House of God (35 page)

‘I can't, Saul, you know that.'

‘So find me someone who will.'

‘I promise you'll have no pain. That's the best I can do.'

‘Pain? What about pain inside, in my heart? What do I have to do, Dr. Basch,' he said angrily, ‘beg? You don't want me to suffer like Sanders. You liked him too, I know.'

I looked into his bloodshot eyes, the infection creeping over the lids toward the conjuctival vessels that were pale because there were so few red cells, and I wanted to say, No, I don't want you to suffer, Saul, I want you to die easy.

‘Dere, see? It's a cinch. Please, finish me off.'

As I continued to protest, remembering how Sanders had suffered and died, a horrible thought crossed my mind, horrible because for an instant it didn't seem horrible, like seeing a baby and thinking of putting an icepick through a fontanelle of its skull, the thought, 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 still 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 the 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 me five minutes and do it in here.'

I got the operator to page Fats and Hooper and 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 on-call 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 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 first time in House memory. That extract might just be 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-old's 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 ventricle 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, stomach, heart, and . . . and liver.' Hooper paused, watching the Fat Man drum his fingers on the desk, and then went on, ‘In other words, Fats, all the organs you 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 Hooper had presented his attempt to tap the chest of Rose Budz, 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 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 Eddie's 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
Fiddler on the Roof
. The place was jam-packed: LOLs in NAD getting their blood drawn humming in tune with SUNRISE SUNSET, waiting to move on around the corner where the tech and the LOL in NAD could hum TRADISHUNNNN as the EKG was done, and then, further along past the sign that said ‘This way to Annatevka,' sure enough, there where the LOL in NAD had to give a urine sample wouldn't she be bathed in the rippling bittersweet strains of ANNATEVKA, the song about the Fiddler's lost home. Lastly, we and the LOLs in NAD got a personal guest appearance by the Pearl in his private office, where he sat perusing the computer-processed results of the tests. Muzak played IF I WERE A RICH MAN, and there, behind a dual flagholder in which were both Israel and the USA, sat Pearl, surrounded by original Chagalls and what looked like the original Hippocratic Oath. He was sweet and kind and generous and seemed like the best damn doc and he told us he was seeing an average of one hundred and nineteen LOLs in NAD per day. No gomers. On the ride back I calculated that the Pearl made my yearly intern's salary in two days. Turning to the Fat Mound next to me on the back seat, I said, ‘Fats, that was Money City.'