The house of God

20

By the end of the first two weeks I was doing four miles a day. To my relief, what I'd feared was anginal pain was, according to Pinkus, pain referred from the stretching of the intercostal ligaments as the rib cage expanded, common to begi

But all was not Pinkus yet. Unlike him, I had yet to come to terms with the Unit. One side of me was filled with the horror of human misery and helplessness; the other was exhilarated, king in an erotic diseased kingdom, competent to run machines. Being on call every other night meant that there was never time to think about the world outside the House, and the conflicts of the Unit became the main conflicts of life. The nurses? Like the background in Vermeer's Lady with a Guitar, the empty black highlighting the glow of candle on lithe fingers, the disease highlighted the sex.

Often I'd find myself entwined in variants of the same erotic theme: late at night, the eerie artificial Unit light punctured only by the green-flashing BLEEP-BLEEP of the cardiac monitors. The nurse calls me from the bed to see a comatose patient whose body is being run by the machine, one parameter of which has gone awry. Following her to the bedside, I notice her bralessness, that she wears no pantyhose. I put a stethoscope on the body. I need to listen to the chest, and ask the nurse to help me. She bends over, the two of us hoist the body to sitting, tube dangling down. I listen to the clogged lungs, inflated by respirator, my fingers on the waxy skin, fighting the stench of chronic disease. I smell her perfume, coconut. Our heads are close together. I drop my stethoscope, put my free hand around her neck, kiss her. Her tongue and my tongue slither together. I lean my shoulder against the patient's body, freeing the other hand. The kiss prolonged, I fondle her breast through her cotton dress, a feeling the coarse fabric scratching against the skin, pulling the nipple erect. We part, the body falls back THUMP on the bed. Later, on her break, she comes to the on?call bunk bed, hoisting up her green surgical skirt because there isn't time to undress. We two begin to take out our hatred, our loneliness, our horror with human suffering and our despair at human endings in the most tender of human acts, making love. Knowing that she hates me for being a doctor, for forgetting her name three times that shift, for being a Jew who views her eunuch Pope's pronouncements on "Human Life" as comical at best, for ru

In tune with this spring theme of sex and death, like eight vultures, the days of Passover swooped down upon the House of God. Despite the false hope offered by Good Friday and Easter Sunday, with the coming of Passover there was no question of God's intent: death. Despite the technocratic thrust toward life, God flexed his biceps and triceps and, for all we knew, infini?omniceps, and began to mock us, with death. During Passover, patients began to drop like flies.

It was eerie. We'd work like hell on someone, who'd appear to have made it, and then?BLEEP?a cardiac arrest and death. I'd pick up a patient in the E.W., and as I put my stethoscope on him, he'd clutch his chest, turn blue, and die. I'd be sleeping peacefully, and?BUZZ?the arrest button would sound and I would run, blinking and trying to hide my sleep erection, into the bright neon and MUZAK searching out the room with the panic, and sure enough God had made his move and another had cooled on us. Afterward, looking back over the recordings stored up by Ollie, we'd find that despite our preparations, an aberrant beat would have landed at the vulnerable period and?BLEEP?ranting, arrogant, in strutted death.

All of us were shocked. The families of the dead, set up with hope and then smashed with despair, suffered beyond words. Blitzed, their own hearts cut from their moorings and rolling and floating in their chests like balls of wool in empty bags, they washed us with their tears. Jo, the perfectionist, was hard hit. By Day Four of Passover, she was frantic. Fighting the specter of what she took as a personal failure to keep her patients alive. Jo adopted a sort of phlogiston theory, deciding that there was something contaminated somewhere in the Unit. When Pinkus arrived, she assaulted him with this idea and insisted that the Unit be torn apart, top to bottom, to find the noxious agent that was killing her patients. Pinkus, phlegmatic, told her she could do as she wished, although he didn't think that was it. He asked me to feel his legs, and I did, and said, "Amazing."

"The Marathon's only six days away. Carbohydrate loading starts today,"

"Pinkus," said Jo with great intensity, the circles under her eyes even blacker, "I want to make one thing perfectly clear: we are going to win this war against; death."

The penultimate setback for Jo, was at four o'clock in the middle of the Fifth Night. Jo usually stayed up most of the night, but the stress of being the first woman resident to wrestle directly with the Angel of Death had worn her out, and with things seemingly under control, she'd gone to bed for an hour. Shortly thereafter, all hell broke loose, with a man named Gogarty, a spanking?fresh virgin MI, having a cardiac arrest. Jo was called, and with a fanaticism hardly ever seen in the Unit, spent an hour 4?plussing the victim back toward life. Unfortunately, Gogarty turned out to be a smokescreen, for as Jo and the nurses left room what sight should greet their eyes but Old Lady Zock spread?eagled nose?down on the tiled Unit floor-stone dead. It turned out that, having heard the commotion in Gogarty's room, Old Lady Zock, in a fine philanthropic gesture, had wished to pitch in at the arrest, and following the most heart?rending of House LAWS: GOMERS GO TO GROUND, had done so, in the process dislodging the cardiac pacemaker which was prodding her generous heart, and had died.

The final irony, of course?the story of Jo's life?that Jo's insisting all nurses tend to Gogarty had caused the neglect of Zock. When a Zock gets neglected, it shakes God's House.

The next morning, there was much commotion. It was Zocks versus Medicine. Recrimination City. Although in the confrontation the Leggo restrained himself from asking for a postmortem, Jo did not, and things got sticky. The Leggo told Jo to "get the hell back inside," and we watched as the caravan led the flock of Zocks away to one of the green plush "function rooms" donated by the Zocks and used only for the stroking of philanthropists of the House of God.

Fed up with Jo's "contamination" theory, I a