The Anatomy Lesson (34 page)

At the ground floor they left the elevator and started down the corridor to the emergency ward.
“
We just admitted a woman of eighty-eight. Ambulance went
to get her eighty-one-year-old
brother—a stroke. They took one whiff and brought her along too.
’
’

“
What
’
d they smell?
”

“
You
’
ll see.
”

The woman had only half a face. One cheek, up to the eye socket, and the whole side of her jaw had been eaten away by cancer. Ever since it had begun, as just a blister, four years before, she had been treating it on her own with Mercurochrome and dressing it with a bandage that she changed once a week. She lived with her brother in one room, cooked for him and cleaned for him, and no neighbor, no shopkeeper, no one who saw it had ever looked under the bandage and called a doctor. She was a slight, shy, demure, well-spoken old woman, poor but a lady, and when Zuckerman came in alongside of Walsh, she pulled her hospital nightie around her bare throat. She lowered her eyes.
“
How do you do, sir?
”

Walsh introduced his companion.
“
This is Dr. Zuckerman. Our resident humanist. He
’
d like to take a look, Mrs. Brentford.
”

Zuckerman was dressed in the hospital robe and slippers and his beard was, as yet, without distinction. He lacked two front teeth and had a mouth full of metal. Yet the woman said,
“
Oh, yes. Thank you.
”

To Zuckerman, Walsh explained the case.
“
We
’
ve been cutting the scabs away and draining pus for an hour—all cleaned up for you. Doc.
”
He led the resident humanist to the far side of the bed and shined a pocket light on the wound.

There was a hole in her cheek the size of a quarter. Through it Zuckerman could see her tongue as it nervously skittered about inside her mouth. The jawbone itself was partially exposed, an inch of it as white and clean as enamel tile. The rest, up to the eye socket, was a chunk of raw flesh, something off the butcher
’
s floor to cut up for the cat. He tried not to inhale the smell.

Out in the hallway Walsh was racked with the cough ignited by his laughter.
“
You look green. Doctor,
”
he said when finally he could speak.
“
Maybe you
’
re better off sticking to books.
”

By midmorning each day the large canvas bins along the corridor were stuffed with the night
’
s soiled linen. Zuckerman had been eyeing these bins for weeks, each time he passed beside one tempted by the strangest yearning. It was on the morning after Walsh
’
s caper, when there was no one anywhere nearby to ask what the hell he thought he was doing, that finally he plunged his arms down through the ta
ngle of sheets and bed wear and
towels. He never expected so much to be so damp. The strength rushed from his groin, his mouth filled with bile—it was as though he were up to his elbows in blood. It was as though the reeking flesh of Mrs. Brentford
’
s face was there between his two hands. Down the corridor he heard a woman begin to howl, somebody
’
s mother or sister or daughter, the cry of a survivor
—
“
She pinched us! She hit us! The names that she called us! Then she went!
”
Another catastrophe—every moment, behind every wall,
right next door,
the worst ordeals that anyone could imagine, pain that was ruthless and inescapably real, crying and suffering truly worthy of all a man
’
s defiance. He would become Mrs. Brentford
’
s physician. He would become a maxillo-facial surgeon. He would study anesthesiology. He would run a detoxification program, setting his patients the example of his own successful withdrawal.

Until someone down the corridor shouted,
“
Hey, yon! You all right?
”
Zuckerman remained submerged to his shoulders in the sheets of the healing, the ailing, and the dying—and of whoever had died there during the night—his hope as deep as the abiding claim of his remote but unrelinquishable home.
This is life. With real teeth in it.

From that evening on, whenever the interns dropped by to say hello, he asked to accompany them on their rounds. In every bed the fear was different. What the doctor wanted to know the patient told him. Nobody
’
s secret a scandal or a disgrace
—
everything revealed and everything at stake. And always the enemy was wicked and real.
“
We had to give you a little haircut to get that all cleaned out.
”
“
Oh, that
’
s all right,
”
the enormous baby-faced black woman replied in a small compliant voice. The intern gently turned her head.
“
Was it very deep. Doctor?
”
“
We got it all,
”
the inte
rn
told her, showing Zuckerman the long stitched-up wound under the oily dressing just behind her ear.
“
Nothing there to worry you anymore.
”
“
Yes? Well, that
’
s good then.
”
“
Absolutely.
”
“
And—and am
I
going to see you again?
”
“
You sure are,
”
he said, squeezing her hand, and then he left her at peace on her pillow, with Zuckerman, the intern
’
s inte
rn
, in tow. What a job! The paternal bond to those in duress, the urgent, immediate human exchange! All this indispensable work to be done, all this digging away at disease—and he
’
d given his fanatical devotion to sitting with a typewriter alone in a room!

For nearly as long as he remained a patient, Zuckerman roamed the busy corridors of the university
hospital, patrolling and plan
ning on his own by day. then out on the quiet floor with the interns at night, as though he still believed that he could unchain himself from a future as a man apart and escape the corpus that was his.

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End
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