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The Delaware Gap
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The
fill-in for Dr. Cohen swabbed heavy gunk on my neck, shoulders and arms,
humming to himself as he massaged my skin with the salve the way a privileged
prince might, were he delighted in a recent art acquisition or presiding over
the funeral of someone disagreeable. His bony fingers probed each set of
muscles as he asked if I’d ever been badly burned there and my pores obeyed,
absorbing his cold medicine and finding the ancient heat embedded within them.
I told this prince, Dr. Singh, the same story I’d told Dr. Cohen, about the record heat at the Delaware Gap years ago, a college trip inner-tubing the river, and how like an idiot I used hand lotion instead of anything with SPF. “There’s always someone has it worse,” I said, telling about the former track star who’d launched himself from a trail high up the Pennsy side and died. “They said he’d been disoriented on account of sun poisoning and drugs in his system.” “That’s a shame,” he said. He placed his glasses on before leaning in and numbing my skin in two other spots he had circled with red marker, one at the base of my neck, the other on my right thigh, just above the knee. “People said he jumped off the cliff like he thought wings were going to take him,” I added, turning my head away from the sharp tools in the doctor’s delicate hands. It took only seconds for him to cut his scoops from me, two little tugs. It felt like nothing at all. “Done,” he said, ripping his latex gloves off and gesturing with them to my piles of clothes. “He landed on the branch of a tree whose seed must have sprouted thirty, forty years before he was born, its arm held out in just the right way to make the catch. There’s something to that, isn’t there?” The princely doctor nodded and removed his glasses. “Perhaps,” he offered and then said, as he closed the door slowly behind him, “You can put your clothes back on and settle up with the receptionist. She’ll give you a number to call tomorrow.” Tomorrow was Saturday, but maybe you could call on the weekend. I didn’t ask. Maybe his lab ran this stuff day and night. Maybe everyone in New York had what I had, our little scoops of skin labeled by patient number on baking trays lined with wax paper in a back room somewhere, room after room of biopsies, just waiting. The prince’s name was Dr. Singh, but on the long walk home I kept pronouncing it singe. Dr. Singe. This tickled me somewhere deep, like butterflies when your stomach lurches uncontrollably. --- This excerpt from "The Delaware Gap" is Copyright (c) 2014 by Stacy Brewster : : All Rights Reserved If you would like to read more, please contact me. |