They’re presents, he says dejectedly, for Him and the parents. His partners weep against the windows. And a bundt cake, consider it yours…the Weizmenn smacking palms against their heads and the Lexus, which is due back by noon.
Standing together, soon holding each other, a huggy group weeping, as an ambulance registered to the Hospital Under the Sign of Everything, Long Island’s premium facility at which no insurance is ever sufficient, goes wailing down the lane, past them and their Lexus pulled to the shoulder, past the hut without a nod let alone a stop or even slowing, no appropriate decal affixed to the windshield of the vehicle, no licenseplate to put through the system, this is an emergency here, we have lives to save, or if not lives then at least our reputation for response time. We’re on the clock, better get out unwell or scram. Doctor Tweiss rides shotgun, the plasticsurgeon twin, we should hope (the other’s a psychoanalyst) — in suit, tie errant in the wind with his window aired down, he’s smoking despite the snow, the weathering gray, a monogrammed DT bag of tools on his lap open and bulging, the glint of stainless steel that blinds the eyes of the crying Keeper leaning up against the shut trunk as they pass: the guardrail’s up, had been up ever since this disaster began, with the cops in their flagrant, almost recreational careening into One Thousand a moment just after midnight’s cold stroke; the shrink who’s daylighting as the ambulance’s driver refusing to yield, driving his fraternal physician in gleeful violation of the speedlimit reduced to twentyfive inDevelopment; Doctor Tweiss attempting to steady his nerves and hands, with one holds onto the forked tail of his tie as if intent on hanging himself from the antenna above. He’s to snip the foreskin from the flesh of a newborn today, they call it a bris, they called it, this circumcision, an operation he’d never executed before but that, since last night’s phonecall in the middle of the president’s latenite address, he’d been thinking about, mentally occupying himself with, without sleep. His other hand smoking as its nails stroke at his nose as if it were the organ to be sliced and not an anatomy more hidden or intimate. With these people, he’s understood, it’d been the same as in the hospital, there were just a few blessings additional, which he’d been assured were unnecessary to the success of the procedure, its validity. Blessed art Thou. Blessed Thou art. Then a little of the woundsucking, that and the schnapps, which he’d had the ambulance stop for, and bought, then stuffed it into his bag with the steel — he’d kept the receipt, he’d be reimbursed.
