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I told him.
"A
"Right. She looks like she's going to die."
"The only way she'll die is if you murder her by doing what Jo says."
"Yeah, but how can I do otherwise, with Jo breathing down my neck?"
"Easy. Do nothing with A
"Hide it from Jo?"
"Sure. Continue the work?up in purely imaginary terms, BUFF the chart with the imaginary results of the imaginary tests, A
"I'm not sure it's ethical."
"Is it ethical to murder this sweet gomere with your work?up?"
There was nothing I could say.
"Well, then, there you are. Let's eat."
During the ten?o'clock meal I asked Fats about Jo. He became somber and said that Jo was terribly depressed. He thought of her as he thought of the Fish and the Leggo and many other Slurpers: terrific medical texts lacking in common sense. They all shared the belief that disease was some wild and hairy monster to be locked up in the neat medical grids of differential diagnosis and treatment. All it took was a little superhuman effort and all would be well. Jo had dedicated her whole life to that effort, and she had little energy for anything else. Her whole life, Fats said, was medicine:
"It's real sad, and everybody knows it. Jo's been preparing for this moment as ward resident for years, and now it's arrived and she's bound to make a hash out of it. She needs these patients so badly to fill up the emptiness of her life that she comes in on Sundays and on her nights off. She never feels needed except when she imagines that her terns or her patients need her, which they don't, because she's such a klutz when it comes to practical?medicine and human contact. The most important treatment for A
Thinking of Berry, I said, "You sound like a male chauvinist."
"Me?" asked Fats, genuinely surprised. "How?"
"You're saying women like Jo make lousy doctors because they're women."
"Nope. I'm saying women like Jo make lousy people because they're doctors, just like some men do. The profession is a disease. It doesn't care what sex you are. It can trap us, any of us, and it's pretty clear that it's trapped Jo. It's awful. You should see her apartment?it's like no one lives there. She's been there over a year, and she still hasn't unpacked her stereo."
We sat in the gloom of Jo's trapped life, each chewing on it, until, finally, it went down, and Fats, brightening again, said, "Hey, did I ever tell you about this dream of mine, the Invention?"
"Nope: "
"Dr. Jung's Anal Mirror: the Great American Medical Invention."
"Dr. Jung's Anal Mirror? What the hell is that?"
"Don't you remember in medical school during the gastroenterology course they told you to 'examine your own anus with the aid of a small mirror'?"
"Yeah."
"Were you able to do it?"
"Nope."
"Of course you weren't. It's impossible. But not with the aid of Dr. Jung's. Anyone can examine his or her very own anus in the comfort and privacy of the home."
"What the hell is it?" I asked, caught up in the joke.
He showed me what it was. On a napkin he drew a complex and intricate combination of two reflecting mirrors and a large focusing lens all fastened together on adjustable stainless?steel rods. He drew the pathways of the light rays from the anus to the eyeballs and back, splitting it into colorful rainbows and sophisticated spectra which he elaborated with multivariate complex equations and graphs. Finishing, he said, "Do you know how many Americans each day have painful bowel movements and blood on their toilet paper or in the bowl? Millions."
"Why just Americans?" I joked. "Why not the world?"
"Exactly. The only problem is translation. If it's millions in America, it's billions in the world. The anus is a great curiosity to almost all mankind. Everyone would like to see it, but no one can. Like darkest Africa before the missionaries. The Congo of the body."
The hairs on the back of my neck tingled as I started to think that this might not be a joke, and I said, "You're joking."
The Fat Man did not reply.
"This is the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard."
"It's not. And besides, that's always what they say about great inventions. It's like those vaginal mirrors that gynecologists are passing out?oh, by the way, you can adjust the Anal Mirror to look in there too-women are using the vaginal mirrors to get to know their vaginas. This is a unisex device. GET TO KNOW YOUR ASSHOLE." Spreading his hands apart as if reading a bumper sticker or a marquee, Fats said, "ASSHOLES ARE BEAUTIFUL. FREE THE ASSHOLES. The potential in human and financial terms is immense. Big fortoona."
"This is outrageous."
"That's just why it will sell."
"But it's a joke, right? You didn't actually make an anal mirror?"
The Fat Man looked distractedly out into thin air.
Feeling queasy, I said, "Come off it, Fats," and I pleaded with him to tell me the truth. It was so preposterous that it might just be real, and over the past ten years whenever?I'd estimated what was fantasy in America?from Jack Ruby's blasting Lee Harvey Oswald's guts all over the insides of the TV tubes of America, to the brown paper bags of money delivered to Spiro Agnew in his vice?presidential chambers?I'd been wrong, dead wrong, and had always underestimated, falling far short of the absurd, which had inevitably turned out to be the real. "Come on, Fats," I shouted, "tell me the goddamn truth! Do you mean it or don't you?"
"Do I?" Fats seemed to awaken from his reverie, and composing himself, said, "Oh, of course I don't, do I? I mean, no one would think seriously of anything as crazy as that, would they? Just remember, Basch, about A
I tried it. I decided to go all out on A
It still wasn't clear how Jo's orthodox medical approach would work on those who the Fat Man had said could die, the non-gomers, the young. As the sweaty green and smelly summer months wore us out, as America frolicked in the news given it by a smalltime White House bureaucrat named Butterfield who revealed that Nixon had gotten so excited about being President that he'd installed a tape system to record every single immortal presidential word, which?immortal words he was trying like hell via some ruse called "executive privilege" to keep from Sirica and Cox, Chuck and I gave ourselves up, during the day, to Jo's fanaticism about the dying young, letting her show us how to do everything to these non-gomertose patients, always. During the day we'd slog along with her, using her as a live textbook, and also, since she found it impossible to let us do things on our own, by feigning incompetence, using her to do anything distasteful, like disimpactions. I'd told Chuck and Potts about the Fat Man's analysis of Jo, and so at first we held ourselves in check, walking around her as if she were a fragile house of cards. We hid our contempt of her from her, and Chuck and I hid our doing nothing on the gomers from her. I slogged through the long, dull, duplicitous days with Jo, keeping Fats alive inside me until, every third night, he and I were together again on call. Remembering his saying about himself, "I spell out what every other doc feels, but most squash down and let eat away at their guts." I studied Jo to detect the symptoms of her ulcer, and studied the Fish for his big ulcer and the Leggo for his giant ulcer. Looming more and more clearly so as almost to be touchable, with me was always that comforting fat presence, just past the edges of my sight.