Wednesday
This is not a perk. I thought, looking down at the "John Doe" in bed eight. I had that thought every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the past three years. He was lean and beautiful, built like a dancer or swimmer. He was also a vegetable, his brain waves going through waking and sleeping phases while his body carried on it's autonomic functions without it. It was a pleasure and a torment to care for him. I could look, touch, but only in a professional way. Never as a lover, never as an equal. I set my bowl on the folding table by his bedside. As usual, he didn't move. I started the sponge bath at his face, washing around his hairline. The water made his pale blonde hair darker where it touched. It was getting long again. Of all my patients, his hair seemed to grow fastest, and I resolved to cut it for him on the next visit.
A drip of water rolled towards his eye, and he twitched a little, but that was all. I had seen it before, the little jerks and twitches, the tiny reactions to outside stimuli. His face was handsome; high cheekbones, soft lips, tall forhead, perfectly shaped nose. I had opened his eyes once, when curiosity got the better of me. They were such a strong blue that they almost didn't look real.
Careful of the IV anchored in the back of his left hand, I rolled him over onto his side, slipping the hospital gown off of his shoulder and arm. From the other side of the bed I rolled him back and took it the rest of the way off. With the sheet covering most of his body, I washed him and dried his back, his chest. There wasn't a mark on him, not a tattoo, not a dental filling, not a single scar. Except the pair on his back. It looked like a piece of farm machinery had attacked him, ripping through the skin and muscles over his shoulder blades. They were perfectly symetrical, and showed no sign that they had ever been treated. The edges of the scars were ragged, irregular. It didn't even look like he'd had stitches. I couldn't imagine the pain of that injury. With careful professionalism I cleaned him lower, my hands under the sheet. The insides of his thighs, behind his testicles, pulling back his foreskin to clean around it. I willed myself to disintrest. Sometimes he rose at my touch. I always had a rise when I washed him, however much I might not want to.
I put away the sponge, made sure he was dry, and re-dressed him. By rolling him to one side then the other, I got yesterdays sheet out from under him, and a new one to take it's place. Sometimes, when my loneliness and his physical attractiveness were conspiring against me and temptation was rearing it's ugly head, I would picture how the headline in our small town newspaper would look. "Faggot doctor wanna-be molests coma patient" was the most erection-deflating one I could think of. Sometimes even that wasn't enough to turn me off.
I went methodicly through all the day-to-day physical therapy Doe's doctor had prescribed. Moving his joints, stretching out his muscles. Sometimes I wondered how he had stayed a John Doe so long. Three years, and nobody had come to identify him, take him home, give his name back to him. Somehow that struck me as sad. Lonely. I made sure the sheet under him was smooth, then re-draped him with a clean top-sheet. The almost-empty "breakfast" bag was changed for a full "dinner" one. I made my neat, dutiful notes of his temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure on the chart, gathered my things, and went to the next bed.