I mustn’t become a bore on the subject, but I have to say that in physical terms Tod and I are now feeling absolutely terrific. Corporeal life is not without its minor indignities. We still take it in the ass every morning, along with everybody else—but the whole thing’s over in a trice these days. Tod, I salute you: what bowl know-how, what can can-do. I was more or less resigned to a lifetime of the tearful half hour. But now we’re out of there after a tearful twenty minutes.
Each day, before the mirror, as I inspect Tod’s humanity—he shows no sign of noticing the improvement. It’s almost as if he has no point of comparison. I want to click my heels, I want to clench my fist: Yes. Why aren’t people happier about how great they’re feeling, relatively? Why don’t we hug each other all the time, saying, “How about this?”
Accordingly, after many false starts, after many hours in the sunless sea of bafflement, apology, and flopsweat, Tod and I have finally cut it with Irene. She was impeccably tactful, and drew no extra attention to the breakthrough.
Tod also played it cool: all in a day’s work. But I was ecstatic. I was beside myself with pride. Almost certainly I was overreacting, as usual. I’ve calmed down a little. Now I’m just gorgeously smug. This is love. This is life. The knack, the trick: there turns out to be nothing to it. Life and love go together. It comes natural.
High romance brings with it, or seems to bring with it (I’m getting more and more tentative about cause and effect), an expansion of my role here at AMS. I say role because doctoring involves you in a kind of cultural performance, the gestures, the lilts, the motions of decent power. It’s all okay. Society humors it. I have vacated that nice little office in back there, making way for an older man, and am now more often to be found in the consulting rooms. I don’t just do old men anymore. I do women and children too. Even babies. It’s as if we can’t leave the babies alone. In fact Tod tends to be more upbeat with them here than he is at home (at home, in slippers and dressing gown, longsufferingly shuffling). The babies get wheeled or carried in here, and they’re well enough, and you look them over and say something like “This little fella’s just fine.” And you’re always dead wrong. Always. A day or two later the baby will be back, crimson-eared, or whoofing with croup. And you never do a damn thing for them. The challenge, I suppose, is to keep at it while somehow remaining decent.
Then there are the cases that actually entail the strange meeting of man-made glass or metal and human flesh. And human blood. Now this I dependably find a real throw-up number but there’s never anything too horrendous because, as my colleagues are always saying, we’re at the darning-and-patching level of the biomedical business: the serious cases we bring in direct, and at speed, from the city hospitals, and we in our turn get rid of them as quickly as we can. So you can say this for the maimed and the mangled. They’re out of here. Yes, it’s quite a deal, at AMS, on Route 6. No wonder people sometimes start right off with an official complaint or even a writ. As for home calls, we refuse over the phone even before we’re asked—before we can hear the mother’s panic, the baby’s cries. We say it’s not our policy. If you want to get fucked up, you’ve got to come on over to our place. The money’s reasonable. And it doesn’t take that long.
Rather as I feared they would, babies have started showing up in Tod’s dreams. They’ve shown up. Or, at least, one of them has. Nothing gruesome happens, and I am coping with it fine so far.
You naturally associate babies with defenselessness. But that’s not how it is in the dream. In the dream, the baby wields incredible power. It has the power, the ultimate power of life and death over its parents, its older brothers and sisters, its grandparents, and indeed everybody else who is gathered in the room. There are about thirty of them in there, although the room, if it is a room, can’t be much bigger than Tod’s nook of a kitchen. The room is dark. More than this, the room is black. Despite the power it wields, the baby is weeping. Perhaps it weeps precisely because of this sinister reversal—the new and desperate responsibilities that power brings. In the faintest of whispers the parents try to give comfort, try to quieten: for a moment it seems that they might even have to stifle. There is that excruciating temptation. Because the baby’s drastic ascendancy has to do with its voice. Not its fat fists, its useless legs, but its voice, the sounds it makes, its capacity to weep. As usual, the parents have the power of life and death over the baby, which all parents have. Now, though, in these special circumstances and in this special room, the baby has the power over them. And over everybody else who is gathered there. About thirty souls.