There's Something I Want You to Do

“Well,” Benny says. He tries to think of what would comfort his friend. A paradise, not of virgins but of experienced worldly women, funny, quick-witted, sharp-tongued women, moviegoers who know the difference between early and late Ozu, or Kurosawa, of the styles of screwball comedies, of Stanwyck saying, “I need him like the axe needs the turkey,” but instead, sitting next to the bed and holding the hand of his friend, who seems now to be drifting into unconsciousness, he launches into a verbal dreamworld of tits and ass, blowjobs, ecstasy, a little touch of verbal porno here at the bedside, to keep his friend’s spirits up, at least for a while.

Sloth

For an hour the doctor could think of nothing worth doing and no reason to rise from his chair, so he sat in a corner of the coffee shop in downtown Minneapolis, four blocks away from the hospital, with the newspaper’s sports section spread out in front of him, unread, the evening traffic outside going by with the characteristic hiss of tires on wet pavement, a sibilant personal sound like whispering. He gripped a double espresso but did not drink it. Wind gusts whipped the decorative downtown trees. That day on rounds he had checked in on one of his patients, a little girl whom he had diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome. She had developed endocarditis, an infection of the heart that had not been caught before some damage to the valves had occurred. This infection had been followed by a stroke. The family had gathered in the ICU’s waiting area, and one aunt had said loudly to the assembled relatives that her niece, lying there, was unrecognizable, and the doctor could tell — from years of similar scenes — that she, the aunt, was eager to assign blame to someone, starting with the pediatrician (himself), and then advancing up the scale of responsibility, to the radiologist, the surgeon, and at last God. With each new step the accusations would grow more unanswerable. Nevertheless, the arias of blame would soon begin, and they would have their predictable and characteristic melodies of resentment, rage, and malpractice. They were unstoppable. The lawyers would accompany her and provide the harmonizing chorus. For now, thinking of his patient, Dr. Jones could not go home or move in any direction, and, once again, sitting with his back against the coffee shop’s brick wall, the newspaper in front of him detailing the Twins’ latest loss to the Royals, he considered pediatric medicine the very worst of all specialties, a curse upon every physician who had ever practiced it, a field that he should never have gone into and would like to quit for some other better job, like selling boats. People were unusually happy when buying boats. Boat salesmen were dispensers of cheer. By contrast, the observance of pediatric medicine put the insane cruelties of God fully on display. His teachers in medical school had warned him about these psychic difficulties, but they had not warned him sufficiently, and just today one of his colleagues asked him whether he had started “laying crepe” with the girl’s relatives, doctor-talk referring to prepping family members for the patient’s untimely demise.