The house of God

Gardens. The Yellow Man lay still, absolutely still. The Runt was nowhere to be seen.

It wasn't until lunch that I was to see him. He was cigar?ash gray. Eat My Dust Eddie and Hyper Hooper led him to the lunch table like a dog on a leash. As he put his tray down, we noticed there was nothing on it but silverware. No one pointed that out.

'I'm going to die,' said the Runt, taking out his pillbox.

'You are not going to die,' said Hooper. 'You are never going to die.'

The Runt told us about the exchange transfusion, about taking the old blood out of one vein and putting the new blood into another: 'Things were going pretty well, and then, I'd taken a needle out of the groin and was about to put it into the last bag of blood, and that porpoise, Celia the nurse, well, she held up this other needle from the Yellow Man's belly and . . . stuck it in my hand.'

There was a dead silence. The Runt was going to die.

'All of a sudden I felt faint. I saw my life ebb past me. Celia said Gee I'm sorry and I said Aw shucks it's all right it just means I'm going to die and Mellow Yellow's twenty?one and I'm twenty?seven and I've already lived six more years than him and I've spent my last night doing something I knew was completely worthless and we'll die together, him and me, but it's OK, Celia.' The Runt paused, and then screamed, 'HEAR ME, CELIA? IT'S OK! I went to bed at four A.M. and I was sure I'd never wake up.'

'But the incubation period is four to six months.'

'So? So in four months one of you will exchange-transfuse me.'

'It's all my fault,' said Potts. 'I shoulda hit him with steroids.'

After the others had left, the Runt turned to me and said he had a confession to make: 'It's about my third admission last night. In the middle of all this crap with the Yellow Man, this guy comes into the Emergency Room and I . . . I couldn't handle it. I offered him five dollars if he'd go home. He took it and left.'

Prodded by my fear of its arrival, my time to be left alone on call arrived. Potts signed out his patients to me and went home to Otis. Scared, I sat at the nursing station, watching the sad sun die. I thought of Berry, and wished I was with her, doing things that young ones like us were supposed to be doing, while we still had our health. My fear mushroomed. Chuck came up, signed out his patients and asked me, 'Hey, man, notice anything different?'

I did not.

'My beeper, man, it's off. They can't get me now.'

I watched him walk down the long corridor. I wanted to call out to him, 'Don't go, don't leave me alone here,' but I did not. I felt so lonesome I wanted to cry. The Fat Man, earlier in the afternoon, as I'd gotten more and more nervous, had tried to reassure me, telling me that I was lucky, that he'd be on call with me all night.

'Besides,' he'd said, 'tonight's a great night, it's The Wizard of Oz and blintzes.'

'The Wizard of Oz and Blintzes?' I asked. 'What's that?'

'You know, the tornado, the yellow brick road, and that terrific Tin Man trying to get into Dorothy's pants. Great flick. And at the ten?o'clock meal, blintzes. We'll have a ball.'

That hadn't helped me much. As I tended to the chaos of the ward, handling the now?hydrated and violent Ina Goober and tending to the feverish Sophie, who by now was so out of it from the LP that she'd attacked Putzel, I almost trembled with fear of what was to come. And then, when my time came, I choked. I was on the toilet and from six flights down, in her communications bunker, the page operator scored a direct hit:

DR. BASCH CALL EMERGENCY WARD FOR AN ADMISSION, DR. BASCH . . . Someone was dying in the E.W. and they wanted me? Didn't they know not to come into a teaching hospital in the first week of July? They wouldn't see a doctor, they would see me. What did I know? I panicked. Olaf's Potato started to zing through my mind again, and, heart pounding, I sought out the Fat Man, who was in the TV room immersed in The Wizard of Oz. Nibbling at a salami, he was singing along with the flick: 'Because because because because because of the wonderful things he does. We're off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Ozzz . . .'

It was difficult to interrupt him. I thought it peculiar that he'd take an interest in something as playful as Oz, but I soon found out that his interest was, like many of his interests, perverted:

'Do it,' Fats muttered, 'do it to Dorothy with the oil can. Spin her around on your hat, Ray, spin her around on your hat.'

'I've got something to tell you,' I said.

'Shoot.'

'There's a patient, an admission, in the Emergency Ward.'

HZ SAMUEL SHEM

'Good. Go see her. You're a doctor now, remember? Doctors see patients. Do it, Ray Bolger, do it to her STAT!'

'Yeah, I know,' I squeaked, 'but I . . . you see, someone's going to be dying down there, and I . . : '

Taking his eyes off the tube, Fats looked at me and said in a kind voice, 'Oh, I see. Scared, huh?'

I nodded and told him that all I could think of was Olaf's big potato.

'Right. OK, so you're scared. Who isn't, his first night on call? Even I was scared too. Let's go. We gotta hurry. We've only got half an hour till the ten o'clock meal. What nursing home is she from?'

'I don't know,' I said as we walked to the elevator.

'You don't know? Damn. They've probably already sold her bed, so we won't be able to TURF her back there. One of the true medical emergencies, when the nursing home sells the gomere's bed.'

'How do you know it will be a gomere?'

'The odds, just playing the odds.'

The elevator opened, and there was the 6?North tern, Eat My Dust Eddie, standing with a stretcher on which was piled his very own first E.W. admission: three hundred pounds of flesh, naked but for dirty underpants, huge herniations of his abdominal wall, a great medicine hall of a head with little slots for eyes, nose, and mouth, and a bald skull covered with purplish crisscrossing neurosurgical scars so it looked like a box of Purina dog chow. And all of it was convulsing.

'Roy,' said Eat My Dust, 'meet Max.'

'Hi, Max,' I said.

'HI JON HI JON HI JON,' said Max.

'Max perseverates,' said E.M.D. 'They unhooked his frontal lobe.'

'Parkinson's disease for sixty?three years,' said Fats, 'a House record. Max comes in when his bowels get blocked. See that intestine pushing its way out through the scars in his belly? Those lumps?'

We did.

'If you X?ray it, you'll find it's feces. Last time Max was here, it took nine weeks to clean him out, and the only thing that finally worked was a small?handed female Japanese cellist who was also a BMS student, equipped with special long?armed gynecological gloves, and promised the internship of her choice if she would disimpact Max manually. Wanna hear 'Fix the lump'?'

We did.

'Max,' said Fats, 'what do you want us to do?'

'FIX THE LUMP FIX THE LUMP FIX THE LUMP,' said Max.

Eat My Dust Eddie and his BMS put their shoulders to the wheels of the stretcher, and Max, gathering momentum, rolled off into the n8on sunset. Yoked together, the three looked like they were trudging around a ring of the mountain of Purgatory. Coming back to my senses as we rode the elevator down, I asked the Fat Man how come he seemed to know all the patients, like Max, Ina, and Mr. Rakitansky.

'There is a finite number of House gomers,' said Fats, 'and since GOMERS DON'T DIE, they rotate through the House several times a year. It's almost as if they get their yearly schedules in July, just like us. You get to know them by their particular shrieks. But what diseases does your gomere have?'

'I don't know. I haven't seen her yet.'

'Doesn't matter. Pick an organ, any organ'

I fell silent, so scared that I was having trouble thinking of an organ.

'What is this? Where did they get you from? On quota? Is there affirmative action for Jews? What lies