station surrounded by the futile attempts of the nurses to make a party out of the place. As I watched Elihu do a hip-swinging, clog-clacking campy rendition of the horah with Flash, I thought of ‘The Follies' at Treblinka. And then I thought about the pictures of the camps, taken by the Allies at liberation. The pictures showed emaciated men peering through the barbed wire, all eyes. Those eyes, those eyes. Hard blank disks. My eyes had become hard blank disks. Yet there was something in back of them, and, yes, that was the worst. The worst was that I had to live with what was in back of them, and what I had to live with, the rest of the world must never see, for it separated me from them, as it had just done with my former best friends and with my one long love, Berry. There was rage and rage and rage, coating all like crude oil coating gulls. They had hurt me, bad. For now, I had no faith in the others of the world. And the delivery of medical care? Farce. BUFF 'n TURF. Revolving door. I wasn't sitting at the end of the ambulance ride, no. There was no glamour in this. My first patient of the New Year was a five-year-old found in a clothes dryer, face bloodied. She had been hit by her pregnant mother, hit over and over with a bludgeon of pantyhose stuffed with shards of broken glass.

How could I survive?

14

I had high hopes that the Fat Man would save me.

Chubby, pumped up, bubbling with all the fresh optimism of a baby rocking in the cradle of the New Year, the Fat Man was back, ward resident in the House of God. During his long swing through the various Mt. St. Elsewheres and the Veterans Administration Hospital, I had missed him. Of course he had loomed large always, and in frantic times, his teachings had pulled me through. For months we had been in touch mostly through rumor. According to Fats, things were going great. Yet, the more I got to know him, the more contradictions there seemed to be. While laughing at a system that cherished Jo and the Fish and Little Otto and the Leggo, Fats seemed not only to be able to survive but also to use it for himself and even to enjoy it.

Among the rumors that had floated in from Fats's long road trip were several about Dr. Jung's Anal Mirror, including one that allegedly had Esquire publishing its listing of ‘The Ten Most Beautiful Assholes of the World.' Yet whenever the Fat Man talked about his invention, it was always in the subjunctive tense, ‘would' and ‘could,' not ‘will' and ‘can'. Gregarious inside the House, when Fats left it, he disappeared. In spite of my offers, I never saw him outside. Although inside the House he was doing something erotic with Gracie from Dietary and Food, there was no word of female relationships outside. Ambitious, Fats wouldn't let women stand in his way. Even his goal in life, to ‘make a big fortoona,' was complicated: whenever I'd ask him how it was going, he'd get a wistful look in his eye and say, ‘I'm just not crooked enough,' and tell me that he'd passed up opportunities that would have made ten fortoonas in the past year alone. ‘If only I had the hearts and minds of the Watergate Boys,' he'd sigh, ‘if only I was G. Gordon Liddy.'