The house of God

'It's not. I can't get them out of my mind. Everything reminds me of the year in the House. I don't know how to forget. It's wrecking my whole life. I never realized it would be so bad.'

'Don't try to forget, love. Try to work it through.'

'I thought I had.'

'No, it takes time. Here,' she said, holding me, 'talk to me, tell me where it hurts.'

I tell her. Again I tell her about Dr. Sanders bleeding out in my lap, about the look in Potts's eyes that night before he jumped, about my pushing the KCL into poor Saul. I tell her how ashamed I am for turning into a sarcastic bastard who calls the old ones gomers, how, during the ternship, I'd ridiculed them for their weaknesses, for throwing up their suffering in my face, for scaring me, for forcing me to do disgusting things to take care of them. I tell her how I want to live, compassionately, with the idea of death clearly in sight, and how I doubt I can do that, ever again. As I think back to what I'd gone through and what I'd become, sadness wells up and mixes with contempt. I put my head into Berry's folds and weep, and curse, and shout, and weep.

'. . . and in your own way, you did. Someone had to care for the gomers; and this year, in your own way, you did.'

'The worst thing is this bitterness. I used to be different, gentle, even generous, didn't I? I wasn't always like this, was I?'

'I love who you are. To me, underneath it all, you're still there:' She paused, and then, eyes sparkling, said, 'And you might even be better.'

'What? What do you mean?'

'This might have been the only thing that could have awakened you. Your whole life has been a growing from the outside, mastering the challenges that others have set for you. Now, finally, you might just be growing from inside yourself. It can be a whole new world, Roy, I know it. A whole new life' Eyes wet with tears, she said, 'I'm going to love you even more, Roy, because I've been waiting a long time for you to begin.'

Overwhelmed. Speechless. Excited, even happy. Yet it seemed too easy. 'I want to believe you, but it all seems so painful. The whole year seems like a nightmare now.'

'Not all of it. There was pleasure in it, too: the pleasure of the mastery of medicine, the pleasure of your group of guys, of latency.'

'Latency? What's latency?'

'Latency is the lull before adolescence. Latency is the time of clubs, groups, teams, when baseball is the most important thing in your life and the days are too short for all that you want to do. Latency is caring. This year's been a latency trip: during your internship, with all of you scared and brutalized, the caring in your bunch of guys sustained you:'

Cradled in her arms, I think back to then, to the tree house in the overgrown shallow ravine, to the early summer nights running out of the house leaping up and up in the warm dusk, to the baseball games when the pepperpot shortstop pegged a two-hop bouncer over to first base to just nip the runner in time, and as I began to curl down into the river must of sleep, like a song hummed by a tyrant and picked up by the birds and spread all along and away, a blanket of soothing ideas spreads itself over me, and I think of days so still that a match flame won't bend and I think of blind fish in the black world of a mammoth?painted cave who somehow, even in their icy smooth?walled limestone pool know about the flat hot slabs of summer slapped against the mime?white walls to warm a dozing cat in the middle of a street of a French hill village overlooking a river valley laced with chateaux of the real sort and of the mirrored marbled butchershop sort caressing chilled meat laced with ribbons of lard and a box of patisserie tied with a green ribbon with a loop looped for a child's finger and a market ebbing quiet as the words flow louder from the mouths of the cafes where men caricaturing French peasants sit with their cigarettes stuck to their lips and a cemetery which chimes 'Priez pour elle, Priez pour elle' in deathly silence and then I think that outside the House of God even in a cemetary there is no result just process and that here at last, with my love holding me, each day might be filled with all things and all colors and the eternal repetition of all colorful things renewed, and I feel that it just might be that in the flow of time the layers of bitterness might begin to peel away, until bitterness itself had become but a faint etching on a glass wall, layers of etched glass walls leading down a life toward a latency, a summergame, a summer of fun, and as I struggle to rest the layers of bitterness are beginning to peel off, are peeling off, leaving me homing upriver toward innocence and nakedness and rest, as in the time before the House of God with Berry thank God for Berry and except for Berry where would I be for without her I could never learn to love as once I did love and will love and love. Humbly, I ask her to marry me.

THE END.

LAWS OF THE HOUSE OF GOD

I. GOMERS DON'T DIE.

II. GOMERS GO TO GROUND.

III. AT A CARDIAC ARREST, THE FIRST PROCEDURE IS TO TAKE YOUR OWN PULSE.

IV. THE PATIENT IS THE ONE WITH THE DISEASE.

V. PLACEMENT COMES FIRST.

VI. THERE IS NO BODY CAVITY THAT CANNOT BE REACHED WITH A #14 NEEDLE AND A GOOD STRONG ARM.

VII. AGE + BUN = LASIX DOSE.

VIII. THEY CAN ALWAYS HURT YOU MORE.

IX. THE ONLY GOOD ADMISSION IS A DEAD ADMISSION.

X. IF YOU DON'T TAKE A TEMPERATURE, YOU CAN'T FIND A FEVER.

XI. SHOW ME A BMS WHO ONLY TRIPLES MY WORK AND I WILL KISS HIS FEET.

XII. IF THE RADIOLOGY RESIDENT AND THE BMS BOTH SEE A LESION ON THE CHEST X?RAY, THERE CAN BE NO LESION THERE.

XIII. THE DELIVERY OF MEDICAL CARE IS TO DO AS MUCH NOTHING AS POSSIBLE.

GLOSSARY

Admission: a patient entering the House of God; two types: emergency, through the emergency room; elective, scheduled.

Agonal: just before death, as in 'agonal' respirations.

Amyloidosis: chronic degenerative disease with increasing deposits of a starchy substance, amyloid, in many organs; rare; incurable.

Anal: pertaining to the anus, as in fissure (tear), sadism (a Freudian concept whereby a sadistic urge is related to early anal activity), and Mirror (cf. Dr. Jung's).

Aneurysm: a ballooning out of a vessel, especially an artery, before it bursts.

Angina pectoris: a pattern of cardiac pain, often felt in the chest, signaling severe disease of the coronary arteries, often a prelude to a heart attack.