Doctors

  ‘Hey, kid,’ Linc said, his great chest desperately heaving, ‘I’ve been in this war business a long time. And I’d say you’ve already booked this bed for somebody else.’

  Browning lacked both the experience and composure to be able to respond.

  Suddenly Linc groaned softly, ‘Shit.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If I had to die in this goddamn war, why couldn’t it at least have been in the field – so my son would have had something to be proud of?’

  The young man was almost in tears. ‘You’ll be all right, sir.’

  ‘You’re a lousy liar, Browning. Wise up, if you expect to make it as a real doctor.’

  There was a gentle knock as the door opened slowly.

  ‘I’m sorry, no visitors,’ the young man said quickly but politely.

  Herschel pretended not to understand and walked into the room, carrying a small bunch of wildflowers.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I have come to see my friend.’

  Browning shrugged and, as he left the room, simply nodded to Herschel, saying, ‘I’ll be right nearby, Colonel. Just call if you need anything.’

  The two men were now alone.

  ‘Flowers for you, Lincoln,’ Herschel said, holding them out as he attempted to smile. ‘You know something amazing? Just a few meters past this world of barbed wire, flowers grow and trees blossom. There is still life in the world.’

  Not for me, Line thought inwardly. And then he asked, ‘How’s Hannah?’

  ‘Well, well,’ replied Herschel buoyantly, ‘almost no fever. Tomorrow maybe I can take her for a walk. We will come to visit.’

  ‘Yeah, good, that’ll be nice.’ He then suddenly gasped, ‘Oh God, my—’

  It took a split second for Herschel to realize that Linc was unconscious, then he began to shout for help.

  Herschel stood wide-eyed and trembling as the clinical staff tried to revive his benefactor.

  ‘I get no pulse in the carotid,’ said a voice.

  ‘Nothing in the dorsalis pedis,’ said another.

  ‘Respiration nil.’

  ‘Let’s try injecting an intracardiac ampoule of epinephrine.’

  ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary,’ said the calm voice of Dr Hunter Endicott. ‘With typhus on top of that pneunomia, the guy didn’t have a tinker’s chance.’

  The group around the bed stepped aside for the senior physician who made a thorough and final check of vital signs and said to the head nurse, ‘Sheila, you’ll take care of the paperwork, all right? And make sure everything in this room is disinfected.’

  She nodded. In a matter of seconds the intravenous drip was removed from Colonel Bennett’s arm, the sheet pulled over his face, and the bed wheeled out.

  None of them even noticed the witness to all this – a thin, stoop-shouldered, frightened man standing in the corner, a few tiny sprigs of flowers still clutched in his hand, tears running down his cheeks.

  Almost involuntarily, his lips parted and a prayer emerged: ‘Yisgadal ve yiskadosh shmei raboh …’ Extolled and hallowed be the name of the Lord in the world which He created according to His Will …

  It was the Hebrew Kaddish for the dead.

  It was at that moment that Herschel Landsmann swore a solemn oath. That Colonel Abraham Lincoln Bennett must not have died in vain.

  Swissair Flight 127 landed in Zurich on the bright clear morning of December 24, 1958. The tall, black passenger in First Class buttoned his blazer, straightened his tie, slung his cordovan inflight bag over his shoulder and headed toward the exit.

  Once down the metal steps, he strode briskly to the baggage area. The carousel brought his matching cordovan suitcases almost immediately. But, like the others who had brought skis, he had to wait for the special cargo to be unloaded.

  He glanced through the glass doors at the crowd gathered outside the Customs area and saw the people he was seeking. He smiled and waved affectionately.

  And Abraham Lincoln Bennett, Jr, walked out to embrace his adoptive parents, Hannah and Herschel Landsmann.

  14

  The victims were clamped tightly to metal tables, salivating, their chests heaving. At the center of the room a beady-eyed scientist, brandishing a scalpel in his right hand, was about to demonstrate to his young disciples how to make the incision to lay bare the viscera of one of these creatures. His blond assistant, fresh-faced as a choirboy, held two other instruments – a forceps and a pair of long sharp scissors.

  There was an odor of feces and urine, excreted by the patients in a reflex of fear as they were being pinioned.

  The demonstrator’s arm moved downward at a forty-five-degree angle and slit open the abdomen. There was a sympathetic gasp by some of the beholders.

  ‘Are you sure they’re not feeling anything?’ a voice asked.

  ‘I’ve told you many times, Miss Castellano,’ Professor Lloyd Cruikshank replied. ‘We’re treating these dogs as humanely as possible.’

  They had returned in January to experience their first encounter with the life systems of a living being. Cruikshank would guide them in the ‘resection’ (a medical euphemism from the Latin resecare, to cut off) of one of their dogs’ vital organs.

  It was also an exercise to develop their tolerance – some would say immunity – toward other people’s pain. To hone the mind while hardening the heart.

  Laura had so dreaded the prospect that she could think of little else during the Christmas vacation. As a child she would feed and shelter every stray that wandered into their garden – until her mother would discover them and call the ASPCA.

  Since they could pick their own team for this exercise, she had begged Barney ‘as a Christmas present’ to assist her through the ordeal. He had agreed but was now discovering it was not all that easy for him, either. Nor for their third teammate, newlywed Hank Dwyer, who today was taking his turn as anesthesiologist – a job Laura envied him, since he could keep his eyes on the heart and respiratory dials and not on the dog’s insides. But Hank was upset enough to keep muttering, ‘Don’t worry. She really doesn’t feel a thing.’

  Dissecting the cadavers had been different. After all, these had been in the most literal sense, inanimate objects. There had also been a comforting anonymity about their faces, which had remained swathed for many weeks and, when finally undraped, were so altered that they were barely recognizable as former humans.

  But by now Barney, Laura, and probably every other student in the dog-surgery lab felt as though they were operating on a close friend. For it was their duty to keep their experimental animals alive between resections.

  At one point a student nearby was driven to complain aloud, ‘I can’t do it anymore. This mutt is too damn cute.’

  Professor Cruikshank responded with his traditional ‘Progress of Mankind’ speech.

  ‘We must always remember that we are not doing this out of cruelty to animals, but rather as kindness to our fellow man. We must learn to operate on living beings.’ And then in a tone slightly less pontifical he added, ‘Okay, let’s get those knives in.’ And with that, he left the room.

  The student reluctantly returned his attention to the beagle anesthetized upon his table. He was both startled and relieved to see that while he had been listening to the professor’s sermon, one of his partners had considerately slit the dog’s belly open. The student’s eyes fixed on the beagle’s paw, now pierced – as were all the dogs’ – by a needle at the end of a long intravenous tube bringing dextrose and saline to the unconscious animal.

  Another difference between dogs and cadavers: Dead people do not bleed. But all afternoon the nervous fumbling motions of the students inadvertently pierced the canines’ arteries that spat blood all over them – and quite often their neighbors as well.

  ‘God, I hate this,’ Laura whispered to Barney.

  ‘Stay loose, Castellano. It’s only for a couple of weeks. Just keep reminding yourself we aren’t hurting them.’

  At this precise momen
t a chilling howl filled the room. It was followed by a woman’s shriek. The first was from Alison Redmond’s collie and the second from Alison herself, whose fury was now focused on the ‘anesthesiologist’ in her team.

  ‘I told you he wasn’t asleep. I told you, I told you!’ she railed. ‘You didn’t give him enough!’

  The choirboy assistant rushed toward her table, syringe in hand. In another instant, the needle was in and the animal silenced. But not Alison’s indignation at the pain her dog had suffered.

  ‘You didn’t prep him with enough morphine,’ she complained.

  ‘I assure you I did, Miss Redmond,’ the assistant replied coolly. ‘I’m not a tyro at this.’

  ‘Then why the hell did it wake up?’

  ‘It didn’t wake up,’ he explained, still unruffled and calm. ‘What you saw was just a reflex.’

  ‘Come on. Screaming and kicking and groaning in pain was a reflex?’

  ‘Correction, Miss Redmond. Your animal was reflexively groaning and twitching. It was you who did the screaming.’

  As he turned back and started to walk off, Alison exploded, ‘Fink – I bet you even get a kick out of their suffering! I mean, what the hell kind of a doctor are you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I’m not a doctor. All right, everybody, get on with your work. I’ll be in Professor Cruikshank’s lab if anyone needs me.’

  The moment the double doors had swung behind him, a puzzled Hank Dwyer asked his classmates, ‘What the hell did he mean about not being a doctor?’

  ‘Oh,’ Laura remarked, ‘aren’t you clued in yet? Cruikshank isn’t a physician, either. Almost none of our teachers is an M.D. – they’re all Ph.D.s. In other words, not lowly practitioners who actually see patients but pure scientists.’

  The final word was left to Alison Redmond: ‘Fuck pure science!’

  Laura was still upset at dinner.

  ‘I feel like Lady Macbeth – I can’t seem to wash the blood off my hands.’

  ‘Come on, Laura, don’t exaggerate,’ Barney admonished. ‘Look, I very carefully took out a piece of our pooch’s thyroid and he didn’t even twitch. Next time you’ll remove his spleen and he won’t feel anything then, either. Those anesthetics are really powerful.’

  ‘Besides,’ Bennett interposed, ‘What makes you think it’s going to be any different when we’ve got a human patient on the table?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, you’ll be doing the job because you’re the one who’s going to be a surgeon. For another, you’ll have a legitimate reason for operating in the first place. And most of all, your patient will be cared for twenty-four hours a day. I mean, there sure as hell aren’t any night nurses in the dog labs.’

  ‘Don’t be childish, Laura,’ Peter Wyman scolded. ‘Anyway, what’s the difference? Next Friday we saw open their ribcages, take out their hearts, and it’ll be all over.’

  ‘I’d like to saw your heart open, Wyman,’ Laura countered, ‘only I’d probably need a pneumatic drill.’ She returned to her unhappy musings. ‘I wonder if our doggie knows what’s happening to her. Do you think they gave her something to sleep?’

  ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Wyman declared to the universe, adding, ‘Castellano, I bet you even cried at Lassie Come Home.’

  ‘Damn right I did, Wyman.’

  ‘Ha – I thought you were the iron lady of our class.’

  They soon disbanded to return to their book-lined cells. Laura remained, toying with her chocolate chip ice cream. She had barely eaten anything that evening.

  ‘Hey, Castellano,’ Barney whispered, ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘You couldn’t,’ she said, squashing the ice cream with her spoon.

  ‘For chrissake, I’ve been able to read your mind since we were in the sand box. You wanna go visit our pooch and see if she’s okay?’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded.

  Now she nodded and looked at him with doleful eyes. ‘And I know you want to come, too.’

  The corridor was pitch black. Laura pulled out a pen-sized flashlight. Its intense pinpoint ray shone nearly the length of the corridor, lighting the final corner they would have to take.

  ‘Hey, where did you get a neat thing like that, Castellano?’

  ‘It was in my mailbox – present from one of the drug companies. Don’t they ever give you any goodies?’

  ‘Yeah, but I never open them. They’re just cheap bribes.’

  As they approached the laboratory they could hear sounds from inside – a soft cacophony of little barks and whimpers. The dogs were in pain.

  ‘You were right, Castellano,’ Barney admitted. ‘What do you think we should do about it?’

  Before Laura could respond, they heard a muffled sound of footsteps padding toward them on the linoleum floor of the corridor.

  ‘Shit, someone’s coming,’ she hissed, immediately snapping off the flashlight. They both pressed themselves behind a column.

  The footsteps came nearer. Now there was a silhouette visible against the frosted glass windows of the lab room door. As Laura and Barney watched breathlessly, the figure pushed open the door and glided inside.

  A moment later the silence became so pronounced that Barney could hear the rapid pumping of his own heart. And then he realized what was happening.

  ‘Castellano,’ he whispered, ‘do you notice anything?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s suddenly quiet in there.’

  ‘Yeah, very very quiet.’

  A split second later the figure emerged, went swiftly past them – this time at a jog – and disappeared.

  ‘Okay,’ Laura said, taking a deep breath. ‘I’ve had enough thrills for one evening.’

  ‘You go back if you want to,’ Barney replied. ‘But I’ve gotta see what the hell went on in there.’

  ‘No way, I’m sticking with you even if you go to the boys’ room.’

  They tiptoed the dozen or so steps to the lab doors, which opened noiselessly and swallowed them. Once inside they could hear a tranquil hum, which they easily recognized as the sound of animals sleeping peacefully. There was not a single murmur of pain or distress. Laura relit her flashlight and pointed it at the dogs’ cages. They all seemed to be slumbering comfortably. Yet in a few seconds the two realized that several were not moving at all.

  ‘Look at Alison’s collie,’ Barney whispered, pointing to the topmost row of cages. They both drew closer and Laura shined her flashlight into the dog’s eyes.

  ‘Jesus, Barney – it’s dead.’

  He nodded and then pointed to a cage below them to the right. ‘That one looks finished to me, too. Where’s our pooch?’

  Laura’s narrow beam searched high and low.

  ‘There she is—’ They both knelt at their terrier’s cage. Barney quickly reached inside and touched its bandaged underbelly.

  ‘Alive,’ he murmured. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

  ‘You read my mind, Barney.’

  When they were safe again among the living, Barney translated their mutual anxieties into words.

  ‘I’m not sure, Castellano. But I’d guess that someone in our class feels pretty strongly about euthanasia … I think there’s an argument for calling it humane.’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s also an argument for calling it weird.’

  The next afternoon, Professor Cruikshank frowned as he addressed the class. ‘I’m sorry to have to say that many of you have not shown appropriate care in performing these surgical procedures. We lost nine experimental animals overnight and that means I’ve had to supply nine new ones just for the final vivisection of heart and lungs.’

  ‘But, sir—’

  All eyes turned to see who had dared to voice dissent.

  ‘Yes, Mr Landsmann?’ asked the professor.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be more economical – and in a way kinder – if the people who lost their dogs joined other tables?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ the professor r
esponded. ‘It’s too crucial a part of your medical education. No one should miss his own exploration of living vital organs. This is an aspect you can never get in books – or even as a spectator.’

  Bennett nodded. In any case the whole question was academic, since the animals had already been shackled and anesthetized in submissive anticipation of the explorers’ knives.

  It had been a strange Christmas for Laura and Barney. They had begun a voyage that was changing their perspective on life. What meager knowledge they now possessed had already begun to set them apart from laymen whose apprehension of the awesome machinery of life was, literally, skin deep.

  Still it was wonderful to luxuriate in the amniotic warmth of familial surroundings. Parents were not merely agglomerations of cells, molecules, and tissue, they were embodiments of love and affection. Watching his younger brother gobble sixteen pancakes at breakfast, Barney marveled at the fact that Warren never gave the slightest thought to the effect the glycogenic process he was inducing would have on his metabolism. And it was sheer joy to have conversations that did not require the regurgitation of facts, formulae, or chemical structures.

  Warren seemed to have grown in confidence – although that may just have been the impression given by his new mustache. In any case he had admirably filled the role of man in the family during Barney’s absence, helping Estelle with the preparations for the inevitable sale of the house and her southward move. Law School was still two years off, but both mother and son had already left Brooklyn – in fantasy.

  With his newly honed powers of observation Barney could discern things that he had never noticed before. Like the creaks in the steps to the second floor.

  Clearly the house was entering old age. Even the basket-ball hoop on the oak tree had been shorn of its net during October’s hurricane and was corroded by more than a dozen years of winter weather. Rust, dust, creaky boards. Brooklyn itself seemed to be growing tired. So many of their friends had already moved away.

  Luis had changed, too. He still described himself as El Peñon, La Roca de Gibraltar. But there were deeper furrows in his brow and he was now somewhat disinclined to make house calls at all hours of the night.