The Anatomy Lesson

by Philip Roth

  Until someone down the corridor shouted, “Hey, yon! You all right?” Zuckerman remained submerged to his shoulders in the sheets of the healing, the ailing, and the dying—and of whoever had died there during the night—his hope as deep as the abiding claim of his remote but unrelinquishable home. This is life. With real teeth in it.

  From that evening on, whenever the interns dropped by to say hello, he asked to accompany them on their rounds. In every bed the fear was different. What the doctor wanted to know the patient told him. Nobody’s secret a scandal or a disgrace—everything revealed and everything at stake. And always the enemy was wicked and real. “We had to give you a little haircut to get that all cleaned out.” “Oh, that’s all right,” the enormous baby-faced black woman replied in a small compliant voice. The intern gently turned her head. “Was it very deep. Doctor?” “We got it all,” the intern told her, showing Zuckerman the long stitched-up wound under the oily dressing just behind her ear. “Nothing there to worry you anymore.” “Yes? Well, that’s good then.” “Absolutely.” “And—and am I going to see you again?” “You sure are,” he said, squeezing her hand, and then he left her at peace on her pillow, with Zuckerman, the intern’s intern, in tow. What a job! The paternal bond to those in duress, the urgent, immediate human exchange! All this indispensable work to be done, all this digging away at disease—and he’d given his fanatical devotion to sitting with a typewriter alone in a room!

  For nearly as long as he remained a patient, Zuckerman roamed the busy corridors of the university hospital, patrolling and planning on his own by day. then out on the quiet floor with the interns at night, as though he still believed that he could unchain himself from a future as a man apart and escape the corpus that was his.

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