The house of God

The last mime skewered me: The Maskmaker switched back and forth a smiling mask, a crying mask, faster and faster, until finally the smiling mask got stuck on his face and he couldn't remove it. The human struggle, the frantic effort to be rid of a suffocating mask; trapped, writhing, wearing a smile.

The theater erupted. Ten encores, twelve. BRAVO! BRAVO! we screamed, and flowed out with the rejuvenated crowd. I blinked, confused. Inside me, all was chaos. My calm had been the calm of death. More than anything, I wanted to jackboot Pinkus in his plump pink soleus. Thank God for Berry, for my orthodox samaritans, my policemen. As we parted from them, Gilheeny, touched, said, "Good night, friend Roy. We'd been worried that we'd lost you."

"We've seen it happen before to interns," said Quick,

"and if it had happened to you, it would have been a singular loss. God bless."

Later, Berry welcomed me back to her, and I felt her caring arms around me as if for the first time. Awakening, I began to thaw. I began to feel a trickle, then a rush of feeling that was scary and overwhelming. Choked up, I began to talk. On and on into the night I talked about the things I'd blotted out. The theme, over and over, coating my bedroom walls with a grayish?white mottled skin, was death. I talked about the horror of the dying, and the horror of the dead. Guiltily I told her about injecting the KCL into Saul. She couldn't hide her shock. How could I have done that? Even if my head told me, Yes, it had been for the best, my heart cried out, No! I hadn't done it for him, for the humanity of it, no. Angrily, to shut him up and to get back at them, I'd done it for me. I'd killed a human being! How that phrase would haunt me, tail me like an Israeli agent a Nazi, search me out when I was least suspecting, clamor after me in sleepy tropical courtyards of my new life where I'd thought that I'd found peace. Finding me, it would accuse me, and I would say: "I must have been out of control, crazy." Coldly, rightly, it would say: "That can be no excuse."

I talked on, about the families of the patients in the Unit, coming in, searching my eyes for hope. What had I done? I'd done everything I could to avoid them. I had been as far from the world of humans as I could get. Disgusted, I talked about how, in the face of suffering, I'd been professionally nonchalant. Where compassion had been needed more desperately than any medicine, I had been sarcastic. I'd avoided feeling everything, as if feelings were little grenades blasting off a fingernail, a toe, a fragment of a heart. Tears in my eyes, I asked Berry, "Where have I been?"

"Regressed. I thought I'd lost you for good."

"Why? Why did I get like that?"

"The more the hurt, the more the fantasied need for defenses. Potts's death rocked you. You imagined yourself to be so fragile; you wouldn't let yourself grieve: Like a two?year?old scared of the dark, you locked onto rituals-your machines, your crazy idolization of Pinkus-to protect you."

She was right. Since Potts's suicide, all of us had gone around like zombies, stu

"This internship?this whole training?it destroys people."

"Yes. It's a disease. The kind of stress you're under, unless you can find some safety, some caring, you've got only a few choices: kill yourself, go crazy, kill someone else. Potts had no one, no way to survive." Berry paused, took, my head in her hands, and more seriously than I'd ever seen her, said, "Roy, you're a survivor. You'll make it now, to bear witness, to record the ones who didn't survive."

All across the country, interns were killing or going crazy, trying to survive. The medical hierarchy would continue. The new residents would say to the new interns: "We did it, now you do it." It was the scaly underside of the American Medical Dream. It was Nixon, in these "edited transcripts" shocking Americans with "I don't give a shit what happens, I want you to stonewall it . . ." And it was my own arrogance in the face of the most feeling human events. a loved one's sickness, a loved one's suffering, a loved" one's death. No more. I would not pay the price, Having felt the first tantalizing suckings of this leech, this doctor's disease, I'd burn the fucker off. How?

"I'm here, Roy," said Berry. "Don't shut me out. I care, and your friends care too. Sharing the experience is what will get all the rest of you through."

"Fats!" I cried out. Apprehensive, worried that by fighting with him in Gomer City and by avoiding him while in the Unit I'd wrecked something with him, I got up. I had to see him right away and tell him. "Gotta see the Fat Man," I said, heading for the door. "Gotta tell him before it's too late."

"It's three AM Roy. What do you want to tell him?"

"That I'm sorry . . . And that I like him . . . And thanks."

"He won't like it if you wake him in the middle of the night."

"Yeah. Damn," I said, sitting back down, "I hope that there's still time."

"There will be. There always is, with people like him."

That was a begi

23

"What are you going to do on July the first?" I asked Chuck.

"Who knows, man, who knows? All I know is I don't want to do no more of this."

It was May Day. I was in the on?call room of my final ward rotation, 4?South. I was lying in the top bunk. This was unusual. The tern always used the bottom bunk so that he wasn't at risk of GOING TO GROUND from the Orthopedic Height and breaking his hip. For some reason I'd had the urge to lie in the top bunk, up under the ceiling, far back from the leading edge. I'd gathered pillows, climbed the ladder, and settled into a peaceful horizontality, snuggled up against the back wall, staring at the pea?green, sea?green ceiling. Very nice. I wished that the top bunk had side rails, like a gomer bed or crib. I wished food, a breast, a nipple, why not?

There I was to stay. Others would try to move me, and at times, others would succeed, but I had work to do. Having recognized the doctor's disease, I wasn't sure that I could escape. Oh, yes, I had work to do, on compassion, on love. Like a park attendant with a steel-tipped stick, I had to patrol the darkening seaside summer park, browsing around the bandstand in the wake of the wedding, stabbing, collecting the shredded scraps of self scattered among the rainbow of confetti, ruffled in the breezes from the bay. From my top bunk I could see in through the windows of the fleshed-out Wing of Zock. With the spring, the workers seemed renewed, and in the plush GI radiology suite across from me, imitation gold toilet fixtures lay scattered on the thick green carpet like mushrooms. This pristine Wing of Zock offered hope, for the House of God, for the People. My hope was to finish the year in one piece.