In Partial Disgrace (7 page)

My father was not on intimate terms with me; he was but a voice, an encouraging voice, let it be said, warm and straightforward, with never a catch. He talked like a book and rarely crossed out a line. He encouraged me to do what I wanted, on the condition that he would not have to pretend to be interested in it, and that I would not lie about it. I have lied to everyone but my father, which I trust was not good enough for him, but
for
him, nonetheless. When it became clear, however, that this world could not be passed on to me, he gave me some advice which I now pass on to you: 1. Neither marry nor wander, you are not strong enough for either. 2. Do not believe any confession, voluntary or otherwise. And most importantly, 3.
Maxime constat ut suus canes cuique optimus
. (Everyone has a cleverer dog than their neighbor; that is the only undisputed fact.)

And perhaps that is why I have never owned a dog, and even shy away from strangers’ pets, for every dog I see signifies to me a missed opportunity. My father kept a daybook every day of his life but one, not a record of the weather or personal experiences or even facts, but to keep faith with a complete record of one’s misfortunes. I, on the other hand, have erased each day with equal ledger-bound determination, all too often seeking with my exaggerations a forgetfulness of an all-too-faithful memory. But if I could not carry on my father’s punctilious bravery, and join the chorus of exalted apologists for heroic and intense living, I could do the one thing he could not do for himself. I could run away for him.

Sleeping beneath the reed beds, his head in the opposite direction of other pike, I was leaning on the
Wodna Mze
, my amphibian Waterman, the sorrowing seducer who shoots upwards from the abyss, his hiding place, and bolts through swine-clouds of semen to the dream of the double life.

PREOPS

(Iulus)

It was with some trepidation that Felix Aufidius made his appointment with Doctor Psylander Sychaeus Pür, for he believed the first precondition of survival in the modern world was a profound aversion to the medical profession. He had never been to any sort of doctor in his life, including the moment of his birth, which was handled expertly by a sixteen-year-old Astingi midwife. He even pulled his own bad teeth, rocking back and forth in his armchair, fingers stuffed in his mouth, until the proud moment when he finally displayed the diseased molar, still attached to his face by a strand of bloody spittle. He regarded science as a perverse ideology devoted to the erasure of its own history and refusing to know its place in the world. He actually pitied physicians—merchants trading in the mitigation of miseries they could not understand—and their inevitable false humor and secret despair. Nevertheless, before submitting to an examination by the Professor, he wanted to be at the peak of his form, and given his inexperience in the domain of passive interlocution, he believed he owed it to his new comrade to at least have a practice session, a trial run in the white arts of preventative care.

Needless to say, he had previously steered clear of Dr. Pür, who functioned as village surgeon, midwife, apothecary, dentist, and barber, and who the peasants treated with the utmost respect, believing he was essentially a weak and desperate man who would hurt you less if he felt revered. My father also recognized Pür as having the strongest of all depressive addictions—that of always being helpful—and that if he did not receive his ameliorative fix of gratitude in every waking hour, he was never far from taking his own life.

Pür’s office was in the Legal and Medical Building, the most ornate in Silbürsmerze. The waiting room overlooked a trout farm formed by a diversion of the Vah through a series of chattering gates and broken concrete sluices, where countless fish kept the water in a constant frenzy awaiting their daily load of American Troutchow. He always had the most attractive village girls as nurses, and it clearly thrilled them to see the man from the big house on the volcano. Naked like the nurses under a billowing smock, Felix braced his buttocks against the cold edge of the examining table, determined to match the excellent spirits of his examiner. Pür’s glistening head hove into view, banded by a circular mirror, gazing longingly into his patient’s face as a man might look down a particularly dark and turbid well.

“And to what may I owe the honor of this visit, Councilor?”

Felix immediately felt the overpowering urge to lie. And Pür, to his credit, seemed to sense this, beginning each rote inquiry before Father finished his last answer.

“Lie down so you look to the stars,” Pür purred.

Dr. Pür was quite proud of his instruments, the cost of which, he constantly reminded his patients, actually required a city of five thousand to support them, not the twelve hundred, noble as they were, of Silbürsmerze—though to Felix’s non-industrial eye the office did not seem inordinately well-stocked. There was a medicine cabinet, an examining table, and what Pür called in a burst of pride, an “extra table.” His special equipment consisted of a thermometer, a stethoscope, an ophthalmometer, a laryngoscope, a sphygmomanometer, a prescription pad, and chemicals to detect the presence of albumen in the urine. There was also a nebulizer, a tank of compressed air, and a rare half-bath. Behind a single glass-fronted bookshelf Father could make out treatises on rubella and diptheria, facial neuralgia and the gibbous spine, relapsing fever and the sweetness of urine, and between bound volumes of a magazine called
New Thought
were Fothergill’s
An Account of the Sore Throat
, Baille’s
Confessions of a Magnetizer
, and Pekelharing’s trilogy,
A propos de la pepsine
.

The patient could barely suppress a sardonic smile, and took grim satisfaction as the doctor dismissed out of hand any comment he made describing his own health. To be fair to the doctor, Pür distrusted his own unaugmented observations as much as his patient’s narratized symptoms, and for that matter anything which remotely smacked of disease theory. He knew that for most people the body only really existed as a kind of delusion, a sort of error without trial, and that self-pity had become not a feeling but a regnant belief system. The only cure he could offer was to encourage his patients to somehow get their minds
off
their ailments, a treatment which could consume time unreckoned, and a patience and imagination beyond his own. This left him bitter, which he thought it noble to suppress. He had no whole world to offer the sick to be whole in, so why pretend otherwise? They should accept that both of them were caught up in the great cycle of medical history, absorbing all that had been condemned as quackery, while at the same moment awestruck as the discarded dogmas were taken up with avidity by new quacks. Yes, the earth, like the body, is mostly fluid—fluids and bad light. Quantify the shame, medicate it, and be done with it.

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:

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.

But then Felix noticed outside the window a large, suspended mirror seemingly designed so that traffic might see the around a corner, and tilted in such a way that he now became aware of the Professor’s face, larger than life, staring back through the window at the patient, and the doctor’s brown eyes suddenly turned almost blue in the convex reflection.

Felix continued to deliver himself of every disease theory and personal crisis he could think of, from heartburn to a recent thump of the prostate, as well as generalized fears of bankruptcy, invasion, and senility, until after moving from organ to organ and from brain to states of mind to soul, he could no longer think of anything to impress the Professor, and embarrassed by a lack of any true symptoms or secrets, he launched into a kind of nonsense, an Astingi camp Latin, running words and puns together—a test to determine if the Professor was really listening.

His interlocutor spun around, acknowledging the sudden discontinuity in his patient’s story, but as if to remind him that he had specified no limitations to their conversation and had not the slightest interest in whether his patient talked shop or Babel, only gazed at him sharply over his reading glasses. This was followed by a mutually sincere pursuit of silences as each pulled a cigar from an inner pocket like a derringer.

The Professor seemed unembarrassed by the vacuum between them, and my father felt grateful that he did not leap forward to engage its awkwardness. Eventually, the Professor responded with a stream of impressions, including a morose allusion to the recent death of his child (a boy of two, from scarlet fever) and the consequent withdrawal of his wife. Felix suddenly realized with an aching heart that his examiner, through the exigencies of private practice, had been forced to lift his eye from the microscope and settle ruefully upon the notion that the tact of a passive observer might wring diagnostic truths superior to more intrusive methods. The Professor apparently was attempting, not without some courage, to put aside his own insoluble griefs and to frame his questions in a way that would not elicit standard answers—and the stranger and more oblique the answer, the calmer he seemed. Felix appreciated this, but knew this was not the time to register it. If Pür was human only in the face of an illness without apparent causes, the Professor seemed to be humbled only by illness which had no physical signposts—indeed, the room lacked that aura of fear present in almost every medical encounter, the sense that the doctor is in mortal terror of contracting the illness he has just diagnosed. Felix did not feel the excitement of having lied, as with Pür; instead, he felt like a schoolmaster’s favorite chagrined by his own tendency to exaggerate every response and be the brightest boy around. Nor did he feel the obligation to reward the Professor by being a happy patient. A large melancholia was over behind that black desk, too deep for any protocols to deflect. So while as yet he felt neither true trust nor respect, neither did he feel impelled to show off or amuse. His interlocutor’s detachment was not defensive as with Pür, and therefore not an offense. He recognized it as a Hebrew version of courtliness, but with a new and harder edge, always staying leewards of a predictable professional or social response. And so their lack of conversation continued, like those ritualistic incantatory chapters in Homer or Virgil which seem totally unnecessary to the story—pure male silence.