Wonderland (50 page)

The woman’s screams. Screams.

A fruit-juice glass jammed up toward the womb.

Myron Diebold came into the lounge. Jesse, startled, put the telephone receiver back. Myron held a sandwich out to Jesse. “Dr. Vogel, my friend, Jack Galt was telling us you didn’t look well. Here. Maybe you’re hungry.” Jesse unwrapped the sandwich eagerly. It was a cheese and lettuce sandwich on white bread, not from the cafeteria but from the vending machine; but his mouth watered violently. He ate it in four or five bites. “Now, why don’t you sleep?” Myron said. “I’m going to hang around for another hour and I can cover for you.”

“All right,” Jesse said.

“Did you hear about Milt Kuzma …?”

“Yes,” Jesse said, not wanting to hear anything more.

“Perrault really gave him hell. Steer clear of Perrault.”

“Yes.”

“Anything interesting come in today?”

“No.”

“Myron left and Jesse sat down on the edge of one of the cots. He did not feel tired. Something was nagging him: that dwarfish boy. Those dull unfocused eyes. He certainly had not seen the boy before. But the boy looked familiar. He must check the boy again, must get back to the room when the mother wasn’t around and question him. Must make a special note on the record—“injuries suspicious”—Restless, Jesse got up and, having nothing to do, went down to the fourth floor. At night, with things quieted down, the hospital did not seem so confusing; each floor had its own unmistakable appearance, its
own shadowy lights cast by certain arrangements in the nurses’ stations and from vending machines that sold coffee and cigarettes. Each floor seemed to have its own smell, its own taste. Jesse could not remember which room the boy was in. He was certain it was on this floor. He questioned one of the nurses, who smiled at him curiously. When he asked her about the boy with the head injuries, she didn’t seem to know whom he was talking about.… They had coffee together and Jesse thought uneasily of Anne-Marie. Yes, he had been close to her, he had loved her. He remembered the violence of his passion for her. Then his mind skipped onto Trick, then onto Trick’s collapse on the sidewalk. Caving in. His legs caving in. Jesse began to breathe quickly, as if he had escaped some awful danger.

After a few minutes he began to feel better. He would check on the boy again in a few days. He would check other hospitals, see if he could find the boy’s records somewhere else. It seemed possible to him that he could do this. Now that things had quieted down.… There was the possibility of completion, of seeing someone through, and not these jagged snatches of people, their personalities reduced to a gall bladder, a lacerated scalp, a patch of burned skin. He loved them, how he wanted to help them …! He did love them. He could crawl in bed with them, matching his length against theirs. Hook himself up to them: his blood and fluids flowing into them. His strong heartbeat would encourage theirs.… This little nurse told him her name was Rosemary. She was very interested in whatever he had to say. Exhausted, Jesse began to talk. He talked about the child with the insect bites, the old man who had hit him, the dwarfish wreck of a boy and how his parents should be treated, not just him, because of course they were sick, they were all crazy, the entire family would have to be brought in. “Not just a victim. The entire family,” Jesse said. Rosemary thought that was a wonderful idea.

People shouldn’t be allowed to die, Jesse said in a rush. Shouldn’t be abandoned. Doctors should never give up, never, no matter how tired they are.…

Rosemary thought that was a wonderful idea.

Jesse’s throat felt raw. He was talking too much. Reluctantly he said good-by, backing away, and the little nurse smiled reluctantly after him as if hating to give him up.

He went up to the interns’ on-call room, where he lay down stiffly
and considered sleeping. But if he fell asleep the telephone would probably ring. He waited for it to ring, jerking from time to time as if he were asleep, conscious of his muscles oddly jerking. He was not asleep, but he dreamed of that fistful of black clotty blood and bright red blood he had hauled out. A broken fruit-juice glass. What a surprise that young woman had given him! Women were always surprises, though; anything could come out of their bodies.… He sat up, frightened. He thought the telephone had rung but evidently it hadn’t. So he lay back again and fell asleep. At once he returned to his dream of that woman’s body, all the blood, the mess, the mutilated fetus. A woman’s body and its dark surprises. Like a corridor: like the corridor outside the door of this room. The room was too hot. The corridor was drafty, especially near the back stairs. Heat and draft. Heat rising, cold air cutting through it, hot and cold, up and down. Corridors were adventures. Doors opened off to the right or to the left, doors that tempted you to enter. First you open the screen door, then the inside door. Turn the knob. Push in.

The telephone rang, jarring him awake. He jumped up in terror.

Only one o’clock.

He was called over to look at a postoperative gall-bladder case. The woman whimpered that she was afraid of dying. Jesse did not bother to get angry with the nurse, he simply brushed past her and went to check over the woman. She was crying and clutching at Jesse’s arm. This was a semiprivate room, and the other patient, a sleeping woman, snored through the frantic consultation. A woman’s face changes so rapidly, Jesse thought, it seems to change colors.… “But why cry now? You’re fine,” Jesse said gently.

Her face was enormous with fear, twitching, shivering, all its human womanly strength focused upon him, needing him. He could not leave. He stayed with her while she whimpered about dying, about the pain she felt, the snippy nurses, the taste in her mouth.… Jesse soothed her with words. Words. He was not sure if this was real or part of his dream. She mumbled something about his age: he was her son’s age. Jesse blushed as if she had flattered him grossly. After about twenty minutes of this, with the night nurse hanging around silent and curious, Jesse was called over to the psychiatric ward, where a patient had started vomiting violently. The nurse on the telephone told Jesse that the man was trying to throw up his insides. Jesse hurried over there, wondering
if the nurse was teasing him, if maybe there wasn’t some conspiracy at night to keep him going, to keep him from sleeping, to flirt with him, to draw him out to the most trivial and unspectacular of troubles.… But he was slowed down at the sight of the patient. Yes, this did look serious. A huge fat man, not much older than Jesse; billows of flesh, flab, blubber, a bare wobbling chest smeared with vomit and blood—darting crazy eyes. Oh, those eyes! Jesse was becoming accustomed to them.

He hated fat people. Hated crazy people. Well, perhaps he did not really hate them, no, because hatred was out of place in his work; he was disturbed by them. They were sick in a way that did not interest him. With crazy people you could not stick a tube down them and drain out the poison or the excess fluid; you couldn’t hook up some plasma and fluids and get them healthy again. Their sickness was a stubborn sickness, stubborn as a fist that could not be unclenched.… This patient was convulsing. Throwing himself around like a small elephant, a small whale. Jesse wondered if he had managed to poison himself somehow, his vomit stank so unnaturally. He put the man in restraints and said in a hypnotic, weary voice, “You’re not going to die. Not going to die. Don’t be afraid.” The man’s heart was going like mad, as if wanting to burst; but Jesse was not going to let it burst. Not tonight. Not while Jesse was on duty. The needle he tried to use on the man snapped in two so he gave him a rectal sedative instead, and by now the place reeked. Ugh, how he hated fat! And such layers of fat! No part of the body was ugly in itself, no face was truly ugly, but such quantities of flesh were hardly physical at all—they were a kind of spiritual obscenity.

Eyes rolling back in his head. The man lost consciousness in the beginning of a convulsion. “Ah, there,” Jesse said softly. He sponged off the man’s wet face. Then he sponged off his own face, breathing hard. He asked the nurses about the patient, curious as always, and yet cautiously, for he sometimes dreaded what he might be told. “In real life,” a nurse said, frowning, “he was a high school teacher.”

In real life!

Jesse stared at the fat man. Harsh labored breathing, minute twitches of his flesh, spasmodic twitches of his fingers.… Jesse felt his own skin tingle, as if about to twitch in sympathy with the man. Jesse
hated death. He hated the way people tried for death, as if stretching to reach it, grunting with the effort. Why did so many of them want to die? It was terrible to see a human being convinced he must die.

The nurses, splattered with vomit, told Jesse about all the trouble this young man had been to them. As they spoke, sullen and faintly excited, Jesse stared at the unconscious man, this fat, sick creature who seemed to him to exist at the limits of human life, human reality, hardly in the family of mankind at all. It frightened him, the man’s massive fleshly certainty, his absolute being, as if so much flesh were a mockery of Jesse’s own spare flesh. The man’s face twitched and seemed to be undergoing changes. Rapid flashes of dreams—nightmares—stretching his face out of shape, then relaxing it again. What was he dreaming? Jesse felt a sudden desire, an almost painful desire, to know what that man was dreaming. He would spend a lifetime in the service of sick people, he was prepared to give up much of his own life to them, and yet he would never know what went on in their heads.…

He ran upstairs to take a shower, to get that filth off him. He couldn’t stand it. The fat man’s big straining face remained in his mind. It was almost a human face, yet not quite human. Jesse believed he had a secret face himself, a monstrous face that gave its special cast to his own normal features and that he had to fight, to hold back. He had never really seen this secret face of his. That monstrous fat man had shown his true face angrily, viciously, without shame. And his heart—Jesse had felt that heart, enormous and pounding. Such intimacy, Jesse feeling the heart of a stranger! How close they had been, like brothers, like twins!… Jesse puzzled over the outrageous stink of the vomit. Had it been poison of some kind?

Soaped and rinsed clean, rubbed dry with a towel. He sighed. He lay down and the back of his mind muddied at once. It was peaceful and good in this ugly little room, his private room for the night … yes, it was good to be on duty, to be responsible for so many people. It gave him happiness to be here and to know that he was needed. In another week he would go on the surgical service, which he feared a little because he feared Dr. Perrault, who was Chief of Surgery … and really he had no interest in surgery, he wanted to go into general medical practice. General medical practice: his life was leading him in that direction.

 … Awakened suddenly by a telephone call: three o’clock. A nurse somewhere in the hospital wanted permission to give someone a sleeping pill half an hour before it was scheduled. Jesse lay down again and must have slept, because the telephone rang again, ringing loudly, and he jumped up with his heart pounding and could not think for an instant where he was.
Helene? Had something happened to Helene?
It was from the emergency room; a nurse who sounded hysterical. Jesse pulled on his trousers, stumbling. Five-fifteen. When Jesse got down there he saw why the nurse was hysterical—a man bleeding in a thick stream from what looked like the very pit of his belly, his groin, held down onto a table by two ambulance attendants and a nurse. Cries. Confusion. “My God,” Jesse said when he saw what the wound was. For a moment he could not move, he was paralyzed, and then the horror of the sight made something click off in his brain—it was too much to assess, he must go through the steps one at a time. First, get the man down. Down flat. A young woman who must have ridden along in the ambulance was in Jesse’s way and he pushed her impatiently aside and got to work. So much blood! Why was there so much blood? The man was in his late thirties; he had a face that must have been handsome but had now gone white and hard, smeared with his own blood. Blood in his hair. His lips were white and he was struggling to breathe, struggling with the nurse and Jesse. His pulse raced out of control; he had gone into shock. Jesse got the shock blocks into place and the table was tipped back, and still the man struggled, and Jesse had to fight down a gagging sensation. All this blood unnerved him, he was even slipping in it, and yet he knew that blood was not very important—the easiest thing to be equipped with—all he had to do was get a sample and prepare for a transfusion, yes, he had done this many times before, except now his own hands were so bloody and the nurses so frightened and the strange young woman—she was hardly more than a girl, maybe twenty years old—so terrified that his mind seemed in danger of breaking into splinters.
What if he found parts of a broken glass jammed up the man’s groin?
But the man had done it with a knife, according to the ambulance attendant, all by himself with a knife. A knife! Jesse listened and kept working, working so fast that he didn’t have time to break.
The testicles slashed, hated so viciously and slashed so viciously
.… But everything was under control. Jesse would not make a mistake.
No you don’t
, he thought as the man tried to lunge backward, as if fleeing his own
wound.
No you don’t, no dying tonight, not on my hands!
A sharp odor of alcohol. An odor of panic.

The young woman, backing away, had bumped into another table. Her hands were out before her in a gesture of supplication. Blood-smeared hands. Fingernails that had been painted carefully, a very pale pink, and now the hands smeared with blood. Jesse glanced up at her face. She was staring at the bleeding man, staring fixedly at him, her face childish with alarm. The skin seemed to be of slightly differing colors, or shades of color, like petals overlaid upon petals. A very fine, healthy skin. The girl’s eyes were dilated, dazed, as if she were staring toward Jesse through water, unable to get her vision into focus, into belief. Slender, blond. Strokes of blood on her face like faint water-color brush strokes. She wore something beige—also smeared with blood, soaked with blood in front—
All we need is for her to faint
, Jesse thought.