Roy starts a new rotation in the House of God’s ICU. He’s working with Jo and another doctor named Pinkus. He meets the ward’s nurses and patients, already depressed at the seriousness of the patients’ conditions. An exception, however, is the healthy woman whom Jo and Pinkus are keeping in the hospital against her will just to try out new medications on her. Another of the patients is a young medical student who caught a cold that has morphed into a deadly and mysterious ailment. Roy is afraid of catching whatever it is and distracts himself with his sexual excitement over the fact that the nurses change clothes in front of him in the staff room when they’re coming in for a shift. 

When Roy goes home, Berry asks him how he’s doing after Potts’s suicide a few weeks earlier. He brushes off her concern, saying he hasn’t had time to think about Potts, and Berry says, “That’s what’s so wrong. It isn’t the medical skills you learn, it’s the ability to wake up the next day as if nothing had happened the day before, even if what happened is a friend killing himself” (283).