“A call had been made to Bellevue Security by his surgical resident colleague Dr. Andrea Intiso, who’d received a call earlier in the afternoon from your son telling her where he was — supposedly in the closed-up building reading hospital records. Of course, that was entirely fictitious, as the hospital had long since been emptied of all its records. According to her, she’d insisted that he call her the moment he left, which never happened, nor did he respond to her attempts to get in touch with him, ergo her eventual call to Security. What she did tell Security when she called was that your son had been under great psychological stress because a number of his assigned inpatients had passed away unexpectedly, and she thought he was taking it personally.”
Claes paused for a moment to allow Benjamin and Clara time to absorb what he’d told them. “Had you heard any of this?” he questioned after a few beats.
“No,” Benjamin and Clara echoed.
“Then let me continue. When Security did locate your son, which didn’t happen until around ten p.m. since the building is rather large, he was in a stupor with bloodstains on the front of his white doctor’s coat. He was also carrying an outdated surgical instrument called an orbitoclast, which had been used in the old days to do bedside lobotomies and which he had apparently found in the deserted building. At that point he was immediately taken to the emergency room, where the source of the blood was determined to be the upper conjunctival vortexes of each eye, which at least raised the possibility, as unbelievable as it seemed to everyone, that he had had a transorbital lobotomy. At that point he was admitted to the ICU to be stabilized and a non-emergency MRI was scheduled for this morning.”
“How in God’s name could he have suffered a lobotomy in a vacant hospital?” Benjamin demanded, his anger returning in a rush.
“I can appreciate your frustration,” Claes said. “Believe me, we all feel it, as there is only one possible way for it to have happened.”
“I’m listening,” Benjamin snapped.
“Self-inflicted,” Claes stated. “Your son had to have done it to himself.”
Author’s Note
For those readers with a newly generated interest in the history of the legendary Bellevue Hospital, I cannot recommend more highly the fascinating Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital, by David Oshinsky (New York: Anchor Books, 2017). In many ways it reads like a novel, complete with larger-than-life characters and a fascinating narrative, revealing all the warts as well as the triumphs. After having personally had the experience of being a sub-intern at Bellevue Hospital in the early 1960s on Columbia Division 1, an experience that was both intellectually stimulating and horrifying at the same time, I’ve always wanted to include this storied hospital in one of my novels, and David Oshinsky’s book helped make that happen.