The house of God

I realized that there was nothing I could do to help him except what he'd said was the only thing a doctor could do, be with him. I took his head in my lap and sponged away the blood and looked into his sightless eyes and said, "I'm here," and I think he knew that I was.

"Help me, help me."

More blood trickled out, and I wiped it away and said, "I'm here," and I just cried. In silence, so as not to scare him, I wept.

"Hi, Roy boy, how's it going, anyway?"

Howard was in the doorway, filling it with his asinine grin and his pipe smoke, and I hissed at him,

"Get out of here." Sitting down in the chair across the room, he puffed and said, "Looks bad for Dr. Sanders, doesn't it? Gosh, it's tough."

"Get the hell out of here. Now!"

"You don't mind if I watch, do you? Follow?up, you know. It's tough in the E.W., because you don't get any follow?up on the patients you admit. I always like follow?up. Sense of completion. Ending. Learn a lot."

"Get outta here, Howard, please."

"Help me."

The blood ran. My lap was wet with it. The eyes were glazing.

"I'm here," and I hugged him.

"You go

I wanted to leap up and kill him, but I couldn't I wouldn't leave Dr. Sanders until he left me. I begged Howard to leave, and he smiled and said how hard it was to have someone dying whom you cared about, " and he puffed his pipe, and stayed.

"Help."

So I tried to obliterate Howard and as I was wetted with Dr. Sanders' thin blood I found myself wanting; only to be able to kill Dr. Sanders with something painless and neat instead of being with him in my helplessness.

"Help me, God, this is awf . . ."

I tried to think of good things, of a woman in a punt on the willowed Cherwell at Oxford, trailing her finger in the leafy stream, but all I could think of was the day's headlines, the sixteen?year?old girl who'd run away to see the world and who was found off a Florida beach naked folded up in a weighted traveling case, and a beaten child wheeled into a courtroom curled up in a fetal position in a crib, who was a vegetable and who "was not going to get any better" and the surgeon said that when he'd first gotten to the child he didn't even know what he was looking at because it was a mass of rotten flesh, days old, and on the abused child's back, burned into his flesh and scabbed over, were the letters: I?C?R?Y.

When I looked back down into my lap, Dr. Sanders was dead. Much of the eighty?percent blood?water that had been him was drained out onto me.

I held his head in my lap until his sick killer blood had oozed out of his heart and brain and into his gut and skin and all the places it should never have been, and, refusing to clot, had flowed out of all the open holes in his body, the last his lazing anus. I held his hairless head in my lap and in my arms until the flow stopped. I laid him back in his bed and covered him gently with his sheet and I wept. He was the first patient whom I'd loved who'd died. I went to the nursing station. The way I put my feet down, one in front of the other, made me think of a chronic schizophrenic I'd seen, a former Ziegfeld Girl who'd been at an asylum since the Follies, and who, each day, rain or shine, would trudge across the meadow with a determined and precise step in an unerring and, clean straight line that would have brought joy to a surveyor's heart, CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP, going nowhere, empty inside.

"Dr. Sanders is dead," I said, sitting down.

"That's too bad. Did you get the postmortem?" asked Jo.

"What?"

"I said, did you get the postmortem?"

I had a vision of lifting the little prodigy up by her thin shoulders, shaking her until her brain splattered against her shell of skull and she convulsed, kneeing her in the guts until I'd wrecked her ovaries from ever spitting out another egg, and then heaving her through the sixth?floor window so she'd splatter arid have to be sucked up by noisy, powerful sucking?up machines and become a bag of goo, picked .over and strained by Hyper Hooper's Israeli Pathology Resident in the morgue. But Jo was pitiful, and so I gritted my teeth and just said, "No."

"Why not?"

"I didn't want to."

"That's not good enough," said Jo.

"I didn't want to see his body ripped to shreds in the morgue."

"I don't understand what you're saying."

"I loved him too much to see his body ripped apart downstairs."

"That kind of talk has no place in modern medicine."

"So don't listen," I said, begi

"The postmortem is important," said Jo. "It's the flower of the science of medicine. I'll call the next of kin myself."

"Don't you dare!" I screamed. "I'll kill you if you do!"

"How do you think we're able to deliver such precise medical care to those entrusted to us?" asked Jo.

"That's bullshit, that we deliver medical care at all," I said.

"Have you gone mad? This ward?my ward is looked up to in the House for being the most efficient and having the most success with placement and handling the toughies with skill. My ward is a legend. Damnit," said Jo, jutting her jaw, "I want that post."

"Jo. Go fuck yourself."

"I'll have to report this to the Fish and the Leggo. I won't have sentimentality ruining my ward. My ward has become a legend in its own time."

"Do you know why it's become a legend? You don't want to hear."

"Of course I want to hear, even though I know why already."

So I told her. I started by telling her about how Chuck and I had, after our original empirical test on A

"Placement picked up because the Social Service liked me and I did such a good job ru

"Jo, everybody hates you and the only reason that placement picked up is that the Runt and I are fucking Rosalie Cohen and Selma respectively. Not to mention the clean sheets."

"What about the clean sheets?"

"Chuck has been fucking Hazel from Housekeeping."

"I don't believe you. No one would do this to me"

"Everyone would if they could, but your terns are in a privileged position."

"You just think you're above it all," said Jo. "Better than everyone else, like you don't have to stoop down to get postmortems. You're afraid of the dirty side of medicine, right?"

"No, sir," I said.

"You mean you're not afraid of the dirty side of medicine?" asked the Leggo, his eyes ru

"No, sir, to my knowledge I am not."

Clad in his butcher?length white coat and with stethoscope, as always, wending its way down into God knows where, he was standing looking out the window, holding my curriculum vitae in his hand. He looked lonesome. Like Nixon must have looked. I stood in front of his large desk. Diplomas buzzed me from all directions, and I was mesmerized by a model of the urinary tract, filled with colored water and driven by an electric motor, bubbling red urine through everything at a healthy clip. My mind was empty of everything but how Dr. Sanders had become a bag of blood?squishy, bloated, and dead.

"You know," said the Leggo, waving my C.V. around in the air, "you look great on paper, Roy.. When I punched your name into the computer to match you for this internship, I was happy. I thought you could be a leader of the interns and of the residents, and even, someday, Chief Resident."

"Yes, Sir, I understand."

"Say, you've never been in the military, have you?"