MONDAY, THE WIND began to blow. It began in the early morning and picked up in intensity as the day went on. By the time I left for the office, it was blowing so hard the maintenance man was taking down the canopy outside the entrance to my building to keep it from shredding.
The wind pushed me up Eighty-sixth, toward Broadway. Seagulls from the Hudson River, blown off course, screeched overhead. The newspaper vending machines, chained to utility poles, rattled and shook in the wind as if they contained some pandemic trying to get out.
I skipped lunch, as an athletic gesture to my physical exam the next day, and stayed in my office and listened to the wind blow.
Through my window, I saw sheets of newspaper swept out of trash cans and become airborne. Some flew low and away toward Fifth Avenue. Others, caught in updrafts, wheeled and spiraled high above Fifty-seventh Street. People walking east lurched like drunks being given the bum’s rush by the wind, hurrying against their will. Those walking west, into the wind, struggled, shielding their eyes. Individuals and little groups walking backwards, like members of some strange religious sect. People getting into cabs. Cab doors flying out of their hands when they opened them. And then the struggle to close them again.
Despite Jerry’s assurance about the kind of doctor this Kolodny guy was, I had some anxiety about my exam. But it was just a trace. It could have been induced by the drop in the barometric pressure that was causing the wind to blow.
I couldn’t even remember the last time I had had a complete physical.
The telephone rang.
It was from Cromwell’s office in California, but it didn’t feel like a long-distance call. Ever since the breakup of AT&T and the subsequent rush of other companies into the long-distance field, the quality of the long distance “sound” has gradually lost all sense of distance. The fiber optics that some of the new companies use has produced a reception so disturbingly clear, it destroys any sense of separation between you and the person at the other end of the line. The sound of their voice is like something implanted in your brain, or like a tiny CD playing in the earpiece of your telephone. I consider the loss of that sense of distance in long-distance calls a tragedy.
The person calling me was Cromwell’s assistant. His name was Brad. But it wasn’t the Brad I once knew who had been Cromwell’s assistant at that time. It was another Brad.
This Brad told me how the Bobbie woman had told him that she and I had had a wonderful chat. Brad, speaking for himself, wanted to make sure I understood what a thrill it was for him personally to speak to me. I was, as far as he was concerned, one of the true pros of the entertainment industry.
He sounded very young. Early to mid-twenties.
I pondered the mystery of his name while he showered me with praise. Almost every studio executive or producer I ever knew had a young man named Brad for an assistant. Brads were the Marias of the movie industry.
This Brad, like the others I had known, had a very easy, mellifluous voice, as if he had been trained from childhood in some music conservatory to talk on the telephone.
“As a student of film …” he went on.
There was something touching about all the Brads I had ever known. They were all partial to certain phrases like “brainstorming.” They not only used them, but they actually seemed to believe that such storms took place on a daily basis in their line of work.
I had no idea what happened to these young men when they got older. Nobody wanted an old Brad for an assistant. Cromwell went through Brads almost as fast as he went through young girls. And none of the Brads that I had ever known managed to climb up the ladder of the movie industry hierarchy. I didn’t know a single movie executive or producer named Brad.
Cromwell, according to Brad, was definitely coming to New York and wanted to see me about a project while he was in town. Was I free to have dinner with him on the twenty-second?
“I’m available,” I told Brad, “but I’m not free.”
Brad laughed. When he laughed, he bleated like a sheep, or a young lamb. But a sheep or a young lamb with its throat slit. Gurgling and bleating, but laughing, as if he were happy to have his throat slit.
Would ten o’clock at Cafe Luxembourg be all right with me?
Yes, it would.
Would I mind leaving my afternoon free the next day, just in case?
No, I wouldn’t.
Mr. Cromwell, Brad informed me, wanted to make sure I knew that he would have called me himself were it not for his hectic schedule. In addition to everything else he was doing at the moment, Mr. Cromwell was asked, and he accepted despite his hectic schedule, to serve as one of the organizing forces of the Vaclav Havel thing.
“And you know how he is when he gets going on a project,” Brad said, and laughed. Because of the fiber optics, and the static-free, distance-free reception on the line, his laughter had the verisimilitude of a hallucination.
I lay in bed, unable to sleep. I could hear the wind blowing outside and the sound of my heart beating.
I spent some time embroidering the harangue I would loosen upon Jay Cromwell.
I wondered what kind of a girl would accompany him when I saw him. He always showed up with some very beautiful, very young girl. Some were almost children. Most of them tended to be refugees from a devastated country in vogue at the moment. Vietnamese girls. Russian Jews. A Christian girl from Beirut. A beautiful black girl from Soweto.
Police sirens outside. First one. Then another. Then, a minute or so later, the sound of an ambulance siren heading in the same direction.
Suddenly, I remembered a nursery rhyme that Billy used to get wrong as a little boy and I smiled at the memory.
Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wolves,
Yes sir, yes sir,
Three bags full …
It struck me (I was a man of countless insights) that my relationship to my son was that of a father, a loving father, but a father who cherished the memory of a son long dead, and not a father with a living son.
I moved on to other thoughts.
My heart continued to beat audibly. Like the sound of a little, lonely drum beating on itself.
My appointment with Dr. Kolodny was at eleven fifteen, but my lifelong mania for punctuality made me arrive at his office ten minutes early. His office was located on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks south of the Metropolitan Museum. The large waiting room could have been furnished by the same interior decorator who had done the McNabs’ Dakota apartment. Italian lamps. Chrome, wood, leather, and plants everywhere.
“Can I help you, please?” The receptionist was young and very professional-looking.
“Yes, I have an appointment,” I told her, and then I thought it best to inform her about the kind of shyster service I expected. I leaned toward her and lowered my voice. “I’m here for one of those insurance physicals.” I gave her a little wink and added, just to make sure, “Jerry sent me. Jerry Fry.”
“What is your name, please?”
“Saul Karoo.”
She checked her ledger and found me.
“Yes, Mr. Karoo. You’re a little early and we’re running just a bit late. It’ll be twenty minutes to half an hour before Dr. Kolodny can see you.”
She gave me, since I was a new patient, a white clipboard with a questionnaire to fill out.
I sat down and started filling it out. Cigarettes were invented for doing just such chores as this and I was keenly aware of nicotine deprivation while I wrote. Name. Address. Telephone number. Height. Weight. Date of birth. Place of birth.
Halfway through the questionnaire, I got weary of my own life and the factual information that constituted it. So I started lying and filling in the blanks with invented details. Normally, I needed no excuse to lie, I just did it, but this time I even had an excuse. I didn’t come here to have a real physical, so why should I need to provide real answers to these questions?
Under occupation, I wrote: commodities broker.
I checked off that I was a nonsmoker.
Both of my parents were still alive.
No history of cancer or diabetes or anything in my family. I had a family with no medical history whatsoever.
As for me, I said that I had regular medical checkups, every six months.
There was a question marked “optional” inquiring about my religious denomination. I lied and said I was Jewish.
The character that emerged from my lies seemed in many ways a lot more substantial and considerably more comprehensible to me than I was to myself.
Dr. Kolodny’s office was a complex of offices shared by three other doctors. The waiting room was three-quarters full.
There was a pile of magazines and newspapers on the long, low glass-top table in front of my chair. I picked up the New York Times and went right to my favorite section of the week, Tuesday Science.
The illustration on the front page was an artist’s rendering of a human chromosome, enlarged thousands of times to focus upon a single gene.
The accompanying article, which I devoured, had to do with a potentially revolutionary reappraisal of psychosis. According to the spokesman for a team of scientists responsible for the study in question, there seemed to be strong evidence to support the thesis that the vast majority of patients suffering from various forms of neurological disorders had a certain gene (see the illustration on the front page) in common. This gene had peculiar nodules around its oblong shape, giving it a vague similarity to the letter S. Hence its name: the S-gene.
Its very shape, the scientists speculated, seemed to determine its function. Each nodule seemed to trigger a set of responses over which the patient had no control. They were still a long way from a cure, but the discovery of this S-gene was a major breakthrough.
It seemed to me, as an avid follower of the Tuesday Science section of the Times, that some of the most exciting scientific research of the past few years had been in the field of biochemistry and biogenetics. In the last half a year alone there had been articles linking diabetes and genes, dyslexia and genes, alcoholism and various other forms of addiction and genes. Studies conducted in penal institutions found almost conclusive evidence that psychopaths, murderers, and rapists were victims of genetic triggers over which they had no control. Evidence that crime itself, instead of being a social problem, or a personal problem, was instead a problem of biology and genetic disorders.
Although I was not a scientist myself, as a diseased layman I applauded these findings.
The story of the S-gene rekindled my hope that my many diseases had a common, genetic source.
Even if a cure was never to be found for my genetic disorder, merely knowing the true cause of my many diseases would almost be a cure in itself. Armed with this information, I could warn others, my son, for example, not to expect certain things from me, because I had scientific proof that they were not mine to give.
I turned the page.
An article about the lemurs on the island of Madagascar caught my eye, when I heard the receptionist call my name:
“Mr. Karoo.”
I went up to her desk.
“Room three.” She pointed down the corridor.
The corridor was lit by overhead fluorescent lights hidden behind a lowered ceiling.
I had no reason to question Jerry’s reassuring description about the kind of perfunctory physical exam I would have, but even so, I felt this tiny bit of anxiety in the pit of my stomach.
When I opened the door and stepped into room three, it was so bright inside that I had to shield my eyes.
Everything was white. The walls, the floor, the cabinets, the two white chairs, the venetian blinds in the windows, even that adjustable contraption on which you lay down to be examined was white and had a white disposable paper cover on top of it.
In the midst of this whiteness stood a young woman wearing a white nurse’s smock and white pantyhose, holding that clipboard with my filled-out questionnaire in her hand.
She had big blue eyes and a fluffy pillow of thick, shiny, blond hair. She was in her early twenties, a little overweight, and had enormous breasts.
I knew, of course, that I shouldn’t be gaping at her breasts, but I couldn’t help myself. Mesmerized, like a rabbit in a python cage, I had not a single thought in my head other than: My God! Would you look at those things.
She wore a little name tag on her left breast, which read: E. Höhlenrauch. The name tag looked as lost on her bosom as a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean.
When at last I managed to pry my eyes away and look up at her face, I saw no hint of displeasure in her big blue eyes for my having gaped like a fool at her breasts.
She understood. With a contented smile, she looked down at her breasts and then up at me again, and the expression on her face was one of lazy sympathy. Who can blame you, her smile seemed to say. They really are magnificent, aren’t they?
“Hello, my name is Elke. Dr. Kolodny will be with you shortly. But first there’s a few little things we have to take care of. Strictly routine.”
She spoke slowly, as if she were on drugs, or recovering from a very gratifying orgasm.
I detected what to my ear sounded like a trace of Austrian or German accent in her voice. Completely rattled by the size of her breasts, I seized upon her accent and her name as the opening gambit with which to launch my attack. I saw it all in a twinkling of an eye. I would seduce this Elke Höhlenrauch with my sense of humor and I would bring her with me to my dinner with Cromwell at Cafe Luxembourg. He might show up with a younger girl, but it was inconceivable that he could find one with bigger breasts. Elke’s breasts would put me in a position of power even before I went into my harangue.
“Elke Höhlenrauch,” I said. “What is that, French?”
Without so much as a smile, Elke answered, “No, I am German.” And then, while my humorous opening lay there on the floor like a piece of lox, and before I could think of another opening with which to replace it, she told me: “Would you like to strip down to your underwear, please?”
“Yes, I would. Very much so. Would you?” I laughed.
Elke either didn’t hear my reply or chose to ignore it. It was hard to tell.
I began taking off my clothes, trying to undress in a manner of some sophisticated elder statesman who was, despite the shambles of his body, still sexy in his own, worldly way.
The more clothes I took off and the more times I glanced at Elke’s mangnificent breasts, the more a breast-induced listeria within me threatened to explode. It was all I could do, as I hopped on one foot, trying to get out of my trousers, to keep from screaming out loud, or laughing out loud, or strumming on my lower lip with my index finger like an imbecile. I could think of no other banter with which to engage her, humorous or otherwise. Only names of movie stars I had met over the years, in my role as a rewriter, came to mind. It was hard to keep myself from ululating their names, rending the air with movie stars, as a way of making an impression on Elke Höhlenrauch.
Dustin Hoffman, Elke. I’ve met Dustin. Meryl Streep. Robert Redford. Yes! Robert Redford. Three meetings, Elke. I’ve had three meetings with him. Paul Newman. Dinner with Paul Newman. Lunch with Richard Gere. Bill Hurt. Robin Williams. Sigourney Weaver. Kevin Costner. Kevin Kline. You want stars, Elke? I’m a rewriter for the stars. Jay Cromwell, the superproducer? Friend of mine. He knows Vaclav Havel. You want to meet Vaclav, Elke? I can arrange it.
I was down to my boxer shorts, socks, and a sleeveless T-shirt.
“Please,” Elke said, and gestured with her soft, plump hand, each finger a French dessert, toward a stainless-steel doctor’s scale standing against the wall.
She walked on ahead. I followed. The inside of her thighs rubbed as she walked, and the material of which her white pantyhose were made caused static electricity to be heard underneath her smock. Like the sound of one of those electric bug zappers, killing bugs in the night.
Ever so gingerly, I stepped on the scale, as if stepping on the gallows. I hated being weighed. I hated weighing myself, but I especially hated having somebody else weigh me. It always made me feel as if I had been suddenly abducted from a country with a constitutional democracy and dumped into some totalitarian state.
Elke’s hand moved the gleaming stainless-steel tumblers inexorably toward my right.
To my complete horror, I saw that I weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds.
My mouth dropped open.
What!
I have never, in all my life, weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds. Even fully dressed and wearing heavy shoes, with a lot of loose change in my pockets, I had never, ever, gone beyond two hundred and five pounds.
Dumbfounded, I stared at the total. It was like staring at some trumped-up charge of crimes I never committed.
I wanted to protest, but before I could get over the shock, Elke Höhlenrauch chuckled.
“You’re a bad boy, Mr. Karoo.” She wagged her cream-filled index finger at me. “It’s not nice to fib.”
Breasts or no breasts, I suddenly felt grim and in no mood for games.
“Fib? What fib?”
She pointed with her ballpoint pen to the spot on the questionnaire where I had entered my weight. Then, as if in a nightmare of some Stalinist or Third Reich show trial, she crossed out the figure I had entered there, 198 lbs., and before I could stop her, wrote over it, in large lurid figures, 225 lbs.
Her presumption, without even knowing me, that I could lie about something as petty as my weight, infuriated me. I knew, of course, that I was quite capable of lying about anything, and had in fact lied about all kinds of things on this very questionnaire. But not about my weight! That she would single out one of the few truths I had stated and attack it as a lie, while ignoring all my other lies, allowed my indignation to assume a self-righteous character.
“Look, Ms. Höhlenrauch,” I said, putting a heavy and semi-sarcastic stress on Ms., and an equally heavy and slightly derogatory emphasis on the umlaut in her last name, “I’ll have you know that I have never in my life weighed over two hundred and five pounds and the one time that I did, I was fully dressed and wearing Timberland boots because it was winter.”
In her lazy, detached manner, she cut me off and said: “These things happen.”
“These things? What is that supposed to mean? These things happen. What things?” I started to get off the scale, but with a firm little push on my chest with her soft little hand, she gestured for me to stay where I was but turn around and face out. She walked behind me, her smock rustling, the bug zapper of her thighs sizzling.
“Erect, please,” she said.
“What!”
“Erect. Stand erect, please.”
I thought I was standing erect, but I tried to comply with her request and invent some new supererect posture for myself. I heard a sound behind me, like the sound of a ceremonial sword being pulled out of its scabbard, and then felt a flat metallic object land on the top of my head.
She was measuring my height.
Never had I tried to stand so erect before. I was barely breathing. It felt like I was in a gulag or a Nazi concentration camp.
“You’re such a bad boy,” Elke chuckled behind me. “You really are.”
“What!” I shrieked. “What now!”
She came around to my side and showed me my questionnaire, pointing with that infernal ballpoint pen of hers to where I had entered my height. Before I could so much as squawk, the nightmare repeated itself. She crossed out what I had written, 6 ft., and over it wrote 5′10½″.
Whatever composure I had, if any, vanished. I began screaming at her.
“Just hold on, Elke! Just hold on a goddamn minute! What the hell do you think you’re doing, anyway?”
“I’m just bringing you up to date,” she smiled, her dimples deepening.
I felt like punching her in the mouth. Right in her sensual little mouth.
“Oh, yeah!” I shrieked. “We’ll see about that.”
I jumped off the scale and ran to my trousers, which were draped over the back of one of those white chairs. I whipped out my wallet, and then I whipped my driver’s license out of my wallet. I stormed back and shook the license in her face.
“Do you see this, Elke? Do you know what this is? This is an official document of the State of New York. And here”—I pointed—“if you can spare the time to observe, you’ll notice that it states that I am six feet tall! I have been six feet tall since I graduated from high school.”
“I’m sure you have, Mr. Karoo. It’s just that you’re not six feet tall now and never will be again. You’re five foot ten and a half now. These things happen.”
“These things again, Elke. These goddamn things you keep on about. What are these things?”
“People, they shrink,” Elke said.
“People, they shrink!”
“Yes. The spine, it contracts.”
“The spine, it contracts!”
“Oh, yes. By all means. It’s like an accordion, Mr. Karoo, the spine is.”
She demonstrated, as if playing one.
“First you grow and grow”—her arms went out—“and then the little vertebrae in your spinal column start to press closer and closer together and you shrink and shrink.”
She seemed delighted with her little demonstration. I was either hyperventilating or not ventilating at all, it was hard to know which. To have this double-breasted Brunhilde standing there in front of me and cheerfully playing an accordion with my spine was like having an image out of Dante’s Inferno come to life.
But, to be still transfixed by her breasts, to be still erotically aroused by the same white-smocked mädchen who was so blithely annihilating me, surely deserved a special little circle of its own in the Inferno.
I felt a harangue coming on.
“This is all a little too Teutonic for me, Ms. Höhlenrauch,” I barked at her. “This is America, not Germany. We don’t reclassify people in this country just like that. Actually, Elke, we don’t classify people period, not according to their physio-racial traits at least. I mean, why don’t you measure the size of my cranium while you’re at it, like your ancestors did to my people? I mean, just because I’m a Jew …”
I wasn’t, of course, but having a blond Elke in front of me made me feel that I was. And not just a Jew, but a self-loathing anti-Semitic Jew who still yearned to take Aryan Elke out to dinner.
My harangue (“Germany is the vampire of Europe, etc., etc.”) went on for a bit more. Elke listened, blinking occasionally, secure in her awareness that I adored every cubic inch of her breasts and that, my harangue notwithstanding, I was still trying to sell myself to her. Her crime, her great crime, her unforgivable crime, was that she wasn’t interested.
“Dr. Kolodny will be with you in a minute,” she told me when I paused to catch my breath.
Her smock rustling, her thighs rubbing, her pantyhose making that sizzling sound, she then left the room, breasts and all.
I stood there in my boxer shorts, socks, and sleeveless T-shirt, still holding my driver’s license, feeling in a state of shock.
According to Elke, I had not only expanded horizontally, I had contracted vertically as well.
The spine, it contracts.
These things happen.
It wasn’t so much the weight; although two hundred and twenty-five pounds was quite a blow, I could always lose the weight. But the one and a half inches I had lost could not be regained.
I was five foot ten and a half inches again. The last time I was five foot ten and a half, I was a sophomore in high school. Smoking Lucky Strikes.
When, I wondered, was the last time I was six feet tall? And how was it that I could lose a whole inch and a half without being aware of it? What was I doing that was so engrossing at the time that prevented me from realizing that I was shrinking?
I sat down on the white chair with my trousers across my lap, to wait for Dr. Kolodny.
It was too late for a complete physical. I wasn’t complete anymore. There was an inch and a half missing.
On the other hand, there were twenty-five extra pounds.
Down and out, the two simultaneous directions of the journey of my body.
And to think, I thought, that all this was caused by losing my health insurance and wanting to be insured again.
Insured against what?
I had been insured all my life and what were the results? The results were that I was riddled with diseases. I had lost a full inch and a half while being fully insured. And yet here I was, slumped pathetically in my chair, with my trousers in my lap, petitioning to be insured again.
Only this time, in addition to the premiums, there was another price to pay. A terrible price. I had walked into this room, this goddamned gulag number three, as a strapping six-footer, and if I wanted to walk out as an insured man, I would have to accept my new classification as that of a fat man of medium height.
The choice, it suddenly seemed to me, was mine. There were no armed guards outside the door. If I was confined to this room, it was a voluntary confinement. Voluntary submission. Voluntary compliance with being reclassified.
But if I didn’t want to be insured by GenMed, I didn’t have to accept the results of my reclassification. I didn’t necessarily dispute Elke’s figures. As a free man, I simply didn’t have to accept them.
To be free, I thought, and felt my blood heating up, to be free is better than to be insured. To be truly free is to be uninsured!
I rose—that’s how I saw it, I didn’t just stand up, I rose—and got dressed as quickly as possible. Already I felt better. Taller. Defiant. Free. Free in the Dostoyevsky and Hannah Arendt meaning of the word. Rebellious. A rebel in the Camus meaning of the word.
I stormed out of the room, not walked, I stormed out of there, and as I stormed through the waiting room where some of those poor, helpless souls were still sitting and waiting, I could not help but think of myself in the third person.
He was a man who would not give an inch. He had walked in as a strapping six-footer and by damn he was walking out as a strapping six-footer.