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