the light rays from the anus to the eyeballs and back, splitting it into colorful rainbows and sophisticated spectra which he elaborated with multivariate complex equations and graphs. Finishing, he said, 'Do you know how many Americans each day have painful bowel movements and blood on their toilet paper or in the bowl? Millions.'
'Why just Americans?' I joked. 'Why not the world?'
'Exactly. The only problem is translation. If it's millions in America, it's billions in the world. The anus is a great curiosity to almost all mankind. Everyone would like to see it, but no one can. Like darkest Africa before the missionaries. The Congo of the body.'
The hairs on the back of my neck tingled as I started to think that this might not be a joke, and I said, 'You're joking.'
The Fat Man did not reply.
'This is the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard.'
'It's not. And besides, that's always what they say about great inventions. It's like those vaginal mirrors that gynecologists are passing out?oh, by the way, you can adjust the Anal Mirror to look in there too-women are using the vaginal mirrors to get to know their vaginas. This is a unisex device. GET TO KNOW YOUR ASSHOLE.' Spreading his hands apart as if reading a bumper sticker or a marquee, Fats said, 'ASSHOLES ARE BEAUTIFUL. FREE THE ASSHOLES. The potential in human and financial terms is immense. Big fortoona.'
'This is outrageous.'
'That's just why it will sell.'
'But it's a joke, right? You didn't actually make an anal mirror?'
The Fat Man looked distractedly out into thin air.
Feeling queasy, I said, 'Come off it, Fats,' and I pleaded with him to tell me the truth. It was so preposterous that it might just be real, and over the past ten years whenever?I'd estimated what was fantasy in America?from Jack Ruby's blasting Lee Harvey Oswald's guts all over the insides of the TV tubes of America, to the brown paper bags of money delivered to Spiro Agnew in his vice?presidential chambers?I'd been wrong, dead wrong, and had always underestimated, falling far short of the absurd, which had inevitably turned out to be the real. 'Come on, Fats,' I shouted, 'tell me the goddamn truth! Do you mean it or don't you?'
'Do I?' Fats seemed to awaken from his reverie, and composing himself, said, 'Oh, of course I don't, do I? I mean, no one would think seriously of anything as crazy as that, would they? Just remember, Basch, about Anna and the other gomers: BUFF the charts, and hide it from Jo. See you later.'
I tried it. I decided to go all out on Anna O. and do my best to do nothing. Teetering on that barren precipice above the long leap down to death, Anna was put into a holding pattern governed by LAW NUMBER ONE: GOMERS DON'T DIE. Finally, one day, as I passed by her room I heard a healthy demented ROODLE! and my heart swung around on its apex with pride and I knew that Anna was back and that I had proved scienterrifically that, just as Fats had said, to do nothing for the gomers was to do something, and the more conscientiously I did nothing the better they got, and I resolved that from that time on I would do more nothing on the gomers than any other tern in the House of God. Somehow I'd find a way to hide my doing nothing from Jo.
It still wasn't clear how Jo's orthodox medical approach would work on those who the Fat Man had said could die, the non-gomers, the young. As the sweaty green and smelly summer months wore us out, as America frolicked in the news given it by a smalltime White House bureaucrat named Butterfield who revealed that Nixon had gotten so excited about being President that he'd installed a tape system to record every single immortal presidential word, which?immortal words he was trying like hell via some ruse called 'executive privilege' to keep from Sirica and Cox, Chuck and I gave ourselves up, during the day, to Jo's fanaticism about the dying young, letting her show us how to do everything to these non-gomertose patients, always. During the day we'd slog along with her, using her as a live textbook, and also, since she found it impossible to let us do things on our own, by feigning incompetence, using her to do anything distasteful, like disimpactions. I'd told Chuck and Potts about the Fat Man's analysis of Jo, and so at first we held ourselves in check, walking around her as if she were a fragile house of cards. We hid our contempt of her from her, and Chuck and I hid our doing nothing on the gomers from her. I slogged through the long, dull, duplicitous days with Jo, keeping Fats alive inside me until, every third night, he and I were together again on call. Remembering his saying about himself, 'I spell out what every other doc feels, but most squash down and let eat away at their guts.' I studied Jo to detect the symptoms of her ulcer, and studied the Fish for his big ulcer and the Leggo for his giant ulcer. Looming more and more clearly so as almost to be touchable, with me was always that comforting fat presence, just past the edges of my sight.
While I had Fats, and Chuck had himself?which seemed, given his having endured worse than the gomers, to have been enough?Potts didn't have much, and was having a helluva time. Having been burned by not telling Fats about the liver functions of the Yellow Man, Potts was reluctant to hide data from Jo. Jo was always on call with Potts, and so every night for Potts was the same as every day, with Jo niggling at him to 'feed the cat,' to do everything for all forty?five patients, always. Even if he'd wanted to try doing nothing on a gomer or two, Potts would not have been able to conceal it, for Jo, in her inability to trust anyone else, more or less took over Potts's service, running it for him. Like an overeager BMS trying to make an A, Jo would stay up the whole night writing obscure referenced discussions of the 'fascinating cases' in the charts, each BLEEP and shriek and nurse's question echoing off the lonely tile walls making Jo feel real full and needed as she never felt full and needed outside the House of God.
And so Potts was in rough shape. Thanks to Jo's aggressive treatment of the gomers, they got worse and never got TURFED, and the dying young took longer to die, and Potts's service swelled, so that out of the forty?five patients, he had twenty?five. Jo's increasing his work meant that on his nights on call he didn't sleep, and that he had to work harder and longer to stay afloat during the days. While Chuck and I, often being off duty the same night, got to be better and better friends, Potts never could do things with us outside the House, and he became more and more quiet and withdrawn. His wife, titillated on the rack of her surgical internship at Man's Best Hospital, MBH, where she was on call at least every other night, had virtually disappeared from his life. We watched Potts sink, and the deeper he sank, the more out of our reach he became. His dog began to pine.
During a late?August thunderstorm, the Yellow Man began to scream, and from the look on Potts's face when he heard the screams, it was as if his own liver was screaming in pain and affront. Coincidentally, another liver disease had presented itself to Potts: Lazarus was a middle?aged janitor who'd had the bad sense and good fortune to hold night jobs all his life, which allowed him to sit and destroy his liver with cheap booze. Lazarus' liver disease was not classy, it was just the standard sure?death brand of cirrhosis seen sucking the end of bottles wrapped in paper bags on every street corner of the world. Lazarus was going to die and was trying hard to do so. Jo and Potts stood in his way. Their efforts began on the plane of the heroic, and soon became, even in the House of God, legendary. From time to time Chuck and I would try to make Potts feel better about Lazarus, talking about how sad it was that he had cirrhosis and was dying.
'Yeah,' said Potts, 'the fuckin' liver gets me every time.'
'Why don't you just let him die?' I asked.
'Jo says he's gonna make it.'
'Make what, man, a new liver?' asked Chuck.
'Jo says I have to go all?out on him, do everything.'
'Is that what you want to do?' I asked.
'No. There's no cure for cirrhosis, and besides, I'll tell you something: Lazarus told me, the last time he was conscious, that he wanted to be dead. He was in so much agony he begged me to let him die. That last bleed from his esophagus where he was drowning in his own blood, scared him to death. I want to just let him die, but I'm afraid to tell that to Jo.'
'Man, you heard her. She wants to hear our complaints.'
'That's right,' said Potts, 'she did say 'any complaints, out in the open.' I'm going to tell her about not keeping him alive.'
Thinking that Jo would bring up the Yellow Man, I said, 'Don't tell her. She'll blast you to bits.'
'She wants to hear,' said Potts, 'she said she wanted to hear.'
'She doesn't want to hear,' I said. 'No way.'
'I want to hear 'em,' Jo had said, 'out in the open, got it?'
'She wants to hear 'em, she said she did,' said Potts.
'She doesn't. You tell her, and she'll blast you to bits.'
Potts told her that he didn't think that she was asking him to do the right thing by keeping Lazarus alive,
