He flinched minutely. "That's for pb. Quarters. If you spook yourself up. And sodium amytal. Grain and a half. Sleep. You can take the whole bottle, if you want to. Then the biopsy will surely be negative and you'll have thrown away your other six lives." He put his arm around my shoulder. "See you tomorrow—at your hotel—around seven."
I walked through the patients—through people who had nothing more serious than hypertension, or gastric ulcer, or diabetes. Or perhaps they did have fatal afflictions, though. Cancer, for example. You couldn't say what they had—sitting there, tremulously thumbing the magazines. They looked at me. They looked at the fat girl who rose because her turn was next.
I lit a cigarette when I got outdoors.
Coal tar, I thought.
Too late not to light a cigarette.
I stepped down in the gutter—in gum wrappers, glittering bits of cellophane, the blanched drift of horse manure, a swatch of blue cloth, a letter that had been rained on, fresh Pekinese sign, and a little dry mud. All around me midday, midtown Manhattan soaked up August in its brick pores, its limestone pores—flashed back August from glass, from polished granite, and from all its million metal fixtures. The sky was bluely vague. An air-liner shoved up through it from La Guardia—a grinding abnormality.
I hailed a cab.
For the ordeal of biopsy, whatever it might be, I summoned my meager contempt. A long experience of surgery is a poor indoctrination for each new need of it. Ringed about with sadists in white suits, with sterile techniques, with inquisitional steel, I have been too often the Exposed Nerve. I do not hope much, any more—and only defy so long as I am able. This artificial pose, garnished with calm and with smiling, is what some men call courage, and others dignity, but no man in his right mind evokes without cost: we are the hateful survivors of our sciences.
It was a little thing.
A needle's prick in an alabastrine clinic. A numb diddling above the tonsil. Some blood to spit out.