The house of God

'Why never mind?'

'Because you could care less. Damnit, Roy, you've gotten so concrete. You won't talk about anything except the internship.'

Feeling swamped with words, I found myself like sewerman Ralph Cramden on TV, 'Goddamnit, I don't want to think, 'cause when I do, I think of the disgusting things I do every day and it's so awful I want to kill myself. Get it?'

'You imagine that talking about your feelings would destroy you?'

'Yeah.'

'That's a fantasy.'

'A what?'

'A fantasy. Why don't you get some help?'

'Help?'

'Therapy.'

We fought. She probably knew we were fighting about Dr. Sanders's long dying and about the illusion in my father's letters and about my plethora of absent role models and the blossoming idea that the gomers were not our patients but our adversaries, and most of all we were fighting over the guilt that I felt for having Molly in a dark corner of the ward standing up, this Molly, who, like me, wouldn't stop and think and feel either, because if she ruminated on what she felt about enemas and emesis basins, she'd lose faith even in her centipede and want to kill herself too. Our fight was not the violent, howling, barking fight that keeps alive vestiges of love, but that tired, distant, silent fight where the fighters are afraid to punch for fear the punch will kill. So this is it, I thought dully, four months into the internship and I've become an animal, a mossbrained moose who did not and could not and would not think and talk, and it's come like an exhausted cancerous animal to my always love, my buddy Berry, and me?yes it's come to us: Relationship On Rocks, ROR.

9

'Fats?' I blurted out in amazement.

'The Today Show!' said the Runt, eyes popping.

'The Today Show?' I yelled.

'Fats!' said the Runt.

My mind did a swan dive.

'But did you actually see him on The Today Show?' I asked.

'Nope,' said the Runt, 'but somebody said they saw him disguised as Dr. Jung, and Barbara Waiters was interviewing him about some crazy thing called?'

'The Anal Mirror. I know all about it.'

'They say Barbara was giggling all the time. Hey, Roy, you wanna hear what she does with her mouth?'

'Barbara Waiters?'

'No, Angel. See, she takes her lips and wraps them around my?'

'Later,' I said. 'First I want to find Fats.'

I knew I'd find him eating, for it was lunchtime, and although he'd been farmed out to the Mt. St. Elsewhere, he'd made some special deal?as he always made some special deal?with Gracie from Dietary and Food which allowed him to eat in the House of God for free. With my stomach flip?flopping, I sat down with this Gargantua of medicine.

'What a delicious rumor,' said Fats, laughing. 'I wish it was true. I sometimes daydream about a spot interview with Cronkite on the CBS nightly news.'

'Why Cronkite?' I asked, reeling from the bizarreness of fatherly Walter Cronkite springing Dr. Jung's Anal Mirror on millions of great Americans expecting only war and jowly Nixon.

'Supposedly he has an anal fissure. Much of the disease in the world is reflected in the anus, you know, and I keep thinking that, somehow, packaged right, the reflection of the diseased anus could make me rich. Just think: if there was an Anal Mirror, and if Nixon owned one, every day he'd get a good look at exactly what he was. It's just the money, you know. I just want to be rich before Socialized Medicine kills me off. It's like what Isaac Singer said.'

'Singer the writer?'

'No, Singer the sewing machine. He said, 'I don't give a damn for the invention, it's the dimes I'm after' But listen, Basch, that laetrile idea the other night was dynamite. There's money there.'

'Laetrile? It's a hoax. Worthless. A placebo'

'So what's wrong with placebos? Don't you know about the placebo effect?'

'Of course I do.'

'Well, there you are. Placebos can relieve the pain of angina. If you're cooling from cancer, placebos are hot stuff. Like dyspareunia.'

'How?' I asked, my mind spinning around the simile.

'You know what they say: It's better to have dyspareuned than never to have pareuned at all.'

'Imagine: we could get the laetrile from apricot pits from Mexico, by bartering the Anal Mirrors for apricots.'

'You'd try to sell Dr. Jung's Anal Mirror to the Mexicans?'

'Of course not Dr. Jung's. Dr. Cortez's Anal Mirror. Lotta diarrhea in Mexico. You know how a Mexican knows he's hungry?'

'How?'

'His asshole stops burning. Ha! But we'd have to be careful in Mexico-might get sued for malpractice.'

'Why is that?'

'Well, even though we'd translate the warning into Spanish, there's always the danger that some jerk would use the Anal Mirror outdoors on a bright sunny day, and you know what happens then?'

'Nope.'

'Well, the lens concentrates the sunlight and it bounces back through the two mirrors and WHOOSH you get one flaming asshole, I'll tell you. Suit City. Demand their money back and all the rest.'

'And where would the money for all this come from?'

'From the raffle and the research project.'

'What raffle and what research project?'

'Well, at the Mt. St. E., I'm thinking of running a raffle, like they did in a Vegas hospital. If you're scheduled for surgery on Monday, and if you come in on Friday instead of Sunday night, you get free tickets to a raffle for a cruise. That way the Mt. St. E. fills its beds and I get a cut. If you win the raffle but die in surgery, the cruise goes to your estate.'

'And what about the research project,?'

'I'd rather not say. It would come out of your tax dollar, and it's completely illegal.'

'How's that?'

'My next rotation is the VA Hospital. Everybody knows how crooked the old VA is, eh? Big-time Watergate-style graft. Graft City.'

'This is all fantasy, right?' I asked, thinking of what Berry might say. 'To feed your idling mind? I mean, you wouldn't do any of this, would you, Fats?'

After a pause that sent a shiver through me, he said, 'Money is not shit. It is nothing to be ashamed of. This great country has a long and glorious history of graft and corruption and exploitation. Just think of what we've done to whole continents and entire little countries chock full of underdeveloped little people we've treated like rodents, let alone what we do to individuals. Why should I-or we-hold back? Did that anti-Semite Henry Ford hold back? Did Spiro Agnew? Did Joe McCarthy or Joe DiMaggio?you know the Yankee Clipper is hocking instant coffee