Into the belly. For somebody planning to go into general surgery, where so many cases are abdominal, that was the name of the game.

“Here you go, Richard. Here it is,” the surgeon said in a little while. His voice was deep. His English was a shade too precise, Adam thought, as if he had learned it as a second language. “Right through the anterior wall of the duodenum. What do we do now?”

“Stitch, stitch, stitch?”

“And then?”

“Vagotomy?”

“Ah, Richard, Richard, I can’t believe it. To be so young and so bright and so half right, my boy. A vagotomy and a drainage procedure. Then it will heal so nicely. A milestone in the annals.”

They worked in silence after that, and Adam grinned above them in the dark, feeling the sloppy intern’s chagrin as he had felt his own chagrin so many times in similar situations. It was warm in the gallery, colored like the womb. He dozed and dreamed an old nightmare of the two furnaces he had fed during the evenings of his undergraduate junior year, hating the yawning orange mouths that hungered for more coal than he could move.

Sitting in the dark gallery he moaned in his sleep and then jerked himself awake, stiff and wretched, momentarily uncertain of why his mood had changed. And then he remembered and licked his lips and grinned; the damn dream again. He hadn’t had it for a long, long time, it must be the new hospital, the unfamiliar situation.

Below him the surgical team still worked. “Help me close the belly, Richard,” the Chief Resident said. “I’ll suture, you tie. I want it nice and tight.”

“You’ll get it tight as your childhood sweetheart,” Richard said, speaking to Meomartino but looking at the scrub nurse, who gave no sign that she heard.

“I want it much tighter than that, Doctor,” Meomartino said.

When he finally nodded, satisfied, and turned from the table, Adam left the gallery and hurried downstairs in time to catch the other man leaving the surgical theater.

“Dr. Meomartino.”

The Surgical Fellow stopped. He was shorter than he had appeared when viewed from above. He should have been my mother’s child, Adam thought inanely as he hurried to him. But not Italian, he decided, Spanish, perhaps. The color of olives, dark eyes, dark skin despite the usual hospital pallor, hair beneath the OR cap dark with damp but almost completely gray. This man is older than I am, he thought.

“I’m Adam Silverstone,” he said, panting slightly. “The new Chief Resident.” As appraising eyes took him in he shook a hand like a block of wood.

“You’re a day early. I can see you will give me competition,” Meomartino said with a slight smile.

“I hitch-hiked. I left myself an extra day and then found I didn’t need it.”

“Oh? You got a place to stay?”

“Here. The letter said the hospital furnishes a room.”

“Usually the Chief Resident uses it only for the nights he’s on. I prefer to live away. You and I would be too damn available living here.”