Initial tests come up negative for nearly everything — except when a positive false or not would more effectively frustrate any effort to know, to put in perspective. Across the board for those who’ve failed their boards — levels are levels, the counts count, nothing’s found out of the recent reinterpretation of the ordinary. Livers are functioning, urea, uric acid…mensch goes to the doctor, doctor gives him six months to live, you know this, don’t you, mensch can’t pay the bill, doctor gives him another six months is how it goes. RH’s factored in, age, height, and weight, how much you need a name for your problem, too, how syllabically badly you want to be wronged. Another round of injections are prescribed: thinners, thickeners, transalphabetical vitamins, middles, downers and ups; pressurelowering meds are administered; gel’s smeared on nipples, hearts thump away. FB test subjects — initially a sample of thirtysix — are prevailed upon to urinate into a cup, one cup plastic for everyone that no one wants to hold, understandably, as they’re all going to go at once; they drool their warm piss all over their hands, each other’s. Prostates are groped, they give cough all at the same time then gag swabbed, their only culture that of the throat and unbecoming, without feeling; they’re poked, prodded, their fettles are fondled, levels leveraged…saliva samples are taken, and that of their colloidal, colluding sperm; the walls of their tushes each the lower and upper the hairily lipped are scraped for the petri, as fungi’s selectively tweezered out from under finger and toenails, then laid flat atop altars of glass for the sacrifice of institutional money, time, and effort; test after test, more tests than Abram ever had to pass to become Abraham, than ever Jabob had to endure to make us Israel if only in name and more trying, without thicketed rams, no angels stilling hands or laming limbs to save. Ratnosed, roachfingered goyim in white labcoats that’ve been tagged with more initials than God has names, paperputschers, pawing keyslaves, buttonclawers, they’re consulting their charts, a flow veining throughout the evidential body, illuminating only the black mass of ectoplasmic night: testing fresh FB samples, every six hours, three, then retesting again why not, those of the living to be compared with those of the dead, all in an attempt, but how, to fix that strange date in this, the strangest land. Idea is, they couldn’t live forever, could they; naturally or not, they as a people would die out, the thought. And then, let’s say they lived, wishful for argument’s sake or hope’s survivaclass="underline" they could intermarry, they could reproduce with us, meaning with others, and then what Lawwise. Attention, executively ordered, is being given to Xmas Eve of this year; Year 0 A.I. it’s been proposed to call it, After Israel or Israelien, depends (studies have been commissioned: how can we ever count again?) — but they’re too optimistic…Unaffiliated. As forecasts are at odds for the upcoming eve of Passover, and when not at odds then just odd, unrelenting in their manifold predictions: such obscuring fronts and systems, ever colder dates calculated for contrast, timetables and stats, too many numbers serving not to clarify but to darken with cloud, with spilled ink; with the government, Garden, Inc., and not to forget the people, too, the firstborns themselves whose inheritance however imaginary is, in the end, what’s funding this Island endeavor, attempting to ensure that their investment remains protected, tasking Der and the Administration behind him to ensure this never happens again; and that, as the President privately asserts, if it does, which might be inevitable, when it does, then they know not how to prevent fatalities, which might prove impossible, but how best to exploit a survivor, if any survivor there’ll be.
If one needed in order to satisfy an unimaginable impulse, or wanted out of some derangement or another, I’m sure a term exists, to diagnose the office, the physical plant — I have the address somewhere out on Long Island — of the twin Doctors Tweiss, dispensing their office and its forsaken environs a dose of their own medicine, transferring temperament, displacing aims and verbiage in an inevitably misguided attempt to describe, preliminary examination would result in recommendation for the immediate destruction of the facility entire, on second opinion along with its parkinglot, too, and with dynamite. It’s squat stucco with not enough windows; altogether against the human — in no way a place of healing, better interested in hurt. Before they’d moved in, it’d been a funeralhome.
As if to say, Aesculapius, I don’t know. Never heard of him. Aesculapius, think I took his sister out once.
An office a mere block away by carpool from their home, in which they’ve lived ever since a disproportionately protracted birth resulting in the death of their mother and, aggrieved, as if in response, in the eventual feminization of their father, beginning with a regimen of hormonal therapy and then, ultimately, a surgical procedure necessitating a second mortgage — a vaginoplasty in which his testes had been severed to form a labia with the remnant, the shaft of his penis, inverted to manifest the hollow of a shallow vagina. Their office, it’s situated across a meridian from a takeout, drivethru concrete box, at the far end of an icy asphalt lot rented at a nominal monthly fee from that once promiment, national fastfoood purveyor just beginning bankruptcy proceedings, its paving recently annexed into adjacency with the mediating island homeopathically weeded, untended, disused — a tar openness providing ample space for the parking of their modest twin sedans, with the smaller, otherwise zoned expanse just past the island made unofficially available to their patients, too, and to any other visitor to this facility of which their practice, or practices, are at present the only two tenants. Here there used to be seven lawyers, six accountants, five actuaries, four insurance firms, three dentists, two dermatologists, and that lone funeralhome, groundfloor fronting the one pear tree, now barren, stripped by wind of partridges and bark. All of whose space is theirs as of last moon, an expansion from their previously tiny office that had been approximately one street, one address, one suite number too far to the west, which is already Queens. This ever since their official retention, an agreement to diagnose exclusively for Garden, Inc., from the aborted bris on to remain oncall; though they still, if guiltily and with a semblance of quiet, are willing do a number of things, grudging favors, for friends and friends of friends, too, for hard money on the side: accepting diamonds, gold, and other precious gems and metals, free meals, drinks, and High Holiday tickets in return, you didn’t hear it from me, for circumcisions and the mental health counseling their effect would subsequently require, both procedures always ritually performed. If with a handful of weird personal touches: as Doctor Tweiss the plasticsurgeon never uses anesthesia, whereas his twin the psychoanalyst always does, explain that; both having practiced for performance upon Ben, they’re thinking, why not put their work to abuse on a person truly grateful and willing — the general paying public. All at the Garden tolerate it, they have to, it’s too lucrative for them not to, and so they take their cuts both sharp and blunt, and look the other way — at their shoes, on the advice of their counsel.