The elevator slowed. They were going to get off before Adam heard the name of the bar and he didn’t dare ask. But as the elevator stopped, Tom said, “It’s called Frank’s on Raven Lake, just outside the town.”
The door opened, the orderlies stepped out, and Tom said, “See you, Doc.”
Adam nodded and the men went toward the nursing desk to pick up their roster for the morning shift. The elevator doors creaked closed and the metal-walled box, just long enough to fit a gumey, ground up to Four, the top floor of Glenvale General.
Frank’s, Raven Lake. He didn’t have to write it down; he wouldn’t forget.
The doors opened, and he stepped into the hall, where Mrs. Warren and two interns who looked like they’d been up all night were waiting to begin rounds.
Rounds started at nine, and it was now exactly nine. Mrs. Warren, the floor’s head nurse, introduced them and they went down the hall to Mrs. Trilling’s room.
Mrs. Trilling’s blood sugar was stable at last; Dilantin had controlled the seizurelike reactions to the wild fluctuations in glucose vs. insulin. Her feet, which had been chill on admission, were warm to the touch, the pulse in her ankles strong. She could go home.
He went over the case with the interns, then turned to her. She was fifty, a plain woman with clay-colored skin and a large doughy nose. Her thick lips were wet, her eyes dark and shiny as wet plums.
“Everything looks fine,” he told her. “You can go home on Monday. Sorry to make you miss the weekend, but better safe than sorry, right?”
Her eyes filled with tears and she mumbled, “I thought I was going to die. I thought I’d never go home again.” She grabbed his hand. He was afraid she was going to raise it to those thick, moist lips and he’d have to run to the toilet to wash or walk around with the slimy feeling of her saliva on his hand. But she just squeezed his hand in her own, which was, thankfully, dry, and let him go.
Next was Mrs. Boucher, whose stitches had been removed yesterday. Her bowel sounds were coming up nicely, and she was also a candidate for discharge on Monday. “As long,” he said sternly, “as you keep walking...” down the hall to the window at the end that had a view of the mountains in the distance and a sill covered with struggling plants the patients left behind and the nurses tried to keep alive.
“No matter how uncomfortable, you must keep walking,” he told her.
She didn’t grab his hand or even thank him. She said, “The gas is terrible,” and a crepitating sound came from under the covers. She blushed and mumbled, “Sorry.” The interns blushed, too, but Adam laughed and said gently, “Feel better?”
“A little,” she said. “Wish they could do something about the gas.”
“It’ll get better in a day or so,” he said, and wrote Gas-X on her chart.
After Mrs. Boucher came Thomas Dorchester, who was losing his final battle with the final stage of lung cancer. Mr. Dorchester would not be going home Monday or ever.
Adam pulled down the clean woven cotton cover and crisp sheet over the man. The nurses were really good here—everything was clean as could be, with only the faintest odor—but nothing could conquer that smell of inner rot. Then he rolled up the white-and-blue-printed hospital gown to reveal the carcass. No other word could describe what was left of the still faintly vital Thomas S. Dorchester. His skin hung like the folds of a burst balloon; the genitals were crumpled paper.
Out of the corner of his eye, Adam saw the interns look away and felt a touch of satisfaction. He never looked away—even from the worst sights. He applied his stethoscope without bothering to breathe on it first. Tom Dorchester would not feel the cold.
The lungs had the texture of disintegrating sponge by now; they could not sustain life much longer. Dorchester would die tonight, tomorrow at the latest, though they could fool you and hang on for days, even weeks. Lots of things fooled you, he thought. His examination was gentle, firm, thorough, and pointless. But he went through it anyway, partly for the benefit of the interns, partly because it was the only kind of examination he seemed capable of conducting. As he went about it, he spoke softly to the two young men across the bed, but that was because of the atmosphere, not because Dorchester would hear him. He wouldn’t.
“The chief resident wants to send Mr. Dorchester down to Albany, where they’ve got a newfangled ventilator.”
“Then why’s he here?” asked one intern, Chatterjee, a very skinny young man with dark skin and liquid brown eyes.
“Because the family won’t have him moved,” Adam said, looking up briefly from his examination. “They want him to die here in his hometown, where he’ll see their faces at the end.”
He rolled down the gown, rolled up the pristine white covers, and looked at the interns. “And the thing is, gentlemen, the family’s right. Nothing the machines in Albany or we in Glenvale can do is going to save him. Better to give death its due,” he said quietly, “and let his last sight be of his family, assuming he ever sees anything again, which is highly unlikely.” He saw a glance pass between them and knew they thought he was wrong and sentimental. They still thought medicine was about never giving up. Adam had felt the same at their age, then had realized, suddenly and without fanfare, about three years ago, that it wasn’t. That fighting death for someone in Thomas Dorchester’s condition was futile and cruel, and he counted himself a physician from that time.
But these two were still in their control mode, and he knew nothing he said would jar them out of it. He straightened up and looked at Mrs. Warren. “Call the family,” he said. “Tell them it’ll probably be tonight.”
“But maybe,” said the other intern, Severensen, who was blond to the point of Albinism, with disappearing lashes and brows and weak-looking eyes.
“Sure,” Adam said. “Maybe. But I think they’d rather have to make a couple of trips than miss saying good-bye.”
Both interns looked down at the dying man, the dark one from India or Pakistan, Adam didn’t know which, and the light one, who looked like his ancestors had been bleached by ten thousand years of sunless ice, and he saw that bole in their eyes. He knew what it was, knew the word for it, just as he knew the word for quark even though he’d never seen one, never held one in his hands, never felt one. Never felt a quark, never felt the pity he saw in the eyes of the two young men looking down at Thomas S. Dorchester.
He straightened up, folded his stethoscope, and put it away, then went over the charts and said a few more things to them about pain control in terminal cancer, although Thomas Dorchester was beyond pain by now. Then they left the room and went on with rounds.
It was 10:00 a.m.; his shift ended at 6:00. Tonight was a full moon, and he’d go home, shower, and shave carefully, then change into the clothes he’d bought at the huge discount mart down in Sawyerville, don one of the el cheapo wigs he’d bought in the same store, and go to Frank’s in Raven Lake.
Frank’s was only a few yards from the lake. It had log siding, long narrow windows, and a neon sign on the roof that threw strands of red light on the black water.
The lot was almost full. Adam parked next to a narrow sand beach and climbed out of the car, looked out over the lake, and got the disorienting feeling he’d been here before. He tried to remember when and couldn’t. It was probably just one of those baseless sensations that people sometimes put down to experiences from an earlier life or some such crap. But it was very strong, and he stayed where he was, looking at the calm black water with the path of moonlight across it, trying to remember. Nothing came to him and then the roadhouse door opened, letting out a blast of noise, and the spell was broken. A couple weaved out with their arms around each other. They crossed the lot to a red pickup patched with orange rust and the man bent the woman back against the truck door and kissed her. His paunch made it hard for their lower bodies to connect, but the woman let out a phony groan of desire. Then the man climbed into the driver’s seat, the woman staggered around the front of the truck and got in the other side, and they screeched out of the lot without stopping to see if any other cars were coming.