“Dr. York carried the sagging bodies and the sodden limbs to the community grave of the bone yard and in the quiet of the midnight moon, buried the human pieces, the heavy hopeless clay encasing his boots and hands.”

The sign read: “Hart Island: Common grave for the burial of unknown or indigent people, strangers or outsiders.”

*

The canoe was heavy with bodies, the stern and bow dipping in turn. Oars slapped the thick midnight water, making stars scatter and waves break. Dr. Yourk’s hood masked his face and canvas covered the canoe’s corpulent contents.

The canoe ran ashore, the clay sucking steady. Dr. Yourk’s boots were tall and his strides strong as his stubborn profile, chin jutting like a jetty. He whipped the tarp; the same sodding heaps of bodies, limbs and bones: the same heaps that have grown in the city’s hospitals and morgues since man began breathing… And then not. The same heap, different fingerprints, different lives, but the same heap.

Dr. York carried the sagging bodies and the sodden limbs to the community grave of the bone yard and in the quiet of the midnight moon, buried the human pieces, the heavy hopeless clay encasing his boots and hands.

*

My patients live & my patients die. That is the life of a surgeon.

With nerves as cool as sharp oxygen and a sterile mind, I save lives with the best of my skills and destroy families when science overthrows my talent with its horrible mechanics.

*

“Dr. Yourk. You are needed in Room 1”

Dr. Yourk’s pace was long and fast, his coat long and starched, profile long and solid. The ER buzzed like a locust infestation; the noise steady enough to not be heard, only vibrated hotly with his body’s every nerve.

The body already stripped and prepped, Dr. Yourk, heard key words, concentrated and stitched, massaged the heart and tried, but the patient was called.

*

“Dr. Yourk. You are needed in Room 1”

Dr. Yourk heard the page in the dark corner of his sleep and cut through the polished linoleum hallway, disregarding exhaustion.

“Unstable trauma. Patient going into hemorrhagic shock. Limb almost severed…”

The surgeon stopped the bleeding by removing the hand above the wrist.

An orderly wheeled the hand down to the morgue, where it waited with the rest of the dead organic matter.

*

Classically clinical in his dress and manners, Dr. Yourk’s mind was a sterile room, filled with the right equipment and neatly printed labels. His imagination was a vascular system of stark stainless steel. Dr. Yourk had studied and sliced, and performed the artless duty that his education and oath demanded.

Dr. Yourk treated a cancerous growth and a fever. A family was left in need or a mother overjoyed. The crying and wailing of the ambulances, family and attendants was an insulation of noise that muffled the sterile room in his mind until the next opportunity to save or destroy arrived.

*

“Dr. Yourk. You are needed in room 1”

“Factory accident. Sleeve caught. Hand… Arm… Head… Heart rate… Still breathing.”

Dr. Yourk’s hands hung lifeless: the room of his mind began filling with recognition, as if someone had snuck in and made themselves at home without his invitation. He went to work on the shredded man, focusing with logical, rapid precision.

The patient’s heart surged, back bowed, eyes shot wide open: dark brown, intelligent eyes. Dr. Yourk’s gaze met the man’s; their eyes could have been brothers, same long aquiline nose: the faces of the men were echoes of voyages, communities, neighborhood affiliations and something shared over a cheery table.

“He’s flatlining. Dr. Yourk! Dr. Yourk!”

The orderly began resuscitating the patient. Dr. Yourk’s hands, akimbo, dripped blood, slowly, he watched the blood drip and drop in the sterile operating room of his profession while the room in his mind was so full he was drowning.

*

The smell of the morgue was frozen loathsome, the atmosphere flickering succinct medicine and finite insanity. Dr. Yourk found the man’s toe tag, recognized his denotation for the pauper’s grave, read his unfamiliar name, Braxton, Richard, and remembered the familiar, similar face.

Braxton’s intact arm slid dead from the stainless table; Dr. Yourk lifted the hand to replace the appendage: their hands, his warm, Braxton’s rigor; the hand of the surgeon was shaped the same as the destroyed laborer. York’s potential to grasp life very vital, Braxton’s impossibility final.

Yourk tucked the canvas around the dead man, and smooth as a new incision, wheeled the stretcher from the hospital, hoisted the man into his automobile’s trunk, and drove to the docks.

The canoe was familiar and the river was calm. The air was fresh and the windows in the room in Yourk’s clean mind were flooded with midnight sunshine and underwater breezes.

Hart Island was a thumb tip in the pitch black darker. The song of the night slapping water, and the unflappable doctor flapped in the cutting trek. Hart Island loomed closer, growing uglier as visibility improved.

Dr. Yourk’s shoes sludged and sloshed as he trekked across the barren clay island, with nothing growing but shame, like ivy on a crumbling mansion, in the room of his mind.

The common graves were already dug, so Dr. Yourk dropped the doppelganger right in the shallow hole, only a thin layer of clay separating the dead. The moonlight silvered Dr. Yourk’s features like an apparition. The gleaming glow that surrounded the doctor highlighted his whites and made his face as unique as a painting of a familiar angel: eyes compassionate, slight smile of kindness.

*

“Dr. Yourk. You are needed in room 1”

Automobile accident. DOA. Passing through…

 

“Dr. Yourk. You are needed in room 1”

Infant with high fever. 104. Parents unfit…

 

“Dr. Yourk. You are needed in room 1”

The cancer has spread throughout…

 

Dr. Yourk treated wives, children and old men. He filled the bone yard with his passions and his failures, intermingled to create his life’s work.