A Case of Need by Michael Crichton

Author:Michael Crichton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Medical, Thriller & Suspense, Suspense, Thrillers, Genre Fiction, Thriller, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 9781480400634
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1968-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

TEN

JUDITH SEEMED TENSE ON THE DRIVE BACK. She sat with her knees together and her hands clasped around them. She was squeezing her hands hard; the knuckles were white.

“Something wrong?”

“No,” she said. “Just tired.”

I said, “Was it the wives?”

She smiled slightly. “You’ve become very famous. Mrs. Wheatstone was so upset that she missed a bid at this afternoon’s game, I understand.”

“What else did you hear?”

“They all asked me why you were doing it, helping Art. They thought it was a marvelous example of a man sticking by his friend. They thought it was heartwarming and humane and wonderful.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And they kept asking why.”

“Well, I hope you told them it’s because I’m a nice guy.”

She smiled in the darkness. “I wish I’d thought of that.”

Her voice was sad, though, and her face in the reflected light of the headlights was drawn. I knew it wasn’t easy for her to be with Betty all the time. But somebody had to do it.

For some reason, I remembered my student days and Purple Nell. Purple Nell was a seventy-eight-year-old former alcoholic who had been dead a year before she became our cadaver. We called her Nell, and a lot of other things, small grim jokes to help us get through our work. I remembered my desire to quit, to stop cutting the cold, damp, stinking flesh, to stop peeling away the layers. I dreamed of the day I would be finished with Nell, when I could forget her, and the smells, and the feel of greasy, long-dead flesh. Everyone said it got easier. I wanted to stop, to be finished and done. But I never quit until all the dissections had been completed, all the nerves and arteries traced out and learned.

After my initial harsh experience with cadavers, I was surprised to find I was interested in pathology. I like the work and have learned to push from my mind the smells and the sight of each new corpse, each new postmortem. But somehow autopsies are different, in some strange sense more hopeful. At autopsy you are dealing with a man, newly dead, and you know his story. He is not a faceless, anonymous cadaver but a person who had recently waged a very private battle, the only private battle in life, and lost. Your job is to find out how, and why, he lost, in order to help others who will soon do battle—and yourself. It is a far cry from the dissection cadavers, which exist in a kind of sickening, professional death, as if their only purpose in their twilight, embalmed afterlife is to be thoroughly, inspectably dead.

WHEN WE GOT HOME, Judith went in to check on the kids and call Betty. I took the sitter home. She was a short, pert girl named Sally, a cheerleader at Brookline High. Normally, when I drove her home we talked about neutral, safe things: how she liked school, where she wanted to go to college, things like that. But tonight I was feeling inquisitive, and old, and out of touch, like a man returning to his country after an extended time abroad.

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