Perhaps it was having just passed a hospital that had given the doctor his nightmare. He had been in a high-ceilinged hall, full of dazzling light. Around fifty people sat in the audience holding their breath, their eyes fixed on him. He was in the midst of a performance of heart massage. He climbed on top of the patient on the operating table and sat there, both hands to the inert heart, leaning his weight into the task of pumping it at varied rhythms and tempos. He was a percussionist, and the audience was appreciating his concert.
He went on massaging, working up a great sweat as he pumped. The muscles in his arms were jelly, and pain and exhaustion gripped his back. He wiped the drops of sweat from his brow with his white sleeve, and glanced at the audience. Some were dozing. Others were rising to leave. Still the doctor couldn’t end his performance. There would be no rest for him until the heart began to beat of its own accord again. But even that rest would be only brief, before he had to begin work on the next patient. More and more patients in cardiac arrest were being brought into the hall.
Even if he failed to resuscitate someone, the doctor thought, he wasn’t directly responsible for his death. It was now around two hours since the heart had stopped. The situation was hopeless. Continuing the heart massage was a mere formality.
He was tired. He longed to stop. There was no way the patient would revive. Yet the audience was poised to applaud the very moment the patient was resuscitated. If he got down from the table now, they’d not only boo him, they’d lynch him. A thought came to him: what if he fainted right now?
The next instant, the prone patient opened his eyes, and gave him a leer that seemed to see through to his very soul. The doctor felt his own heart squeeze tight, and at that moment the dream bumped him back into reality.
“Could you please go someplace where there isn’t a hospital?” he asked Kita confidingly.
“I don’t suppose you’ve been dreaming of all the patients you killed getting their own back on you, have you?”
The doctor sighed in response, and said, “Heart massage is a nightmare. I’ve had it up to here.”
“It really does make your heart ache, eh?”
The doctor could remember heart massages that had gone on for four hours straight. If there’s no response within thirty minutes, you can generally assume brain death, but the patient’s family still hadn’t shown up so he had to keep going. You have to show the relatives that you’re massaging the heart. The doctor will go on trying until he’s too exhausted to pump any more, so that the relatives will acknowledge that he’s done all he could. The family will use the doctor’s sweat as surety for the fact of their relative’s death. That’s the custom in hospitals.
“So what does it feel like to massage a corpse?” Kita suddenly asked.
“You have to like corpses. If you think it’s pointless, you can’t get your arms and back working strongly enough. You have to tell yourself it’s for humanity and the world as you press.”
“How do you do it?”
“You get on the corpse, shake your head around wildly, yell ‘Don’t die, you crazy fool!’ and go like this.” The doctor placed his hands against the dashboard and leaned into it, breathing heavily. The car swayed slightly.
“I guess it would feel pretty good to the guy being massaged.”
The doctor drew a deep breath through his nose, and irritably tutted again. The next time he makes a bad joke, he thought, I’ll give him a shot to put him to sleep.
He closed his eyes again, but he didn’t want to return to the dream, so he imagined music. The prelude to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He used to listen to this opera a lot in his student days, so he thought he could remember most of the melody, but it began to repeat itself half way through and he couldn’t move it on. Oh well. To cheer himself up, he taunted Kita, “By the way, maybe it’s natural to get an erection when you’re close to death.” He’d apparently noted the shape of Kita’s pants of the corner of his eye. “I think it’s a normal reaction,” he went on, red-faced.
“It felt like having sex with a car back there. Literally car sex.”
“A car accident is sex with a car, you know. You don’t need a man and a woman for that. All you need to do is step on the accelerator. You reach climax in no time.”
It was four in the morning. Kita had no idea where he was going. There wasn’t a building to be seen along the roadsides. No hospitals, no graveyards. The road simply stretched ahead to carry them along. Kita pressed harder on the accelerator again. His forehead grew hot, and a thrill ran down to his thighs.
The doctor chuckled reminiscently, and murmured, “You know, after a car accident you sometimes find people with a blissful expression on their face. Just like they’ve come through wild sex.”
That young hot-rodder had been like that. He’d been playing tag with a motorcycle cop, failed to take a corner, and piled into a noodle shop. That was the first time the doctor had seen that ecstatic look. The accident happened right near the hospital where he worked, and the patrol car had taken him to the site. Three broken ribs appeared to have pierced his stomach. The helmet was smashed, but his head was unhurt, and he was conscious. When he was carried into the operating room, he was drooling and grinning, his eyes glazed. When they removed the bloody clothes and set about dealing with his injuries, they found his pants were wet with semen. He’d apparently ejaculated at the moment of impact. His penis was still engorged.
The boy had seized the nurse’s arm and said, “Suck me off.” She was appalled. He went on, “One more time, one more time before I die!”
“Pull yourself together!” the nurse scolded him. She took hold of his penis.
“Thank you,” he said, and lost consciousness.
It must have felt really good, for he developed a taste for it. He managed to crash his motorbike not once but three times, and get himself brought back to the same hospital. Each time, he had the blissful expression of Saint Sebastian. The third time he came in, however, the back of his brain had been gouged out, and he died three hours later.
“By the way, what happens to your penis if you die with an erection?”
“I’d say you’d lose it,” the doctor replied curtly.
“Wouldn’t it stay for a while?”
“Who knows. Why do you ask?”
“It’d be pretty amazing to have an erection when you’re already dead. How was it with that Saint Sebastian fellow?”
The doctor shook his head. “It didn’t work for him that third time,” he told Kita. “The guy’s brains had spilled out, after all. There wasn’t even any point in massaging his heart.”
After a brief silence, Kita announced, “I’ve decided how I’m going to kill myself.”
“In a crash?” The doctor frowned, and scratched his head. “You’d already made that decision when you stole the car, hadn’t you?”
“That thrill just drives me wild. I’m going to commit love suicide with my car, like your Saint Sebastian.”
“But dying in a crash won’t be good for your internal organs, you know. We can’t use a liver or kidney that’s been pierced by a rib.”
The doctor was still after his organs, it seemed. “I’ll make sure it’s OK,” Kita promised, but the doctor gazed steadily at him.
“Are you really sure you’ll succeed first time? It’s a question of probabilities, see.”
“You’re saying I might not die?”
“I once saved a young man’s life even though his heart was cut open. He was struck by a truck and brought in unconscious with dreadfully heavy bleeding. I was sure he was done for, but I opened his chest up then and there, without anaesthetic, pinched the wound in his heart together and stopped the flow of blood, and spent a long time sewing him up. Six months later he left hospital and went back to work.”