White and clean.  He preferred his room and everything in it this way.  His pillow, his bed, his sheets.  The paint, the wallpaper, the curtains, the tiling of the floor.  A bit of color burst through here and there: the wooden furniture gleamed a reflective, lacquered brown; the flowers, delivered fresh every morning, could not help themselves but be yellow, peach, blue, and their stems and leaves a deep, mottled green; the TV’s aluminum-silver casing did not clash in the least, and in any case he rarely if ever turned it on; but everything else stood out white and clean.  It was a comfort to him.  Call him old-fashioned, but a hospital should be white and clean.  If not, well . . . if his death was all left that lingered, let it come in this room, his room, white and clean. 

Then the pain had come and taken over his life, beginning as a pinprick in the abdomen, turning in a matter of months into a steady flow of blood and shit flushed down the toilet, and writhing cramps that he could not banish. 

He remembered being tested, but not at a hospital.  Instead, he had desperately sought an appointment at an out-of-the-way private laboratory.

"It’s the digestive system," one of his old colleagues, still practicing, had told him after agreeing to review his X-rays, MRI’s, chemistry.  "Stage three, going four.  We can still give treatment a try.  We should."

"That would mean . . .,"

"We’ll need to do this in Radiology.  At the hospital."

"No."

"I insist."

"No."

"What’s that saying we first learned in med-school, as froshes?  ‘Doctors make the worst patients. ’"

"No."

"Come on.  The hospital bought the latest equipment, just last year.  They don’t have that here.  This place doesn’t even have rooms."

He had held his ground and refused, that day.  As the patient, he knew his prerogative.  But the following week the pain had intensified, had taken him by the gut and beaten him down into tearful submission.  With pride stripped and blood from his rectum leaving a trail on the floor from bathroom to telephone, he had made the call and agreed to be brought in.

"I’ll send the ambulance over for you," his colleague had told him.  "We’ll have you confined straight away so we can start treatment."

Confined.  While waiting to be picked up he had ample time to reflect on the meaning of the word. 

When they wheeled him into the hospital, the horror that had welled from his heart almost killed him right then and there, even before the cancer could.  He didn’t sleep a wink, that first night.  But as his treatment progressed over the weeks, as his hair fell out and his body shriveled, as his pain dimmed into palpable fatigue, the uneventful regularity of daily routine overcame everything else.  Only then did his fear subside. 

Now, lying alone in an uncomfortable and narrow hospital bed, he realized wryly that though he no longer felt afraid, all that remained to him was a steadily depleting bank account, and a white, clean room. 

Outside, the sun sank slowly into the horizon.  On cue, the door to his room opened and a nurse in an impeccably white uniform entered.  She smiled at him and crossed in front of his bed to the windows.  On his instructions for the end of each day, she drew the white curtains shut with a pull on the drawstrings. 

"Would you like the TV on, sir?" she asked.

"No, thank you," he answered, so she turned to leave.  He reached for a button on the control panel by his bed and flicked it, switching on all the fluorescents, bathing the room in soulless, antiseptic, white light. 

The nurse, halfway out the door, paused, as if deciding on a course of action.  Having chosen, she turned to face him.

"Sir," she said, "I must say something."

From his propped up position on his pillow, he moved his head to face her. 

"Others in the hospital have told me who you are, and what you did when you were still a practicing doctor.  If not for people like you, sir, we women would have had no choice.  Sir, I just want to say . . . thank you."

The nurse left.  The door swung shut with a gentle click of the knob’s latch.  He lay back on his pillow and stared blankly at the ceiling. 

The price I have to pay, he used to say to himself when he was younger; and with a nonchalant smile and a proud shrug of acceptance, no less.  But he had had to keep on paying it, over and over again, until the pressure foisted on him nearly drove him mad.  Those who approved of what he had done were easier to deal with.  In fact, he used to welcome them, though not for decades.  He had grown tired of being their hero, their poster-boy, their messiah.  Now, he saw them all for what they really were: fanatics.  They were all the same, even those who hated him.  He wished they would all just go to hell and leave him alone.

To his surprise, the scar on his arm ached suddenly. 

"You abortionists are all murderers!" his attacker had shouted as he was being cuffed, the gleaming, giant crucifix around his neck dangling on its gold chain like an insult.

"What about you?"  The pain in his arm had spoken for him when his mind had known silence would’ve been best.  "You wanted to kill me!  That makes you a murderer too!"

"You can defend yourself!" the man had spat back.  "They can’t! God reserves a place in hell for baby-killers like you!"

"Tell your fucking God I’ll see him there!"

That statement had renewed his attacker’s fury, had made him foam at the mouth and come at him again screaming incoherently, but Security had a firm hold of him.  He had watched with pleasure as they hauled him, cursing and frustrated, away. 

When his arm had healed he wore his scar proudly, and resumed his work with renewed fervor.  From then on, whenever he took up his scalpel, his attacker’s face filled his mind. 

"Cut me, will you?" he had thought as he sliced through flesh, any flesh.  "I’ll do the cutting around here."

The ache in his arm grew.  He moaned.  Why should it hurt now?  His brother and sister-in-law said they would visit tonight.  He hoped the pain would subside before they arrived.

He raised his head, looking to his bedside table for his water glass.  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something beside his aching arm that shouldn’t be there.  With the surge and power of an erupting volcano, his subdued fear exploded from the pit of his gut to choke him like thick smoke. 

The bed sheets were no longer white; they were stained red, with blood, damp with it, glistening.  Beside his prone form a fetus, slick with placenta and mucus, considered him with a steady gaze.  It sat upright on the bed like a miniature person, studying him with eyes that shouldn’t be able to focus, shouldn’t even be open.  Its skin was pock-marked and wounded, like it had been prodded many times by a sharp, pointed instrument. 

"Haah . . ."

His throat made a helpless sound.  Filled with the sudden strength brought on by panic, he pushed away from the fetus with his legs.  He bumped hard into his bedside table, tipping everything on it onto the floor.  His water glass fell and shattered.  With his good arm he reached for the call button and pressed it madly.

I don’t believe what I’m seeing, he thought, hoping that his mental defiance might make it disappear, but it did not.

The fetus remained, appraising him. 

The same nurse who had drawn the curtains entered the room.  She took one look at his panicked state and called back down the corridor for help before rushing in.

She grabbed him by the shoulders.  "Doctor!  Sir!" she said, but the new fear had given him an adrenaline surge.  He tried to force himself off the bed while she tried desperately to hold him down.  His eyes never left the bloody fetus.

"Don’t you see it?" he screamed.  She turned to where the old man’s eyes were riveted but all she saw were bed sheets, white and clean, if rumpled.  "Calm down, please!" she said, ignoring his ravings.

A beefy male orderly entered the room and moved to help the nurse.  Following him was an older couple, his visiting brother and sister-in-law, both of whom had confusion etched on their faces.  "What’s happening?" they said together.

The orderly ran to the side of the bed where the fetus was, but like the nurse he acted as if the bloody thing wasn’t there.  Completely ignoring it, passing through it, he reached across with his strong arms and hefted the patient’s frail body back to the middle of the bed.

"You!  I know you!" he said, hysterical.  Everyone in the room paused to look at each other.  Who was he talking to? 

"It’s you!  I know you!" he repeated to the same empty spot on the bed.

Though he wished he could, and had spent his ten years of retirement trying to do so, he never forgot the events of his last day as a doctor.  Alone in the lab, checking a patient’s tests, he had looked up from his clipboard and caught sight of a specimen jar on one of the shelves.  Inside the jar a fetus, premature and stillborn, floating in a murky, formaldehyde solution, had shocked him by turning its head to him suddenly, blinking its eyes, pressing its small hands up against the glass as if to reach for him. 

He had stumbled out of the lab in a cold sweat, leaning against the wall for support.  A passing intern had expressed concern, but he had kept enough of his self-control to bark that he was all right.  He had stuck his head back into the lab to see if he had been imagining things, and discovered that he had not.  Upon catching sight of him, the fetus had shifted its body in his direction and reached out for him again. 

That afternoon, he had quit medicine for good.  There had been enough money in the bank, after all.

"Time to go," it seemed to say.  "We’re here to bring you with us."

He rolled his eyes around the room and more fetuses appeared, of different sizes, races, stages of growth, of injury or deformity, all drenched in blood.  They were on the sofa, the floor, his bed, in the air dripping, all around.  His room was no longer white and clean.  Blood covered everything, its metallic tang assaulting his nose.  Gone from his vision were the nurse and the orderly, his brother and his brother’s wife.  Only those things existed, bloody cherubim come for him. 

"Call the attending . . .," the nurse ordered when she felt his body turn rigid and cold in her grip.  "I don’t know what’s happening!"  His brother and his wife watched on in helpless fear.  The orderly ran out the room.

His vision dimmed, his consciousness faded.  He could hear nothing but his heart echoing in his inner ear, a dying drumbeat.

He died, his eyes rolling up into his forehead, saliva dribbling from his open mouth. 

***

The nurse pulled away, jerking back from his body.  She saw blood all over him, all over her uniform and hands.  She licked her lips and the taste of blood on her tongue made her gag.  There were thick pools of it on the floor, and countless small, bloody footprints and handprints on the curtains, the walls, and the ceiling.  At first, she doubted her eyes and thought she was hallucinating, but the expression on the faces of the old couple told her that they saw what she saw. 

It lasted for only a few, brief seconds.  Then the room was once more what it was, what it had always been, white and clean. 

The orderly returned with the attending resident and a stretcher; but the former doctor, the patient, was gone.