by Tito Perdue
It developed that his employer had somehow wheedled a contract with a Formosan furniture manufacturer that needed large imports of walnut timber. His position thus secured, at least for the nonce, he liquidated $9,000 of Swiss bonds and risked the money in a mutual fund that concentrated on Formosan equities, a beneficial investment that was to return about 12% over the following year. He had come to the point where his contributions to civilization were just about the same as the return on his money and not one cent more. He wanted, like Socrates, to leave life with all his debts defrayed, defrayed and forgotten and even the very ink made unreadable. As to his epitaph, he wanted to improve upon Keats in the following manner:
“Whose name was engraved in air.”
There passed then a few days during which his contributions to the world actually came down to nothing. Displeased with himself, he arrived at work early on Tuesday and remained till past 4:30. Thursday, he satisfied his obligations to Nathalie and then stayed up late to finish that rather curious volume that Leland had craved. But Friday was the day, the worst in the year, when he must see his physician.
He was a Jewish doctor in a family composed mainly of investors, pornographers, lobbyists, film producers, and other altruists noted for their participation in the design of American foreign policy. Bored with medicine, the man had taken an interest in recreational physics, Old English, submarines, time travel, graphology, Chinese ceramics, progressive bondage, and a host of other subjects having a close connection with his interest in these matters. His face was not especially attractive, and bore the evidence of X-ray burns. His height was poor, his coloration sallow, and such was his rhetoric that he couldn’t have left New York and still be understood.
But Philip didn’t see this person right away. Instead, he was signaled to the waiting room, also sallow and furnished with a supply of specialized magazines that no squeamish person could want to see. Even so, Philip took up a mint-new copy of a quarterly on slick paper, a really well-produced journal full of horrifying photographs of intestinal diseases. It was 3:14 by his watch, but 3:08 by the vestibule clock that had no very large claim to dependability.
The receptionist seemed well-fitted for her job, fully capable of calling out the names of people and handing off a plethora of forms that had to be filled and signed. Philip, however, refused to give away his bank account and brokerage numbers. With the place as crowded as it was, he had a choice of standing or of sitting between a 300-hundred-pound Negress (a term now lacking in modern dictionaries) on one side, and a fidgety child on the other. Worse yet, he had begun to attract the notice of a pubescent girl with a musical insert lodged in her ear. He never condescended actually to wink at females, preferring instead to stick out his tongue and lick his lips.
It was 3:21 before he again checked his watch, while in the vestibule it remained 3:08. Desperate for intellectual food of almost any sort, he selected a magazine with the picture on the cover of a sportsman lifting a large and vigorously thrashing trout from the cold waters of some, apparently New England, stream. Going for his glasses, he could also perceive a tiny boy in the extreme background of that photo, a supernumerary that the photographer, the editor, the printer, etc., etc., hadn’t bothered to eradicate.
He dozed, taking care to do it soundlessly, coming awake at just a few moments before the hand of his watch crashed into four o’clock. Not for the life of him could he recall how he had come to be seated in one of the split bottom chairs that faced the window. He knew, of course, that the doctor would delay his appointment until the last. Because he delighted, that man, to share in what he believed to be highly sophisticated converse with the linguist. Therefore Philip settled even deeper into his chair and began lazily running certain impossible Greek conjugations through his head. Yes, and someday the whole world would use that language and that language only, putting Philip in the best of all situations imaginable. Or when waiting on doctors at any rate.
It wasn’t until 3:08 by the vestibule clock that he was beckoned to the door by a medical assistant in a snow-white ensemble, a dignified personality who smiled at him in a way that made him nervous. It simply wasn’t true that Philip was never disquieted by anything; he was often put off balance by medical people showing signs of compassion. From the lobby there suddenly came the sound of gunshots from the television, and further down the hall a child screaming piteously under the stress of whatever it was that was being done to her.
He knew he was about to be ushered into a cell, made to take off his shirt, and have his blood pressure taken. In spite of everything the pressure proved normal, a happenstance that seemed to disappoint the woman.
“Let’s try it again,” she said, doing so. And then, to his amazement: “You know my son, I believe.”
“Oh?”
“Chris Martin.”
“Why, yes! Good Lord. And so you’ll be his mother, then?”
“No, I’m already his mother.”
“Good Lord. You’re not that Melanie Martin, are you? The one who saved all those lives?”
She blushed modestly. Philip was surprised the doctor had allowed her to bring her dog to work, a tricolor castrate with one bad eye.
He snoozed again. Anticipating a long wait, he had succumbed to the sound of air conditioning and random screams. There was only a pitiful literature here available, which is to say a single bulletin referencing a new molecule, a relatively simple construct attached to a nitrogen radical. He memorized the formula and then went to a blank area on the reverse of the bulletin and tried to recapitulate it with his ballpoint pen.
There was a chart on the wall showing the human circulatory tract. Philip studied the thing, focusing especially on the sheer size and carrying capacity of an enormous artery that ran up and down a person’s thigh. He smoked, sucking quickly lest the Martin woman intrude upon him and abort the activity. Across from him sat a woman of some kind and four children divided evenly among the genders. Philip could not be certain about the youngest, though it was clear to him from their expressions that the elder children had already selected mediocrity for themselves, and to pursue an opportunistic course through life. He predicted success for all three.
Going to the window, he saw an exhausted-looking tramp trundling down the walkway with a knapsack over his shoulder. For him, life was pretty much finished and he knew it, and Philip knew it, too. What wisdom and secrets, what hard-earned conclusions was he not carrying in his head? And was this not mayhap the divine Achilles himself reawakened to life in an incompatible era for people of his type? Helen, too, he saw, or anyway the top of her head.
Dusk was dawning in the form of trillions of elusive little dots striving to come together and construct a brand-new night. Saw an insect (Philip cheered for him) chased by a bat. Saw two automobiles confronting each other nose to nose. A victorious shopper hurrying homeward with her bags, each bag holding quantities of inessential merchandise. And finally saw an eighteen-inch boy followed by a small mechanical dog.
At 3:08 he was ushered into the X-ray room — he knew it well — and put into the recumbent position where the camera could get at him. Normally he might be photographed just three or four times; today, however, he was subjected to twice that number. Had they perhaps discovered the worm that lived in his heart? The technician was an oriental woman with a merciless face and Philip half-expected to be strapped to the platform whereon he lay.
Meantime the doctor had earned at least a thousand dollars while Philip was being processed. Give him (Philip) just 10% of that man’s wages and he (Philip) could have retired several years ago. He knew the type — such as wish to be part of the cognoscenti and rich at the same time. Meantime people were striding back and forth in the hall, where he was sometimes able to perceive a stainless white shoe appearing momentarily in the hiatus beneath the door. Finally, just on the other side of that door, he could hear his physician rifling swiftly through his (Philip’s) voluminous dossier. Time was pressing and the man was able to
give only a moment or two to restoring his memory of the linguist’s condition.
“G’morning, g’morning, g’morning,” the man said, entering the tiny room and then lowering himself gingerly into the second-best chair. “Still smoking, I see.”
An hour ago, the ashtray had been empty.
“They’re developing your X-rays back there” (he pointed back there), “but I’m not looking forward to ’em. No, Philip, it might be easier just to put a gun to your head, hm?”
“I plan to start exercising next week.”
“Not talking about exercising! I’m talking about other things.”
They looked at each other. The doctor had a tic in his lower left eyelid, a suggestion that he did at least take his work seriously. Locked into motion, the lid shunted back and forth at a rate of about seventy a minute, Philip estimated. The pocket of his blouse held a pencil-like instrument that looked like a tire pressure gauge. He had a lofty forehead and on the right side of his nose a small green wart shaped like Argentina. His hands were large, very large, large enough indeed for just one of them alone to encircle Philip’s entire neck. Philip gazed upon the man’s soapstone ring that bore a golden caduceus on a background of red. Going to the back of the room, Philip then perused the framed certificates and awards that decorated two of the usual four walls. (One wall had a window in it.) And then, finally and at last, the physician was dressed in shoes that might be appropriate for garden work but nothing else.
“Still seeing that woman? No, no, this is simply a therapeutic question, nothing else. Well?”
“Occasionally.”
“And that’s your only exercise, I assume?”
“Yes, sir,” said Philip, immediately hating himself for applying the word “sir,” to whom was after all only a trained craftsman of sorts. “But I do walk back and forth to work.”
“A distance of…?”
“Three blocks. But I try to take two steps back for each one forward.”
“So! Going in the wrong direction, it would seem.”
That was when the X-rays were delivered to them by the Chinese woman, who appeared to have mellowed somewhat over the past few minutes. Her hips were satisfactory, but she stood urgently in need of an “Italian chest” (as he liked to say), if she hoped for the Caucasian husband such women undoubtedly desired. Not that he would criticize her for that.
“I’m looking at your X-rays,” the doctor explained, looking at the X-rays. The window was bright enough and both persons were easily able to detect some of the anomalies that afflicted the poor boy’s right lung. Philip was not surprised. In order to be truly, indeed supernally beautiful, it were also necessary to be sick, a lesson he had learned from Thomas Mann and one or two others.
“I’m sending you to New Mexico, Philip, my friend. They’ve got a sanatorium out there, exactly what you need.”
“I’ll pass.”
“It’s the best place in the world!”
“Yes, but I’m thinking about the patients. What kind of people are they?”
“Why, just ordinary people. Like everybody else.”
“See what I mean? No, I’d rather just stay here and work on my diet.”
“That won’t do a thing for your longevity. Want to know something Phil? You’re full of smoke and cigarettes and you’re going to die.”
“Not yet.”
“You’re also the worst person I’ve ever dealt with. You want to die young and make a good-looking corpse, is that what it is?”
The man had hit upon one of Philip’s truths. He had read that not very good novel in which the “good-looking corpse” meme had first been bruited. Meantime — it was 4:41 by his personal watch — people were roving up and down in the hall outside, Negroes and Chinese, addicted people, and once in a while a residual European perhaps, all of them on death’s agenda.
“Don’t pay attention to those people out there, pay attention to me. You’re tired.”
“I do get tired sometimes.”
“No, you’re tired all the time. This is how it works, Philip, that if you don’t care about anyone or anything, why, you’ll be tired all the time.”
With no reason to disagree, Philip lit up a cigarette and then offered one to the physician, who actually accepted it.
“There was a time when I was just five years old,” the linguist confessed.
“Say again?”
“Five.”
“What’s with this? All right, go on.”
“She had lost her dog and was looking for it. I was standing out in our front yard. We talked about the problem for a minute or two, and then she went away.”
“And how old was she?”
“Five. Maybe six. She was sincere, and had a bell-shaped head.”
“Then what?”
“Well! She lived some distance away, and so I never saw her again.”
“That’s it?”
“You ever seen a case like mine?”
“Not good, Philip. You need to get out more, meet people. I’m going to recommend you to a group that meets every Thursday night.”
Philip laughed. “My Thursdays,” he said, “are sacred to me.”
“There’re other groups.”
“And you want me to be mixing with the sort of people who go to meetings? Please.”
“Meet some people.”
“Bad enough having to meet with you.”
(The man believed that he was joking.)
By Philip’s watch, it was time to shutter the building and close for the night; instead, the doctor brought out a flask of premixed daiquiris and disbursed the solution half and half between the two men.
“Tell me, my friend,” the physician asked, “you think it would be better if the human species had never existed? Just a philosophic question, you understand.”
He knew, the doctor, less of philosophy than Philip of the price of blood pressure medicine. “Neither dogs nor man,” the linguist responded. “You do know, I assume, what was done to Bruno and Tyndale and the rest? And to me, too, if they knew what I’m usually thinking?” (Having gathered himself, he lit a cigarette and continued on.) “Saints and scholars at the beck of businesspersons? A system that punishes earnest people and rewards investors, pornographers, lobbyists, and film producers?”
“You expect too much.”
“But I don’t expect it.”
“Well then, you want too much.”
“I suppose.”
“You want too much, and can never be happy.”
“Happy? Is that a noble goal?”
“Maybe not, but it sure is a popular one.”
(The drink wasn’t awfully good, but sufficed to stand in lieu of food.)
“You have a poor opinion of me, too, I expect,” the doctor said.
“No, I need someone to write prescriptions for me. They won’t let me do it for myself.”
“That’s the system. We call it ‘democracy’.”
“By God, I believe you’ve put your finger on the problem!”
“Jesus, Philip.” (The man was plainly irritated.) “You’re pretty young to be so wise. Where do you come off with all this stuff? What, you want us to have a dictator or something?”
“I’ll support any dictator that’s strong enough, and willing, to punish the general population.”
“Jesus Lord God shit, I think I’ve had just about enough of you! You’re on a glide path to death, and yet you say these things. Who do you think you are after all?”
Philip took a drag on the cigarette and tossed the hair out of his eyes. Came to him the sound of far-away airplanes crisscrossing overhead.
“You’re a sick boy, Philip, in both senses, and you’re not even going to do anything about it. Are you?”
The linguist could not but laugh, at the same time taking another swig of the drink which seemed to be getting better. It was of course a mistake to speak honestly to mediocre people, though he enjoyed doing so from time to time.
Ten
He arrived home at a few moments past eight and, after checking on the mousetrap, prepared himself another daiquiri. Having consumed it to the lees, he then stretched out on his beloved couch and never got up again until it was dark inside both rooms of his small apartment. Going to the window, he caught the last modicum of sunlight, a green and gold display that seemed indisposed to fade away. As to the people down below, and there were numerous of them, they were all facing in the exact same direction in which they each were going.
How humiliating, to be a person. If he (Philip) wanted to be somewhere, he ought to be there automatically, and if he craved bit of music, it ought to pick up in his head just where it had left off earlier. And if he wanted to be fully alive, and yet without a body, that too ought to transpire immediately and right away, allowing him to explore the upper stories of these encompassing buildings on mental wings.
Instead he turned on the television and witnessed a few moments of a comedy dealing with mistaken identities and sexual liberation, a daring and boundary-breaking riff on outgrown opinions about something or another, according to the New York Times. He stayed for an advertisement showing how a certain foot deodorant could get a man more pussy. And then, finally, the most up to date ultimate in boundary breaking riffs — three couples in bed. Sick to death of the world, he left his room and, holding to the banister, worked his way down to Christopher Martin’s laboratory/apartment. This time the dining table held a peculiar-looking beaker with a cork in it. He loved the way he was welcomed in this place, and loved the alacrity with which the last best woman in the world fetched his coffee and mail.
“I can’t see anything,” Philip admitted, “in that peculiar-looking flask.”