heart get in the way,' Hooper had brightened right up and said, 'It's OK, Fats, it's a great family for the post.
'I know there's usually no liver,' said Hooper, 'but it seems as how in this case there was an aberrant lobe.'
'Messy TURF, Hooper, messy TURF,' said Fats solemnly, slowly ripping Rose Budz to shreds. Again Hooper had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Holding up another card, Fats called out, 'Tina? Eddie?'
'Dead,' said Eat My Dust.
'What?!' shouted Fats. 'Tina too? How? Who killed her?'
'Not me,' said Eddie, 'all I did was get her to sign for dialysis. The Leggo's crack dialysis team did the rest.'
Tina had died by being inadvertently murdered by a nurse in dialysis who'd mixed up the bottles. Instead of diluting Fast Tina's blood, the machine had concentrated it further, and all the water had been pulled out of Tina's body and her brain had shrunk and rattled around in her skull like a pea while the nurse sat and read Cosmopolitan. Tina's pea?brain had rattled and stretched until one of the arteries straining between her neck and thalamus burst and she had hemorrhaged to death.
'Sorry to say this, Hooper,' said Eddie, 'but since Tina was my patient, it's another postmortem for the kid.'
'Stop!' said Fats. 'Tina was the Leggo's patient. No Post.'
'But the Leggo loves posts. He called them the flower?'
'Not when they prove malpractice!' said Fats in a tone that would hear no answer, all the while ripping Tina's cards to pieces. 'Next? Jane Doe?'
'Hey, doin' great,' said Hooper. 'I coulda sworn that today she sat up and gave me a big hello?'
'Never mind,' said Fats, irritated. 'That woman's never given any intern a big hello and she's not gonna start with an intern like you, slobbering after her corpse. Any bowel activity yet?'
'Nope. No bowel sounds at all. Bowel might be dead. No nuthin' since you slipped her that 'extract' of yours last month.'
'That stuff is dynamite,' said Fats. 'Keep running in the VA antibiotic, Hooper. We've got to turn her on again. Next.'
We waded through all the rest and ended with the Lady of the Lice, and Fats asked Eat My Dust if he'd found the cancer or the allergy.
'Who knows?' said Eddie. 'I'm OTC.'
'OTC? What the hell's OTC?'
'Off The Case,' said Eddie. 'New concept.'
'Stop it. Pull yourself together. You can't be OTC.'
'Why not?'
'Because you're her doctor, that's why, get it?' said Fats, mopping his brow. 'Jesus. Did you ever find the cancer or the allergy?'
'Nope,' said Eddies BMS, 'the only thing we found was the sperm. Her last three urinalyses have come back 'sperm.' '
'Sperm? SPERM? In a demented seventy?nine?year old gomere?'
'Sperm. We think it's from Sam Levin, your pervert with diabetes.'
That morning, the Fish was taking us on a field trip. Hooper had gotten paged to see the Leggo, and while we waited for him, wondering whether the Leggo had paged Hooper to castigate him for killing poor Rose Budz or to congratulate him for obtaining Rose's tricky postmortem, Eddie and I continued to torment the Fish in our usual ways until, eyeing us suspiciously, he left to make final arrangements. When Hooper reappeared, the Fish loaded us into his station wagon for our field trip. On the way, he talked sincerely about Hooper killing Rose Budz: 'You know, you can't possibly learn medicine without killing a few patients. Why, I myself have killed patients. Yes, every time I killed a patient, I learned a little something from it.'
It was hard to believe that he was actually saying that, and I drifted off, imagining the Fish saying, 'Killing patients is a special interest of mine. I have recently had the opportunity to review the world literature on killing patients. Why, it would make a very interesting research project . . .' and by the time I snapped out of it, we were in the office of the Pearl.
This was our second field trip: The Fish took us on field trips to get us out of the House, to minimize the damage we were doing to his Chief Residency year and his career. The first field trip had been a ghetto health center, where the Fish had seemed ill at ease. This was the opposite. The Pearl had risen up through the House Slurpers as easily as the Fish might have wished, and by this time had become the richest Private in the House, the city, perhaps the world. In his office all was automated and set to Muzak. The Muzak played
'Of course. Even in the bowels of the nonstars, one can find the big fortoonas.'
After the ten?o'clock meal I went to see Molly on floor six. She was mad at me for forgetting it was Valentine's Day and not getting her a gift. She yelled at me and I felt guilty because I did like her and I even found myself dreaming about her, which must have meant that I sort of loved her, and I really loved making love to her because she still moaned like a moist Mesopotamian every damn time. Theoretically I had just as much interest in her, and I still saw her as a short?skirted majorette from St. Mesopotamia High marching along throwing her tan kneecaps first at one curb and then at the other and masturbating the longest baton in the band between those far?flung thighs producing MIS in the senile Legionnaires lining the route, but I had been bombed on Gomer City and my sexual stride had been broken. I knew I'd been screwing her partly to affirm life, and the uneasy thought occurred to me, syllogistically, that since now I was not screwing her much, did that mean I'd ceased affirming life? I listened to her telling me I was getting dull and acting thirty, and I realized that in some ways I was, because it seemed like such an effort to go out in the razored wind and blasting cold to see her, despite my desire when I was with her and my jealousy that maybe some other guy was wearing gold cleats and getting the hot oil and myrrh all over him. I began to warm to her, and see her as sexy and loving right then and there, and I reached out and put both my hands under her boobs all tight?lifted and beruffied in her cute nursing costume and I flashed on her blond pubic hair in which I'd nuzzled and laid my head and I levered her to me and kissed her and remembered the round?the?town movements of her hips and lips and we began to get as excited as we used to get in bed. I began to ask myself where that part of me that was willing to make the effort had gone, and I began to scheme about sleeping with her that night, but she pulled away and asked me to do her a favor, to check out a patient having agonal respirations.
'Agonal respirations mean death. Is he supposed to die?'
'That's just it: I'm not sure. He's got end-stage multiple myeloma and renal failure and he's been in coma for weeks, but Dr. Putzel has never told the family and there's an argument about his dialysis continuing and about when he's supposed to die. It's all confused.'
I went and saw him. It was too much. Young man, gray and dying, filling the room with his stale ammonium breath, His human centers of respiration were dead and phylogenetically he was breathing like a stranded fish. I went back to Molly and said, 'He'll be dead in fifteen minutes. He's not in any pain?'
'No. The Runt's been giving him morphine all night.'
'Good.' Overcome with tenderness because she and I were young and not dying but one day would die, filled to our gills with morphine if we were lucky, I said, 'Go draw his curtain, love, and come sit down with me and
