The house of God

"Well, man, what all is she worried about?"

I was drunk enough to tell him. I told him how she'd noticed he'd gotten so much fatter, so out of shape. How he'd wolfed down his food, how he'd stopped caring about his body, and how he was begi

"No foolin'. I used to be in great shape, and look at the mess I'm in now. Pitiful, man, pitiful."

"She says it's anger, that all of us are so pissed off we're begi

He parked the car like an alcoholic, orthogonally to the House white lines. We got out and in unspoken defiance peed on the House lot. The two clouds of steam were a comfort.

"So Berry's a little worried about me, huh?" asked Chuck.

"Yup. More than a little. Hey, I'm worried about you too."

"Well, Roy, tell you a little secret: so am I, man, so am I."

The alarm went off. I separated myself from the hothouse under the covers with Berry. I groaned. Potts's father had died and Potts had left for the funeral in Charleston and Eat My Dust Eddie was covering the ward for Potts and I had to cover for Eddie in the E.W., a twenty?four?hour shift. The morning was so cold that despite my bundling, when my ass hit the seat of the car the chill made me shake and chatter, and as I shivered my way down to the House I thought about Wayne Potts.

The strange thing about Potts was that he wasn't acting strange. Perhaps he'd grown more quiet, more withdrawn. One night I'd found him sitting in nursing station with a dazed look on his face, like that of a child at a funeral. "Oh, hi, Roy," he'd said. "You know, I just went to see the Yellow Man I could have sworn he looked right at me and knew me, but then, when I looked again, he was the same as ever, eyes closed, comatose."

Potts plodded along. With his wife having multiple orgasms of power as an MBH surgical intern, Potts spent a lot of time alone. We'd get together, and I'd grown to like him. His Southern roots resonated with my love of the rootedness of England, of Oxford with its cameo pieces of strawberries and cream and champagne served on the smooth lawns in the fifteenth-century courtyards. We became friends partly through a shared contempt for the competitive Slurpers of the North, and a shared longing for permanence, for a solid past. We'd sit at his house talking and listening to blues and gospel, Potts's favorite ballad being Mississippi John Hurt, on dying:

When my earthly trials are over, cast my body down in the sea;

save all the undertaker's bills, let the mermaids flirt with me.

One day we'd talked about how we'd gotten into medicine.

"Well, I remember one summer at Pawley's Island, I was about twelve. Mother had kicked Daddy out, and that summer my brother and my mother and me went to the shore. One day I spilled hot oil all over my hand, burned it real bad, and Mother rushed me back into Charleston to our family doc. His office was just these two big old rooms all mahogany?paneled with brass knobs and fixtures, apothecary drawers, urns, you know? He dressed my burn and said, 'Boy, you like fishin', don't you? 'Yessir.' 'What do you like to cetch, boy?' 'Sea bass and bluefish, sir.' 'Are the bluefish ru

"What happened to him?"

"Oh, he's still there. He's waiting for me to finish up here and come on down and join him for a whit till he retires and I take over. I suppose it could as soon as next year."

"Sounds great. Is that what you want to do?" '

"Yeah, but I guess it's just a dream."

"Why just a dream?"

"It's not the kind of medicine I'm learning here, it? I wouldn't know one end of a twin delivery from another. And my wife doesn't want to move from the surgery program at the MBH. She do want to move to the South at all."

At the Leggo's party, Berry had asked me which one was Potts, and I'd pointed him out. He was only one without a name tag, and Berry asked me why that was.

"He lost it."

"He didn't get another?"

"Nope."

"Doesn't sound too healthy.. Unless he's being flamboyant "

"Potts flamboyant? No way."

"It doesn't sound like he cares too much about himself."

"You're much too analytic," I said, getting irritated.

"Maybe, but I'd worry about him, Roy"

"Thank you for your expert diagnosis. I'm not losing any sleep over Potts."

I had been wrong. One night I'd found myself lying awake thinking about him. I thought of his disappointments: his wife, his too?academic internship, his withering dream of going home to Charleston to be a doe there, his sad dog. I began to feel nervous. A few days before, Potts and I had been watching the Crimson Tide of Alabama roll over Georgia Tech on his TV in his bedroom. Next to his bed was a revolver, an unholstered loaded forty?four.

I parked in the House lot and hurried toward the E.W. When I'd told Potts over the phone that I was sorry about his father's death, he'd said, "I'm not. He died in the gutter after a fight with some other drunk. I figured it would end this way. I feel kinda relieved."

"Relieved?"

"Yeah. You've got to understand, Roy: for years he used to walk into my bedroom when he thought I was asleep, and stand there in the dark staring at me. And every once in a while I'd see a glint of light off the barrel of the revolver he carried in his hand. I'm just going to the funeral to see Mother. Sorry, you've got to cover for me. I'll make it up to you."

And so it was a bone?chilling Sunday in the middle of the dead week between Christmas and New Year's, and I expected, in my twenty?four?hour shift, few major traumas and more the small stuff trying to get into God's House for the warmth. How shortsighted, to think that on that Sunday I'd see only the products of that Sunday. Two thousand years previously Christ had bit the dust, hundreds of years ago some Renaissance red hot had thought up hospitals, fifty years ago some Jewish red hot had thought up the House, two months ago God had reincarnated winter, a few days ago some TV programmer had switched off a spine-tingling pro?football game to put on a rerun of that Teutonic grenade Heidi, elevating male blood pressures across the land, and one night ago, two crucial events had taken place: first, in the interest of "educating the public," there'd been a TV show on "the signs of heart attack"; second, it had been a Saturday night in a city gone sour. They were go