Jesus, the kid's a kid. Whatever else it may or may not be, freakish aging is a childhood condition. And there, precisely, is the whole hopeless situation in a handbag. The would-be Department of Pediatrics, Dr. Joseph "It's Under Control" Milstein presiding, is about as mythically monolithic as that twenty-five-language empire on the other side of the globe, at this very minute breaking into a caldron of contentious turfs. Their service is no more than a Jack-and-the-bean-curve, a wide-load Gaussian with Infancy on one end and Adolescence on the other, with a class of cases fat in the mode-peaked middle for which English has no good word.
Pediatrics is not a discipline. It's a default, a catchall. Kraft cannot connect even its two main provinces. The bins themselves are hopelessly coarse: from birth to vertical, and from vertical to near voting age. What, pray tell, is the common denominator between pyelonephritis and Munchausen syndrome by proxy? In one, the kidneys drive the parents crazy; in the other, the parents drive the kidneys insane. The specialty is designed by one of those guys who go into bookstores and order a yard and a half of red hardbacks no taller than eight inches. As Dr. Brache once told him (and irony lies outside the bounds of Miss Peach's rhetorical modes), if you can crack a fourteen-month-old's chest, than you can wean a fourteen-year-old off crack.
The international community, from Kraft's third-hand vantage, is currently engaged in some intensive R & D, smoking up several delicious monster scenarios for the coming collective blowout. Things are definitely on the march. Nightly news lays out its attendant horrors in a series of thought-eradicating, three-minute music videos. Ice caps melt. Fuel reserves push toward asymptote, with nothing anyone can do about it. Debt amasses faster than global capital. IRS computers threaten to trigger the long-teetering global financial shutdown by issuing checks and debits essentially at random. The president's astrologer joins the Secretary of Defense in clicking off the Patmos checklist of critical warning signals. And Angel City, an incredible place to live for Those About to Die, has about a decade and a half s jump on all other up-and-comers.
But Pediatrics supplies Kraft with an alternative wrap-up scenario. The department nurses, whom he tries to avoid for reasons not sufficiently buried in his checkered past, report this tremendous spike in preemies, SIDS cases, placental substance dependence, inherited autoimmune deficiencies — slopes ramping up for an assault on the airy altitudes above the graph-paper tree line. His imagination is entranced by the chance of an annual power skid in the male-to-female ratio, not just statewide, but throughout the euphemistically labeled developed countries. A Pink Shift drifts demographics measurably away from snips and snails, sugar-and-spiceward. An almost imperceptible but steady 0.1 percent reduction in males per live birth per year, when coupled with the recent slight increase in male infant mortality rates, and the shift reveals nothing less than the steady girlification of the world, with its inevitable — although belated — precipitous drop in procreation.
Wouldn't that be the ultimate kicker? After all the high-visibility threats, the dire predictions proliferating like food stamps, the concerted forward two-and-a-halfer over the brink of willful critical mass, to wind up perishing slowly from irreversible sex-ratio drift, brought on by some invisible drinking-water effect on gamete motility? Sure, it smacks of wishful thinking on Kraft's part, when faced with the grab bag of aggressively masculine apocalypses, to hope that the species might sink into a more benign disappearance, a surfeit of female.
But until the collective end of choice arrives, or until he finishes this service and graduates to the next one — the VA, a weekend cake promenade in comparison — whichever comes first, he is compelled to make his minor mitigations for those sufferers who share nothing in common except their unripe green. Monsters, freaks of gene or accident or pathology, race up and down these halls in relays, in fifty-yard dashes leading to no medal, no record, nowhere. Files of them, parades of shell-shocked, half-staffed pilgrims. What's it to you?
"Okay. Now roll over. Move your arm like this."
"God. Lay off. You're killing me."
"Don't be such a baby."
"Stop. Wait. No, really, Linda. I need both my arms. It's a professional thing."
"Oh, come on. Why is it that men start shrieking at the least little hint of therapeutic pain?"
"Who you calling a man? Jesus. I think you dislocated it."
"Then it probably needed to be dislocated. It's for your own good. I've never seen anyone with more restricted mobility."
"Yeah? Well that comes from years of conscientious discipline."
"Discipline? You ungulate, you. I ought to teach you the meaning of the word."
"I'm sure you could."
"Do you want me to fix you or not?"
"I ain't broke."
"That's what all the boys who come see me say. Your little mascot these days, Tony the Tuff? Diminutive little machismo thug. He sits in my office whining that it hurts when he grimaces."
" 'Don't grimace?' "
"No. Don't get your ear cut off next time. Now, if you want to talk about real bravery…"
"I'm supposed to sing 'Sank heven vor leetel gerlz' now, right? Speaking of which, did you give them to her?"
"Give what to who?"
"Joy. The books."
"Of course I gave them to her. You think maybe I fenced them for their street value?"
"What did she say?"
"When I brought them to her, she just… I'm sorry. You know, those eyes. It's like: 'I have to protect you from what you don't know about the world.' She thanked me profusely, and begged me to thank you, and looked up to me, deadly serious, and said, 'Do you want to read them out loud to me?' Like that's the only official way of doing these things. Like they were part of some…"
"And what did you say?"
"Will you shut up, please, and let me tell this story? I asked her, Would you like me to read them to you?' To which she very tentatively suggested, 'I think I would rather look at them carefully during my free time.' "
"Free time? Free time from what?"
"From her self-designated study periods. We have to graduate, didn't you know?"
"Oh God."
"Here. This way. A little radial…"
"And did she read them?"
"She took what is for her a leisurely stroll through them, compared to the day and a half she usually takes to polish off the histories and almanacs. Then she tried to return them with the usual politeness. When I told her they were hers, she said she had a few questions. Why does that boy, when they wheel him into the garden, say I shall live forever? That other boy, the one who never grew up: How is that possible?' Not your typical twelve-year-old concerns."
"Utter failure, in other words."
"Oh, I don't know. Who can say what Joy's imagination is capable of? That she's kept pace with reality is astounding."
"Not her. I mean me. Utter failure in selecting tides."
"I wouldn't say that either. Okay, now the planar axis."
"Ouch. Oh Christ. What are you doing to me?"
"I'm not sure. But you love it, don't you? Admit it. Admit it or I'll twist your little wing right off.".
"Anything. Anything."
"Undress me."
"What? Here? In the middle of…?"
"Come on, come on. Am I going to have to do this myself?"
"Espera! Oh holy. Shh. Stop. People will hear."
"So what? They'll just think, Hmm. Old Dr. Kraft in there, bashing the bishop."
"Old?"
"Enough to know what he's doing."
"Oops! I'm afraid that's my beeper."
"Look at him grin. I hadn't realized you could make it go off just by wishing."
He does not say good-bye, or set the time and place for finishing what they have started. He does not tell her that far more than the foot is in danger, that getting away with just the calf would be deliverance. His old saving grace: say as little as contractually necessary.