At such times, I conclude, the soul can only hang in the dark, like a white bat, and let darkness have the day. Beneath, the body does what it does, in mechanical exertions of will and sinew, while the soul waits. It must be safe to assume—surely to God—that this is it. This is the gravamen of the dreams of Tod Friendly, of John Young, where the half-dead stand in line and a white-coated figure sweats with power, cruelty, and beauty, with all that is entirely unmanageable. But the dreams lied. I thought (I was sure) that our transgression would be some kind of departure. I thought it would be extraterritorial, out of society, forming its own new universe. I certainly never figured Tod/John for a life of crime. And yet it turns out to be the same old stuff only worse, more, again, further. I mean, where is the limit? Show me the ultimate intensifiers of sin. What can you categorically not do to someone else’s body? I won’t claim ignorance. Pretty much the same sort of shit was coming down at AMS, if we’d gone looking for it, and of course it was happening all over town at well-known locations: St. Mary’s, St. Andrew’s, St. Anne’s. It is general. It is general hospital. Nobody can pretend for a minute that they don’t know what’s going on. The ambulance is out there screaming for all to hear, its lights looping, lassoing: watch us hog-tie all the horrors of the night. Behind the fringe of orange crime-scene tape, on the street, the chalked outline of a human body. Here we are in our fatigues, delivering our damage. Stand back! People—don’t interfere. Let us do what we need to do.
The air of the hospital is lukewarm, and it hums, and tastes of human organs obscurely neutralized or mistakenly preserved. We the doctors move between ceiling and floor, between striplight and the croak of linoleum. In these passages there is a feeling of necessary novocaine; morally we are like the refrigerated tongue on the dentist’s chair, mouth open as wide as it ever goes to the instruments of pain, but speechless. In the operating room you can only see my eyes.
Here the men cover their hair with paper caps, the women with scarves. On my feet are wooden clogs. Clogs. Why clogs? I wear my surgical gown, my skintight rubber gloves. I wear an outlaw’s mask. My headlight band is connected to a transformer on the floor, half-submerged in blood. The cord goes down my back, under my surgical gown, and wiggles around behind me, like tail of monkey, tail of fiend. With our eyes we see only the eyes of the others there. The victim is invisible, fully shrouded: except for the bit we’re working on. When it’s over, we wash our hands like trained neurotics. The printed sign on the mirror enjoins: Each Finger Nail Should Be Stroked Fifty Times. Finger Tips Should Be Kept Higher Than Elbows. Each Stroke Requires Two Motions. Each Finger Has Four Sides. Then the fluorescence of the locker room, its cord carpet and steel shelves, the laundry barrels and the fattest trash cans you ever saw, from which we fish our presmeared tackle. Out in Casualty it’s always Saturday night. Everything is possible.
You want to know what I do? All right. Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head. We don’t mess about. We’ll soon have that off. He’s got a hole in his head. So what do we do? We stick a nail in it. Get the nail—a good rusty one—from the trash or wherever. And lead him out to the Waiting Room where he’s allowed to linger and holler for a while before we ferry him back to the night. Already we’re busy with this bag lady we’ve got, welding sock and shoe plastic onto the soles of her evil feet. . . . When we’re done with the bad ones, we can’t wait to get them out of here. Gangway. It doesn’t matter. There’s always more.
I keep thinking I know them. This happens ten times a day. I keep thinking I know them, these that are wheeled on trolleys or borne on stretchers. Wait. Wasn’t that Cynthia, who worked in the deli? Was that woman maybe Gay nor, whom I knew with the act of love? But surely this is Harry, the doorman at the Met. It all happens so fast. I can’t hear, with the screams and the ribcrack. Whose child is that? Wasn’t he the kid who used to dash across the road, back in Wellport? So many years. Slow. Children.