The Belly of the Beast

     I have done most of the paperwork involved in my brother's disability claim. He had an appointment to see a doctor for the State agency that does the local work for the Social Security Administration. I made the sixty mile drive to take him to the doctor's office.

     He hasn't had a drivers' license in a long time. I remember once being in a bit of a panic, when the forms we were filling out came to the point where some sort of state-issued card with a person's name and address had to be presented to some officious minion in the Kafka world of the bureaucracy - or the Ikiru world of the government, but without Watanabe-san's great soul - and I had no idea what he would use. It turned out that he had a state identity card, useful for those who do not drive. I had never heard of such a card before. I wondered if you had to present it like a passport when you travelled between the townships.

     He thought it strange that I had never heard of such identity cards, and he gave me a funny look, which was fine with me, having myself become very tired of casting funny looks at every entity that claims some familial relationship to me. In fact, I rather enjoyed it.

     So I made the trip, allowing my aged parents the luxury of remaining at home and being yelled at by various strange men and blonde bombshells on FOX...or that rather odd "morphadite"  of the two species: Glenn Beck.

The clinic was Bauhaus old. It had been designed with something in mind about fifty years ago, something minimalist, yet not so minimalist that a number of cylinders like pipes could not be fabricated into some sort of decorative web over the sign, a sort of sign that looked like the Olympic Ring theme multiplied to exhaustion in some sardonic fun-house.

Birds of spring were giving the cylinders the glad eye, thinking scrub and till, thread and foil, and the birds and the bees...and nests.

It never ceases to amaze me how many establishments, ostensibly built to serve the health and welfare interests of humanity, incorporate into their designs some absolutely atrocious niches, cubby-holes, and astragals all aparently intended to resist the mundane efforts at cleanliness and hygiene. I recall my mother-in-law resided at a very nice establishment on Lawrence in Toronto.

Yet, there far above the reach of anyone except a lift-all were the light treatments, made from wood: an intermeshing that was probably intended to diffuse light and look natural, but to me was an outrageous expanse of surface gathering piles of dust, and not amenable to the easy method cleaning during the eight-hour shift on straight-time, resisting even the tad more heroic staff who might go to the closet and procure the large ladder. These were well above the height of standard ladders. There was a mezzanine off the second floor, where the library was placed, overlooking the dining room, and these light treatments were just above that level, at a slight angle upwards. So you could not really see all the filth, but that was - I'm sure - the architect's idea in the first place.

     The doctor's offices were drab. Wear and a film of dirt and dust muted any colors that had once been there. Our father went with us, so I told him to be sure he took a leak before we left: some of my brother's doctors have offices in clinics where there are no rest rooms. I remember once being in one, and I had to walk to the hospital across the street, sign in, and get a visitors' badge just to use the rest room.

     There were sweat suits...a lot of sweats. The nurses for the most part tended to be very rotund. It's not that they were uniformly large, although some were. But they were quite rounded, all drawn with the same circular protractor. And the uniform of choice was sweats.

     
     There was a lot of hair that had been washed a couple days ago, staff and patients alike. Maybe it was a type of gel that gave it that look. I remember black sweats and black strands of curly hair, glistening like a Moor's dagger, while the nurse held a the door to the examining rooms open, and stretched herself towards the nurse  at the front desk...speaking, I think, but possibly trying to stretch out her full rounded frame and reach some scrap of paper on the desk, while not letting loose of the door - which would probably slam shut and lock her out: they keep many doors locked in this part of town.

     I was tired, so I spent most of my time asleep in my chair. I woke with a sore neck.

     My brother had been in the back examining rooms for over an hour, and he was in a foul mood, and gave vent to the usual invective about sitting around for hours in doctors' offices.

      When we walked back out to the car, he threw his cane in the back seat. I cautioned him against appearing too spry while we were still within sight of the office. He grunted.

     Lunch was on the menu. Funny sentence that, lunch "being" a menu item; self-referential statements, and all that. My brother and my father played that time sanctified game of discussing which restaurant to eat at, as if any of them were any good. These discussions usually mean that a certain place does not make you vomit outright: that is a "good place".

     We went to a local place down in the Bucket o' Blood district where my brother lives, and we decided to pretend that it was a "good" eatery. The staff knew him, and they said hello. He beamed a smile back, tired of having to play his role of disabled person, and happy to play one of the guys in the crowd. The waitress, Sandy, came over and pinched his cheek. There was an unusual bonhomie, I thought, until I remembered that he used to tip in the 30% range.

     Sandy wore jeans. She had a t-shirt on that seemed to have a broadside on it, but I did not want to stare, in case she wanted to pinch my cheek, too. Her hair was long and pulled together in the back in a braid; a thickly braided rope, it seemed that it should have been a tie-back to some old-timey set of drapes in a Victorian house, worn and thready, color faded to gray, yet still substantial.

     I looked at my brother, and he was smiling, and saying what a hell of a bunch of people they were down here, and, say, he'd rather live here than anywhere else in the world. My father didn't hear any of this, and I smiled. Everyone was pecking at food, or reading the insubstantial newspapers of the present age, or gazing out the window at the parking lot. And some were talking about spring.

     "Kathy..." I heard my brother say.

     "Who?" I asked.

     "I was wondering if Kath was here."

     "Who's Kath?" I said, then adding "You're getting like old Bill, mentioning names nobody else knows. You know,  Bill'd say  '...so then I sez to ol' Blackbird...' "  I looked at him, "Did you ever know who old Blackbird was he was talking about?"

      He shook his head. "Kathy's the owner's wife. I wondered if she was here today. Usually is."

      Pretty soon a leathery number comes up for air from back by the kitchen. I figure this is Kathy. After nosing around a few cubby-holes and patting a few backs, she wanders over to my brother and pats him on the back.

     "How ya doin', stranger."

     So he smiles a smile as wide as outdoors, like the Pope, President, Dalai Lama, and Paris Hilton had just walked up to him.  "Stranger? Whatcha talkin' 'bout? You the one been on vacation."

     She says something about how hard she works every day, smiles, and wanders back towards the rest rooms. He never introduced her to me, and she never even glanced at me, nor my father - like we did not exist...a fact from which I derived a vague sense of comfort.

     The food was just under mediocre. My father had a Sloppy Joe, which seemed to me to possibly have been the eponymous Joe of the entire messy species, and my brother and I had pick'rel - as they say it. There is sort of a religious veneration of "pick'rel" in those parts, stemming from the old days when there was no mercury in the fish, and people could buy fish caught that day. But that was sixty years ago, or more.

     It was a day when you had to hold yourself in, lest you scream out in madness.