The house of God

a fontanelle of its skull, the though Yes, Saul, I'll do it, I'll finish you off. I began to work like hell to save him.

I went back to the ward, and came to the room with Putzel's terminal?cancer woman. Fats was in there, playing cards, chatting. As I passed, something surprising happened in the game, a shout bubbled up and both the players burst out laughing.

After the next morning's cardflip, when Fats had gone to eat and Hooper had gone to Path, EMD got a silly look on his face and told me that Lionel Blazer had paged him to take a look at some 'little red things' on his gorgeous pubis that itched like hell. Eddie asked me what to do, and I said, 'Do? You're a doc, so do what docs do: examine him. Give five minutes and do it in here.'

I got the operator to page Fats and Hooper Selma and the nurses and the Fish and Housekeeping to come STAT to Gomer City, and then I watched Lionel come up the hallway, look around cautiously and enter the on?call room. I ran up to the group I'd paged and said, 'Hey, I got paged to go into the oncall room, STAT!' and then the ten of us rushed into the room. Lionel was blue?blazered only from the waist up and was sitting on the table naked from the waist down, pawing through his brown pubic hair. Eat My Dust was sitting across from him, lost in contemplation. When Lionel saw us, he went red and started to explain. He realized that he didn't want to explain and stopped, and blushed, and said, 'It's about a medical problem.'

'Crab lice,' said Eddie, 'Lionel's got the venereal crabs.'

'Medical problem?' I said. 'You know, we can't blame Lionel for this, no. We can only blame the system, the one that has paramedical personnel seeking free medical advice. How often is it that here in the House one gets tapped on the shoulder and hears, 'Hey, doc, I got this problem, you got a minute?''

Lionel put on his spinnaker?patterned briefs and his classy gray slacks and left. From that time on, whenever any of us ran into Lionel we couldn't help but think of him in terms of his unblazered, crab?infested prick.

'You shouldn't have done that, Basch,' said the Fat Man, walking out onto the ward with me.

'Why not?'

''Cause with guys like the Blazers, you can't win: as soon as you engage in the struggle, you lose. Lionel's boss, the flunky Marvin, who assigns admissions, is gonna make life miserable for you. Look, Roy, you're older than Hooper and Eddie, you can step back a little, and roll with it. It's hard enough without Blazers and Privates and Slurpers making it harder.'

'Give in to those assholes?'

'I never said that.'

'What's the alternative?' I asked, challenging him.

'Don't let them use you, Roy. Use them.'

'How?'

'Like this,' said Fats, sitting down across from Jane Doe and taking out his stopwatch. 'Observe.'

'What are you doing?'

'Using them. In ten minutes I'll explain.'

'Look, I want to go home. I'm going to sign out to Hooper.'

'Go ahead. Come back here in ten and I'll explain.' I went into the on?call room and signed out to Hooper, and even though I knew he hadn't heard a word I'd said, I didn't care, and I got up to go home. Hooper was reading the manual I'd used at the beginning of the year, How to Do It for the New Intern, the section on 'How to Do a Chest Tap:' I thought this strange, since we were more than halfway through the year and a chest tap was standard procedure. As we had gotten into the habit of helping each other out, even if it meant staying around a little longer, I asked. Hooper if he needed help and he said, 'You mean Lionel?' and I said, 'No, me,' and he said, 'Nah, I'll just read this manual and then go tap Rose Budz's chest.' I left him poring over the book and pointing j

his own finger at his own chest in the imaginary needle:

track he was going to take on Rose Budz. On the ward,~'

I rejoined Fats, who clicked off his watch, turned to me, and asked, 'What didn't happen?'

'I don't know.'

'Ten minutes, Basch, and Jane Doe didn't fart.'

'So?'

'So her bowel is completely turned off, for the time in House memory. That extract might just the cure for that VA diarrhea. A good deed; a fortoona. Just what I and the world need. Use 'em, Basch, use 'em.'

'Did you and the Fat Man get along any better?' asked Berry.

'Worse,' I said, 'not only does he love the gomers, but he's acting like a Boy Scout. He keeps telling us not to fight back, he makes me search the whole place for a demented ninety?seven?year?olds eyeglasses, and then he spends the whole night sitting up with a woman with terminal cancer after he's told her she's gonna die.'

'He did that?'

'Yeah, why?'

'I never pictured him doing things like that. The way you described him, he seemed so cynical, so sick. Now I'm not sure.'

'He's not cynical enough. He's turned into a patsy. It's almost like he's deserting me.'

'He seems more reasonable now. You're the one who's acting sick.'

'Thanks a lot.'

'I'm concerned, Roy. This acting out is dangerous. Maybe the Fat Man is right: someone's gonna get burned.'

I lay awake chewing on Berry's concern. It had been fun to say 'I don't know' to get the Fish, to get Lionel, to race around laughing and sarcastic, but there was a bud of bitterness in it that might blossom into savageness and make me sad enough to kill myself or mad enough to bite. I tried to get my worry in my hand, but I was a child grasping a sunbeam, opening my hand to find the light turned dark, the warmth gone. I drifted toward dream, finding myself ringside at a circus and seeing an elephant, yes, an elephant, and seeing a busty girl on a musty elephant puffing dusty sawdust under the roustabustybout and lusty really big and bustyredhot tent of a bighot top?WAIT! ?with some alarm I realized that Hyper Hooper had been sitting in the on?call room reading my manual with his finger as his needle pointing?no, it couldn't have been, but yes it was?pointing in a straight shot right toward Rose Budz the LOL in NAD's heart.

16

'OK, Hooper, let's hear about the postmortem on Rose Budz. Let's hear what you with your one little needle shot have done.'

Fats was flipping cards as we lay in the icy ventric of dead February as it lay in the corpse of the year. There was no question that Eddie and Hooper and I were on our knees and that they were breaking us. Most of the House hierarchies hated us. Gomer City was turning out to be the worst. Far from taking care of it, it was beginning to take care of us.

'The post on Rose Budz confirmed what we thought from when they sectioned the needle I used,' said Hooper in a tone of contrition mixed with a certain professional satisfaction. 'I got spleen, lung, stomp heart, and . . . and liver:' Hooper paused, watching the Fat Man drum his fingers on the desk, and went on, 'In other words, Fats, all the organs ' named the other day, plus a helping of liver and stomach as well. I think it's a new world record for most organs hit with a single needle shot.'

'Liver? The liver's nowhere near where you went in.'

I thought back to that day when Hyper Hoops presented his attempt to tap the Chest of Rose and had told us that 'there had been a little bleeding.' If a Californian isn't enthusiastic, it means a disaster has occurred, and Hooper meant that Rose was dying. He'd sent her to the MICU, and Fats, concerned and thinking malpractice, brought his Gomer City A Team to the MICU to see where the needle had gone in. The hole in Rose's chest was in the front, right over her heart. Fats had said, 'Come on, Hooper, you didn't really put your needle in there, did you?' and Hooper had said, 'Yup, that's what Roy's manual said, unless I had it upside down.' Although Hooper had seemed a bit contrite when the Fat Man had said, 'You never tap a chest from the front because things like the