“He’s here for his physical.”
“Are you family, ma’am?”
Ava kept writing, did not look up. She said, “You can call me Dr. Katsina.”
“Just take a seat,” the woman at the computer said when the completed papers were handed over.
The doctor kept them waiting. They sat in awkward, unwilling postures among magazines that were wrinkled and damp, having been picked through by so many anxious fingers. Hearing their names, people got slowly to their feet and entered small rooms to be examined. Steadman saw them as poor, weak, naked flesh, struggling to stay whole, flunking their tests, humiliated in their failure.
“I don’t even know why I bothered to come here,” Steadman said. “I know what the verdict will be.”
“I wish I knew.”
“That’s what I’m saying. They won’t have the slightest idea.”
Saying this, he stood — he was being summoned by a stammering receptionist. He was aware of the voice a fraction of a second before Ava heard anything.
“Follow me, please,” the receptionist said. And to Ava: “If you don’t mind waiting.”
Steadman was shown to a room where a woman wearing white was seated. She was the doctor. She was heavy, inert, her body as pale and dense as cheese, the swags of flesh on her slack arms squashed against her sides, her gaze fixed on a computer screen. Her smell of antiseptic and talc put Steadman in mind of plastic flowers, of disguise and decay. Her ankles were swollen, overflowing her shoes. A wall clock behind her was ticking, and the face of the clock resembled hers. He detected a sadness in her but, offended by her officious manner, rejected the thought.
She did not rise or look at Steadman when he entered. Instead, she leaned away from him and shifted her heaviness onto the hams of her thickened thighs. When she picked up a pencil and clipboard her body filled the tight white uniform, binding it. She seemed to him like a keeper in a madhouse, chosen for her bulk. She had a bully’s body, and was probably a bit mad herself for her airless days in this sorry room, sitting in judgment on the sick. He disliked her for not greeting him — he a cripple, a blunderer, a blind man measuring his steps in the room with the tip of his cane.
Without engaging him in conversation, she watched his progress as he tapped with his stick and found a chair to sit in.
“When was your last complete physical?”
“Does it matter?”
“Lift your shirt for me,” she said, and he heard the squeak of her chair’s casters, the tug of her crepe soles, as she rolled toward him with more orders, abbreviated ones: “Sleeves up. Mouth open. Lift your tongue.”
She took his blood pressure and temperature without commenting, but all the while she breathed through her nose with a rasp of the bristly hair inside her snout.
Scratching with her pencil, her plump hand chafing across the paper, she entered numbers as though carving them with the chisel of her pencil point.
“What sort of work do you do?”
He could hardly believe that the doctor, staring at his name, did not know this simple, well-known fact; that she was swollen and slow did not explain it. Everyone knew his name, which often annoyed him when someone recognized it and greeted him. In the past it had been like a mockery of him, for what he was not doing.
“I’m Slade Steadman.”
The pencil lead trembled against the paper, then began paring at the page like a knife point. No other sound came from the doctor except the bump of her bare forearm on her desktop, like the skid of raw meat, a fat rind of cold pork slapped onto a butcher’s block.
As she began to write, and it sounded like an indictment, her scraping the paper with her pencil point, Steadman inwardly objected again: another doctor dominating him, behaving as pompously as a priestess, hinting that she had power over life and death, knew the diagnosis for all mortal ills, if not the cure, protective of the special language of illness, the code words of doom, a superstitious idiolect, a lingo that was all about fear and flesh. He was supine; there was no sympathy here.
He had come to believe that many doctors caused disease. Ava was a notable exception, yet he sometimes looked at her and thought, But you never know. He could rant on the subject of physician-assisted illness. Gnawing in secret like the canniest rats, worrying your confidence and good feeling with their arrogance and secrecy, doctors were at the bottom of it all. Steadman was certain that doctors brought healthy people down by uttering dire warnings and attaching the most grotesque meaning to the commonest and least harmful symptoms. “Your headache might be a brain tumor,” and “Your cough might be more serious than you think,” and “That skin blotch might be melanoma,” and “What you think is just bad eyesight is macular degeneration — you are going blind.” They were the bearers of fearsome news that made sick people sicker.
Or they told you nothing at all, treated you like a pickled specimen, a sample ailment, a case number. Then they squinted and scrutinized, frowned and scribbled, as this fat uncommunicative harridan was doing now. They were drug dealers with the dirtiest drugs, which cleared up some symptoms but gave you others: dizziness, nausea, insomnia, anxiety, impotence, skin rash, hair loss, depression, renal failure, the shakes, and you were incapacitated by these side effects, or died. A few doses of a vaguely named antipsychotic drug and you ended up palsied, with all the outward symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Check into a hospital to fix a painful rotator cuff and you picked up bacteria that triggered arthritis so crippling you couldn’t get out of bed. Hospital air was soupy with germs. Shot-happy doctors made people ill, as this woman had already begun trying to do to Steadman, demoralizing him by ignoring him, by breathing hard, a kind of poisonous exhalation. But he knew better.
“What is your name?”
“Dr. Budberg,” she said in a panting breath, surprised by the sudden question, but not so startled that she forgot to give him her title.
He wanted to remind her that all ignorance needs a name. She was really no better than a Vineyard lout doing yard work, who smiled resentfully at words like “threadbare” and “profusion” and “extricate,” and was insulted when Steadman used them, saying with aggression, “I guess I’ll have to write that down, Mr. Steadman.”
He said to Dr. Budberg, “I do the same work as Herr Grass and Dr. Canetti and Mr. Wolcott.” When she did not react, nor even raise her head, he added, “Señor García Márquez, Mr. White, Mr. Milosz, and Mrs. Gordimer.”
Her hesitation showed him he had rung no bells — her head still down, her pencil motionless, poised over the blank line headed Occupation.
“They won the Nobel Prize for literature,” Steadman said, and wondered what she would say. She said nothing. “I haven’t so far, but may I say you have a strange scotoma?”
She looked at him and — given her specialty, this seemed odd — blinked in confusion.
“Writer,” he said.
Just last week the president of the United States met me, he wanted to say. And: How is it that this exalted man knew my name and work, and you, arrogant lump that you are, did not?
Dr. Budberg was wearing what he took to be her game face. Doctors learned early how not to look fazed. She was proof of such scientific posturing, busying herself with an eye chart, shifting in her chair, rolling it on its casters as she skidded and stumped with her lisping crepe-soled infirmary shoes. She adjusted the viewing hood, and Steadman knew he was no more than a pair of goggling eyes attached to an insurance policy.
But in the studied scorn of her indifference, a bit too contrived, she lost her poise and knocked her pencil to the floor. Before she could retrieve it, Steadman stood and walked four steps and snatched it, played with it a little, fingered its lettering, made her wait for it, then handed it over and sat down again, all unhesitatingly and without using his cane.