The Select (14 page)

Tim smiled. "Could be."

*

"I don't know if I can handle
this."

Judy Trachtenberg was speaking,
holding a forkful of prime rib over her plate and staring at it.
Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, she wore no make-up,
and looked very pale. She and her roomie Karen Evers occupied the
room next to Quinn's. She'd hooked up with them on the way to the
caf. Tim and his roommate Kevin Sanders, a big black guy, a quiet
type who didn't say much, had joined their table.

"If it's too rare for you," Tim said,
"I'll take it."

Judy rolled her eyes and returned to
fork to her plate.

"I'm not talking about
the
food
. I'm
talking about this... this whole medical school thing."

"This is only the first day," Quinn
said. "It'll get better. It has to."

She said it to encourage herself as
much as Judy. She knew exactly how she was feeling. Like Judy she'd
found today almost overwhelming.

"I can handle the courses
easily enough," Judy said. "I mean, give me a textbook, put me in a
class, and I can
learn
anything. But these
labs
. Have you
seen
the lab schedule? Every
afternoon! And Anatomy Lab has got to be the
worst
! Am I right?"

A chorus of agreement from the
table.

She went on. "I mean, I've
washed my hands half a dozen times since we got out of lab and
they
still
smell
like formaldehyde—and I was wearing
gloves
! My God, I
still
smell it. It must
have gotten into my
nose
. I mean, even the
food
tastes like
formaldehyde. I don't know if I can handle a whole year of
this."

Quinn sniffed her own fingers. Yes,
there was a hint of formaldehyde there. She'd thought she'd tasted
it for a while, but that was gone now. Maybe Judy was more
sensitive to it—or more dramatic. Either way, she was not a happy
camper.

"Does that mean you're not going to
eat your meat?" Tim said, eying Judy's plate.

Judy shoved it toward him. "Here. Be
my guest. Eat till you burst. Doesn't any of this bother
you?"

Tim speared the prime rib from Judy's
plate and placed it on his own.

"Sure," he said. "It's sickening. But
I don't dwell on it. It's something you've got to get through. And
if you can't handle it, maybe you shouldn't be a
doctor."

Judy reddened. "I don't
intend to practice on preserved corpses. I plan to have
living
patients."

"Right. But you've got to have a
certain amount of intestinal fortitude, got to walk through some
fires along the way to get to those living patients. If you can't
handle this, how are you going to handle spurting blood and
spilling guts when people are calling you doctor and looking to you
for an answer?"

Quinn watched fascinated
as Tim somehow managed to cut his meat, poke it into his mouth,
chew a couple of times, and swallow, without breaking the rhythm of
his speech. His expression was intent—on his food—but his words
struck a resonant chord within Quinn:
You
do what you have to do.

Maybe she and Tim weren't so different
after all.

"Looking at the way you eat that red
meat," Judy said, "I can see you've got no fear of blood and
guts."

Amid the laughter, Tim grinned and
held up his knife.

"Okay. How about this? We've all met
the estimable Mr. Harrison, haven't we?"

Nods and groans all about the
table.

"A dork of the first water," Judy
said.

"Indisputably. But consider the fact
that he's a second-year student. That means he took whatever The
Ingraham threw at him in his first year and came through. In your
moments of self-doubt, gird yourself with this little thought: I
will not be less than Harrison."

Judy stared into Tim's sunglasses for
a few seconds, nodding slowly, then she reached across the table
and retrieved the remainder of her prime rib.

"I will
not
be less than
Harrison," she said.

Amid the applause, Quinn looked at Tim
and made a startling discovery.

I like you, Tim Brown. I
like you a lot.

But she'd never tell him
that.

CHAPTER NINE

Tim's head was killing him as he
pulled into The Ingraham's student parking lot. He leaned forward
and gently rested his forehead on the steering wheel.

Jack Daniel's...too much Jack
Daniel's. It happened every time someone talked him into trying
some sour mash.

He shook himself and straightened.
He'd made it from Baltimore in forty minutes—record time—but he
hadn't raced all that distance just to take a nap in the parking
lot. He glanced at his watch. Two minutes to get to Alston's
lecture. He jumped out of the car and hurried toward the class
complex. He eyed the security cameras high on the corners of the
buildings, wondering if they were eying him.

As the days had stretched into weeks,
Tim had found himself falling into the rhythm of The Ingraham's
class and lab schedule. The basic first-year courses were mostly
rote. Anatomy, pathology, and histology were purely memory.
Biochemistry and physiology were more analytical, but still mostly
regurgitated facts. And regurgitating facts was Tim's specialty.
Poor Quinn needed hours of crunch study to master what he could
absorb in minutes.

So he'd found himself getting bored.
Sure there was the roving bull session in the dorm, but he could
take only so much of speculating and arguing about the future of
medicine. Novels and his tape collection could hold his interest
only so long. With everybody's head but his own buried in a book
most of the time, he'd begun to feel like the only seeing, speaking
person in a land populated by the deaf and blind.

The only answer was to get off campus.
The nearby county seat of Frederick was little better than staying
on campus. He needed a city. Baltimore and Washington were the two
obvious choices.

He was passing the pond when he heard
a familiar voice.

"Where have you been?"

He turned and saw Quinn hurrying up
the walk behind him. He stopped to wait for her, nodding to others
he knew as they swirled past him. She looked great but he didn't
want her to get too close. He figured he had a terminal case of
morning mouth.

"Miss me?" he said.

"I was looking for you last night.
Kevin told me you took off after dinner. God, you look awful. Where
on earth have you been?"

"Baltimore."

He knew a little about the city. Some
guys he'd hung with in high school had gone to Loyola and he'd made
a few trips down there during his four years at Dartmouth. But last
night he'd headed for downtown, far from Loyola's suburban
neighborhood. He'd hit Baltimore Street: The Block. Baltimore's
down-sized equivalent of New York's West 42nd Street or Boston's
Combat Zone.

He hadn't gone there for the porn
shops, the peep shows, the strippers, or the whores. He'd gone for
the games. He'd learned on his past visits that there were a couple
or three backroom card games in progress on any given night, games
with stakes high enough to make things interesting.

Trouble was, they hardly ever played
blackjack. Poker, poker, poker was all these guys cared about. Tim
knew he was a decent poker player, but nothing close to what he was
in blackjack. Still, he was desperate for some action, and Atlantic
City was too far.

"Did you get mugged or something?"
Quinn said, looking him up and down.

He smiled and thought: In a way,
yes.

He'd stayed up all night playing
five-card stud. The other players had been stand-offish at
first—because of his youth, Tim assumed—but after they'd seen he
could play, they'd warmed to him. Even started buying him drinks
after a while. Jack Daniel's. Many Jack Daniel's.

Good ol' Tim. C'mon back
anytime.

They loved him. Why not? He'd dropped
a couple of hundred.

Poker. Not his game.

"No. Just not enough
sleep."

"Well, come on. You're late, and Dr.
Alston will cut you up into little pieces."

"You go on ahead. I'm
going to sit in the back.
Way
in the back."

He watched her cute butt hurry off and
followed at a slower pace.

Dr. Alston's Medical Ethics: the
semester's only non-regurgitant course. It was scheduled for only
one hour a week but that hour fell at 7:00 a.m. on Wednesday
mornings. Some days it was hell getting there, and today was pure
murder, but Tim had never missed it; not simply because attendance
was required and strictly monitored, but because the class actually
was stimulating.

I could use some stimulating now, he
thought as he slipped into the last row and took a seat in a
shadowed corner.

Dr. Alston seemed to take delight in
being provocative and controversial. His manner was brusque, witty,
acerbic, and coolly intellectual, as if he were contending for the
title of the William F. Buckley of the medical world.

Tim vividly remembered the first
lecture a couple of weeks ago...

"Most medical schools
don't offer this course," Dr. Alston had said on that first
morning. He'd looked wolfishly lean in his dark business suit and
one of his trademark string ties. The overhead lights gleamed off
his pale scalp. His movements were quick, sharp, as if his morning
coffee had been too strong. "I guess they expect you to become
ethical physicians by osmosis—or pinocytosis, perhaps. And a few
schools may offer something
called
Medical Ethics, but I assure you it's nothing
like my course.
Their
courses are dull."

Amid polite laughter he'd stepped off
the dais and pointed at one of the students.

"Mr. Kahl. Consider, if you will: You
have a donor kidney and three potential recipients with perfect
matches. Who gets the kidney?"

Kahl swallowed hard. "I...I don't have
enough information to say."

"Correct. So let's say we've got a
nine-year-old girl, a 35 year-old ironworker with a family, a 47
year-old homeless woman, and a 62 year-old CEO of a large
corporation—who, by the way, is willing to pay six figures for the
transplant." He pointed toward the rear of the room. "Who would you
give the kidney to, Mr. Coyle?"

"The little girl."

"She has no money, you
know."

"Money shouldn't matter. I
wouldn't care if the CEO was willing to pay
seven
figures for the
kidney."

"We wouldn't be indulging in a bit of
reverse discrimination against a rich, older man over an indigent
child, would we, Mr. Coye?" He turned to another student. "How
about you, Mr. Greely? Think carefully and unemotionally before you
answer."

Tim was impressed. This was Dr.
Alston's first lecture to the class and already he seemed to know
every student by name.

"I believe I'd also give it to the
little girl," Greely said.

"Really? Why?"

"Because she's got the most years
ahead of her."

"Years to do what? You don't know what
she'll do with her life. Maybe she'll perfect cold fusion, maybe
she'll die at eighteen with a needle in her arm. Meanwhile you tell
the homeless woman, the ironworker, and the CEO to go
scratch?"

He turned toward the second row. "Who
would you choose, Miss Cleary?"

Tim leaned forward when he realized
Quinn was on the spot. He saw her cheeks begin to redden. She
wasn't ready for this. No one was.

"The ironworker," she said in that
clear voice of hers.

"And why is that?"

"Because he's got a family to support.
Other people are depending on him. And he's got a lot of productive
years ahead of him."

"What about the CEO? He's very
productive."

She paused, then: "Yes, but maybe
he'll get twenty years out of the kidney. The ironworker might get
twice that."

"Perhaps, perhaps not. But the CEO's
present position places him in charge of the livelihoods of
thousands of workers. Without his management expertise, his
corporation could go under."

Quinn obviously hadn't thought of
that, but she didn't seem ready to back down. Tim decided to buy
her some time.

"Are doctors supposed to be playing
God like this?" he called out.

Dr. Alston looked up and pointed at
him. He didn't seem annoyed that Tim had spoken without being
recognized.

"An excellent question,
Mr. Brown. But 'playing God' is a loaded phrase, don't you think?
It implies an endless bounty being dolled out to some and withheld
from others. That is not the case here. We are dealing with meager
resources. There are barely enough donor organs available at any
one time to fulfill the needs of one
tenth
of the registered recipients.
No, Mr. Brown, we are hardly playing God. It rather seems more like
we are sweeping up after Him."