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.
It was close to noon before I finished my admissions. And by the time I made my way out into the world, where the ice-shattered sunlight struck me blind, I had almost forgotten everything before then.
It was only two weeks later, when the news came of Hawley’s death—he had been found slumped over a chart at the Peds nursing station, a massive MI that he must have recognized, because there was an empty bottle of nitro found in one hand—that I remembered his implausible story of Schott and how he had paid his debt. At the time, I remembered it, as I imagine the rest of us did, as one last hurrah in a career memorable for little more than eccentricity. But that story, and the odd coincidence of its teller’s death two weeks later, the same interval that had elapsed while Schott’s body swung unnoticed in his attic, kept returning to me. It seemed to say something about how Hawley had come to be there, scribbling one of his inscrutable progress notes at two in the morning, on a night when he was not on call. There was something in Hawley’s career, in its old-school devotion to service, that seemed to have about it its own element of expiation. Was there some debt he had tried to repay? I believe so, although of course by then it was too late to learn what it was, or if he had managed to settle it.
But in the years since, I’ve come to understand what he tried to tell us, why he chose to tell us in the way he did. It was part of that expiation, which was also why he didn’t care if we thought him foolish. I understand this now, almost as well as I know how tedious you find me, now that I’m the one telling pointless stories. I don’t mind. There are many mistakes we are doomed to repeat, again and again and again. This is only one of them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terrence Holt teaches and practices medicine at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOME OF THE STORIES in this volume have appeared previously, in slightly different form. “A Sign of Weakness” and “The Perfect Code” in Granta, “Giving Bad News” (as “Bad News”) in the Boston Review and (in abbreviated form as “Giving Bad News”) in a literary supplement to the Telegraph of India, and “Orphan” in the Boston Review.
ALSO BY TERRENCE HOLT
In the Valley of Kings: Stories
Copyright © 2014 by Terrence Holt
All rights reserved
First Edition
The characters and institutions in these stories are fictional. Any resemblance
between them and any actual individual, living or dead, is coincidence.
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,
write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830
Book design by Lovedog Studio
Production manager: Anna Oler
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Holt, Terry.
Internal medicine : a doctor’s stories / Terrence Holt.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-87140-875-4 (hardcover)
1. Holt, Terry. 2. Medicine—Anecdotes. 3. Internal medicine—Anecdotes.
4. Physicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.
R705.H65 2014
616—dc23
2014020125
ISBN 978-0-87140-880-8 (e-book)
Liveright Publishing Corporation
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories Page 21
