The doctors, they’re booked for moons.
Through the door to the office that’s wide enough for a gurney, a prehumous coffin and its two medically fit pallbearers — this to facilitate the twins’ coming and going, the two of them at once through the lobby — there’s a sign: The Tweiss Group. One to the left and one to the right, then they meet in the middle. A lobby that also serves as the first waitingroom, as the initial station of a series of rooms that would test the commitment to recovery of each individual patient: however long they’re willing to be kept waiting indicative of how badly they’re in want, or need, of healing. Ratty pornographic periodicals they’ve recovered from the trash of a lawyer vacated or dead, facsimiles of transcribed testimonials provided by, if extorted from, patients former and present, promotional materials for ever newer prescription narcotics designed to alleviate the aftereffects of elective surgical procedures, too, fanned out atop little rickety, unmatching endtables, the nicest of them hardwoods topped in fauxmarble. A scattering of vases with even their cracks chipped, their fill a handling of left umbrellas, corrupt caducei. Antiquities behind frames that once held glass, stationed on both sides of the door, cabinets of rare fragiles shuddering with the entrance of every patient, never exit — and so their shattered statuettes with the heads of dogs and Gods, their idols in shards and showy halfamphoræ. Against that wall an analysand’s settee forbidden for sitting, at its sides two armchairs dermatologist’s purchases smokedamaged, tossed out, then divested by the brothers from a temporarily neighboring dumpster; the other wall hosts the receptiondesk, which is splintering, set on shapely legs — set on highheels — forbiddingly high.
As the firstborns are put through their battery of tests, subject to the painful whim of any government granting or other ostensibly official disbursement, many, though, private and so privately festishistic, insane, Ben’s kept waiting, shifting in one of the waitingroom’s armchairs, sloppily womblike, leaking its stuffing. His appointment scheduled for a lifetime ago, hours, an hour. Reduced to the abject, demeaned by each knifing lick of the clock above, He’s become its lowly ward, and that of the desk below it, too, not to forget behind the desk its girl, sitting low as if unaware of her power. All the waitingrooms, and there are many, as many of them as there are hells, even as many as there are ways and means by which to earn your hell, to become cursed and damned, to deserve it here on earth — all are the domain of this young woman, the offices’ shared receptionist and sole fulltime employee; according to the nameplate her employers would often fantasize nailing to her forehead, her name’s Minnie Tung de Presser.
No, I have Misses Abernathy down for three this afternoon.
Yes, she says, she dialed me frantic from work and I just managed to squeeze her in…squeezes herself, then realizes the telephone’s disconnected, plugs its jack back into the wall. What did she do, what didn’t she do: she’d settle disputes in case of scheduling conflicts, though often she’d be the one responsible for scheduling the conflicts, in an effort to assert her dominance over the doctors who’d woo her, this hourglass shiksa maybe a few grains shy of legal age. Domineering, like she’s making double what she makes, with spoiled ascension pretensions though of trashy stock, a Midwest import, eightfathered Bible Beltbeaten provenance, this who does she thinks she is requiring no analysis and even less anatomical enhancement. The Doctors Tweiss, they’d both been trying to bed her for years, to no avail, though they’ve become quite successful at their fantasy, wetdaydreaming of penetrating her small, pinch-veined, hairless, O so tight nostrils with what they think, they hope, passes for professional abandon; straddling her face, their testes dumbly smacking like tonsils her soft lips glossed in red, then leaving their seed there, shooting it deep and up to store, gunking her septum, behind her eyes then to her brain, giving her recurring sinus headaches they’d surely charge her to cure, deduct it from her minimum wage. They give her no insurance; they pay her in cash only when they don’t miser her in coin. To sit with her breasts rising from the fall of her halter uniform, midnight pleather; her chair’s retrofitted with a dildo, its modification to her feeling natural, the ultimate in cervical comfort, and a bonus to her employers, too, who for relaxation would sniff and lick it after hours: she’d sit impaled on it all day, her legs dangling for the floor, their feet nude, vanillapale and perfect. If perhaps indicative, or so the doctors would only wish, of the laterlife lymphatic — edema, a swelling from pregnant idle. If only she’d let them inseminate; if only impotence wasn’t physiological, too — then, they couldn’t have cared less. Dominatrix pleather except for the naked feet with their toes tapping to the rhythmlessness of her altogether tuneless hum, both accomplished at a volume enervatingly low amid the loud of her lipchewing, gumclacking, and the sucking of her sweets, which are ostensibly sugarfree, a panoply of red and green lozenges she’d enjoy herself while denying them to the uninitiated impatient from a jar atop her desk; rationing them in return for humiliation, to be perpetrated only during breaks from her work of all break, which is nothing more than losing things, not limited to files and office supplies. Abutting the jar, a holder hosts a single businesscard, lonely, its corners crumpled stale — that of the funeralhome director, having long required his own services.
As for the doctors, they’ve recently begun specializing in two disjunctive disciplines: rhinoplastics, specifically the physical enlargment and psychological encouragement of human noses, their exaggeration in all cardinalities and dimensions, imparting to them a particular aspect that can only be described as Mosaic — a nip of counseling and a Prophet’s tuck, as if the nose were a spindle of the scrolling Law; you know it when you see it, you feel it from within: elongating and bumping the rhinion to the supratip is what, which forms the downward sloping ridge of the organ, then restructuring the columella and its dissolution in the philtrum up to the nasion and its ascent to the glabella, is the term, the terminus, which is the root of the nose to be found embedded between the brows of the wondering eyes, the stupefied mind behind their incredulity ever widening; their other late specialty being penile reconstruction, specifically the surgical detachment of the foreskin, and, also, the severance of the primitive imagination’s attachment to that flesh, a process known to most as circumcision, which the people dead and soon usurped had once ritually performed to perfect their babies at the age of eight days, in an attempt to renew perpetually the covenant of their forefather, Abraham — a procedure continued now if not improved with only a sip of fruity schnapps, a quick and sure knife and a concomitant minimum of hygienic pain.
Today, which is of the new moon prepped if it isn’t tomorrow already what with this senseless sitting around, is to be, since birth, Ben’s first checkup, then down and all around — initially an examination septic, deep into the very nature of proboscine protuberance, its nostrils both actual and mindfuclass="underline" an otoscope is what it is, a slight light up the schnozz and, as if that isn’t enough, a brief if free consultation regarding the continuous shed and regrowth of His foreskin — a followup concerning the tender length below: perhaps a sample’ll be taken, maybe a test or ten again, whatever it is the doctors ask of Him, in truth whatever operation their backers, bosses, and peers have ordered them to perform, medical mercenary tactics on order of the Administration as actioned through the auspices of Garden, Inc., just a little too into this stuff, as it’s rumored, overmuch obsessed with it, His thing, He says, Hanna said thingie, down there, Israel would have said His putz, the Israelien member, apparently a most unusual specimen; operations President Shade would perhaps perpetrate himself, it’s gossiped, if just for the experience or pleasure, if only he’d be assured of, then insured against, not losing the valued patient in the process. Idea is, if Ben’s endowment keeps secreting skin, keeps growing a foreskin then flaking, shedding, regenerationally then growing and shedding itself again and again, not what do we do to arrest or perhaps moderate the pain it might cause and it does, but instead — how can a profit be made in its exploitation: with many prominent secularists to suggest an exhibition of His remnants to be opened at the Metropolitan or at the Museum of Natural History stuffed and mounted Uptown just off the Park, perhaps a sensational display of the actual regenerative process to be commenced in a public place, a spectacle to be appended with appropriate admission fee, think an amphitheater of GrecoRoman proportions, or the Rose Garden of the White House with all the presscorps corpsed in attendance and the President himself with the thorn of a pointer, explaining away for the media masses: tissue repair as a metaphor for survival, the recent regrowth of God’s science in every sector, a resurgence of interest in the divine mysteries of human life; the mystics to suggest, however, the pursuit of a fate far more secret and as such, more holy, namely the collecting of His foreskins solely for the purpose of further creation: the assembling of them into the form most familiar — once serviced by the appropriate incantation, of course, and the setting of a magical shem beneath the flat flap that would serve as a tongue — the making of a golem is what they’re talking, a mensch made exclusively of this sheath: a savior, though immortally soulless, uninspired and voicelessly dumb.