The doctor's fingers were cold. They were damn cold.
He signed the waiting list and took his seat in the antechamber, where there were four other men. The men all had magazines in their hands, magazines devoted to automobiles or sports and they were staring intently at these magazines, all of them knowing that each of them knew what they all were there for.
There is a blood test, one of the men said to no one. There is a blood test. This is no longer necessary.
I do not trust the blood test, another of the men said. This is a humiliation and an unmanning, but I now have fifty years and must have this done.
They just let some air in, as I understand it, a third said. He said it with a small dirty smile that made the man want to strike him with a rolled up magazine.
After a time, they called his name and he went into the examination room. He stepped out of his trousers and folded them neatly and placed them across the back of the chair. Then he took his shirt and folded it in half lengthwise and laid it over top of his trousers. He stood there in his socks and his jockey shorts and his undershirt. He has me at a disadvantage, he thought to himself. He will come in here fully clothed and also with instruments for measuring and poking and prodding and I have nothing but my hands and the garters holding up my socks. It’s damned unfair, he thought. But this is what happens. If you do not die in the mud in a country far from your home, if you do not get shot or gassed or gored or just disappear one foggy night over the Indian ocean, you find yourself here. At a disadvantage.
The doctor came in and made some small talk which the man was too preoccupied to hear. So many of the boys who wanted to be men that he’d known when he did not yet have thirty years, not even twenty-five years, they would never find themselves listening to this small talk. The small talk was over for them. All things were over for them. The doctor asked that he lie on the table and remove his jockey shorts.
The doctor’s fingers were cold and covered in some sort of slick jelly-like substance. The doctor inserted his fingers in the man’s rectum and the man thought of all the ways he might have died before having to suffer this indignity, this unmanning. After some time of considering this, the draggings and maulings and the Haitian Neckties–a tire soaked in gasoline and set ablaze after being forced around a man’s body–and the garrotings that the hollow-eyed men had once described to him when he was writing down stories from hollow-eyed men in a country so distant from the one where he was born that it seemed another world altogether, the doctor announced that he was done and that the man could pull his jockey shorts back up, and also put on his clothes.
It is an unusual line of work to be in, the man said to the doctor as he was pulling on his trousers. Why this line of doctoring and not some other?
Well, the doctor said, attempting to be jocular. It’s the consistency. You know every day you come into work that you’re going to be dealing with nothing but assholes.
The man attempted to smile, to put the doctor at what ease he could, but he could not.
My father, he said instead. He was a doctor. He was a fine surgeon and also very skilled in obstetrics.
That’s great, the doctor said.
He shot himself, the man said. He took down the gun with which he first showed me how to kill the ducks and he put it in his mouth after Sunday dinner and he pulled the trigger.
Lord-a-mercy, the doctor said.
Maybe, the man said, he should have pursued a career path with more consistency. Perhaps the unknown quality of the days stretching before him were what kept him from staying his hand when the impulse for self-slaughter came upon him.
The doctor looked then like some boys the man had seen once, boys who would never be men because they were dead, boys that had been very surprised to discover that they were dying, dying, and then dead.
The man smiled then, buttoned his shirt, and departed.
