Coma

Several small flakes of snow danced down Longwood Avenue in the half-light of February 23, 1976. The temperature was a crisp twenty degrees and the delicate crystalline structures fluttering earthward were intact even after striking the pavement. The sun was obscured by a low cover of thick gray clouds which shrouded the waking city. More and more clouds were swept in by the sea breeze, enveloping the tops of the taller buildings in a mist, making it become paradoxically darker as dawn spread its frail fingers over Boston. It was not supposed to snow, yet a few flakes had crystallized over Cohasset and had blown all the way into the city. The few that reached Longwood Avenue and were blown right on Avenue Louis Pasteur were the survivors until a sudden down-draft slammed them against a third-story window of the medical school dorm.

They would have slid off had it not been for the layer of greasy Boston grime on the pane. Instead they stuck there while the glass slowly transmitted the heat from within, and their delicate bodies dissolved and mingled with the dirt.

Within her room Susan Wheeler was totally unaware of the drama on the window pane. Her mind was preoccupied with extracting itself from the clutches of a meaningless, disturbing dream after a restless, near-sleepless night. February 23 was going to be a difficult day at best and possibly a disaster. Medical school is made up of a thousand minor crises occasionally interrupted by truly epochal upheavals. February 23 was in the latter category for Susan Wheeler. Five days earlier she had completed the first two years of medical school, the basic science part taught in the lecture halls and science labs with books and other inanimate objects. Susan Wheeler had done very well because she could handle the classroom, the lab, and the papers. Her class notes were renowned and people always wanted to borrow them. At first she lent them indiscriminately. Later, as she began to perceive the realities of the competitive system which she thought she had left behind in Radcliffe, she changed her tactics. She lent her notes only to a small group of people who were her friends, or at least were people from whom she could borrow notes if she had had to miss a class. But she rarely missed a class.

A number of people chided Susan playfully about her. marvelous attendance record. She always responded by saying she needed all the help she could get. Of course that was not the reason. Having entered a profession dominated by males, in which essentially all the professors and instructors were males, Susan Wheeler could not skip a class without being missed. Despite the fact that Susan looked on her mentors in a neutral sexless way as her professional superiors, they did not return the view in kind. The fact of the matter was that Susan Wheeler was a very attractive twenty-three-year-old female.

Her hair was the color of winter wheat and very wispy. Since it was long and fine it drove her batty in the wind unless she had it pulled back and clasped with a barrette at the back of her head. From there it fell in a sheen to the lower edges of her shoulder blades. Her face was broad with high cheekbones, and her eyes, set well back in their sockets, were a mixture of blue and green with flecks of brown so that the chromatic effect changed with different light sources. Her teeth were ultra white and perfectly straight, the result of fifty percent nature and fifty percent suburbanite orthodontist.

All in all Susan Wheeler appeared like the girl of the Pepsi-Cola people’s dreams. At twenty-three years old she was young, healthy, and sexy with that American, Californian style that made eyes turn and hypothalamuses awaken. And on top of it all, perhaps in spite of it all, Susan Wheeler was very sharp. Her grammar school IQ ratings had hovered around the 140

range and were a source of infinite delight to her socially committed parents. Her school record was a monotonous series of A’s with numerous other evidences of achievement. Susan liked school and learning and reveled in using her brain. She read voraciously. Radcliffe had been perfect for her. She did well but she earned her grades. She had majored in chemistry but had taken as much literature as possible. She had no trouble getting into medical school.

But being attractive as Susan was had certain definite drawbacks. One was the difficulty of missing class without being noticed. Whenever questions were asked, she was among those unfortunate few who served to demonstrate the stupidity of the students or the brilliance of the professors. Another drawback was that people formed opinions about Susan, with very little information. She so resembled models glaring out from advertisements that people continuously confused her with those frequently mindless girls.