Coma

“Thank you for your time, Dr. Stark.”

“Not at all, Susan.”

The line disconnected and Susan hung up.

The soiled gloves fell into the wastebasket beside the sponge rack. On the rack was a group of blood-stained sponges hanging like dirty clothes on a line. A nurse passed behind Bellows and undid the string at the neck of his operating gown. Bellows tossed it into the hamper by the door and left.

It had been an uncomplicated gastrectomy, a procedure Bellows usually liked to perform. But on this particular morning Bellows’s mind had been somewhere else and the double-layer closure of the stomach pouch and the small bowel had been tedious rather than enjoyable. Bellows could not stop thinking about Susan. His thoughts ran the gamut from tender concern, accompanied by remorse for the words that had driven Susan away the night before, to self-righteous pleasure in the comments he had felt justified in making. He had already gone too far, gambled too much, and it was quite apparent that Susan had no intentions of easing up on her idiotic drive in the direction of career suicide.

On the other hand, the sweetness of the evening before last was still very much in Bellows’s mind. He had responded to Susan in a way that had been so natural, so fresh. He had made love with her in such a manner that orgasm had been a mere part, not a goal. There had felt something so wonderfully equal, a communion of sorts. Bellows realized that he cared for Susan very much, despite the fact that he knew so little about her, and despite the fact that she was so blasted stubborn.

Bellows dictated his operative note on the gastrectomy case into a tape recorder with the usual medical monotone, ending each sentence with a vocalized “period.” Then he went into the dressing room and began to change back to his street clothes.

Acknowledging affection for Susan put Bellows on guard. His rationality persuaded him that such feelings would diminish his objectivity and sense of perspective. He could not afford that, not now, when his career opportunities were in the balance. Since Susan had been transferred to the V.A., things had already quieted down. Stark had been civil on rounds, even to the extent of semiapologizing for his ungrounded implications concerning Bellows’s association with the drugs found in locker 338.

Bellows completed dressing and walked over to the recovery room to check the post-op orders on his gastrectomy patient.

“Hey, Mark,” called a loud voice from the recovery room desk. Bellows turned to see Johnston coming toward him.

“How the hell are those students of yours? I understand that the girl’s a piece of ass.”

Bellows didn’t answer. He waved his hand in a questioning fashion. The last thing he wanted to do was get into some idiotic conversation with Johnston about Susan.

“Did your students tell you what happened at the med school this morning? It’s one of the funniest stories I’ve heard in a long time. Some guy broke into the Anatomy Building last night He must have been some kind of a nut because he discharged a fire extinguisher, unveiled all the first-year students’ cadavers, shot up the place, got himself locked in the freezer, and then had a brawl with the bodies. He knocked a bunch of the corpses down and shot up some of them. Can you imagine?”

Johnston erupted in gusts of laughter.

The effect was just the opposite on Bellows. He looked at Johnston but thought about Susan. She had told him that she had been chased again, that someone had tried to kill her. Could that have been the same man?

The freezer? Susan was rapidly becoming a total mystery. Why hadn’t she told him more?

“Did the guy freeze?” asked Bellows.

Johnston had to pull himself together in order to talk.

“No, at least not all of him. The police had been tipped off by an anonymous phone call in the middle of the night. They thought it was a med school prank so they didn’t check it out until the morning shift came in. By the time they got there the guy was unconscious, sitting in the corner. His body temperature was ninety-two degrees, but the medical boys succeeded in thawing him out without any trouble with acidosis. I think that’s pretty commendable for those assholes. The only trouble was that they waited for two hours before calling me on consult. Hey, you know what the nurses in the ICU call him?”

“I can’t guess.” Bellows was only half-listening.

“Ice Balls.” Johnston broke down in laughter again. “I thought that was pretty clever. It’s a takeoff on Hot Lips from M*A*S*H. What a pair, Hot Lips and Ice Balls.”

“Is he going to make it?”

“Sure. I’m going to have to amputate some. At the very least he’s going to lose part of his legs. How much will be determined over the next day or so. The poor bastard might even lose those ice balls.”

“Did they find out anything about him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, his name, where he was from, you know.”

“Nothing. It turned out he had some I.D. which proved to be fake. So the police are very interested. He mumbled something about Chicago.