Witz полностью

Nurse, how she insists on the qualification, despite having failed the entrance exam to every New York nursing school seventeen times or so, even those less discriminating accredited upon islands Long and Staten, that and she hasn’t yet begun reviewing for her next attempt, if there’s to be one — de Presser, she rises with a moan in her mouth and a crop in her hand, makes her way up to Him loosely, to escort Ben with a nod through the opposite door, which she unlocks with a key affixed to her uniform’s zipper, then over that threshold revealed, a glaringly bright uncleanliness, a pitiless fluorescence hovering in a dull buzz over the uncarpeted linoleum grime: here another waitingroom, this the second containment in an apparently infinite circuit of waitingrooms that in truth number three and only seem that way, eternal as without span, each furnished more and more sparsely, with less thought given in each instance and every area to patient experience, the conditions of comfort physical and psychological both, a deductible factor of welcome: the periodicals get older, more out of date, more and more specialized (Journal of Panamanian Gastroenterology, for example, Confronting Asian Identity Through Cosmetic Surgery, for another), with more pages from them ripped out, holding together from wet, pamphlets, catalogs and brochures, leaflets and flyers; the idyllically stilled lives hanging graven on the walls cracked, crumbling, prefab, massproduced, purchased in their frames from which pricetags still hang their half off, reproductions of images that if they ever existed shouldn’t have, needn’t have, the hideously landscaped pastoral, hills rolling dales, burbling brooks set with trees put out to pasture; diplomas onsite financed, and mailordered, or xeroxed, stolen and forged, their fields not yet filled in, unsealed and unsigned and unframed, held to the walls encrusted in mold with deformed, defective nails, tacks and swaths of tape, which are peeling to trap the flies swarming. Nurse de Presser leaves Him to an armchair utterly depleted, falling apart even more than the armchair wrecked previously; they’ll blame Him for its damage, the Garden will be billed. Of all the designs of this waitingroom, its appointments particular and that of its others, progressively, regressively, dilapidated, the trouble taken for welter, their worthless use, worn, lorn, and fray, He’s most interested in whatever that is opposite Him, whether furnishing or human. Nothing else but to wait for its revelation — calm in knowing that it can’t know Him, though, as it’s sitting slumped in what feels like a diaper, its head bandaged if head it is, a nose if that bound in mounding gauze.

It says from out of nowhere in a voice that’s a rubbing, a rustling sputter, how’s it hanging? then laughs, bandagebitten — anyone there? and so it’s probably a person, and suffering, with hurt evident in a laughing groan shifting its entire form toward Ben, its diaper, painful diapers, noising like parchment ripping dry.

I’m sorry?

Hard to resist, I know…mine’s hanging when it’s warm out just a little to the left. Today, it comes off — not all of it, you understand, just the crown, you know of what I’m talking.

You still there? I can’t see or nothing, it’s the nose…your head’s only this bulb to me, forgive.

A nose swelled with a pride so false as to occlude sight — no, only overly prepared: this thing’s entire hook has been iced at home, then wrapped for outsourcing to specialists, a mess professionally marked down the middle thickly with a greasy, waxy substance that represents to Him like ash; it smears at the apparitional pick, this large line demarcated down the spine of the proboscis, hatched with smaller lines, diagonally, and purposefully irregular xs where a wart, mole, or miscellaneous growth’s to be implanted, according to the whim the goy’s saying now of his wife, her expectations of him and his physicality not as difficult as they are embarrassingly tedious to adumbrate at present, and to a stranger in a waitingroom at that. Must be uncomfortable, like the flaming expected from his swaddled groin: this suffering a mere idea of the symbolic, a small portion of the distress it’s intended to provoke, not only within but also without, amid the greater world and its nosy, invasive demands — not yet fully understood, hardly articulated at so early a phase — for a people, new or renewed it’s no matter; and, too, for a specific Messiah, perfected: both looking the part and feeling it in equal measure, whose faces and Whose Face just have to have a certain character for credibility’s sake — and so this going under, the undergoing of this forever sit and wait.

I’ll admit it, he says to Ben…I’m a late arrival, what of it — that Xmas, the night they all…you know, that just destroyed me.