The house of God

'Ask her.'

'Hello, dearie. What's your hobby?'

'MOO-ELL MOO-ELL!'

'What a funny joke, Roy,' said Pinkus. 'Say, look at this.' Pinkus unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a running shirt on which was a giant-sized full-color healthy heart. He took off his trousers, revealing pink shorts on which, in blood red, was the slogan YOU GOTTA HAVE HEART. PINKUS. HOUSE OF GOD. 'Here,' he said, motioning the nurses' and my attention to his calves, 'just feel these.'

We fondled the steel cords that were his gastrocs and soleus. Pinkus reached into his tote bag and produced a pair of running shoes and said, 'Roy, these are for you, a pair of my shoes that I don't use anymore. Already broken in, so you can start right away. Here, I'll teach you the stretching exercises. I'm on my way out for my A.M. six miles.'

Pinkus and I performed the ritualized stretching of the muscles from the pelvis to the toes. Warmed up, he began to walk out of the Unit as dawn was beginning to break. He passed the room with the lights on, Bloom's, and asked, 'Who's that?'

'New admission. Name's Bloom. No hobbies. None at all.'

'Figures. So long.'

The next day I was surprised that I was not tired. I felt excited. I'd been in control of the sickest, deadest patients alive. By watching the numbers and occasionally giving a med or turning a dial, I'd averted disaster all night long. Bloom had made it through the night. My biggest thrill that morning was Pinkus turning to me at the end of rounds and saying, much to Jo's chagrin: 'Roy, good job on your first night on call. And not just a good job, no, I mean darn good job, Roy. Darn good job indeed.'

For the rest of the day I rode the backs of the rolling waves of intoxication at my competence. Before I left, I went to 'M and M Rounds,' which stood for 'Morbidity and Mortality.' At this conference, mistakes were aired, with the idea of not repeating them. In practice, it was a chance for the higher-ups to shit on the lower-downs. Given the propensity for mistakes on the part of some of the terns, the same terns would appear over and over again. That day, again it was Howie, being shat on for mismanaging someone with disease in his future specialty, renal medicine. Unfortunately, Howie had missed the diagnosis, and had treated the man for arthritis until he died from renal failure. I entered at Howie pronouncing the death.

'Did you get the post?' asked the Leggo.

'Of course,' said Howie, 'but I'd made a mistake the patient was not dead after all.'

'Well, what happened next? '

'I called the resident,' said Howie, as the audience laughed.

'Yes?' asked the Chief.

'Then. the patient really died and we got the post. The dying words were something like 'the nurse is incompetent' or 'the nurse is incontinent.' '

'What difference does that make?' asked the Leggo harshly.

'Why, I don't know,' said Howie.

And Molly loves that asshole? I dozed off, and awakened to the Leggo discussing the case, saying, 'Most people who have glomerulonephritis and spit blood have glomerulonephritis and spit blood.' I thought I'd been dreaming until, awakening again, I heard the Leggo's next pearl: 'There is a tendency for healing in this fatal disease.' How pedestrian. Poodling around with kidney disease, and I was doing high-powered medicine with exact regulation of every known body parameter, in the Unit. I left M and Ms, signed out, drove home. I was surprised to find myself whistling, happy, thinking of the musculature of the leg. I would become like Pinkus. The deadness I'd felt in Gomer City was being replaced by the excitement of the Unit. Like the E.W., it was not a place where the gomers could come to linger and outlast me, no. From the Unit, unless they were rich or young, they would be TURFED elsewhere. The thrill of handling the complexity of disease, of running the show well and with power, on top of the pile, the elite of the profession. I was king. Hotcha.

I couldn't wait to slip into my shorts and Pinkus's old shoes. Well-worn, they cradled my feet. Tired as I was, I put myself through the Pinkus stretching maneuvers, and trotted out to the street, and with the sun lowering in front of my eyes, with the soothing PLONKA PLONKA of the wide cushioned soles against the asphalt, I was carried a few miles farther toward the land of dilated coronary arteries, patent to rich red well?oxygenated blood. I was a child, free after supper, floating on Icarus wings in the first warm evening breeze of Daylight Saving Time, of spring.

I came back with chest pain, worried that I had angina pectoris and that I had started exercising took late in life. I would die from an MI while running: Pinkus would view my corpse and say wistfully, 'Too bad. Too late.'

Berry was waiting for me at home, and given my usual sedentary life, she couldn't believe her eyes.

Taking her hands, I put them on my gastrocnemis and said, 'Here, feel that.'

'Yeah?'

'That's BEFORE. I want you to form a clear mental image of that, for when you get to feel AFTER.'

20

By the end of the first two weeks I was doing four miles a day. To my relief, what I'd feared was anginal pain was, according to Pinkus, pain referred from the stretching of the intercostal ligaments as the rib cage expanded, common to beginning runners. I began to run the four miles to work, floating along the cycle path?named in honor of a famous marathoning cardiologist who'd died of old age?next to the river, the dawn breaking over the awakening city, my PLONKA PLONKA a soothing affirmation of my lifebeat.

But all was not Pinkus yet. Unlike him, I had yet to come to terms with the Unit. One side of me was filled with the horror of human misery and helplessness; the other was exhilarated, king in an erotic diseased kingdom, competent to run machines. Being on call every other night meant that there was never time to think about the world outside the House, and the conflicts of the Unit became the main conflicts of life. The nurses? Like the background in Vermeer's Lady with a Guitar, the empty black highlighting the glow of candle on lithe fingers, the disease highlighted the sex.

Often I'd find myself entwined in variants of the same erotic theme: late at night, the eerie artificial Unit light punctured only by the green-flashing BLEEP-BLEEP of the cardiac monitors. The nurse calls me from the bed to see a comatose patient whose body is being run by the machine, one parameter of which has gone awry. Following her to the bedside, I notice her bralessness, that she wears no pantyhose. I put a stethoscope on the body. I need to listen to the chest, and ask the nurse to help me. She bends over, the two of us hoist the body to sitting, tube dangling down. I listen to the clogged lungs, inflated by respirator, my fingers on the waxy skin, fighting the stench of chronic disease. I smell her perfume, coconut. Our heads are close together. I drop my stethoscope, put my free hand around her neck, kiss her. Her tongue and my tongue slither together. I lean my shoulder against the patient's body, freeing the other hand. The kiss prolonged, I fondle her breast through her cotton dress, a feeling the coarse fabric scratching against the skin, pulling the nipple erect. We part, the body falls back THUMP on the bed. Later, on her break, she comes to the on?call bunk bed, hoisting up her green surgical skirt because there isn't time to undress. We two begin to take out our hatred, our loneliness, our horror with human suffering and our despair at human endings in the most tender of human acts, making love. Knowing that she hates me for being a doctor, for forgetting her name three times that shift, for being a Jew who views her eunuch Pope's pronouncements on 'Human Life' as comical at best, for running her Unit, for her being trammeled on by men like me, for my always being the smarter one in the class, for all those hates and for the arousal bred by hates, bash away at each other savagely, skin on skin, cock in cunt, with the desperation of two space travelers on a journey of light?years, with death at the far end and no way back, imprisoned in a spacecraft of chrome and lights and computers and MUZAK. She will not talk to me about her hatred, she will not even gesture to me about her hatred, she will only fuck me for her hatred, and let it go at that. Groaning, we rattle the springs of the bunk bed, secured by the vigilance of two machines: her IUD, and each of our abilities, the next morning, to forget. California, here I come! We finish. Blushing from the clitoris and not from the heart, she goes back to work.