“Nike.”
“How unromantic! Michael Jordan’s going to win! He’s Superman. He’s from Krypton!”
Escapism caused me to think about Superman and how he was described as leaping “tall buildings in a single bound.” Wasn’t it enough to simply say that he leapt tall buildings? “In a single bound” really gilded the lily, and gave the whole thing a corny, retro feel, as well as suggesting that Superman was a sort of ape.
I think that by the time our meals came, I had already asked myself, “Where is this going?” And the answer was, “Nowhere.” That was when I started to enjoy myself. It was barely raining outside, about like a cow pissing on a flat rock; this was a good time to stay indoors, eat, talk. I thought I had only to strike something up and the rest would take care of itself; but Vicky was making eyes at the county attorney, a dilettante politician with great landholdings along the Big Horn River; and the county attorney was responding by taking in the ghastly artwork around the walls, eyes swooping unpredictably to meet Vicky’s. I sensed that some sort of delectable situation was at hand, during which I could turn my attention to the handsome cutlet adorning my plate while the eye play went on without any effort from me. As I dined and made perfunctory conversation, watching the lovebirds exchange glances, I began to notice that the county attorney’s wife, who would have been a beauty but for the prominent bags under her eyes, was aware of the situation existing between her husband and my date, the very beautiful Vicky. When I had the chance, I gave her a co-conspirator’s wink, to which she nodded grimly. I realized that it was the food that interested her, too. At the end of the meal, I made a cordial stop at their table. “Why, Earl,” I said, for that was his name, “you’ve hardly eaten a thing.”
Earl said, “New cook.” I introduced Vicky and said that she too had eaten like a bird. Earl’s wife, Edna, bragged that she had cleaned her plate while I claimed that not enough was left of my cutlet to attract an ant. When Vicky returned to the table, I had a sort of out-of-body experience in which I raved on about the dessert cart and aperitifs. This dyspeptic display went nowhere: Vicky said she’d had enough, and I took her home in a remorseful mood despite my real attempt to be charming and funny. She was stone-faced all the way to her door.
Well, I couldn’t really say how I felt, nor why I went to the clinic after hours, let myself in, and walked along the examination room doorways, glancing in at the scales and wall-mounted blood pressure cuffs as though they could tell me something. Seeing from the clock at the end of the corridor that it was almost midnight did no wonders for my mental orientation either. I went into my own room and stretched out on the paper-covered exam table, fingers laced behind my head, with the intention of thinking — but I fell asleep. However, I quickly awakened, the idea of being found snoozing on my own table feeding worries of seeming even stranger than I already did in the eyes of my colleagues. So I got up and, looking into a few case folders, came up with “you’re born and you die,” with the rest an avalanche of minor footnotes — no attitude for a doctor.
I left my office and went down the hall to the waiting room, which in a medical facility is an inherently unhappy place. At the check-in desk, there is usually a staff of lady cannibals inured to the suffering and anxieties of the patients registering their stories, their fears, and their Social Security numbers. No matter what happens to them, their stories will be digitalized, and no previous human fear of inconsequentiality can compare to the reduction of mankind by such frontline operators as those of us in medicine. Heading our group was the traditional explosive fat nurse, who raised hell with the fretful while applying order to the huddled masses assembled at her desk.
I sat among these ghosts in the waiting room. A television hung on a wall bracket in one corner of the room. I remember voting for this item as a way of softening the effect of the inevitably delayed appointments, but a squabble broke out once too often between patients and the nurses who controlled the channel changer, and it became necessary to turn the thing off. I went behind the appointment desk, found the remote embedded in a box of Kleenex, and turned the television set on: great moments from the NFL including Vince Lombardi with those terrible teeth carried from the field by the men he had tortured. A Bette Davis movie. She wore a kind of ruffled collar in this one, and she just pitched her head back and went to throwing spit. I was on the edge of my seat. When that was over, I found an extraordinarily peaceful story of migrating penguins, even more peaceful with the sound muted, so that I could watch the ballet of these little persons in arctic seas. This is when I fell asleep, and where I was found by the staff.
I spoke to no one but headed to my office, locked the door, and resumed sleeping on the examining table. I slept much of the day, tormented by dreams that vanished as soon as I awakened, as though from amnesia. And it was quite an unnatural sleep too, based on need not for rest but for escape from the consequences of my strange behavior.
Eventually, I stirred. I went to the washbasin and tidied up, drying myself with tissues, then grimacing by way of an examination of my teeth. Perhaps I was noisier than I realized — when I stepped into the hallway, it was filled with gazing doctors and their gazing patients. Head high, I walked through them, through the lobby where I had first dozed off and which was now bright with sunlight and disordered magazines, noting only the resumption of murmuring as I made my way through the front door.
There was a steady turnover of nurses in our practice, a bit above the general turnover of residents, which was plenty. Some nurses had been in the clinic long enough to know much of what we doctors knew, but there was an unspoken agreement that they wouldn’t use the knowledge, as though their hard-won comprehension could infringe on our relationship with the patients. I did once see Laird McAllister blister his poor nurse in front of a lot of people for telling a patient his resting pulse rate, just after she’d taken it. “I tell them that. That’s what I tell them.” Some of the older nurses serving older doctors began to resemble priests’ housekeepers. We had good doctors and mediocre doctors and only one like me: well trained, with exceptional medical instincts in an emergency, but lacking conviction. It may have been that some of my mother’s evangelism had persuaded me that life on earth was trivial.
I thought the best thing would be to meet with my friend Dr. Jinx, knowing full well the jokes headed my way for seeking counsel from a baby doctor. As it was, when I asked to speak to her — she was standing by her desk in her office and straightened slightly when she heard my voice behind her — she replied, “Gladly, but not where we can be seen.”
We sat on a bench by the old waterworks, the damp, weathered bricks giving pungency to the balsamic air arising from the shrubs around the duck pond. The very high white clouds over the Absaroka Mountains seemed to demand attention. We could hear children playing over by the soccer field. In my present mood I reflected that decade after decade you heard the same quality of noise from that direction, as though the group of children never changed, always seeming to be the same group. This thought merely deepened my disconsolate inner weather suggesting that of all the people on earth, only I stood still, serenaded by the zombie children beyond the duck pond. Were they calling me? At that time I’d have believed anything. I’d have believed the children were calling me to oblivion.
Jinx said, “Give me the headlines and please don’t set it to music.”
“I guess it was extreme reluctance to enter the salt mine.”
“If you think it’s a salt mine.”