Hands

Every time he went back to the doctor's he got worse. The doctor would ask him into the little dark room with the light-up panels, x-rays of his bones on display, and show him important details with the tip of a pencil. This darkening here, this lightening here. What this indicates, my diagnosis, it appears from this.

The bones in his hands were getting old. Refusing to work properly. The doctor couldn't do anything except tell him how bad it had gotten. And that wasn't something he wanted done anymore. So he stopped seeing the doctor. It had been once a month, and then once every two weeks. Before the doctor asked him to rent a cot in the hospital, he stopped going.

The doctor called once or twice. He sounded unhappy to lose his audience. Or maybe it was more like a sculptor losing his model. Because without his hands and his bones that thinned and thickened improperly—every time the doctor said "improperly," he thought of small children—the doctor was helpless. The doctors want you only to think of the transaction working in the other direction. Yes, yes, without doctors, where would we all be then, and so on. But without patients, without sick people, without people whose bones are improper, where would the doctors be?

He stopped going. He went to the park on Monday afternoons instead. He went to the park and watched children and birds. They were innocence and laughter. Even the birds laughed. He tried not to think about his bones. He tried not to think about his doctor. He tried not to think about anything. One morning, he couldn't hold his coffee cup. His fingers wouldn't close the way he told them to. They misbehaved. They had minds of their own now, and couldn't believe that the old people knew more than they did.