Terrence Holt: Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories

“I stayed long enough to register my triumph. I had nailed him indeed. I knew what he was, and he knew. And oddly, at that moment, that was enough for me. Far too much, as it turned out. I stayed just long enough to register the deed, and then I turned and fled that room as though the devil was after me as well.

“Two weeks later, they found Schott’s body hanging from the rafters in his attic. He had been there, the coroner estimated, about two weeks: in that weather it was hard to know, but it had been that long since anyone had seen him, and the physical findings were not inconsistent with the interval.”

THERE WAS A RUMBLE from the darkness behind the couch. We all turned to look as the head and shoulders of Clark, radiology, heaved themselves into view. His shock of white hair and frozen, chiseled features gave him a spectral quality.

“Cripes, Hawley,” he said.

Hawley turned his gaze in that direction. His eyes were open, but the flatness of his expression made you feel he wasn’t looking through them.

“Yes?” he said mildly.

“When did you say all this happened?”

A long pause. It was like waiting for some antique clockwork to perform.

“Sixty-two.” He said at last. “Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters.” Clark straightened impressively. The two disheveled surgeons slumped on the couch goggled up at him. “It matters because it’s all a load of crap,” he said. “I came here in ’64. Are you trying to tell me somebody hanged himself two years before that, and this is the first I’ve heard of it?”

He raked the rest of us with a glare that suggested we were gullible fools.

“You’re filling these children’s heads with lies, Hawley. None of this—” He waved a large hand in our direction. “None of this is true.”

He settled back into his dark trench, muttering something we couldn’t catch before falling silent.

In the stillness that followed, we all turned to look at Hawley. That bland, moonlike face beamed at us undisturbed.

“For a man who spends his days reading shadows, he’s awfully definite. Don’t you think?” He twinkled at us then, and I had a brief, queasy insight into why his patients were so taken with him. “What does truth have to do with it?” he said, quietly, more to himself than us. “Of course it isn’t true. It’s lies, all of it. It never really happened. I never said it did.” He shook himself then, settled back in his chair, and as he sank back into his Buddha-trance we saw to our horror that he was about to start up again.

“NO ONE KNEW WHAT to make of it at first. Oh, I thought I knew — was afraid I knew. When I heard he left a note, I was afraid I might have figured in it somehow. I shouldn’t have worried. The note was in German: it took the medical examiner a while to find someone who could translate it. All it said was, I pay my debt . And from there the whole mystery started to unravel.

“In the desk was more. A box in the lower drawer held a small collection of personal effects, the only items in the entire ill-furnished house that shed any light on the man who had maintained an existence there. There were letters, and photographs, and a few legal documents, enough to piece together a history, although as far as I know no one ever did much to substantiate it.

“There had been a wife, and a child, and it seemed both were still living back in Göttingen, although there had been no communication since Schott’s coming to the States five years earlier — at which time, apparently, there had been some irrevocable rupture. There had been previous training in oncology, that much was clear from academic certificates found filed elsewhere, but there had been difficulties with licensure; it had probably been necessary to begin all over again in America.

“But the story of Schott’s queer mission had its beginnings before then. There had been one. And as I gazed at the photograph, blurry, sunstruck, of a slight child squinting at the camera, the bald head just beginning to grow the strange fuzz of the survivor, and then at the series of later images, these much clearer, of that child grown taller, straighter, far more substantial, his head sprouting an unruly mop of otherwise ordinary hair, and of the woman hovering at his side in a half crouch of perpetual protection, I knew that I was looking at the one. His own child, who had somehow, miraculously, survived.

“Had he treated his own son? Was this how it began? And how long had it taken him, how many treatment failures followed that one impossible cure, before he had realized that he was doomed? He was doomed to go on no matter how high the numbers mounted, as doomed as the innocent victims he must torture if he was ever to pay his debt.

“How it had become a debt I thought I could understand. We are not supposed to use our gifts that way: not for ourselves. There was something illicit about it, and that first, miraculous success could only have confirmed, perversely, its essential wrongness. The only way to right the balance was to find someone for whom the cure might be an act of grace freely given, and not of selfish need. His only hope was that someday, somehow, it might all come right. Then all those victims would have died for a good reason. I could understand his thinking at least that much. Which is something else I would rather not ponder too deeply. There’s enough about this case that gives me bad nights even now.”

HAWLEY’S VOICE, WHICH HAD been sinking for the past hour into a half-audible whisper, finally wound down. The room was sunk in silence even thicker than the gloom. From the corner Benson’s soft snores were the only sound. Everyone else, I realized, was still awake.

Hawley sat quietly for a minute, poised and introspective, before he sprang into motion with an odd abruptness, like some kind of clockwork figure whose hour had rung. He reached down and plucked an antique pager from his belt, peered at it with a puzzled expression, held it to one ear, and shook it as if it were his pocket watch and it had stopped. He stood, took a general inspection of the room, and said with a deliberate sort of inconsequentiality, “I should start my rounds. There’s probably something going on.”

I looked at my watch. It wasn’t yet four. What rounds? I wondered. Nobody rounds at four.

Hawley took one more glance at Benson sleeping in the corner. “Somebody should wake him up,” he said as he sidled toward the door. I didn’t know then that this was the last time I would see him.

As soon as the door closed behind him, Benson rolled over.

“The old fraud,” he said. He revealed the phone clutched in his hand. “I’ve been paging him for the last half hour. To his own PICU, no less. ‘Start my rounds.’ The old fool would rather bore us to death than see a patient.”

There was a general muttering of irritable agreement, cut off when with a rush of air and activity the door was flung open. It was Jawanda from the ER, looking harried and annoyed.

“What’s wrong with you idiots?” he demanded. “The paging system’s been down for two hours. The whole hospital’s been on PA paging but one of you geniuses turned it off in here, didn’t you? Benson? It was you, wasn’t it?”

Benson did what I never saw him do before or since, which was blush, and slouched quickly toward the door. Jawanda scowled over the anesthesiologist’s scuttling form. “And the rest of you have three dozen patients piled up in my ER waiting to be admitted.” He raked us all with vivid scorn before flinging the door shut behind him. In his wake, the lot of us sat befuddled, staring at our pagers as though they might tell us something useful, but we saw nothing that their unnaturally prolonged silence shouldn’t have told us long ago.