I have a bad scalp condition. I go to the doctor. In her office, she hands me a brochure and starts to talk. At first I am thoroughly confused by her terminology; then I realize, looking at the posters on the walls, that I am in a travel bureau. The doctor is very enthusiastic about the country she is selling me on: it has lice perhaps as big as my thumb, she says, and there is no fresh meat available whatsoever. “So you think this scalp thing might have something to do with diet?” I ask, straining earnestly to follow her line of diagnosis.
She stares at me, blinking in puzzlement. Then she shakes her head a couple of times, as if to clear it, and rolls her shoulders, and begins poking through some brochures. Finally she pulls one out. “Okay!” she says. “Here’s a country where the weather is usually pretty awful right around the time of your trip, and everything is incredibly expensive.”
I look at her, trying to translate her remarks into plain language, trying to find any kind of diagnosis camouflaged among the lines. I can’t. I notice, really for the first time, that she is wearing only a bikini and that she considers me through the panes of enormous circular sunglasses, like some species of disco owl. “You’re a funny kind of doctor,” I tell her, and I get up to leave.
On the way out, I pass by a pool. Bathing beauties lounge on its tiled shores, sipping drinks from pineapples through glittering straws. I step towards them, then I remember the disfiguring condition of my scalp. I catch myself and scuttle woefully out the door.
At home I sit in the fusty dimness of the living room, fingering my head. “She didn’t know a lot about medicine,” I think, “but I’ll bet she knows a lot about other kinds of things.” I doze off. In my dream we are on a desert island. I have managed to get her to take off her bikini. I wear the bra part on my head, Mouseketeer/babushka style. “So you really think this will work?” I ask her. She looks up from her ukelele and smiles tenderly. “Not a chance,” she tells me.