He stood in the empty yard and rubbed the stress stone and thought of that important first class and of all the classes to follow, a lifeline into the future that would link him to men like Lobsenz and Kender and Longwood. He remembered with some embarrassment that he had promised Gaby enormous achievements from medicine, solutions to problems like aplastic anemia and hunger and the common cold. And yet he knew that, through the nameless and faceless young physicians whose lives he would touch, it was not unlikely that he would be close to awesome accomplishment. He had not lied to her, he thought as he turned and went back inside the building.

Upstairs, in the disassembled office, he sat in the chair with his head on the desk and for sweet minutes, dozed.

In a very short time he started, pulled awake. The firecrackers were sounding again, a longer illegal burst this time, and in the final crack he heard through the open window the first banshee wail of a far-off siren, an ambulance coming in, but these things had not awakened him.

In his lapel pocket the paging device beeped again, and when he called in he learned that one of Miriam Parkhurst’s patients was in pain and demanding unauthorized opiates. “Call Dr. Moylan and have him take a look at her,” he said, curiously reluctant to leave the office and aware that the intern was on duty and had first call. When he returned the phone to its cradle he sat back in his chair. His books were in the cardboard cartons. The file cabinets of case histories were locked and the scratched metal shelves were bare. The office was exactly as he had found it, down to the old coffee stain on the wall.

The pageboy buzzed again, and this time he learned he was needed in Emergency for a surgical consultation.

“I’ll be right down,” he said.

He took a last slow look around.

There was a ball of paper on the floor and he picked it up and balanced it on the full waste basket, then he opened the empty middle drawer of the desk and dropped in the stress stone, a gift for Harry Lee, who would be Chief Resident in the morning.

The paging device signaled again as he stood and stretched painfully, wide awake now. It was a sound he would always associate with this room, he thought, louder than sirens, louder than firecrackers, loud enough even, God willing, to drown out the faint, mocking tinkle of the Harlequin’s bells.

His fingers involuntarily made the sign of the horns, and he grinned as he closed the door behind him. Scutta mal occhio, poo-poo-poo, he thought, accepting his grandmother’s help in warding off the enemy as he waited by the elevator shaft for the slow, creaking monster to come and carry him to Emergency.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR