You should be grateful, she says, you’ve been fasttracked, straight to the top. No one’s gotten so far, so quickly.
A hallway, a glorified madward, an asylum transplanted like a canker from the dimly far, catarrhcoughing past, to bloom here in a wintering of institutional white amid the the tubercular exurban; the asphalt just a block too far to be boroughed. People checking off their listless, a life too inconsequential to register on the Xrays on which they sit; a goy standing to piss through an eyelet ripped into the tip of his bandage, wetting the floor and its median rug opposite the entrance door, its purples and gold dampening richer with his wail: a rug the foreskin of a vast endangered animal, the doctoring brothers would often boast (a whale, the Leviathan, lion, bear, or just a costly imitation), luxuriantly soft, stretched as a welcome mat, wipe your feet split then nailed; translucently dark motifed with veins, rumor has it that if you stand on it long enough, it’ll become a carpet, wall-to-wall. You’ll have to excuse me, the nurse says over her shoulder as she escorts out the disturbance micturating still. Just a moment, for her to think of the appropriate delay: the doctors are now occupied treating each other.
A woman who’s known better days though her eyes seem to ask, but haven’t we all, approaches Ben as Nurse de Presser and her cropped charge disappear with a twitch behind the door, which is locked again, the goy’s urine foaming in from under the draft. I’m looking for Doctor Tweiss, she’s staring down to the puddling warm and her only in her slippers; would you be so kind as to point me in the right direction? What left to do but shrug. I was referred to Doctor Tweiss by a Doctor Tweiss — smiling half a tooth — and he, such a nice boy and single, can you believe, referred me to this Doctor Tweiss for a second opinion, who then referred me back to Doctor Tweiss for unspecified tests, and now that Doctor Tweiss, he must make a comfortable living, you think, such a wonderful soul that one he’s referred me to a specialist, a certain Doctor Tweiss whom I’m trying to find now, and I’m afraid I’m lost, and quite late for my appointment.
About to give a grin in response when another younger woman, only a girl spasms between them and asks loudly of Ben, Tell me about your father!
Myoclonic. Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a sigh?
Her hair is in her face, but those on second inspection are wrinkles.
Enough, she yells, so tell me about my father, will you?
All the patience of the hall turns at this noise, makes to mob the arrival, this whomever hunk promoted past them, unremembered from the haven of earlier rooms — thinking, here the potential for new information. Husbands and wives in for counseling and couples you can’t tell which they’re in for, in declining health whether psychological, physical, psychosomatical, psychophysiological, or only hypochondrial, hysteria termed as mere suggestion; their clothes as if their insides turned out, an airing messy, ravaged with aliment; their faces haggard, cheeks sucked shallow to image as if idolatrously the hollowness lately experienced within: neglected, they survive on nothing more than dust, which is both sustenance and an experimental drug, as a palliative unsurpassed, a universal prescription the ingestion of which — by salivaswallowing, snorting, fingering on the gums, the thumbing of which up the tush — induces a nostalgic quiescence, a wistful longing for the unknown or possibly never extant past; the doctors have it imported from overseas, a treatment intended especially for the edification of their longest lasting patients, at an expense said to be significant both financially and, too, for the mind and body; its only effect whether side or frontally lobed being a particular thirst, which as its specificity’s not yet been identified is impossible to quench.
Across from Ben leaning against a wall of the hall — another later clock.
Tick, tick.
Just a wristwatch tacked — a tock.
