helplessness.
'Help me, God, this is awf . . .'
I tried to think of good things, of a woman in a punt on the willowed Cherwell at Oxford, trailing her finger in the leafy stream, but all I could think of was the day's headlines, the sixteen?year?old girl who'd run away to see the world and who was found off a Florida beach naked folded up in a weighted traveling case, and a beaten child wheeled into a courtroom curled up in a fetal position in a crib, who was a vegetable and who 'was not going to get any better' and the surgeon said that when he'd first gotten to the child he didn't even know what he was looking at because it was a mass of rotten flesh, days old, and on the abused child's back, burned into his flesh and scabbed over, were the letters: I?C?R?Y.
When I looked back down into my lap, Dr. Sanders was dead. Much of the eighty?percent blood?water that had been him was drained out onto me.
I held his head in my lap until his sick killer blood had oozed out of his heart and brain and into his gut and skin and all the places it should never have been, and, refusing to clot, had flowed out of all the open holes in his body, the last his lazing anus. I held his hairless head in my lap and in my arms until the flow stopped. I laid him back in his bed and covered him gently with his sheet and I wept. He was the first patient whom I'd loved who'd died. I went to the nursing station. The way I put my feet down, one in front of the other, made me think of a chronic schizophrenic I'd seen, a former Ziegfeld Girl who'd been at an asylum since the Follies, and who, each day, rain or shine, would trudge across the meadow with a determined and precise step in an unerring and, clean straight line that would have brought joy to a surveyor's heart, CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP, going nowhere, empty inside.
'Dr. Sanders is dead,' I said, sitting down.
'That's too bad. Did you get the postmortem?' asked Jo.
'What?'
'I said, did you get the postmortem?'
I had a vision of lifting the little prodigy up by her thin shoulders, shaking her until her brain splattered against her shell of skull and she convulsed, kneeing her in the guts until I'd wrecked her ovaries from ever spitting out another egg, and then heaving her through the sixth?floor window so she'd splatter arid have to be sucked up by noisy, powerful sucking?up machines and become a bag of goo, picked .over and strained by Hyper Hooper's Israeli Pathology Resident in the morgue. But Jo was pitiful, and so I gritted my teeth and just said, 'No.'
'Why not?'
'I didn't want to.'
'That's not good enough,' said Jo.
'I didn't want to see his body ripped to shreds in the morgue.'
'I don't understand what you're saying.'
'I loved him too much to see his body ripped apart downstairs.'
'That kind of talk has no place in modern medicine.'
'So don't listen,' I said, beginning to lose control.
'The postmortem is important,' said Jo. 'It's the flower of the science of medicine. I'll call the next of kin myself.'
'Don't you dare!' I screamed. 'I'll kill you if you do!'
'How do you think we're able to deliver such precise medical care to those entrusted to us?' asked Jo.
'That's bullshit, that we deliver medical care at all,' I said.
'Have you gone mad? This ward?my ward is looked up to in the House for being the most efficient and having the most success with placement and handling the toughies with skill. My ward is a legend. Damnit,' said Jo, jutting her jaw, 'I want that post.'
'Jo. Go fuck yourself.'
'I'll have to report this to the Fish and the Leggo. I won't have sentimentality ruining my ward. My ward has become a legend in its own time.'
'Do you know why it's become a legend? You don't want to hear.'
'Of course I want to hear, even though I know why already.'
So I told her. I started by telling her about how Chuck and I had, after our original empirical test on Anna O., become fanatics at doing nothing and had lied to Jo about it, making up all forms of imaginary tests and BUFFING the charts. I told her how in modified form we'd done the same with the dying young, who went ahead and died, but died without the hassle, pain, and prolongation of suffering that their care might otherwise have produced. The final thing I told her about was placement.
'Placement picked up because the Social Service liked me and I did such a good job running my ward,' said Jo anxiously.
'Jo, everybody hates you and the only reason that placement picked up is that the Runt and I are fucking Rosalie Cohen and Selma respectively. Not to mention the clean sheets.'
'What about the clean sheets?'
'Chuck has been fucking Hazel from Housekeeping.'
'I don't believe you. No one would do this to me'
'Everyone would if they could, but your terns are in a privileged position.'
'You just think you're above it all,' said Jo. 'Better than everyone else, like you don't have to stoop down to get postmortems. You're afraid of the dirty side of medicine, right?'
'No, sir,' I said.
'You mean you're not afraid of the dirty side of medicine?' asked the Leggo, his eyes running up and down my bloody whites.
'No, sir, to my knowledge I am not.'
Clad in his butcher?length white coat and with stethoscope, as always, wending its way down into God knows where, he was standing looking out the window, holding my curriculum vitae in his hand. He looked lonesome. Like Nixon must have looked. I stood in front of his large desk. Diplomas buzzed me from all directions, and I was mesmerized by a model of the urinary tract, filled with colored water and driven by an electric motor, bubbling red urine through everything at a healthy clip. My mind was empty of everything but how Dr. Sanders had become a bag of blood?squishy, bloated, and dead.
'You know,' said the Leggo, waving my C.V. around in the air, 'you look great on paper, Roy.. When I punched your name into the computer to match you for this internship, I was happy. I thought you could be a leader of the interns and of the residents, and even, someday, Chief Resident.'
'Yes, Sir, I understand.'
'Say, you've never been in the military, have you?'
'No, Sir.'
'Yes, I knew that, because that's why you call me 'sir.' 'Sir' is the military form of address, do you see?'
'I don't get it.'
'People who have been in the military never call me 'sir.' '
'Oh? Why not?'
'I don't know why not. Do you?'
'No, I don't. Except it seems to fit.'
'It's the strangest thing. I mean, you'd think it would be the other way around, right?'
'What does it mean?'
'I don't know, do you?'
'No. It's the strangest thing. Sir.'
'Yes, it's the strangest . . : '
As he trailed off out the window, I fantasized about him: his life had been lived with the vow never to be as cold as his own pop, and yet, like Jo, the Leggo had become a victim of success, had slurped his way up, and had become so cold that his own son must already be in treatment to work out his revulsion for his cold pop and his longing for his cold pop to be as warm and loving as his pop's pop, his grandpop. The Leggo had spent his whole life living for that electric moment in medicine when a concept cleared away the stench of a disease, and when this
