Pür took delight only in his instruments, the mathematization they conferred, the senses they augmented. Surrounded in the room by plaster-of-paris models of the organs he was examining, as well as cabinets full of less effective, outdated, and superseded instruments, he was never so happy as when isolated among the sounds, sights, and signs of illness the patient himself could not see or hear. There were times he could visualize a pulse curve without even touching the person, and he looked forward to the day when it would be possible to diagnose without seeing the patient at all.
At the conclusion of the visit, Pür handed Felix a small card with a column of numerals designating the acceptable range of microscopic analyses to come.
“You have the body of a man half your age,” he said rather wantonly, then, “I suspect that your tests will be on the high side of normal — not a revelation to you, I suppose.”
When Father shrugged at the numbers on the paper, Pür’s temples flushed with the shame of health, and a small coil of concern appeared in his smooth forehead.
“How well do you wish to get, Councilor?”
Every now and then the Augesee would regurgitate a small tsunami. The tidal swell was usually sighted first on the color-leached Plains of Mon, where Astingi patrols tried to outrace it, and when it deluged the covered bridge at Chorgo, the yellow weather flag was raised on the fortress. The next train was given the message to be dropped off at the stationmasters at Umfallo and Malaka, so that the king and prime minister, if in residence, might be informed. Invariably Count Zich would then open his monogrammed leather-bound telegraph key and tap out the news to the post office at Vop, whose thousand harpists would send a chord hurtling down the canyon of the Vah, resounding throughout the basin of the Mze. At such a moment, the Desdemona would suspend local operations, and after loading up with sturgeon and champagne, improvise on the crest of the wave all the way to Therapeia, like a skier who descends the mountain in a tenth of the time he took to climb it. Felix took advantage of one of these improvisatory chutes and found himself amazed to be walking briskly toward the low-lying quarter of the Professor’s address after only two hours on the river.
He had a great distaste for Therapeia, a university town full of conceited students and bad tobacco shops. Every weekend in Therapeia featured dog shows, and its residents considered themselves the universe’s most ardent dog lovers. However, they were almost exclusively show people, not hunters, and their main accouterment was a large, over-the-shoulder striped sack in which a gentleman could carry a seventy-pound animal, whilst from every woman’s muff, a pug’s mug protruded. In place of a kunstlerhalle there was the famous Dog Museum, where each citizen was invited to reconstruct a furnished room from their own home, and during viewing hours live in it with their various dogs, so the rest of the populace might visit to compare and contrast their own quarters and pets.
They believed themselves genial and simple folk, much like their dogs, when in truth all they had managed was to connect their dogs in weak analogy to their own messes. Everywhere in the town, rich and poor quarters alike, steaming heaps of meat-flavored, half-digested American cereal products festooned the curbs, mirroring not so much the poor animals who deposited them but the slovenly, lonely personalities of the citizenry. To avoid these matters Felix had to constantly cross and re-cross the street, until finally, in a huge block of flats with innumerable dark entrances on the rue des Carcasses, he found the Professor’s yellowed card on a heavily grated door, reflecting that this second submission to medical authority was at least pro bono.
Up the narrow winding stairwell, the door to the anteroom was slightly ajar, pinned with another yellowed card:
WE ARE ALWAYS HAPPY TO CLARIFY Advice is Extra
The anteroom itself he recognized immediately as one of those strange libraries full of splendid and bulky volumes, complete sets only, books sent to you by someone else, and having never been read, put on display for yet a third order of reader. Where there were no books, large etchings of half-naked allegorical women hung, and from behind a velvet curtain in the corner protruded a silver gynecological stirrup.
Upon being admitted to the inner office (the door seemed to swing open on its own) he was surprised to see not a single instrument, nor an examining table or a nurse, only a shabby pseudo-Turkish loveseat and a desk piled high with empty dossiers, from which he inferred that the Professor had not been in private practice long. But the man who had greeted him so warmly and effusively on his exile territory, kissing his wife’s hand repeatedly and patting his child’s head until he blinked, now regarded him with a somewhat indifferent air, without even motioning for him to take a seat. When Felix asked if he might take the chair by the desk, the Professor said only, “As you wish.”
During their conversation the Professor neither touched him nor made use of any instrument, not even a pen. Indeed, he never came closer than eight or ten feet and barely spoke. Leaning back in his chair, making a tent of his fingers, gazing at the high ceiling, he would occasionally modulate his voice and throw him a glance of rather pointless solicitude and reassurance, but nothing more.
The examination began with three innocent questions: Do you hear voices? Is anyone watching you? Who controls your thoughts? Then the conversation switched to a kind of elevated pubchat about the female of the species, ending only when Felix lashed out in frustration:
“How dare you bring my mother into this?” His voice had risen slightly, and he was covering his nose in what he knew to be the classic symbol of deception. He made his eyes impassive, smiled inappropriately, and refused to maintain eye contact. But the Professor took no notice.
“When you think of the word ‘pocket,’ what does it recall to you? Does the word ‘straight’ bring anything to mind? Why are you playing with that button? Put your hand in your pocket and feel the pennies.”
Whereas Pür had rejected every commentary out of hand, the Professor seemed interested in nothing but his self-descriptions, especially in their vaguest and most speculative aspect — the most disguised complaints, the most ill-described sensations, the most precarious theories, the most tenuous flights of the soul. Felix did his best to fit his long-lived family’s total lack of medical history and their speedy, unsuffering deaths into this universe of physical changes concealed from the natural senses. At one point the Professor stood up and faced out the window, his back to him, hands crossed over his rump, apparently in exasperation. This gesture, rude in anyone else, seemed to be reflective and forthcoming, given the odd context of the meeting.