With the sweat dripping from my brow onto Jimmy's chart and the flu dripping through every muscle and bowel villas in my body, I finished my write-up and sent the Bruiser along with it to the SICU. I sat for a moment musing: Well, this has been the worst night of my life, but now it's over, and now I can go to sleep. They can't get me now. Through the open window came that comforting smell of fresh rain on hot asphalt. The nurse came in and said, "Mr. Lazarus has just had a bowel movement that is all blood:"

"Hey, that's really funny, Maxine. You got a great sense of humor."

"No, I'm serious. The bed is solid blood."

They wanted me to go on, and I could not. The world became the world just before the head?on crash. It could not be what it was. "I can't do anything more tonight," I heard myself say. "I'll see you in the morning."

"Look, Roy, don't you understand? He's just bled out a gallon of blood. He's lying in it. You're the doctor, and you have to do something for him."

Filled with hate, trying to get rid of thoughts that Lazarus wanted to die and I wanted him to die and I had to break my ass to stop him from dying, I went into his room and was face to face with black putrid sticky wet blood. On autopilot, I went to work. My last clear memory was putting a naso-gastric tube down into Lazarus' stomach and having the bloody vomit spew up and out and all over me, as Lazarus rolled his death-defying eyes.

Just after Lazarus, just before dawn, Dr. Sanders came back in, bald from the chemotherapy, infected and bleeding, having had to cut short his fishing trip.

"1'm glad you'll be taking care of me again," he said weakly.

"So am I," I said, wondering if this admission would be his last, and realizing how attached to him I felt.

"Just remember: no whispering behind my back, Roy. And as for heroic measures-we'll talk about that, together."

I put him in the same room with Saul the leukemic tailor, thinking that while Sanders would die, Saul might be just old enough to survive. How crazy was that? As I lay down in my spewed clothes for my hour's sleep, I found myself wondering where Molly was, more than where Berry was, and wondered if that meant that it was the beginning of the ROR?Romance On Rocks?and then I thought with pleasure of the phone call I'd gotten at about one A.M. from June, the Runt's poet, wondering if I knew where he was, and I chuckled at that and composed a letter in my head to give the Runt in the morning: "Congratulations on your bravo three?dimensional night of love. You are herewith charged with rape. Red pubic hairs, I might warn you, will stand up in court." But then I realized that, Goddamn! the Runt was seeing what Angel did with her mouth while I still hadn't gotten past Molly's long nipples, and then finally I recalled that no one yet knew what Angel did with her mouth because I'd just made that up to torment that optimist Howard, who knew that being a doc really was the cat's balls after all. And I realized that they could never hurt me more than they had just hurt me that night, and that out of chaos like this had to come confidence and skill. Something had happened when I was with Saul and Jimmy and Lazarus and Dr. Sanders, and I didn't know for sure what, but I knew that from taking the risks and learning and remembering Fats, I had pinned down my terror and exploded it to bits. From that night on, I might be everything else, but I'd never again be panicked in the House of God. It was a thrilling thought?almost like in the intern novels and in the inside of Howard's skull and in my father's letters?until I realized with alarm that I hadn't learned how to save anyone at all, not Dr. Sanders or Lazarus or Jimmy or Saul or Anna O., and that what I was thrilled about was learning how to save myself.

My mid?September, according to Jo's schedule, neither I nor any other tern was supposed to have learned how to save himself. That next morning, as the warmth of the fading summer percolated up through the crisp air, as the clear cirrus football weather blew into the ward through the skeleton of the Wing of Zock rising higher and higher like jail bars over our windows, I showed up for rounds a half?hour late, and I was the first tern there. Jo was furious, and when, an hour late, Chuck ambled in, wearing yet again the same dirty whites with the same fly open and the same no necktie, Jo exploded, saying, "I told you, Chuck, that rounds start at six?thirty. Got it?"

"Fine, fine."

"Where have you been?"

"Oh, well, I been getting my car fixed"

Just as rounds ended, in flew the Runt. His hair was frazzled, his belt undone, his shirt was hanging out, his stethoscope dragged from his back pocket, and he had a big smile plastered over his carnival of a face. He was sizzling.

"Are you sick?" asked Jo.

"Hell, no. I feel grrr?ate."

"Where have you been?"

"I've been fucking my eyes out," said the Runt, and then, roaring, clapped a hand on each of Chuck's and my shoulders, and with an idiotic rolls coasts of a grin, yelped.

"You've been what?" asked Jo.

"Fucking. Copulating. You know, vasodilation of the penile veins, it gets hard and the male sticks it into?"

"That's inappropriate?"

"Hey, Jo," said the Runt, looking to us for support, and then, ignoring her fragility, "go fuck yourself, huh?"

With that Chuck and I knew we had created a monster and felt real good about it, but Chuck pointed out that it was sort of like watching your mother?in?law drive your new Cadillac off a cliff, because we knew that Jo would not go fuck herself but would go talk to the Fish, who would go talk to the Leggo, who would get us back but good, since the essence of any hierarchy is retaliation. Jo led the rest of rounds in silence, until we got to the admission named Jimmy, who'd been TURFED to the SICU. Jo insisted we go see him, and as our caravan turned up the hall, Jo got excited about the case, and unable to contain herself any longer, blurted out, "Hey, Roy, that sounds like a really great admission."

Without thinking, remembering how Jimmy's decompensation had strung me out, as if from somewhere else than me, although I knew it did come from some bilious region within me, I heard myself create a new LAW NUMBER NINE: THE ONLY GOOD ADMISSION IS A DEAD ADMISSION, which stopped Jo in her tracks, the same way that, a few minutes later, when Chuck and the Runt and I were poodling around the SICU while Jo macerated Jimmy, we were stopped in our tracks when we saw, rigged up in an orthopedic apparatus, the remains of a human. Bandaged head to toe, it was clear that the patient had collided with something and that the point of impact had been his testicles. They were cantaloupe, even honeydew. Here we had an aberrant Hell's Angel who, on his Harley Hawg, had smashed head?on into a tree. A sign on the end of his bed read: IT TAKES BALLS TO RIDE A HARLEY.

None of us could have imagined what an ace auto mechanic Angel was until we heard from the Runt how, even the first time, she had fixed his compact car: "Well, I was so upset at what was happening last night, I couldn't even talk straight by the time I got to her apartment. I don't know what you said to her on the phone, Roy, but when she hung up, things were a lot easier. She poured me a drink, but all I could think of was Lazarus and Risenshein and the graffiti above the urinal at the Chinese restaurant: STAND CLOSER, IT'S SHORTER THAN YOU THINK. Well, anyway, she asked if I'd??like to watch TV and I said sure. We were sitting on the couch, and I didn't know if she liked me, and then all of a sudden she's sort of leaning her boob against me and her red hair is unpinned and down to her scapula and I start to feel better. And she says It's kind of uncomfortable in here, why don't we watch inside, and unplugs the TV and carries it into the bedroom. I couldn't believe it. I start to nuzzle her neck and she says Clothes are such a hassle, and she takes off her sweater and her skirt. Well. She starts to make husky noises and since she's taken off her sweater, I take off her bra. Ha! Perfect! Big soft tits! Ha! I pull off her panties," said the Runt, pulling off Angel's panties right before our eyes in the middle of the nursing station, "and she pulls off my pants. Incredible!"