The house of God

Gilheeny was lucky. His leg might not work ever again, but it didn't look like he was going to die. Gath, shaky as the rest of us, trying bravely to 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 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' 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 an 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 largebore 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 non?folks 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 mant 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 an the lips.

And yet neither friendship nor a weekend away from the House could contain my rage. Feeling free, 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 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."