with new.'
'That never works. The blood still has to go through the liver, and there is no liver. He's going to die.'
'Yeah, that's what they all said too, but since he's young and was walking around yesterday, they think it's worth a try. They said I had to do it, tonight, and I'm scared stiff.'
Screams came from the room. The Yellow Man was flopping up and down on the bed like a hooked tuna, screaming. A member of Housekeeping ambled up, pushing two huge carts laden with linen, gowns, operating?room garb, and large polyethylene bags labeled 'Danger?Contaminated.' The head nurse told the Runt that the blood would be ready in half an hour and that there was only one nurse to assist, since the others were scared of sticking themselves with a needle and catching the fatal disease. They refused to work in the room. The Runt and I watched the nurse walk away, and watched Housekeeping, whistling, disappear into the down elevator. The Runt looked up at me with terror in his eyes; and then put his head on my shoulder and cried. I didn't know what to do. I would have volunteered to help, but I was scared of catching whatever bad thing it was that had you walking around chatting up the Tit one day and convulsing like a hooked tuna the next.
'Do one thing for me,' said the Runt. 'If I die, take the money in my trust fund and donate it to the BMS. Make a prize for the member of the class, who first realizes the insanity of this business and drops out to do something else.'
I helped him on with his sterile operating?room garb, his gloves, face mask, hat. Like an astronaut, he launched himself with an awkward shuffle into the room, up to the bed, and started the procedure. The bags of fresh blood began to arrive. With a lump in my throat I walked out, down the corridor. The cries, smells, bizarre sights riddled my head like bullets in a nightmare war. Even though I hadn't touched the Yellow Man, I went to the bathroom and gave myself a long surgical scrub. I felt terrible. I liked the Runt, and he was going to poke himself with a contaminated needle, catch this liver?ripping hepatitis, turn yellow, flip like a gaffed fish, and die. And for what?
As if in a tankful of water, I listened to Berry while I read my father's latest letter:
. . By now you must be in the middle of your work and it will settle down to a routine. I know that there is so much to learn and you will be immersed in it. Medicine is a great profession and it is a wonderful thing to be able to heal the sick. I played eighteen on Saturday in the heat and it was made bearable by a gallon of iced tea and a birdie on number . . .
Unlike my father, Berry was not as interested in preserving an illusion of medicine as she was in understanding my experience. She asked me what it had been like, and although I tried to tell her, I realized that it had not been like anything, and I could not.
'But what made it so hard? The fatigue?'
'Nope. I think what made it hard was the gomers and the Fat Man.'
'Tell me about it, love'
I told her how I couldn't decide whether or not what the Fat Man taught about medicine was crazy. The more I saw, the more sense the Fat Man made. I had begun to think I was crazy for thinking he was crazy. As an example, I told Berry about the gomers and about how we'd laughed at Ina in her Rams helmet socking Potts with her purse.
'Calling old people gomers sounds like a defense.'
'Gomers aren't just old people. The Fat Man says he loves old people and I believe him, because he gets tears in his eyes when he talks about his grandmother and her matzoh balls that you eat sitting on ladders scraping them off the ceiling.'
'Laughing at this Ina is sick.'
'It does seem sick right now, but it didn't then.'
'Why did you laugh at her?'
'I don't know. It was hilarious at the time.'
'I'd like to understand. Try again.'
'Nope. I can't.'
'Try to snap out of it, Roy, please?'
'No! I don't want to think about it anymore.'
I shut up. She got mad. She couldn't have known that all I wanted then was to be taken care of. Things had moved fast. Two days, and already, like swimming in a strong current, I'd looked up and found my life an eternity farther downstream, the near bank far gone. A rift had opened. Up until then, Berry and I had been in the same world, outside the House of God. Now, for me, the world was inside the House, with the Yellow Man my age and the Runt both about to Grump, with the dead father my age who'd popped an aneurysm playing baseball, with the Privates, the Slurpers, and the gomers. And with Molly. Molly knew what a gomer was, and why we'd laughed. With Molly, so far, there had been no talk, there'd been only the straight bendovers, the clefts and the round full hollows, the red nails and blue lids and panties splashed with flowers and rainbows, and the laughter amidst the gomers and the dead. Molly was the promise of a breast against an arm. Molly was recess.
Yet Molly was recess from much that I loved. I didn't want to laugh at patients. If it really were as hopeless as the Fat Man said, I'd give up now. I didn't like this rift with Berry, and so, thinking to myself that the Fat Man really was bananas after all and that, somehow, if I believed him I'd lose Berry, I said, 'You're right. It's sick to laugh at the old people. I'm sorry.' For an instant I saw myself as a real doc rushing in and saving lives, and Berry and I sighed together and snuggled together and got undressed together and were together in love together tight and warm?wet, and that portending rift sealed over again.
She slept. I lay awake, afraid of my tomorrow, my upcoming first night on call.
5
When I went to wake up Chuck the next morning, he looked wrecked: his afro smushed down over one side of his head, his face scarred from the wrinkles of the sheets, the white of one eye red, and the other eye swollen shut.
'What happened to your eye?'
'Bugbite. Bugfuckinbite, right in my eye. There's some fierce kind of bug in this on?call room.'
'Your other eye looks terrible too.'
'Man, you should see it from this side. I called Housekeeping for some clean sheets, but you know how it is. I never answered calls neither, before those postcards started arrivin'. There's only one way to handle Housekeeping, man, and I'm gonna do it.'
'What's that?'
'Love. The boss of bedmaking is named Hazel. She's a big Cuban woman. I know I could love her.'
In the cardflip, Potts asked Chuck how it had gone.
'Great. Six admissions, the youngest seventy?four.'
'What time did you get to sleep?'
'Midnight.'
Amazed, Potts asked, 'How? How'd you ever get the writeups done?'
'Easy, man, shitty write?ups, man, shitty write?ups.'
'Key concept,' said the Fat Man, 'to think that you're doing a shitty job. If you resign yourself to doing a shitty job, you go ahead and get the job done, and since we're all in the ninety?ninth percentile of interns, at one of the best ternships in the world, what you do turns out to be a terrific job, a superlative job. Don't forget that four out of every ten interns in America can't speak English.'
'So it wasn't so bad, Chuck?' I asked hopefully.
'Bad? Oh, it was bad. Man, last night I was used'
My worst warning was the Runt. As I'd walked into the House that morning, deflated by the transition from the bright and healthy July to the diseased neon and a?seasonal stink of the corridor, I'd passed the room of the Yellow Man. Outside it were the bags marked 'Danger?Contaminated,' now full of bloodstained sheets, towels, scrub suits, and equipment. The room was covered with blood. A special?duty nurse, wrapped like a spacewoman in sterile clothes, was sitting as far from the body as possible, reading
