Getting to it meant entering the status of your patients in their charts and dealing with any flux in their status; inking in request forms for X-rays or electrocardiograms; checking lab results of urine, stool, and sputum; drawing bloods, inserting intravenous tubes and catheters; and performing the two-hour admittance procedure on new patients. And because third-year students were at the bottom of the team totem pole, and because gravity mandates that shit roll downhill, they got buried in it.

Here was the ostensible source of our problems. In late October, Glenna vanished from my life. Every morning, except for Sundays, Glenna left the house at six. Twice a week, she did on call, so I wouldn’t see her for a minimum of a day and a half. Otherwise, if things went well with her patients, she returned around seven at night. If things didn’t go well, as they frequently did not, there was no saying when she’d show up.

Since I was busy making it to an occasional class at Brooklyn College, writing short stories and profiles for the Long Island Press, the change didn’t register right away. And in the beginning, Glenna was turned on about playing doctor, and I liked hearing about it.

“Gordo, guess what?”

“You—”

“I diagnosed an anemic.”

“Do tell?”

“I tugged on his lower eyelid and it was rimmed with white instead of the normal red. Want me to check you?”

“Absolutely.”

She pulled on my eyelid.

“Am I all right?”

“You’ll live,” she said.

“Then can we eat dinner now?”

Sometimes, I’d be sleeping when Glenna came in, and she’d crawl into bed and tickle me awake.

“Dr. Fecal Breath told me I’m the only member of his team who can be relied on to read an X-ray.”

“What did it say?”

“A resident thought he saw lung cancer, but I could see it was pneumonia. ‘Eyes like an eagle, Miss Rising,’ Fecal Breath said. ‘Keep it up, you’ll have quite a future.’”

“Did he mention if your future will include sleep?”

Glenna laughed. “He said nothing about sleep.”

I wasn’t surprised that she had impressed Feldstein: Robin had told me that Glenna was in the top 5 percent of their class. But Glenna had confessed to me that she felt like an airhead, which I suspected was not an uncommon complication for good-looking women with brains. Glenna was afraid that she wouldn’t make it through med school, would screw up and kill a patient, or flunk out and disappoint herself and her parents. Her doubt fueled her doggedness at the hospital. So after the novelty of doing her doctor thing wore off, she often came back to Spuyten Duyvil exhausted and appeared annoyed to find me sitting in bed and writing on the legal pad in my lap.

“Don’t you go out?” she asked.

“During the day. Like normal people.”

“Wouldn’t hurt you to get some exercise.”

“I am, Glenna. I’m splitting infinitives.”

“And stop smoking cigarettes. It stinks.”

“I’ll get some more incense.”