The house of God

his own finger at his own chest in the imaginary needle:

track he was going to take on Rose Budz. On the ward,~'

I rejoined Fats, who clicked off his watch, turned to me, and asked, "What didn't happen?"

"I don't know."

"Ten minutes, Basch, and Jane Doe didn't fart."

"So?"

"So her bowel is completely turned off, for the time in House memory. That extract might just the cure for that VA diarrhea. A good deed; a fortoona. Just what I and the world need. Use 'em, Basch, use 'em."

"Did you and the Fat Man get along any better?" asked Berry.

"Worse," I said, "not only does he love the gomers, but he's acting like a Boy Scout. He keeps telling us not to fight back, he makes me search the whole place for a demented ninety?seven?year?olds eyeglasses, and then he spends the whole night sitting up with a woman with terminal cancer after he's told her she's go

"He did that?"

"Yeah, why?"

"I never pictured him doing things like that. The way you described him, he seemed so cynical, so sick. Now I'm not sure."

"He's not cynical enough. He's turned into a patsy. It's almost like he's deserting me."

"He seems more reasonable now. You're the one who's acting sick."

"Thanks a lot."

"I'm concerned, Roy. This acting out is dangerous. Maybe the Fat Man is right: someone's go

I lay awake chewing on Berry's concern. It had been fun to say "I don"t know" to get the Fish, to get Lionel, to race around laughing and sarcastic, but there was a bud of bitterness in it that might blossom into savageness and make me sad enough to kill myself or mad enough to bite. I tried to get my worry in my hand, but I was a child grasping a sunbeam, opening my hand to find the light turned dark, the warmth gone. I drifted toward dream, finding myself ringside at a circus and seeing an elephant, yes, an elephant, and seeing a busty girl on a musty elephant puffing dusty sawdust under the roustabustybout and lusty really big and bustyredhot tent of a bighot top?WAIT! ?with some alarm I realized that Hyper Hooper had been sitting in the on?call room reading my manual with his finger as his needle pointing?no, it couldn't have been, but yes it was?pointing in a straight shot right toward Rose Budz the LOL in NAD's heart.

16

"OK, Hooper, let's hear about the postmortem on Rose Budz. Let's hear what you with your one little needle shot have done."

Fats was flipping cards as we lay in the icy ventric of dead February as it lay in the corpse of the year. There was no question that Eddie and Hooper and I were on our knees and that they were breaking us. Most of the House hierarchies hated us. Gomer City was turning out to be the worst. Far from taking care of it, it was begi

"The post on Rose Budz confirmed what we thought from when they sectioned the needle I used," said Hooper in a tone of contrition mixed with a certain professional satisfaction. "I got spleen, lung, stomp heart, and . . . and liver:" Hooper paused, watching the Fat Man drum his fingers on the desk, and went on, "In other words, Fats, all the organs " named the other day, plus a helping of liver and stomach as well. I think it's a new world record for most organs hit with a single needle shot."

"Liver? The liver's nowhere near where you went in."

I thought back to that day when Hyper Hoops presented his attempt to tap the Chest of Rose and had told us that "there had been a little bleeding." If a Californian isn't enthusiastic, it means a disaster has occurred, and Hooper meant that Rose was dying. He'd sent her to the MICU, and Fats, concerned and thinking malpractice, brought his Gomer City A Team to the MICU to see where the needle had gone in. The hole in Rose's chest was in the front, right over her heart. Fats had said, "Come on, Hooper, you didn't really put your needle in there, did you?" and Hooper had said, "Yup, that's what Roy's manual said, unless I had it upside down." Although Hooper had seemed a bit contrite when the Fat Man had said, "You never tap a chest from the front because things like the heart get in the way," Hooper had brightened right up and said, "It's OK, Fats, it's a great family for the post.

"I know there's usually no liver," said Hooper, "but it seems as how in this case there was an aberrant lobe."

"Messy TURF, Hooper, messy TURF," said Fats solemnly, slowly ripping Rose Budz to shreds. Again Hooper had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Holding up another card, Fats called out, "Tina? Eddie?"

"Dead," said Eat My Dust.

"What?!" shouted Fats. "Tina too? How? Who killed her?"

"Not me," said Eddie, "all I did was get her to sign for dialysis. The Leggo's crack dialysis team did the rest."

Tina had died by being inadvertently murdered by a nurse in dialysis who'd mixed up the bottles. Instead of diluting Fast Tina's blood, the machine had concentrated it further, and all the water had been pulled out of Tina's body and her brain had shrunk and rattled around in her skull like a pea while the nurse sat and read Cosmopolitan. Tina's pea?brain had rattled and stretched until one of the arteries straining between her neck and thalamus burst and she had hemorrhaged to death.

"Sorry to say this, Hooper," said Eddie, "but since Tina was my patient, it's another postmortem for the kid."

"Stop!" said Fats. "Tina was the Leggo's patient. No Post."

"But the Leggo loves posts. He called them the flower?"

"Not when they prove malpractice!" said Fats in a tone that would hear no answer, all the while ripping Tina's cards to pieces. "Next? Jane Doe?"

"Hey, doin' great," said Hooper. "I coulda sworn that today she sat up and gave me a big hello?"

"Never mind," said Fats, irritated. "That woman's never given any intern a big hello and she's not go

"Nope. No bowel sounds at all. Bowel might be dead. No nuthin' since you slipped her that 'extract' of yours last month."

"That stuff is dynamite," said Fats. "Keep ru

We waded through all the rest and ended with the Lady of the Lice, and Fats asked Eat My Dust if he'd found the cancer or the allergy.

"Who knows?" said Eddie. "I'm OTC."

"OTC? What the hell's OTC?"

"Off The Case," said Eddie. "New concept."

"Stop it. Pull yourself together. You can't be OTC."

"Why not?"

"Because you're her doctor, that's why, get it?" said Fats, mopping his brow. "Jesus. Did you ever find the cancer or the allergy?"

"Nope," said Eddies BMS, "the only thing we found was the sperm. Her last three urinalyses have come back 'sperm.' "

"Sperm? SPERM? In a demented seventy?nine?year old gomere?"

"Sperm. We think it's from Sam Levin, your pervert with diabetes."

That morning, the Fish was taking us on a field trip. Hooper had gotten paged to see the Leggo, and while we waited for him, wondering whether the Leggo had paged Hooper to castigate him for killing poor Rose Budz or to congratulate him for obtaining Rose's tricky postmortem, Eddie and I continued to torment the Fish in our usual ways until, eyeing us suspiciously, he left to make final arrangements. When Hooper reappeared, the Fish loaded us into his station wagon for our field trip. On the way, he talked sincerely about Hooper killing Rose Budz: "You know, you can't possibly learn medicine without killing a few patients. Why, I myself have killed patients. Yes, every time I killed a patient, I learned a little something from it."

It was hard to believe that he was actually saying that, and I drifted off, imagining the Fish saying, "Killing patients is a special interest of mine. I have recently had the opportunity to review the world literature on killing patients. Why, it would make a very interesting research project . . ." and by the time I snapped out of it, we were in the office of the Pearl.