The Axeman's Jazz

you work? It’s not normal. It’s not natural. You’re going to keel over one day.”
    “Do me a favor, Missy. Don’t call me precious, okay?”
    “Why not?”
    “It’s a name for a little kid.”
    “But you are precious.”
    He headed for the shower, feeling slightly depressed, hoping against hope for a good day. Yesterday had been one Room Four after another, sometimes two at a time.
    At least for once he’d had a full night’s sleep.
    Though you could tell it only from the roof, Charity was actually a giant, nineteen-floor H. From the street it merely looked like some out-of-control antique, urban sprawl in microcosm, the hospital that ate New Orleans. But Charity wasn’t about to devour anything. Nurses hated working there, and many wouldn’t. It was still a good teaching hospital with one of the best trauma units in the country, but it was perennially short-staffed and underfunded.
    The building itself was so outdated you could hardly believe it had elevators, much less elevators with robot voices (which it did). Above the fourteenth floor, there was no hospital, only the now-empty call rooms where residents had once resided, and a couple of ancient operating theaters. Sonny had explored every inch of the place, knew which of the call rooms had keys above the doors and could be entered for a catnap, when you could make speeches to imaginary audiences in the operating theaters. (Now and then meetings were held in them.)
    The first time he’d seen the waiting room, where, despite emergencies and imagined ones, many waited the better part of a day, he’d thought:
Calcutta.
The place looked caught in time, a scene from a Thirties movie that should have been hung with cobwebs. People moaned on gurneys or in their chairs, held broken arms against their bodies, drooped in misery and boredom.
    Sonny could feel himself absorbing their pain. He’d had a dream once, of being a flasher—he’d opened his trenchcoat and his skin came open as well, exposing his heart, liver, intestines, everything that needed protection. Being in the room was like that, like the dream come true. He was open, vulnerable, couldn’t separate himself from the misery in the air, couldn’t get his skin zipped up.
    Half an hour later, behind the closed doors of the trauma room, where he’d watched as a team stabilized a man found beaten up in the street, where he’d seen a nasty cut stitched, where the hospital bustle mixed reassuringly with the misery, making inroads, he was fine.
    It was a pretty normal reaction so far as he could tell. Even Missy had had it. The touted medical armor didn’t take months to develop, it came on you almost immediately. You couldn’t go around with your skin open, you had to close up.
    But this rotation was still the worst for him—the worst by far, the only thing he’d ever gotten into that made him doubt himself.
    His uncle had come over once to find his parents fighting, arguing before a party. “Robson Gerard,” he’d intoned, “you are a physician!”
    When his dad left his guests and came to tuck him in, Sonny asked, “Why did Uncle Bick say that?”
    “Because doctors are supposed to do better than other people—didn’t you know that?”
    “No. Why?”
    “They just are, Sonny boy. That’s why you have to be such a good boy—because you’re going to be one someday.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I just do.” He had drawn a finger down Sonny’s nose and left him then.
    In medical school they taught you by example not to show reaction—anger was okay, but nothing else, never anything else. Even in your own family you didn’t show weakness, didn’t say you felt for a patient, you hurt for him, a little of you died when he did.
    Was it really that way, or just the way he perceived it? Maybe no one else was weak, or felt for the patients, ever—maybe it wasn’t all just a front. Maybe he really was different. And if he was. he couldn’t be a doctor.
    And even if he wasn’t, but didn’t conquer it, he still couldn’t be a doctor. And if he couldn’t be a doctor, he couldn’t be Sonny Gerard. Sonny Gerard was born and bred to be a doctor. Both his grandfathers had been doctors, and so had all their sons and so would all
their
sons be (except for Sonny’s brother Robbie, who had never fit in). With that one exception, it was what Gerards did. All they did, and Robbie had paid by becoming a family outcast. Not that he seemed to give a damn, but he had chosen not to