Short Folk #9: Perfect Specimen

Two doctors were at my bedside with their long white coats, each with an attendant nurse. My wife was also there. My parents too.  All these people had been coming in shifts from the beginning but this was the first time everyone had been in the room at the same time.  Good or bad, something was about to happen. The moment balanced on the sharp edge of a scalpel.

The head doctor was the first to speak. I figured it would be him or my father.

 "You do not have cancer. You are not dying. It's more than that, actually.  My colleague and I have been keeping you off your feet for a purpose. We needed to run more tests, but not for your sake."

He looked hard at me as if I was supposed to understand. I didn't and I looked around at my family. They all seemed to understand, like they had been briefed earlier. Still, they looked on the verge of tears, even with the good news. I was confused and tired. My mother though, looked as if she were proud. The other doctor was the next to speak. He was a cardiologist.

"This is really quite unique. And not at all easy to say. I'll admit, though, it gives me some pride to say it. I'll come right out with it. You are perfect. We can find no asymmetry in your body. There is nothing in any of your tests which is not optimum. No microscopic impurities in your blood. No indication of contamination whatsoever. Independent tests of your organ functions shows each one in textbook shape. In fact, there is nothing about you that is not textbook. You are the textbook. God, your heart is a marvel.  Of course you are aging, that is natural, but, and this might not make sense to you, but you are aging perfectly."

The other doctor broke in, a little impatient,

"It's unprecedented. And that's exactly the point. You are unprecedented. You are the only perfect specimen in the history of medical literature, and we need to keep you here so you can be studied. And we need to study you, how do I say this delicately? in ways where your consciousness will not effect our studies. Do you grasp what I am saying? I'm saying that even if I had to spend the rest of my life in jail I'd still euthanize you so that others could study you.  Do you realize what you could do for the human race?"

He looked hard at me again, this whole time he had been looking hard at me, as if I was supposed to understand. I did understand now.  I looked around the faces in the room, my mother and her proud and tragic look, my father with an approving nod, the light blue walls, the nurses averting their eyes almost respectfully, the hard look of the head doctor, the bemused look of the cardiologist, my wife deliberately looking away but still holding my right hand.  I looked down at her hand. Her hand in my right hand. Her hand in my perfect right hand. My perfect right hand. I was going to speak.  I could feel it. Something perfect was about to happen.


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Composition Notes:

I was just reading Haruki Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle and this story is an attempt at some points of his style. Stark contrast it seems to me from yesterday. Yesterday I was reading Sutree and I think that story came out strongly influenced by McCarthy, with some Raymond Carver (love him) thrown in for good measure.  Not that I don't love that, but it seemed like time for something different on this blog. There are so many ways that I admire Murakami. His pacing. He saves his most imagistic prose for heightened moments in the text, so it serves a double purpose of beauty and warning for the reader. And his "normal" prose is very clear. The reader is able to clearly follow along, with few distractions.  I'm especially in love with how even his expository prose comes across as clear and uncomplicated. It makes his stuff so easy to read. It has a much higher entertainment value in that way than an author  like McCarthy, who I tend to love to death, but can only read 20-30 pages at a time.  The idea for this story came from a line in the Wind Up Bird Chronicle where Kumiko mentions having a deep well inside, in a figurative sense.  I took it literally and wondered what it would be like if someone had a fountain of youth inside, what the implications would be. Then the whole perfection thing came out of that initial musing after I started writing the scene.