'For work is the curse of the drinkin' man,' said Quick.
'And to cerribrate the Man Who Drove the Snakes from Ireland,' said the redhead, 'we have foundafittin Rose!'
With the help of the Fat Man and Humberto they hoisted the Rose up to a sitting position and I saw that they had pinned a green sign edged with shamrocks to her nightie, and the sign said:
KISS ME, I'M IRISH
I started to laugh and slipped on a turd and fell down in the doorway. I lay there in the filth, laughing, and the Fat Man came over to me and bent over me and waved a little test tube under my nose and said, 'See this? This is all the urine she's made in five days, and half of this is the diuretic I gave her. Her bed has been sold forever. She's had five courses of electroshock therapy for depression, the last in 1947.'
A shriek came from the gomere: REEE?REEE?REEEEE . . . and all I did, while they stared at me, was lie on the tile floor and laugh.
'Her neck is so stiff she can lie with her head off the bed and with no pillow, without pain,' said Fats. 'She is unresponsive to everything we've tried.'
REEF?REEE?REEEEE . . .
And I lay on the floor and laughed.
'I stuck a tongue blade in her mouth, and she sucked on it so hard I still haven't been able to pull it out, and neither has anyone else. She has the strongest suck-reflex in history, which means, of course, that there is no frontal?lobe function, no frontal?lobe function at all. And do you know why? Because she had a lobotomy in 1948. Ho! Ho! HOO!'
And I lay down and laughed and laughed.
'The ultimate gomere, and you, you ***MVI*** you, she's totally and completely yours! HOOOO!'
REEEE?REEEE?REEEEE . .
And all I could do then, tears streaming down my cheeks, realizing that these gomers had won, that they had outlasted me and would survive in Gomer City after I'd gone in two weeks and left all of them to try to break my replacement, Howie, and all I could do, then, crying, was lie in the shit on the floor and laugh.
I couldn't laugh when I realized that Potts was gone and Dr. Sanders was still gone and Saul was gone and Molly was going with Howie and Eat My Dust Eddie was gonzo gone and Hyper Hooper was more or less gone and Teddy was gone and half of Teddy's stomach was gone and the Fat Man was soon really going a long way away from me on his Fellowship wherever, and that the only ones who weren't gone were the gomers. I had yet to see a gomer die in the House of God, unless it was with the aid of Hyper Hooper's needle shots or the dummies in dialysis who'd shrunk Fast Tina's brain down to the size of a pea and what the hell mistakes do happen don't they? Almost anyone I cared about was gone, exploded into a billion corpuscular fragments like a Great American Grenade might explode in Vietnam with the shrapnel raining down like confetti except that it wasn't at all like nice soft red white and blue confetti because it brought you to your knees and broke you and hurt you and left wounds that wouldn't heal and watery poisoned blood that wouldn't clot and would never wash out of your whites and images that wouldn't fade like the discoloration on the parking lot that had once been Wayne Potts. We were mostly gone, caught in a net of silence and pain where it might just be that the dead did lie, restless, and even in death fearing worse death or something worse.
I lay on top of my bed. Berry came in. I was silent. Berry sat on the edge of my bed and talked to me, but I was silent. I was not tired or sad or mad. She cradled my head in her lap and looked into my eyes and started to cry. She tried to leave. She came back a couple of times between the doorway and the bed and finally, hesitating at the door a final time like a mourner might hesitate before allowing the casket to be closed, she left. Her sad footsteps echoed down the stairs and died, and I did not feel sad. I was not tired or mad. I lay on top of my bed and did not sleep I imagined I felt what the gomers felt: an absence of feeling. I had no idea how bad I might be, but I knew that I could not do what Dr. Sanders had told me to do, to 'be with' others. I could not 'be with' others, for I was somewhere else, in some cold place, insomniac in the midst of dreamers, farfar from the land of love.
THE WING OF ZOCK
18
I was ready to be taken over by machines. On the morning of April Fool's Day, I found myself just outside the hermetically sealed double doors of the MICU, the Medical Intensive Care Unit, what the Fat Man had called 'that mausoleum down the hall.' Like a suburbanite in a fugue state who starts out heading for Wall Street and turns up three days later, blank, in Detroit, I had no past or future, I was merely there. I felt scared. For the next month I would have to take responsibility for the intensive care of those perched precariously on the edge of that slick bobsled ride down to death. I would be on call every other night, alternating with the resident. A bronze wall plaque caught my eye: THROUGH THE MUNIFICENCE OF MR. AND MRS. G. L. ZOCK, 1957. Zock, of the Wing of Zock? When would I meet a real Zock? With the technocratic dispassion of an astronaut, I pushed through the double doors, sealing myself hermetically in.
The inside was ultraquiet, ultraclean, ultraunbusy. MUZAK shirred the crisp atmosphere as gently as a French chef might shir a sleepy egg for an early-rising guest. I wandered through the deserted eight-bed unit, searching for intensive care. The patients were in their beds, quiet, at peace, at home with all they touched in this calm sea, happy fishes floating, floating. I found myself happily humming along with the MUZAK:
Some enchanted eeee-veniiiinng . . .' and stopped in front of a computer console, which filled me with a mixture of awed childhood memories of Cape Canaveral and adolescent fears stirred up by 2001. I watched the bright lights blink, the oscilloscope flicker with what looked like something like rows of heartbeats. As I watched, there was an unpleasant buzz from the console, lights flashed, one of the rows of beats froze in space and time, and like ticker tape, out spewed the pink blue?gridded tongue of an EKG strip. At that, from a nearby room, out spewed a nurse. She looked at the EKG, looked at the oscilloscope screen, did not look at the patient, and with a mixture of pique and cajolery said to the console, 'Shit, Ollie, wake up and get it together, will you, for Chrissakes?' As if for punishment, she poked a few keys fortissimo, which sent the thing humming along again, almost in syncopation with the fresh aria from MUZAK, a samba: 'When they begin, the bee?geeene . . :'
Relieved to see a warm?blooded being in this freaky reptilian lab, I turned to her and said, 'Hi, I'm Roy Basch.'
'The new tern?' she asked suspiciously.
'Right. What's this thing?'
'Thing? Not hardly. He's Ollie, the Computer. Ollie, say hi to Roy Basch, the new tern here,' and with a few prompting punches in the vital parts, Ollie spewed out a pink blue?gridded tongue of an EKG strip, on which was printed: HI, ROY, AND WELCOME, I'M OLLIE. I asked the nurse where I could put my things and she said to follow
