Only to look when he waked, not so much refreshed or even rested as startlingly wakeful, directly into the very odd face of someone gazing down at him. The face was somehow as disturbingly familiar as it was strange.
“Oh,” said the man, “I am penitent to startle you. You must are the ill American monsieur, Mr. Miller.”
“Am I ill?” Miller asked, for he realized even before he took in the man’s old-fashioned black bag he must be the doctor.
“This is something we will shall be deciding together. Dr. Félix Rey, Mister Monsieur.”
“Do we know each other?” Miller said. “You seem familiar to me.”
“Oh.” laughed the doctor, “This is a common mistake I have so the likeness of my great-great-grandfather, Dr. Félix Rey, the médecin of Vincent Van Gogh, whom he attended for the amputate of his ear.” He took a card from the breast pocket of his suit coat and handed it to Miller. It was a postcard from a museum gift shop with a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey.”
“You do,” Miller said, “you’re his spitting image!”
“Not a handsome man,” said Dr. Rey.
It was true. Both grand-grand-grandpère and grandfils had thin, vaguely Oriental faces like inverted equilateral triangles that were made to seem even more triangular by both the long, dependent Vandykes at the bottom of their chins and their flat, dark, brushcut hair. Astonishingly, like points of interest, the prominent left ears of the two young men (for they were young; both Miller’s physician and Van Gogh’s could not have been more than twenty-five or — six years old) seemed to flare out from the sides of their heads red as shame and exactly matched the shade of their full, pouty, Kewpie doll lips. (As they stood out against the general jaundice of their complexions.) Both men wore handlebar mustaches. Both evidently plucked their eyebrows.
Miller kept shifting his glance from the picture postcard to the great-great-grandson. For all the flawlessness of their unquestioned resemblance it seemed a bit stagy, as though one of them were cross-dressing, say, or as if some feature on one of their faces — the beard, the plucked eyebrows — had been cultivated for a specific effect, accented as a nose or a hairline in a caricature.
“It is very remarkable, is it not, Mister Monsieur? Do I state the case amiss? One might summarize that Vincent was so geniused that he fixed the gene pool forever with his picture brush. But you will see from your eyes. There live in Arles to this day descendants from the peasant Patience Escalier; the postesman Joseph Roulin and his femme, Berceuse, their sons, Armand and Camille; and of Madame Ginoux and of even the fierce Zouave.”
Handing back the “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey,” Miller wondered if the physician had picked up his English in much the same sort of way Miller had picked up his French, studying rubrics on the backs of postcards as he had memorized vocabulary lists, Yet there was something about Dr. Rey’s speech Miller, admittedly no student of languages, didn’t quite buy. His accent, measured against the accents of Frenchmen in films, seemed wrong. It wasn’t so much uncultivated as uncluttered by their smoky, theatrical rumble and heavy breathiness. It seemed to Miller that even the man’s syntax was off by four or five hundred miles, as though it belonged at least that much further up the Mediterranean coast.
Now Rey listened to Miller’s heart, tuned in on his lungs, took the measures of his pressure and pulse and temperature. He examined Miller’s ears, ran light into Miller’s eyes, palpated Miller’s belly, dug his fingers painfully deep into Miller’s groin. He had Miller gag three strained ahhs under a rough wooden tongue depressor. He had him sit along the side of the bed and tested his reflexes with a little hammer. He took his pressure a second time, removed the stethoscope again from where he had stuffed it into a jacket pocket and asked Miller if he minded submitting to a second examination of his chest. He breathed on the little black disc at the bottom of the stethoscope, warming it the way one might move breath across one’s lenses before rubbing them clean with a tissue. Nothing the doctor had yet done so alarmed Miller as this little gesture of solicitude. Then he had Miller cough. Hard. Harder please, s’il vous plaît. Press, Miller interpreted freely, the pedal to the metal.
And Miller, accommodating, coughed with such force that he brought up the reduced, soured biles of the gorgeous great omelette, toast, tea, peeled fruit, and apéritifs of his delicious dinner. Félix Rey gave him a handful of toilet paper, which he removed from his doctor’s satchel.
It had been a thorough, even arduous, examination. “Is something wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?” Miller asked nervously. “I’m no hypochondriac, doc, but I have to admit, ever since my arrival I’ve been a bit off my feed.” It was so. Whatever else, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Miller generally enjoyed good health. Almost thirty-seven, he was still active in sports, still played a good, hard-driving pickup basketball game with the students in the BTCC gym, or handball at the Indianapolis Y. Unlike many others younger than himself he detected no loss of spring in his step under the boards, and was, despite his liquor and cigarettes, still a strong jumper, and an aggressive, even combative, player. He usually drew more fouls than any other player on his team. (Indeed, he had a small reputation as something of a bad sport, and had always vaguely equated this as a sign of stamina and good physical health.) And on the lively YMCA handball courts he was as quick as ever, his aces and killers as devastating as they had ever been. “What’s wrong with me,” he asked again, “am I ill?” And felt, who’d been unable to pick up any of the steams and busted light waves pouring off the solid objects in his darkened room, his alarmed features anxiously arrange themselves on his face.
“Mais not, Mister Monsieur. I am just remarking what strange fabulousness is it that the physical qualities of so differents citizenships should such often present liberté, égalité, fraternité, the European as well as the Berber, the Berber as much as the Japanese, the man as the woman, a Mexican like an American like a Jewish gentleman like a Turk. Palpation and respiration and the rate of the heart are demonstrations. The Zulu and Eskimo are both at normal at centigrade thirty-six degrees.
“There is nothing needed for further testing, Monsieur Sir. Of wounds to your body there are none presenting. Nor pathologies neither. I have not need to take your blood, I have not need to collect your urines. If there are damages it is in your spirit you are weakly.”
“My spirit?”