The Class of 1969: A Medical Novel

By Henry Rex Greene

It is 1965, and the Watts Riots have just ended when newlyweds Max and Jan King enter medical school. As Max and Jan converge with other students in the Los Angeles County medical complex, neither has any idea that their foray into the world of medicine is about to test their inner strength, perseverance, and activist views in more ways than they ever could have imagined.

While civil unrest hangs over the country like a dark cloud, Max and Jan immerse themselves in their freshman year surrounded by cadavers, demanding professors, and chemistry labs. But the challenges of school soon threaten their happiness as a couple, unearthing a trove of doubt for Max, who is tempted to cheat not only in his marriage, but also on his exams. As Max grapples with an overwhelming fear of failure and the prospect of years of mind-numbing toil, he secretly wonders if the pursuit of prestige, affluence, and social status is really worth it after all.

In this medical drama, Jan and Max are each drawn to help the world overcome the vast challenges of the 1960s. Now only time will tell if Max will ever be able to shed his ambivalence over his choice to become a doctor and embrace his chosen life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475931068

Henry Rex Greene

Henry Rex Greene is a hematologist-oncologist. He earned a bachelor of arts in zoology from UCLA and an MD from UC–Irvine. He has been involved in medical ethics, hospice, and palliative care throughout his career and is active in organized medicine. The author of the novel Thirteen Months a Year, he has two grown children and lives with his wife, MaryJo, in Lima, Ohio.

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Copyright © 2012 by Henry Rex Greene

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Certain characters in this work are historical figures, and certain events portrayed did take place. However, this is a work of fiction. All of the other characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-3104-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3106-8 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3105-1 (dj)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012910029

iUniverse rev. date: 7/3/2012

Contents

Watts Riots

Welcome to the Priesthood

Life among the Dead

November 22, 1965

CPC

The Christmas Party

Showbiz

Christmas Break

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Animal Liberation

Close Encounter

Natural Selection

Domestic Trouble

Lethal Bigotry

Confrontation

Politics

End of the Beginning

Time Changes

No Dogs Allowed

Tell It to the Marines

Cultural Revolution

All That Jazz

Honor Code

Bad Baby

Herd Immunity

Mortuary Science

Old Friends, New Times

Merry Christmas

House Calls

Sensitivity Training

Lambs to the Slaughter

Real Doctors

Accreditation

A Real Gas

Accountability

The Sound of Music

Feedback

Make Love, Not War

Dragnet

The Summer of Love

Century Plaza

Getting to Know You

California Rehab Center

Hiroshima Day

Back to CRC

Country Doctor

Haight-Ashbury

Festival of Life

Free Clinic

Drug Enforcement

VIP

Boys’ Night Out

Idyll Time

Cybernon

Baby Catcher

Moonlight Blues

Peace and Freedom

Basic Black

Cutters

General Surgery

Top Guns

Trying Times

Civil Disorder

Acid Test

All the Way with RFK

The Outside World

Winding Down

On to Chicago

Friday, August 23, 1968

Saturday, August 24, 1968

Sunday, August 25, 1968

Monday, August 26, 1968

Tuesday, August 27, 1968

Wednesday, August 28, 1968

Thursday, August 29, 1968

The Vulture

Working Man

Fishman’s Freak Show

End of the Line

Rainy Day Blues

Star Chamber

Ah, Look at All the Lonely People

Draft Dodger

Return to the VA

Star Chamber

New Beginnings

Cancer Ward

Home Stretch

The Sarge

Two Hundred Fifty-Six Steps

Clean Marine

A Kid from Texas

Tough Guy

Final Feedback

Watts Riots

Max King sat at his pick-up point, a bar in Norwalk, watching television and nursing a Schlitz beer. Scenes of violence filled the screen. In eerie black and white, the LAPD, sheriffs, and highway patrol sparred with rioters in South Central Los Angeles. He was waiting for his crew boss, Roger Brown, after his night’s work selling encyclopedias—his summer job before he and his wife, Jan, started medical school in the fall. When Brown arrived, Max said, Something’s going down in the ghetto.

Outside, he tossed his briefcase into the trunk of Brown’s car, a black ’65 Chevy, and handed him a fresh order. Nice shot, Brown said, studying the contract and pocketing the front money. Let’s go see what’s happening. Max slid into the backseat.

Art, did you catch the boob tube? Art Burton, Max’s best buddy, sat next to him. He was prelaw at Stanford. They’d both signed on the previous summer in Pasadena but now worked from the district headquarters downtown. After work they would grab a beer and eat carnitas tacos at an outdoor taco stand. They’d share a ride home, polishing each other’s sales techniques or bullshitting about politics. Max was a few days short of twenty-one; Burton, two weeks older. In their suits and close-cropped haircuts, they never got carded, usually taken for police officers.

Frank Royal rode shotgun. The niggers are stealin’ all the booze and shit they can carry. He had an Oklahoma drawl and was the only permanent member of the crew besides Brown.

This isn’t about upgrading your hi-fi system, Max said. It’s a civil war.

Where are we going? Calvin Murray, the rookie in Brown’s handpicked crew, asked from the far side of the backseat. He had arrived a month ago from Georgia Tech and lived with his girlfriend, a TWA stewardess, in Playa Del Rey.

Harbor Freeway—Watts, Brown said. I base my opinions on firsthand observation. He was a college dropout, Max’s age, who had quit when his wife got pregnant during his freshman year at Purdue. He had followed the Midwest district manager, L. T. Hornsby, to LA two years earlier and was running the Pasadena sales office when Max and Art hired on in ’64. He had lost his office but hoped for a new one based on the production of his crew, currently the best in the district.

I question the propriety of visiting a riot zone, Burton said.

You question the pro-fuckin’-priety? Royal said with a snort. Don’t go usin’ that college shit on us simple folks. His speech was slurred from the trio of Seven and Sevens he had consumed after work. I got nothing to go home to. Loretta’s visiting her boyfriend. Let’s go watch the jungle bunnies.

Christ, do you have to talk like a fucking racist? Max said.

I am a fuckin’ racist and proud of it, he sneered. Looks like I’m right, too.

They pulled off the freeway at Slauson Avenue and headed west, looking like a load of plain-clothes policemen in a black sedan. At Vermont, a pair of inverted cars smoldered in the intersection. At the far corner, a ransacked liquor store burned, illuminating a glittering patina of broken glass that covered the street and sidewalk like scattered diamonds. A police barricade blocked further westward movement. A black-clad LAPD officer waved them over. He looked Japanese and had the white shoulder patch of traffic control. He was hesitant, perhaps uncertain whether they were reinforcements or curiosity seekers. May I ask your business down here?

We’re headed for LA International Airport, Brown said. Gotta catch a flight.

The officer exploded. Are you for real? They’re shooting at anything that looks like a cop—white people in particular. You idiots are taking a shortcut through World War Three! Get back on the freeway and stay on it.

I’m going to send that cop a thank-you note, Burton said.

Did you see that shit? Murray said. Nobody will believe it back home.

Max felt relief going home to his wife rather than being served up to the coroner.

On Saturday Brown let the crew stay home, as nobody was interested in buying encyclopedias. Smoke from the riots hung over LA, a disorienting brown haze that blocked the sun and disrupted circadian rhythms. The Kings were staying with Jan’s parents in a new tract in Glendora. His physician father-in-law had redone the landscaping a half dozen times since moving the previous year and was currently digging a fish pond.

This is horrific, Max said. It’s getting better coverage than JFK’s assassination. The Channel 5 News helicopter showed looters cleaning out a smoking appliance store, looking like a line of insects carrying chunks of food for winter storage. Police attacked the line, causing it to break up and scatter. One officer fired a pump shotgun at a shadow in the front doorway.

It’s crazy, Jan said. Where we did precinct work over by Jefferson High is in the middle of the riot zone. It was a little run-down, but a nice neighborhood—better than I’ve seen outside of uptown New Orleans. What’s making these people do this?

I don’t know. Maybe they look up the totem pole and see that everyone else is better off. You don’t have to be in the slums of Rio de Janeiro to feel deprived.

Max switched to the network news, a clip of LBJ explaining that the South Vietnamese Army needed a temporary boost of reinforcements. Max snickered at his transmutation of Vietnam into Vit-nam. Johnson claimed the upcoming campaign would be short and casualties minimal. We’ll be home soon. We’re not gonna do what Asian boys should do for themselves.

Since JFK’s assassination everything has gone wrong, Max said. We were supposed to be entering a golden age, not this nightmare.

I don’t trust Johnson. Evidently, blacks don’t either. When he ran, all he talked about was The Great Society.

Med school isn’t what I’d planned for, but the draft is making it look good.

Surely the war will be over by the time we graduate.

Wasn’t Ugly Bird the peace candidate? Barry Goldwater was the warmonger?

Segregation is shameful, and Proposition 14 would have made it legal. I was glad to be away from the south, standing up for equal rights without risking our lives.

Max sighed. Brown’s taking us on the road next week to get away from the riots. I’ve still got a shot at five hundred bucks in the sales contest if I stay strong. When I get back, we can start looking for a rental near school.

On his last night, Max was tied with Mike Ferrell, an urbane Ivy Leaguer who had taken a year off from Dartmouth to work in California. Brown took Max to Pasadena, knowing his love of the city, but nothing was happening. At 9:30 he spotted a lighted duplex with kiddy toys in the front yard and knocked on the front door. A young father, nursing an infant from a bottle, opened the door. The mother was sitting on a couch, watching TV. Max smiled. He walked in and made his last sale of the summer.

Burton waited in Brown’s car. At the district office, Brown checked the sales log. Strong work, he said. Ferrell wrote an order tonight. You’re still tied.

Burton hugged Max. Close call.

Can I buy you guys a drink? Brown asked. You’re no longer underage.

No thanks. I’m going home to tell Jan.

He gently shook her awake. I won—tied actually. Let’s book a honeymoon before school starts. We’ve got two hundred fifty bucks to blow.

Way to go. She fell back to sleep.

The St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco was a quirky locale for their belated honeymoon. The concierge washed pocket change, giving the silver coins still in circulation a lovely sheen to go with their musical clink. No matter how cold the weather, ladies in short skirts and halter tops patrolled Union Square across the street. On their wedding night in the bridal suite at the Huntington Sheraton, it was Jan’s time of month, when her moods swung between passion and irritability. This time it was passion.

Hand-in-hand, they explored Pacific Heights, full of elegant homes with bay windows and opalescent stained glass. They walked to Chinatown and rode a cable car to Fisherman’s Wharf, where they strolled along the water’s edge, eating cracked crab from a street vendor. Jan made reservations at Ernie’s, the restaurant where Kim Novak and James Stewart dined in Vertigo, one of their favorite movies. Jan’s resemblance to the flaxen-haired actress had caught Max’s eye three years before: beauty and brains—irresistible.

Max felt a tension in their relationship. They had had little time together since they got married, mainly because of a demanding senior year at UCLA and a lack of free time during the summer. Maybe Jan resented being pressured to take a temporary job. It was hard to get her to say what was on her mind, but they had plenty of years to get to know each other. She was the reason Max wasn’t heading for law school with an English degree. In interviews he couldn’t admit that being beguiled by his wife was his motivation for applying to med school.

This ever-so-brief honeymoon was worth waiting for, he said over after-dinner liqueurs in a booth at the lush restaurant. We needed to recharge our batteries.

One weekend? she said with a laugh. We need a lot more than that.

The next four years will afford us lots of shared time—with our noses in books.

I wonder what lies ahead. Her classic profile was silhouetted in front of an oval mirror. Daddy says the freshman year is the hardest year of your life.

I’m ready to buckle down; confident. We did well in undergrad.

Being a champion salesman won’t be worth anything next year.

Two heads are better than one—what could they throw at us that we haven’t already handled?

Brutal competition. What if it’s a repeat of premed with all the dirty tricks?

Why cheat in medical school? What’s the point—to get into med school? We’re there. You worry too much. You’re smarter than anyone I know and got As on tests you thought you’d flunked.

I’m serious; what if medical school is worse?

The point is to be totally honest with ourselves. Know what you know; know what you don’t know.

She looked puzzled. Do you want to tell me something? What’s bothering you?

His stomach tightened. I mean we can’t know everything. Premed cheating was a sickness we fortunately avoided. He didn’t know if it was false bravado or hormones that had made him jump into the medical field, which had held no interest for him until he met his future wife.

I couldn’t tell what your little speech was about. Talking about honesty, do you know why you’re going to med school? This isn’t exactly the career path you had in mind when we first met. For a newlywed she had great instincts about her husband.

Nothing better to do, he said with a smile. After I met you, law school lost its allure.

Flattering, but you’re being evasive.

I like a challenge. Anyhow, I can make choices without being completely sold on them. Life is uncertain. I don’t ruminate about my options; I trust myself.

That’s rather flippant. Medicine isn’t a hobby; it’s a total commitment—long hours and hard work. I don’t want to be surprised if you change your mind.

It may be an advantage to have no preconceived ideas about my future career.

Their return home was a time of small miracles. With a dollar left in Max’s pocket, they discovered that their car had a dead battery and a ten-dollar parking fee. Luckily, a GMC pickup was parked in front of them; it was an old model that had its hood latch was under the front grill. Their jumper cables just reached the battery. Max ran his engine long enough to ensure that he didn’t discharge the truck’s battery. He left a thank-you note on the windshield. The parking attendant smiled, took the dollar, and waved them through the gate.

We must look like newlyweds, Jan said.

Max grinned. We are.

The next day, they moved their meager possessions into a cottage on a dead-end street in El Sereno, a town of turn-of-the century homes at the north end of the barrio, a few minutes’ drive from school. They had found a rear guesthouse renting for sixty dollars a month, so cheap that they would have extra spending money. Their cottage was hidden by avocado trees, up a long driveway on a sloping lot in a quiet neighborhood of dogs and children. It was surrounded by a low picket fence, giving peace and privacy; and it offered something Max had always wanted—a whimsical address: 164 1/2 Copland Place.

While they unpacked their belongings, Jan surprised Max with his birthday present. A van delivered a new bed, as large as a trampoline, that she had bought with some of her summer earnings. He handed her a bottle of Shocking by Schiaparelli—a musky perfume that he’d bought in the perfume shop at the Mark Hopkins Hotel when they dropped by for a drink at the Top of the Mark. They showered, threw a sheet on the bed, and put their gifts to use.

Welcome to the Priesthood

In Los Angeles, the Watts riots had generated a high level of angst, threatening more uprisings and perhaps an inner-city revolution. In a land of palm trees and breathtaking sunsets, black people had every right to despise their circumstances, but their plight was only one of many factors contributing to the general uneasiness. From April to December, eye-burning smog hung in a suffocating pall, trapped against a rim of mountains by onshore flow—dense as poison gas. The long, dry summers baked the soil, making it as hard as granite, and it was covered with a layer of dust that seldom stirred.

The first winter rains ran off into concrete-lined channels, barely increasing the groundwater. Where wildfires had burned off hillside chaparral, mudslides swept away expensive homes. Beyond the San Gabriel Mountains, the San Andreas Fault hooked like a hockey stick, an omnipresent threat of a nine-point quake, the big one, capable of leveling the city. Three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, air-raid sirens blared on the last Friday of the month, a reminder of the Atomic Age, when grade-schoolers had to drop and cover in hopes of surviving a nuclear blast. Idyllic LA could feel like the verge of the apocalypse.

On the first day of school, dozens of cars converged on a gravel parking lot past railroad tracks to the north of the campus, in sight of the vast LA County medical complex across Mission Road. Lincoln Heights had once been a neighborhood of Victorian homes, long ago turned into storefronts and boarding houses, a melting pot of immigrants. Its main thoroughfare, North Broadway, had as many signs in Spanish as English. It bounded the community, beginning at the bluffs overlooking Mission Road and extending past Chinatown, where it made a sharp left turn past the original LA settlement at Olvera Street.

Downtown, South Broadway was lined with art deco theaters that had been the preferred site of movie premieres in the early 1920s; now they were places where Skid Row bums slept for a quarter in all-night picture shows. Boyle Heights lay to the southeast, a once-thriving Jewish settlement that had shrunk to a pocket of octogenarians attending the last synagogue, hanging on amid the largest Spanish-speaking population north of Mexico City. To the west the LA River sliced the East Side from downtown, usually a trickle of water littered with tires, bottles, and occasional corpses. The San Bernardino freeway bisected the area east to west, past a natural gas tower and the Lucky Lager brewery to the south and the looming County Hospital complex on low hills to the north of the freeway.

The student gathering looked like a fraternity mixer. The men wore ties and white shirts and had short college cut hair; women wore roomy blouses and pleated skirts. Jan had a pink scarf across her forehead, looping under her hair. Max parked their dented ’59 Chevy, with its gull-wing tail fins and vinyl top, next to a new Jaguar XKE. Somebody’s daddy must have been happy about his kid getting into medical school, he said as he cut the engine.

I’m sure our parents would have done the same thing if they had the money.

I prefer independence. I got lots of negative feedback in the past. I want to make it on my own.

She smiled. That’s crap. You were a lousy high school student.

True, I didn’t find myself—or you—until college.

The growl of diesel engines drowned out their conversation. A freight train slowly moved into view alongside the parking lot, threatening to bar the way to school. Max and Jan followed their best friend, Jake Feynman, across the tracks. Half a dozen students reacted too slowly. They’d soon learn that the 7:55 a.m. freight was also an impediment to research; its vibrations precluded the installation of delicate instruments like an electron microscope. They were a long way from the sophisticated facilities at UCLA.

At the lectern, the dean, Dr. Norman Fenwick, made a joke about the need to get on track. He was a gangly Ichabod Crane look-alike in his early fifties. His affected serenity seemed more appropriate to a mortician than a physician. He surveyed the new students trickling into the lecture hall, holding his hands tented, fingertip-to-fingertip, like childhood spider push-ups. A former president of the state medical association, he had been appointed to smooth the school’s transition from osteopathy to allopathic medicine.

The Kings slid into back-row seats. Student seating changed little during an academic lifetime; it followed three strata: the front-row brown-nosers, perfectly behaved children beguiling the faculty; the middle tier, sheep grazing in safe anonymity; and the back-row, the iconoclasts, who kept their distance. Max loved the back-row—a way of life that meant freedom to wander in late, listen, doodle, sleep, or not show up.

The dean cleared his throat. Welcome to the priesthood. This will be the defining experience of your lives, and the next few years you’ll be closer to your classmates than your families. Your behavior will reflect on a profession that has served mankind two and a half millennia. You will give up much to gain much more. Unfortunately not all of you will finish. Dr. Hiss will explain our promotions policy later this morning.

Nice touch, just a note of threat, Max said.

Jan jabbed Max in the ribs. I don’t need a play-by-play.

We’re in the midst of a transition, the melding of two traditions of healing. We’re still recruiting faculty. I’m sure that in spite of our current limitations you will learn what you must, no matter the circumstances—and remember always to look professional.

A dress code, Max muttered. Are we still in high school?

Jan frowned. Don’t clown around.

This room is full of white, Anglo-Saxon preppies. Wrap us in a white coat and we’ve got the professional look down pat.

The dean closed with another warning. You will experience many temptations the next four years, but you must resist. In short, keep your prick out of your practice. On that jarring note, he departed the podium. As a group they would not see him again until graduation four years later, in a far different time and place.

Following his departure, the assistant dean, Dr. Jack Scholl, a fiery Scotsman with thinning hair and a thick red moustache, muttered a gruff welcome. He gave an overview of the curriculum. Freshmen and sophomores spent two preclinical years studying the basic sciences. Juniors and seniors were away on clinical clerkships—the clinical years. This format had not changed in the fifty years since Abraham Flexner eliminated proprietary schools and revolutionized medical education. Unfortunately, the first year of Flexner’s curriculum was a rehash of subjects that were well covered in premed.

Dr. John Newell, the freshman class advisor, spoke next, striking a gentler tone while reinforcing the importance of biweekly haircuts and clean fingernails. He closed with his view of the doctor-patient relationship. Physicians must convey ‘detached concern.’ Not too close; not too distant. As has been said, we need gray hair for the look of distinction and hemorrhoids for the look of concern. The class laughed.

A ray of hope, Max said.

I know how traumatic the freshman year can be. I want to hear your problems—personal or academic. My door’s always open.

The next speaker, Dr. Whittaker Hiss, waddled to the podium. He was a staff psychiatrist whose title was chairman of Promotions and Health. He was short and rotund, with a five o’clock shadow up to his cheekbones. He blandly described how the school disposed of failing students. They were pronounced psychologically unfit and terminated.

Max said, The Gulag—failure redefined as insanity.

The last official act of the morning was a ceremony in which Dean Scholl handed freshman Joe Nardi the school’s only first-year scholarship. He was a big, beefy honors graduate from USC. At the end of the ceremony, he expressed his gratitude in a hoarse whisper without looking at his classmates.

During lunchtime Max and Jan explored the school. The ancient recreation hall and the cafeteria—a privately run hash house that extended credit to hungry students—were a few steps across Griffin Avenue, a quiet side street that ran from Mission to North Broadway. There were lecture halls for the lower classmen, but the juniors and seniors were too busy with clinical clerkships to attend classes on campus. The freshmen were housed in Fennessey Hall, a poured-concrete building from the 1940s. The first floor housed the lecture hall and the histology lab. A physiology lab, the dean’s office, and the library were on the second floor. The Pathology Department was in the basement, with its eerie museum of pickled human specimens.

When the class returned from lunch, the scholarship winner, Nardi, had disappeared along with his check. According to his college roommate, Harvey Powell, he’d entered the anatomy lab, removed the lid of the nearest cadaver tank, stared at a plastic-wrapped body, and headed for his car. He was the first of ten students who would vanish over the next two years, reducing the class from eighty-five to seventy-five.

The day ended with a hodge-podge of speakers—the Student AMA, insurance companies, fraternities, and the Big Brother mentoring program. The last speaker was the prim, elderly librarian. She was stooped over and as thin as a cancer patient. They booed her from the room when she announced that the library’s hours were 8:00 a.m. to noon and 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., times that the students were in class. She never finished her explanation of the Dewey decimal system

Life among the Dead

The first anatomy lab began with Lowell Darman, PhD, director of the lab, a decorated ex-marine—a P-38 pilot in the squadron that shot down Admiral Yamamoto in 1943. He got married, had kids, and went to graduate school on the GI Bill, abandoning his dreams of medical school. He was renowned, brilliant, and merciless—a nemesis for lazy freshmen. This is your official warning. What you’ve heard about gross anatomy is true. We expect you to know everything, maybe more. He smiled, showing off a set of even, white teeth. His black hair was graying at the temples, and his tan face had deep frown lines. You’ll be tested on each other’s cadavers, so do your dissections completely. Plan to use your brains. There are no ‘gimme’ questions on my tests—and no cheating.

With a full year of lab, gross anatomy dominated the freshman year: a lecture every day and three afternoon labs a week—over a third of class time, plus after-hours work. A meticulous dissection of the human body took far more time than was allotted. Darman assigned the class into groups, four per cadaver. Robby Mintz, a three-year graduate of USC’s accelerated premed program, joined Jake and the Kings. They received a summary of each cadaver’s medical history. Theirs was a woman in her late fifties who had died of uterine cancer.

Max and Jake lifted the heavy metal lid of the stainless steel tank, a metal coffin on four sturdy legs. They cranked up the slatted platform that held their cadaver in a bath of preservatives, slit open a plastic wrapping, and exposed a small, gray-haired woman who had stiffened into permanent parade-ground attention. Their eyes watered from the formaldehyde, the pungent chemical that Max would never smell again without remembering his cadaver. Her right arm—made brittle by disease and embalming fluid—fractured when they flipped her over.

The willingness to tear a human body to shreds didn’t come naturally, no matter how lofty the aim. They began with the cadaver face down, a waxy form in the shape of a human being. Hardening future physicians required treating the human body as an object no different from the sharks and cats they dissected in premed biology. No existential questions appeared on anatomy tests. Jan named their cadaver Lucy. Giving her a name conferred a degree of respect.

Darman recommended heavy rubber gloves, but Max found them too cumbersome. Surgical gloves were useless—too permeable. Jan wore yellow dishwashing gloves, but Max’s bare hands stayed raw from formaldehyde. The deep splits in the skin over the nail beds and joints would last one month into the following summer. The smell forced him to eat at long range. He used tongs or wrapped finger food with paper towels to keep the acrid odor away from his face.

Nonetheless, Max found lab surprisingly satisfying. He zipped through his work and wandered around, helping other students. A dozen classmates had graduated from his alma mater, UCLA. The studious Kings had barely gotten to know anyone in college. They were too busy with their premed requisites, lucky to find time to socialize with the Feynmans. Outside the lab, Max felt buried under a pile of expensive books. He had little time to follow current events. He spent as many hours at home studying as in the lecture hall. Not enough hours in the day. Not enough hours for a marriage. He lay on their worn-out couch, reading until his eyes slammed shut. Jan studied in the bedroom, propped up on pillows. Their time together consisted largely of sitting at the dining-room table, going over class notes in preparation for exams.

Most of their classes were a boring repeat of undergrad subjects, but anatomy wasn’t boring. Terrifying was more the case. Darman wasn’t kidding; they had to learn everything about the human body, all the standard features and all the variants—every bone, muscle, nerve, tendon, blood vessel, and lymph node, plus all the viscera. Even if they memorized every page of Gray’s Anatomy, they’d have to know more. His tests were not obvious, naming organs with pins stuck in them; he put a functional spin on anatomy. Students had to know how all those organs worked.

During the first