The house of God

I nodded, and continuing my exam, asked what his business was.

"Nuts and bolts. Started with five hundred bucks ill the depression, and now . . . millions. Nuts and bolt not the best, but the most."

I told Nate that as long as we didn't do anything much to his bleeding gut, it would probably heal. A I finished, Trixie poked her head in, upset, saying that Nate would get only the second?best room in the House. Nate told her to scram, and said, "So what? I always get the best room; nobody visits you in the best room. So I'll rough it for a night. So what? That's what happened to those kids: all the time the best, and what happens? Fat. Too goddamn fat."

789 had had a rough day. Caught in a maze of tests ordered by Olive. O.'s Private, Little Otto, whose name still?still!?rang no belt in Stockholm, Sev was discouraged about making any headway with the humps. His first admission of the day had seen Sev and th radiology resident decide that the patient had a lesion on chest X ray, and when he presented the case to me, I dismayed him by quoting a House LAW: IF THE RADIOLOGY RESIDENT AND THE BMS BOTH SEE A LESION ON THE CHEST X RAY. THERE CAN BE NO LESION THERE. Despite Sev's insistence, the lesion turned out to be the technician's bracelet, and Sev was crushed. I tried to cheer him, but he'd have none of it, so I gave up. I'd try no more for anyone that night. "Sev," I said, hoisting myself down from the top bunk to the bottom, "I'm going to sleep. I want you to get your scrub suit and change into it now, so that you won't come barging in here later, turn on the light, and wake me up:' Through half?open eyes I saw the short, bearded scholar strip down, bare his pimply and already flabby body to the neon, quickly and scurrilously slip on his morgues gray scrub suit, and then pause. I asked what was the matter. After the thoughtful pause so characteristic of him, he said, "Dr. Basch, I've got several hours' more work to do tonight, and you don't. How come you're always going to sleep and I'm always staying awake?"

"Simple. You're a mathematician, right? Now, I get paid a fixed salary by the BMS, no matter how many hours I'm awake. You pay a fixed tuition to the BMS, no matter how many hours you're awake. Therefore, the more I sleep, the more I earn per waking hour, and the more you stay awake, the less you pay per waking hour. Got it?"

There was a pause and then Sev's QED: "So you get paid for sleeping, and I pay to stay awake."

"You got it. Hit the light on the way out, eh, good buddy? Oh, and remember: Nate Zock is not a BMS case. If you talk to him?even say 'Hi, Nate? or 'Hi, Mr. Zock' to him you die. Nighty?night."

I heard the ataxic shuffle of the little polymath, I felt the puzzled look back at me, and then the lights went out, and I slept.

By the next morning, something had changed. A small epidemic had begun. Never in the House of God had there been anything like it. Starting as a murmur, a trickle, a loss seen full?face on a dusk?dappled island, the epidemic spread, and was soon many rivulets streaming around many islands, sounding louder a louder, an ululation of a river against a sea. Suddenly urgently, five of us terns in the House had become infected with psychoanalytic thought. We had begun to BUFF ourselves for the possibility of TURFING ourselves into a residency in pyschiatry on July first.

Together we five began to study Mourning and Melancholia. We sought out Dr. Frank, who at first delighted with Eddie's interest in a psych residency at the House, but who, when four more of us folk suit, ran to the Leggo with the news. We ordered psych consults on our patients, and we attended psych rounds, our dirty whites conspicuous amidst the psychiatric fashion show, our rudimentary questions on anger, and loss, and guilt demonstrating our ignorance. At a case conference on an obscure autoimmune disease, Hooper startled us by letting fly a psychoanalytic interpretation based on Freud's "Death Wish." Eddie, still racing Hooper down the stretch for the alleged Black Crow, was delighted to find Freud so tight into anal sadism, and developed a facial tic. Chuck grooved on the passive?aggressive personality, and discovering his pathological closeness to his momma while his poppa was reading cowboy novels at work, came out with, "Man, it's amazin' I ain't queer, 'cause everythin' in my upbringin' points right to me bein' a fag." The Runt, of course, plunged deepest into the one whom Fats had tagged "that red?hot from Vie

The day came for our "future-plan-Leggo-chats." The Leggo had heard of the epidemic and had discounted it. He harbored no doubts about our future plans: the House residency year. With July less than a month away and a year full of residency on?call night slots to fill, the Leggo was a little surprised to hear the Runt, Hooper, and Eddie, one after the other, say: "Well, sir, I'm thinking of starting my residency in psychiatry."

"Psychiatry?"

"Yes, sir, on July the first."

"But you can't. You've agreed to stay in medicine for your residency year. I'm counting on you, on all of you boys, to stay."

"Yeah, but you see, I feel kind of urgent about this. Lotta things to work through, and some things, sir, well, they just can't wait."

"But your contract says?"

"There is no contract, remember?"

The Leggo didn't remember that the House had refused to write us a contract?the only way it could legally treat us like shit?and he said, "There isn't?"

"No. You said we didn't need one."

"I said that? Hmmm . . ." said the Leggo, drifting out the window. "Why, no one doesn't need a contract. No one doesn't, at all."

When Chuck mentioned psych, the Leggo burst out with "WHAT!? YOU TOO?"

"No foolin', Chief. What this country needs is a high?class black shrink, right?"

"Yes, but . . . but you've done so well so far in medicine. Up from the poverty of the rural South, your father a janitor, to Ober-"

"Ezactly, man, ezactly. And get this: today I was in my Clinic, and this chick got mad at me and threw this textbook across the table and hit me in the ear, and instead of smackin' her up side of her haid, I go: Hmmm, gurl, you mus' be angry, huh?' So right then I knew I was go

"But you can't start this July, I need boys like you."

" 'Boys'? Did you say 'boy'?"

"Well I . . . What I meant was?"

"Want me to send in Roy now?" '

"Basch? Hmmm. You wouldn't know his future plans, would you?"

"Yup."

"Psychiatry?"

"Really."

"Yes, well, no, you don't have to bother to send Roy in."

And so he didn't call me then. Despite Berry's formulation that the Leggo couldn't help it, that he had been damaged by the system, I was too angry not to see him as Nixonesque, getting squeezed by us as Nixon was getting squeezed by Sirica and the Supreme Court for the tapes. Couldn't it have been the Leggo himself, standing with St. Clair on the bow of the yacht Sequoia at Mount Vernon, listening to the ceremony of ship's bells and the National Anthem, who, when it was over, drunkenly spilled out: "They pay you nickels and dimes, but this is what makes it worth it." Berry was right?it was pathetic. But these pathetic men were powerful men, and soon the Leggo began to pressure us to stay. Through the Fish, at first by insinuation and then by clear threat, the Leggo made it known that to leave in July "would seriously-very seriously?jeopardize one's future plans and career." We didn't budge. The Leggo got more vicious. Vulnerable and powerless, we got madder. As July closer, all his retaliations having failed, the Leggo began to panic.