What if it had been me, I was thinking…what’s my responsibility to the dead and why — provoking questions, know what I mean?
I was crushed, wasn’t comfortable with who I was anymore.
It’s guilt, insecurity, those old feelings of inadequacy, and so I’m having these procedures…the nose — it’s a solidarity thing; identification, status; and then I’m getting sliced, too, ritually snipped.
Nature’s raw law, the more primitive, the primal, the animal, that’s on the outs says the wife; she’s been after me day and night. I told her what they told me, that there might be considerable detriment to, nu, sensitivity, occasional hymn difficulty, you understand — a bit of impotence at first, nothing medication won’t remedy, I’m assured.
She’ll love it, I’ll live with it, we’ll deal. I’m the last in my office to have this done; the doctors’ve come highly recommended — I’m told they have a heavy hand; apparently, it shakes.
Nurse de Presser enters the room again, and escorts Ben through the door opposite, which gives out onto a room even smaller and dirtier — a closet’s custodianship of a bathroom, maybe, converted to dinge as if for the accommodation of a solitary and reflective wait with the preservation, or installation, of a plumbingless porcelain toilet upon which He sits with its seat down amid the intricate webbing and egglings of tiny spiders, and the lonely motes stuck for their sucking, fat fluffs of dust to be leeched of their defilement. He faces Himself in the dim — the wall’s lone hanging, a mirror unframed in which’s reflected only shadow. He tugs the chain to the bulb above, no luck. If there’s anything else here it would be only a form, derelict, forgotten: a mop, thinhandled, or a broom bristlehairy, gunked thickly with sopping sweep, leaned up against the wall at corner.
I’m next, it says, and so it, too, seems a person, but standing on his head. And no way you’re getting in front of me, no matter what, won’t let you…I’m sorry, pleased to meet you.
Ben reaches out to the foot offered and shakes it lightly bare in shvitzy greeting.
People don’t respect the old order anymore — you know, they never did.
Patience, patience, patience, a bissel calm?
By the time I get in to the doctors, I want to be sick enough to merit their full attention, that’s the goal, I’m talking totally out of it, some days I even wish I were dead…he sighs, knocks knees. I want to give them something to work with, wouldn’t presume to waste their talents and their time.
I’ve been standing like this for a while now; they say it’s good for you, for your head, helps with the memory, brings back whatever’s repressed.
Nurse de Presser returns, escorts Ben through the barren’s backdoor, on their way stepping on the goy upsidedown, giving him in his howl a leer to her legs, the darkred wounding between them; the door opening into the vivisection of a hallway, still unheated, and again travestied, the paint, paper, paste of its near walls hopelessly torn at as if with nails grown teeth; a hall labeled opposite the door with two signs shaped like arrows…what are their points, opposing — one declaring Doctor Tweiss and the other the same, though not evidencing that to the right’s the psychoanalyst, and to the left the plasticsurgeon, if and only if it’s not the other way around. Throughout this lowceilinged, linoleumfloored hall, people in multiple stagings of an evident distress (being clinical), or derangement (becoming pathological), pace a placebic back and forth, slip on slickshod poolings of their own urgent wastes, only to rise relapsed through the ambit between the two closed, and probably locked, doors, one at either end.
They’re confused, says the nurse in a tone that’s been memorized though not quite as well as that that she’s employing such to confide: her briefing, closenosed introductory remarks — not sure as to which of the doctors they’re here to see, and for what they’re here to see which of them about. I’ll make it quick, pay attention.
Those who arrive for psychological treatment, seeking help let’s say with a relationship or sexual issue, often enter the wrong office and emerge two, even three days later pregnant, or else with a larger bust or smaller chin; sometimes this solves their particular problem, whatever they’d thought that was, other times not; though not a few of the cases you’ll find have changed their minds on their own: headed for one, they turn right around and head for the other, which I don’t need to tell you would necessitate another appointment, requiring yet another wait; some cases, as I’ve said, are confused — noncompos, maybe, whether from a preexisting condition or not; but others, the poor wretches, are merely forgetful, meaning their memories aren’t what they used to be — and whatever they used to be, that they’ve forgotten, too; and then there are many just waiting for their insurance to be approved: they’re one form short, perhaps, a missed premium, it’s tragic.
