And so any diagnosis must be a consultation made brief with belief, an experiment of the etiologically theological, what we’re talking is a matter of faith. If, as it’s been said, God is everything, both a maker and a ruler, a judge and a king, then He must be a dermatologist, too, accredited by His own infinite wisdom, insured by His own illimitable might — after all, Who can know the world and its skin and the creatures that infest it as us better than the One Who created them all, only to wrong us with sickness, punish with disease.
Ben reaches the Greenhouse if it still has enough walls and enough of a roof to be called or considered any kind of a house, though greener than ever from the slurry of turf: it’s fallen, a skeletal stress of twisted trophies and signage tangles, the remnant of banquet facilities with legless chairs up on splintered tables, locker modules ripped from the setting of their rooms then arranged in the showers, as if metallic megaliths and trilithons intended for the worship of pagans. Inside, which is now its outside, the same, everything’s in a feverish splotch, made lesion, numbly ashen, and flaky. Pusssoaked shammies. Pinkgray flesh flayed loose on clubs and barbarous spikes. Ben parks the cart and wades in in search of food and drink. And the more He stands gleaning through the rubble for any perishables that might’ve preserved, even the alcohol, a light Kiddush from the bar forever closed, the hackedup cherrywood with its bacillarylike rows of bottles not cellared — how He burns more and more, a skinpeel, it’s unbearable, maculamade, that and a flow of blood from the nose, epistaxis the name; inflammation from nodule to plaque, His nostrils impassable, the same with His sinuses, His throat a stack puffing, a blowsy chimney on fire itself.
A crackling barbed rustle, then a prickle of shrubs, a mustering sound…as over a slicking hump He’d driven around once the concrete barrier of the parkinglot fronting the lazaretlike, leprosariumal Greenhouse and all in a tizzy tripping and falling over fallen and tripped parts of themselves, deforming in a partiform peel — the feral caddies klutz in on Him, pariahs in a panicked charge; they’re hurling golfballs at the misered glass the edifice has left as windows, as walls, sharding into stings, to embed amid the loosening of limbs; they the frontline, they’re tearing under their armpits with grownout nails and fisted tees wedged to nest between the knuckles remaining; caddies devolved, grown apelike, primalputsched, silverfurry with the molder of fervent, feverous illness, they’re sharp of tooth and eyed in wild suppuration, overworked yet underpaid, never tipped enough to stave off their eventual, inevitable revenge: some weak ones hanging by the stumps of near trees, wrapping their wounds one by one in the club’s insignified linen napkins so as to be prepared at a moment or signal, for a last assault, a final attempt — to swing for the groin or the throat; others scramble up trees shaggy with snow, drooptrunked, for a better position from which to sling their pocketed balls, smashing even the heads of their fellows, the stronger ones having hopped the lot’s perimeter hedge to swarm through the remains of and tumular over this Greenhouse fallen, its sharp edges of metalmade detritus: counters’, chairs’, tables’, slicing them flanking Him at all ruin’s routes, fall’s momentary escapes, with exits left unilluminated; they’re wielding gripless sand wedges, drivers and irons numbering high into the sixthousands, woods and putters, their bags’ umbrellas, poisonously ferruled, ribs spooked out to corner Him to carcass, to whip Him into submission with gratis towels knotted from the laundrybins of the lockerroom showers, soiled and un, wetted hard then rolled, and then there in the last stall with its spillsticky floor and its soapdish bitten to muffle to punch and kick at Ben, as if to infect their own form, sustaining toward what if not death…their knuckling tees, their fingers and toes only missing, not missed.
