House of God (39 page)

I felt a chill. Potts looked white and chill, and his eyes looked dull and dead, and I said, ‘I'm sorry. I mean, I'm really sorry.'

‘Yeah,' said Potts, fidgeting as if he wasn't really in the same world with me any longer, ‘yeah, well, he was going to die, it was just a matter of . . . of time.'

‘Yeah, he was,' I said, and I thought about how much torment Potts had gone through every day that the Yellow Man had been alive. ‘Are you all right?'

‘Who, me? Oh, yeah, I am. It's just a little hard . . . I didn't ask for a post. I didn't want to get one,' said Potts, almost pleading with me that it was all right.

‘It's OK. I know how you feel. I didn't ask for a post on Dr. Sanders. Sit down and talk about it, eh?'

‘No, I think I'll just go upstairs and see him once more and then maybe take a walk.'

‘Right. I'll be down here if you change your mind.'

‘Thanks. You know, I should have given him the steroids.'

‘Stop it. Nothing would have helped.'

‘Yeah, well, steroids might have helped. Well, anyway, we sure had some fun the other night with Otis, didn't we?'

‘Sure did, Wayne. We'll do it again, eh?'

‘Yeah. Soon. If I can find the time.'

As I watched him slip away down the corridor and disappear into the up elevator, I thought of the fun we'd had. I'd gone over to his house, and although it was depressing with the place a mess and with that loaded revolver by the bed, Potts and I had taken Otis out for a run in the March chill, and we'd talked about the South. Potts had told me about Mrs. Bagley's Dancing Class held at the country club every Friday night. Mrs. Bagley, an immigrant, would come out in a chiffon dress with a cinched waist and pop the needle into the groove and out would come the Charelles. They learned to dance pressing a walnut between their noses, and the big event, year after year, was on the last Friday night when Potts and his less tame but still Old Family buddies would roll B-B pellets onto the polished oak floor during a slam-banging one two three one two three Roll Out the Barrel polka. I'd thought it strange, that day, that Potts hadn't even mentioned his father's recent violent death.

I realized suddenly what was going to happen! Fool! I ran to the elevator and pounded on it, but it wasn't moving, and I raced up the stairs to floor eight, and I kept cursing myself for not realizing it in time and praying that I had or that I was wrong.

I was not wrong. While I'd been cradled in his reminiscences of Mrs. Bagley's, Potts had taken the elevator straight to floor eight, had opened a window, and had thrown himself out to his death. From the window I saw the splattered mess on the parking lot below, and in between my panting for breath and shivering in the chill draft I heard the first siren squeal, and I leaned my forehead on the sill, and I sobbed.

‘Did he leave a note?' asked Berry.

‘Yeah. It was pinned to the Yellow Man, and it said, “Feed the cat.” There was no cat.'

‘What did it mean?'

‘It was meant for Jo. When Potts and Chuck and I were together with Jo upstairs, Jo kept niggling Potts to take better care of his patients, to “feed the cat.” Jo said that if Potts had been on his toes, the Yellow Man mightn't have died.' I found myself thinking of Potts as a tragic figure, a guy who'd been a happy towheaded kid you'd love to take fishing with you, who'd mistakenly invested in academic medicine when he'd have been happy in his family business, and who'd become a splattered mess on the parking lot of a hospital in a city he'd despised. What had been the seductiveness of medicine? Why? ‘They killed him.'

‘Who did?' asked Berry.

‘Jo, the Fish, the others . . .'

While most of us in the House felt empty and didn't know what to say or do, others had definite ideas. Jo, perhaps thinking of her own pop's leap from a bridge to his death, raised the question of the postmortem exam ‘to find out if there had been any organic precipitant.' The Fish talked to us in a heartfelt way about how ‘suicide is always an existential alternative.' The Leggo seemed upset, puzzled that one of his boys, especially one who he'd thought had loved him more than most, had killed himself. He talked about ‘the pressures of the internship year' and about ‘the waste of a great talent.' The Leggo reassured us that he wanted to give us some time off to mourn. However, he could not do this. In fact, we'd have to all work a little harder, to fill in: ‘You'll all have to pitch in and help.'

Like many other events in the House of God, this response from our leaders seemed so crass as to be imagined. If imagined, however, it had been imagined by us all. No one mentioned how the House Medical Hierarchy had tormented Potts with the Yellow Man, how it had ignored his pain. We tried hard to forget Potts fast, but for the longest time we could not, for every day when we parked our cars in the parking lot we saw and tried our hardest to avoid the little blotchy discoloration on the asphalt. None of us wanted to run over Potts with our cars, even if he was already dead. At first there was good reason to avoid the blotch, for there was real blood there and bits of hair and bone stuck to the thawing asphalt. As we tried to avoid it, the parking problem increased, and the House sent out some of Housekeeping to scrub it off. Try as they might, although they washed away the hair and bone, they had a lot of trouble washing away the discoloration. Sure it got lighter and lighter, but the hooker was that it also got spread wider and wider over the lot so that it became more and more difficult to avoid it, and we all felt, every day, that we were scrambling to avoid parking on Potts. Everyone tried to park on the perimeter of the lot. Some showed up early so as not to have to park in the middle. All in all it was a worse reminder than before they had spread Potts around. Each of us took the nebulous and faint discoloration and created out of it first an image of bone and blood and bits of hair, and then an image of Potts falling, and then of Potts leaping out, and finally, sadly, of Potts alive, and then, the last, of Potts alive and being crushed by guilt for not having given the Yellow Man the roids. Thinking how they had tormented Potts until he had ‘bought it,' we got mad, for many of us thought that of all of us, Potts, with his compassion and gentleness, might have become a wonderful doc. Of all of us, he was dead. Outrageous.

‘What's suicide about?' I asked Berry.

‘Here,' she said, drawing me to her, ‘put your head here. Close your eyes. What are you feeling?'

Blank. Then fury: ‘I'm pissed. I'm so furious I could kill!'

‘That's what suicide's about. Under incredible pressure, alone, with no support from your bosses, most of you have found bizarre ways—this role labeling of Hooper with death and the Runt with sex—to project your anger outside yourselves. Potts didn't. He never acted strange, he never got mad. He took his rage and blasted himself. Introjection. The opposite of what you do, Roy.'

‘What do I do?'

‘You rail at everything, you're sarcastic, and even though you're pretty obnoxious, it's the one way you've chosen to survive.'

Survive? It was not at all certain that I would survive Gomer City. I didn't know much of anything anymore, but I knew that I was in big trouble and acting crazy and that I didn't really care.

Fats and I sat in the on-call room. In the air was death. Fats looked sad, and I asked him what he was thinking.

‘Grenade Room Dubler and his HTE Service,' he said.

‘HTE Service?'

‘Yeah. Hold the Elevator Service. When Dubler was here in Gomer City he got so fed up—so the rumor goes—that he knocked off the gomers at a terrific clip. He used intravenous KCL, ‘cause it can't be detected at autopsy. Whenever he took the elevator down he'd shout out “Hold the elevator!” and would wheel in a corpse, and ride down with it to the morgue. They say Dubler seldom made the trip down alone.'

‘WHAT? He knocked off the gomers?'

‘Rumor, Basch, rumor.'

We sat there together, my mind on this HTE Service and Saul the tailor and Wayne Potts. I felt numb. After a few minutes I looked up. The Fat Man was crying. Quiet tears filled his eyes, fat wet tears of desperation and loss. They rolled down his cheeks. He sat still, a hero overcome.

‘Why are you crying?'

‘Roy, I'm crying for Potts. And I'm crying for myself.'

From far off I heard a tune in my head: not the bright thunderous Sousa march blared out by the trombones and crunched by the cymbals as the glittering marching band was led down the street by a miracle like Molly, no. No, seeing the Fat Man crying, the tune I heard was the one always played by a lone bugler and wafted out over a grassy knoll littered with alabaster slabs, heard by those weeping as the Kennedy widows and orphans had wept, a tune of an immense numb solitude, taps.

Saul the leukemic tailor was going through hell. Everyone, including the cheery oncologist who'd failed to cure his leukemia, had given up on him and was waiting for him to die. In coma, he was dying slowly, and could last for a long time. The worst part was that he was in terrible pain, his poisoned bone marrow sending shocks and screams straight through his heart and head, and it all came out in moans and tears. Saul didn't shriek. Saul cried. It wasn't a natural, human crying, for several strokes had obliterated his human sleep cycle so that he never slept. The crying was continuous, animal, moans of pain, streaks of tears on cheeks. It was driving everyone mad. I hated it; I hated him.

Without much thought, raging inside, one night I snuck into the medicine cabinet, got the KCL and syringe, and made sure that no one saw me enter Saul's room. He lay there in his own feces, a mass of tubing and tape and bruises and rotted skin and empty bone poking through at the ribs and elbows and knees. I thought of what I was about to do. I stopped. The memory of Dr. Sanders' death rushed through me, and I saw him oozing blood and saying, ‘God this is awf . . .' and I heard Saul saying to me, ‘Finish me off, do I have to beg you? Finish me off!' I caught myself thinking of Potts. Saul screamed. Angrily I uncapped the syringe and found the IV outlet and pushed in enough KCL to kill him. I watched him gasp for breath as his heart depolarized, and I watched his breathing become laborious, and his hand give a little twitch, and then a stillness come over him, a peace, but for his agonal breathing, which seemed to last a long time. I put the light out and went to be somewhere by myself. I was paged by the night nurse. Saul was dead.

On St. Patrick's Day I was called down to the E.W. late at night as part of the preferential treatment that the Fish had invented to turn us into lunatics, and I was startled to see a sideshow row of what had to be the worst patients in the world: a dead nun being resuscitated by Chuck; a homosexual murderer TURFED in from prison who thought his tern, the Runt, despite his mustache, was a girl; two roommates who'd overdosed on heroin and were dying; many gomers. I picked up my admissions chart and headed for the Grenade Room. I wondered where Fats was but I didn't really care and I didn't have to wonder long, because I opened the door and saw Fats and Humberto and the two policemen in what looked like green uniforms because it was St. Paddie's Day and a gomere named what else but Rose, and with Fats and Humberto covered in vomit and feces and urine and blood.

‘A greatandagrandgood evening tooyooo,' said Gilheeny, drunkenly waving a shillelagh, ‘and itiz true that good officer Quick and I have been while on duty pouring Guinness stout into our bodies and are inebriated.'

‘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.'

REEEE-REEEE-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!'

REEE-REEE-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.