by Joshua Cohen
As for the doctors, they’ve recently begun specializing in two disjunctive disciplines: rhinoplastics, specifically the physical enlargment and psychological encouragement of human noses, their exaggeration in all cardinalities and dimensions, imparting to them a particular aspect that can only be described as Mosaic—a nip of counseling and a Prophet’s tuck, as if the nose were a spindle of the scrolling Law; you know it when you see it, you feel it from within: elongating and bumping the rhinion to the supratip is what, which forms the downward sloping ridge of the organ, then restructuring the columella and its dissolution in the philtrum up to the nasion and its ascent to the glabella, is the term, the terminus, which is the root of the nose to be found embedded between the brows of the wondering eyes, the stupefied mind behind their incredulity ever widening; their other late specialty being penile reconstruction, specifically the surgical detachment of the foreskin, and, also, the severance of the primitive imagination’s attachment to that flesh, a process known to most as circumcision, which the people dead and soon usurped had once ritually performed to perfect their babies at the age of eight days, in an attempt to renew perpetually the covenant of their forefather, Abraham—a procedure continued now if not improved with only a sip of fruity schnapps, a quick and sure knife and a concomitant minimum of hygienic pain.
Today, which is of the new moon prepped if it isn’t tomorrow already what with this senseless sitting around, is to be, since birth, Ben’s first checkup, then down and all around—initially an examination septic, deep into the very nature of proboscine protuberance, its nostrils both actual and mindful: an otoscope is what it is, a slight light up the schnozz and, as if that isn’t enough, a brief if free consultation regarding the continuous shed and regrowth of His foreskin—a followup concerning the tender length below: perhaps a sample’ll be taken, maybe a test or ten again, whatever it is the doctors ask of Him, in truth whatever operation their backers, bosses, and peers have ordered them to perform, medical mercenary tactics on order of the Administration as actioned through the auspices of Garden, Inc., just a little too into this stuff, as it’s rumored, overmuch obsessed with it, His thing, He says, Hanna said thingie, down there, Israel would have said His putz, the Israelien member, apparently a most unusual specimen; operations President Shade would perhaps perpetrate himself, it’s gossiped, if just for the experience or pleasure, if only he’d be assured of, then insured against, not losing the valued patient in the process. Idea is, if Ben’s endowment keeps secreting skin, keeps growing a foreskin then flaking, shedding, regenerationally then growing and shedding itself again and again, not what do we do to arrest or perhaps moderate the pain it might cause and it does, but instead—how can a profit be made in its exploitation: with many prominent secularists to suggest an exhibition of His remnants to be opened at the Metropolitan or at the Museum of Natural History stuffed and mounted Uptown just off the Park, perhaps a sensational display of the actual regenerative process to be commenced in a public place, a spectacle to be appended with appropriate admission fee, think an amphitheater of GrecoRoman proportions, or the Rose Garden of the White House with all the presscorps corpsed in attendance and the President himself with the thorn of a pointer, explaining away for the media masses: tissue repair as a metaphor for survival, the recent regrowth of God’s science in every sector, a resurgence of interest in the divine mysteries of human life; the mystics to suggest, however, the pursuit of a fate far more secret and as such, more holy, namely the collecting of His foreskins solely for the purpose of further creation: the assembling of them into the form most familiar—once serviced by the appropriate incantation, of course, and the setting of a magical shem beneath the flat flap that would serve as a tongue—the making of a golem is what they’re talking, a mensch made exclusively of this sheath: a savior, though immortally soulless, uninspired and voicelessly dumb.
Nurse, how she insists on the qualification, despite having failed the entrance exam to every New York nursing school seventeen times or so, even those less discriminating accredited upon islands Long and Staten, that and she hasn’t yet begun reviewing for her next attempt, if there’s to be one—de Presser, she rises with a moan in her mouth and a crop in her hand, makes her way up to Him loosely, to escort Ben with a nod through the opposite door, which she unlocks with a key affixed to her uniform’s zipper, then over that threshold revealed, a glaringly bright uncleanliness, a pitiless fluorescence hovering in a dull buzz over the uncarpeted linoleum grime: here another waitingroom, this the second containment in an apparently infinite circuit of waitingrooms that in truth number three and only seem that way, eternal as without span, each furnished more and more sparsely, with less thought given in each instance and every area to patient experience, the conditions of comfort physical and psychological both, a deductible factor of welcome: the periodicals get older, more out of date, more and more specialized (Journal of Panamanian Gastroenterology, for example, Confronting Asian Identity Through Cosmetic Surgery, for another), with more pages from them ripped out, holding together from wet, pamphlets, catalogs and brochures, leaflets and flyers; the idyllically stilled lives hanging graven on the walls cracked, crumbling, prefab, massproduced, purchased in their frames from which pricetags still hang their half off, reproductions of images that if they ever existed shouldn’t have, needn’t have, the hideously landscaped pastoral, hills rolling dales, burbling brooks set with trees put out to pasture; diplomas onsite financed, and mailordered, or xeroxed, stolen and forged, their fields not yet filled in, unsealed and unsigned and unframed, held to the walls encrusted in mold with deformed, defective nails, tacks and swaths of tape, which are peeling to trap the flies swarming. Nurse de Presser leaves Him to an armchair utterly depleted, falling apart even more than the armchair wrecked previously; they’ll blame Him for its damage, the Garden will be billed. Of all the designs of this waitingroom, its appointments particular and that of its others, progressively, regressively, dilapidated, the trouble taken for welter, their worthless use, worn, lorn, and fray, He’s most interested in whatever that is opposite Him, whether furnishing or human. Nothing else but to wait for its revelation—calm in knowing that it can’t know Him, though, as it’s sitting slumped in what feels like a diaper, its head bandaged if head it is, a nose if that bound in mounding gauze.
It says from out of nowhere in a voice that’s a rubbing, a rustling sputter, how’s it hanging? then laughs, bandagebitten—anyone there? and so it’s probably a person, and suffering, with hurt evident in a laughing groan shifting its entire form toward Ben, its diaper, painful diapers, noising like parchment ripping dry.
I’m sorry?
Hard to resist, I know…mine’s hanging when it’s warm out just a little to the left. Today, it comes off—not all of it, you understand, just the crown, you know of what I’m talking.
You still there? I can’t see or nothing, it’s the nose…your head’s only this bulb to me, forgive.
A nose swelled with a pride so false as to occlude sight—no, only overly prepared: this thing’s entire hook has been iced at home, then wrapped for outsourcing to specialists, a mess professionally marked down the middle thickly with a greasy, waxy substance that represents to Him like ash; it smears at the apparitional pick, this large line demarcated down the spine of the proboscis, hatched with smaller lines, diagonally, and purposefully irregular xs where a wart, mole, or miscellaneous growth’s to be implanted, according to the whim the goy’s saying now of his wife, her expectations of him and his physicality not as difficult as they are embarrassingly tedious to adumbrate at present, and to a stranger in a waitingroom at that. Must be uncomfortable, like the flaming expected from his swaddled groin: this suffering a mere idea of the symbolic, a small portion of the distress it’s intended to provoke, not only within but also without, amid the greater world and its nosy, invasive demands—not yet fully understood, hardly articulated at so early a phase—for a people, new or renewed it’s no matter; and, too, for a specific Messiah,
perfected: both looking the part and feeling it in equal measure, whose faces and Whose Face just have to have a certain character for credibility’s sake—and so this going under, the undergoing of this forever sit and wait.
I’ll admit it, he says to Ben…I’m a late arrival, what of it—that Xmas, the night they all…you know, that just destroyed me.
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.
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?